Dr. Wooden caught him by the arm, drawing him into the next room. It was a smaller laboratory, bare but for long chrome tables with metal cradles hung from tripods resting on their tops. In each cradle was pouched a block of crystalline rock formation, semi-transparent, with fine veins of iridescent color interlacing with each other to form weird patterns in the milky depths.
"You're young, Jonathan, and you're imaginative. I'm not trying to dissuade you. I just want you to consider."
He put his hands on the rocks in the cradles. These stones were calcatryte, dredged accidently in a scoop shovel off Great Barrier Reef and sent to the National Foundation for testing.
Dr. Wooden bit his lips. Jonathan knew what restraint he was exercising. This research institute was his heart's dream, with its marble halls and linoleum lab floors, its chrome tables. He had two things in his life: the Institute, and his theory. And Jonathan was part of both.
His theory was this: that somewhere in the world there is an element, a substance, that would emit straight light as one of its properties. Light that did not curve as all light did. Light that would, by its very rigidity, cut through the atomic structure of other matter by the sheer energy of its photons, cutting a path in a thing by ripping electrons from their beds. A light to outmode all cutting and sawing instruments; a ray that would be easy to handle, and inexpensive to operate.
Many elements they had tested and tried; many tested, many thrown aside. When the calcatryte had been brought in, they had not even hoped. But it gave off straight light.
"The credit is yours, Jonathan," the doctor was saying. "You've done a lot. It was your discovery, the tungsten beam that heated the rocks to the pitch high enough to rip those rays from it. Uncurvable rays. A series of lines of unbendable light. I'll harness that light, soon."
"I know. But there's that urge in me. The wanderlust."
"You're giving up a lot. Fame. Maybe fortune."
Jonathan grinned a little, saying, "Maybe I've gotten a lot more in exchange."