Thomas nodded. It was not the final tenth of one percent job. It was not direct current. The diagravitic force was not constant. It operated only seven tenths of the time, and was turned off and on fifteen or twenty million million times per second. Nothing short of high-definition test equipment would ever tell the difference, however.
Gone were the massive electromagnetic deflection field coils. In their place was a set of seventy kilovolt electrostatic plates.
Missing entirely were the variable-speed motor generators. In their place was a simple crystalline formation under permanent magnetic stress. "Artificial radio-activated crystals," muttered Thomas. "Good for a couple of years."
But the feed lines. The feed lines. The current carrying ability of space itself—not the metallic conductor—did the trick. Using the ultra high frequency bands, the busbars had been replaced with cylindrical wave guides. The depth of penetration was measured in microns at those frequencies—and as long as the guides were properly designed, they offered little loss in power. The current went down the wave guides by virtue of the magnetic fields created throughout the guides—magnetic fields generated in the space inside of the tubular guides.
The generator itself was one of the new crystal microwave generators and the rectifiers at the receiving end were of the same ilk.
And the five tons of equipment had vanished in a puff of tubular guides, electrostatic plates, and intermittent operation.
Thomas hit a snag for a moment. The engineer had answered his challenge. So he'd come up with the answer to the five-ton-per-fifty-pound answer—and had gone further. Thomas knew that there was no apparent limit to the maximum power or lift. It merely set a fifty pound minimum—actually it was 49.87 pounds by measurement—under which limit no amount of tinkering would produce the effect.
He smiled. There must be something beyond. After all, small stones moved quietly in natural poltergeist manifestation; they would be able to reproduce that eventually. But for now, the engineer was willing to accept the limitation whereas the physicist would not.
He knew now. And he'd leave the sky car until the engineer returned. Let him beef up the control force. It was his baby.
Thomas put the panels back on the sky car and stood off to admire it. It was a neat job, just what the public wanted. The urge to get in and drive was a most compelling one, and Thomas succumbed. He sat for a moment, inspecting the dashboard until he had the pattern well set. Then he snapped on the power, took the wheel and pulled back gently. The sky car lifted its nose slightly, and as Thomas pressed the foot pedal, it took off on a side-line straight into the sky. He leveled off at a thousand feet and he did some scurrying back and forth in midair. It did handle a little sloppy but not enough to make the physicist uncomfortable. Yet it wouldn't stand any hedge-hopping or bridge-undercutting without a prayer on the part of the driver. Butter the controls a bit and you could thread a needle with it on the first try.