"I've got it, folks!" he cried. "A gravity beam!"
CHAPTER XIX
The Gravity Beam
"A gravity beam!" they ejaculated together in tones varying from incredulity to simple puzzlement. "What's that?"
"Well, it'll take quite a bit of explaining, but I'll drop out the technical part of it.... You see, it's like this—You remember old man Einstein, the frizzy-hair Frisian, demonstrated that magnetism and gravity are the same thing down underneath? And that some of the astronomers and physicists have said that both magnetism and light are the same thing? That is, forms of vibration. Well, one of the things I picked up from the lads in this Lassan city was that light, matter, electricity, gravitation, magnetism and the whole works, are the same thing in different forms.
"They've just jumped one step beyond Einstein. Now, they've got a way of producing, or mining, pure light, that is, pure matter in its simplest form. When it's released from pressure it becomes material and raises hell all over the shop. How they get the squeeze on it, I can't say. Anyway, it isn't important."
"Very interesting lecture—very," commented Gloria, gravely.
"You pipe down and listen to your betters till they get through," Sherman went on. "Children should be seen, not heard. But what I've got here is a piece of permalloy. Under certain magnetic conditions it defies gravity. Now if we can screen gravity that way, why can't we concentrate it, too?"
"Why not? Except that nobody ever did it and nobody knows how," said Ben Ruby.