Camhorn nodded. "Potentially," he said, "Ym-400 is an extremely violent explosive. No question about it. The other speculation—it isn't actually too far-fetched—well, that would be the equivalent of instantaneous space-travel, wouldn't it?"
Fry shrugged. "I suppose so."
"However," Camhorn said, "we haven't transmitted even a speck of matter as yet. Not deliberately, at any rate. Do you know why, Gus?"
"No. How would I?"
"No rumors on that, eh? I'll tell you. Ym-400, when activated even in microquantities, immediately initiates the most perverse, incalculable effects ever to confront an experimenter. There has been, flatly, no explanation for them. I've had ordinarily unimpressionable physicists tell me with tears in their eyes that space-time is malevolently conscious of us, and of our attempts to manipulate it—that it delights in frustrating those attempts."
Gus Fry grinned sourly. "Perhaps they're right."
"As it happens," Camhorn observed, "the situation is very unfunny, Gus. Experiments with Ym-400 have, to date, produced no useful results—and have produced over eleven hundred casualties. Most of the latter were highly trained men and women, not easily replaced."
Fry studied him incredulously. "You say these accidents have not been explained?"
Camhorn shook his head. "If they were explicable after the event," he said, "very few of them would have happened in the first place. I assure you there's been nothing sloppy about the manner in which the project has been conducted, Gus. But as it stands today, it's a flop. If the stakes were less high, it would have been washed out ten years ago. And, as I said before, if there were reason to believe that the stable compound was involved in the disappearance of a space transport, we probably would postpone further operations indefinitely. One such occurrence would raise the risks to the intolerable level."
Fry grunted. "Is that what those accidents were like? Things—people—disappear?"