"Perhaps not directly. But those are precision parts, are they not?"
"The finest."
"Magnetostriction. The deformation of ferrous materials under powerful magnetic fields. The very pins that the trigger rotated upon might have expanded sidewise jamming itself in the slot."
Lloyd shook his head. "We'll try keeping guard, but it may be with fixed bayonet against tanks, Vinson. God! I feel helpless as a kitten."
President Comstock stood up. "So do we all. But we are—at long last and praise Heaven—both on the same side of the fence. We can go far together. And the first thing is to permit Vinson and Miss Varada to go to work together. You," he said to them, "will work unmolested in the Department of Applied Physics Laboratory at the Bureau of Standards."
Work.
A wonderful word, panacea for many ills. Yet how can one work when the tools refuse to co-operate? Not the small tools, but the big ones. The vast levers that force natural phenomena to man's will.
The slide rule, pencil, the simple adding machine, still worked. Pure, insensate mechanical things, too stupid to think for themselves; or even more stupid, unable to respond to the dictates of their own kind. But try to measure, to investigate the properties of a small cube of grayish metal with the best and finest in electronic gear when the measuring equipment stubbornly refused to give any but obviously false answers. Gone was the reliability of the machine. Once, men invented machines to replace the human equation in making calculations since a machine can make only those mistakes entered by the human operator. But an electronic calculator that insists that two and two equal three and one half or four point five-seven—depending upon how it felt when the simple problem was entered—is of no use whatsoever.
The Wheatstone Bridge insisted that the electrical resistance of a length of copper wire was several thousand ohms, while an open circuit vacillated between eight and fourteen ohms until the delicate balance-indicating meter shook itself to bits. The voltmeter they placed across one of the wires coming from the grayish metal block wrapped a kilovolt meter needle around the end stop, while there was no discernable—feelable—voltage across the wires. On an inductance balance, one pair of wires showed a negative inductance—which of course was completely refuted by the capacitance balance when they tried that.