"I'm tired of this jerky stuff," said Sandra Drake entering the room. "It seems to me that you should be able to duplicate the mess you have here by something similar up in the nose."
"Yes?" asked Steve Hammond politely. He was interested but not impressed.
"What I'm trying to say is this: Wouldn't a set-up similar to this space-eating drive also be capable of exerting mechanical attraction, thereby getting you a constantly increasing neutralizing force?"
Steve thought that one over. "Not bad. Not bad at all!"
Jimmy jumped to his feet. "It'll work, Steve. We'll have to induce the mechanogravitic force in a cupralum bar by secondary gravitic radiation, but it is a known phenomenon. Drakey, that's top!"
"Except for one thing," said Larry. "We're fresh out of magnetogravitic generators. Aside from that, we can run this heap all the way to Sirius."
Pete said: "Yeah, and if we did have one, we'd still be short a few thousand alphons. The alphatron won't carry another generator, nor will the little one upstairs." He grinned at Sandra. "We're not tossing cold water on your suggestion. It'll work—but not right now."
"Then it was good?" asked Drake with the first question of honest awe she had used in years.
"Perfect," said McBride, cheerfully. "But not quite complete. We won't censure you for that, however, since we know that you haven't been hanging around space-warp engineers for the last ten years. You couldn't have known that this mag-grav generator will do service on both ends. All we have to do is to direct the output on a two-lobe pattern instead of a single-lobe pattern, and set our induction bar up above in the field of the mechanogravitic we've already got there. Jimmy, change the output pattern of the mag-grav and we'll hike aloft with the cupralum bar." He bowed at Sandra. "Thanks to that one, we'll be moving right along!"