Thomas forgot about the pilot model. What he wanted to know was the whereabouts of the five tons of equipment that had been an integral part of this idea. He looked at the model. He wondered whether the engineer had installed the whole thing, stepping up the power and using the main part of the power to support the equipment. That did not seem possible. Any failure would cause the little sky car to collapse of its own dead weight. Besides there was not enough room in the little crate to pack all that equipment-tonnage.
The engineer had achieved the impossible. He had done away with the main part while retaining the effect.
The pilot model landed. It was not the finished job of the prototype. The cabin was squarely functional and the landing wheels were not faired into the hull. The rear end, instead of tapering gently into a narrow paraboloid of revolution, was a truncated four-sided pyramid.
Jerry did not emerge. He merely tossed the door open and shouted: "Come on—we ain't got all day!"
Thomas nodded. "I'll call you when I get it fixed."
Call who? the physicist wondered, and then forgot about it. He wanted desperately to dig into the sky car. He wanted to find out where the engineer had packed five tons of equipment. He wanted to see what made the wheels go around. No doubt the thing could be returned to its owners without calling in the police. The thing was probably recorded in the precisely kept engineering notebook of the physicist's alter ego.
The pilot model was not completely out of sight before Thomas had the power cowls off, and the whole model stripped of its servicing doors. They had done an excellent job of design; the sky car without its servicing panels was but a skeleton frame, with every line, every connection, and every control rod open for easy servicing.
And it was then and there that the physicist understood what the engineer had been doing.
Instead of the low-voltage high-current supply lines, with their attendant heavy busbars, thin pipes ran about the sky car. Seamless aluminum tubing carried the energizing current. Or, rather the space inside of the tubing carried it. At the generator end, a ten megawatt microwave generator supplied high power at ultra high frequency. At the terminus, rectifiers brought the ultra high frequency down to direct current for operation of the force-field generators.