He glanced up at the cones and shook his head. They were far too vast to carry in the spaceship. He might duplicate them if he knew how they worked, though.
"Quick," he rasped at Nichols. "Start hunting for plans—blue-prints—anything that might tell what this apparatus is, how it works, what its principle is."
They sprang about the room, searching the scrolls that hung on the walls, the inscriptions graven in stone and metal. Off in one corner, a great leaden casket lay in a niche. It was Emerson who found it, and his yelp of delight brought Nichols running.
"It's here, all here. Diagrams. Calculations. All of them worked out mathematically. They don't use our system, but it'll be easy enough to decipher theirs. We've got it, Car!"
Nichols stood with head bent, lips soundlessly moving.
"It's atomic power, all right," assured Emerson, "with that block as its source. But lord, what tremendous advances from the atomic power we know. The block is acted upon by the cones which cause it to send out streams of radioactive atoms, throwing them back to the cones that take them up in turn to hurl them all around the room.
"Matter is constantly in motion, thanks to the molecules that comprise it. They keep moving about one another eternally; in the case of solids, they just about make it. That motion is carried on at a certain rate of speed. To an extent, you might say it vibrates at a certain pulse. If the atoms are attuned to that pulse, they feed and nourish. If the matter vibrates at a different rate than the atoms, the atoms destroy it. The straps that bound us are gone, but our clothes are unaffected. Perhaps that's because the things we wear are tuned in some manner to our own vibratory rate. Maybe it's because what we wear comes from Earth, and things from Earth have their own peculiar motion. I'm not sure, yet. But I do know anything that's in this room when the cones are set at a certain pulse either vibrates in harmony with that pulse or is wiped out of existence by the atoms that hit it. Like Gunn. Like the cancer cells that vibrated differently from our otherwise healthy bodies!"
"The block," whispered Nichols. "We'll need the block!"
"Certainly. It's radium, in all probability—perhaps treated in some manner we don't know of. But we can take it. It'll fit into this box. The box was made for it. It's lead."
The doors were opening soundlessly. Warned by eyes upon him, Emerson whirled and dove for the cone controls. He set a hand on a lever and turned to face the thing.