Only two seemed to be completed. One resembled a small, portable radio. It was a plastic case with two knobs and a two-inch speaker grid. There was no cord outlet. The machine may have been powered by batteries, for I heard a faint humming when I turned the knobs. Nothing else. Dr. Price had left a handwritten card on the box. He intended to call it a Semantic-Translator, but he had noted that the word combination was awkward for commercial exploitation, and I suppose he held up a patent application until he could think of a catchier name. One sentence on that card would have amused you, Bill. Price wrote, "Should wholesale for about three-fifty per unit." Even in his dotage, he had an eye for profit.
The Semantic-Translator—whatever that may mean—might have had possibilities. I fully intended to take it back with me to General Electronics and examine it thoroughly.
The second device, which Price had labeled a Transpositor, was large and rather fragile. It was a hollow cylinder of very small wires, perhaps a foot in diameter, fastened to an open-faced console crowded with a weird conglomeration of vacuum tubes, telescopic lenses and mirrors. The cylinder of wires was so delicate that the motion of my body in the laboratory caused it to quiver. Standing in front of the wire coil were two brass rods. A kind of shovel-like chute was fixed to one rod (Price called it the shipping board). Attached to the second rod was a long-handled pair of tongs which he called the grapple.
The Transpositor was, I think, an outgrowth of Price's investigation of the relationship between light and matter. You may recall, Bill, the brilliant technical papers he wrote on that subject when he was still working in the laboratories of General Electronics. At the time Price was considered something of a pioneer. He believed that light and matter were different forms of the same basic element; he said that eventually science would learn how to change one into the other.
I seriously believe that the Transpositor was meant to do precisely that. In other words, Price had expected to transpose the atomic structure of solid matter into light, and later to reconstruct the original matter again. Now don't assume, Bill, that Price was wandering around in a senile delusion of fourth dimensional nonsense. The theory may be sound. Our present knowledge of the physical world makes the basic structure of matter more of a mystery than it has ever been.
Not that I think Price achieved the miracle. Even in his most brilliant and productive period he could not have done it. As yet our accumulation of data is too incomplete for such an experiment. I believe that Price created no more than a very realistic illusion with his arrangement of lenses and mirrors.
I saw the illusion, too; I used the machine.
There were two dials on the front of the console. One was lettered "time", and the other "distance". The "time" dial could be set for eons, centuries or hours, depending upon the position of a three-way switch beneath it; the "distance" dial could be adjusted to light years, thousand-mile units, or kilometers by a similar device. Since there was no indication which position would produce what results, I left the dials untouched. I plugged the machine into an electric outlet and pushed the starter button. The coil of wire blazed with light and the chute slid rapidly in and out of the cylinder.
That was all, at first. The starter button was labeled "the shipper", and I gathered that Price had visualized the practical application of the Transpositor as a device for transporting goods from one point to another.
I looked around the lab for something I could put into the chute. There was a card, written in red, warning me not to load beyond the dimensional limits of the chute. The only thing I saw that was small enough was the little radio-like gadget Price had called a Semantic-Translator. Loaded horizontally, it just barely fit the chute.