In short, the victim just flops over and snores up a half-hour or so, and then awakens as if from a short nap, though perhaps with some puzzlement. There is no injury whatsoever.
Naturally I wanted to find out how the Cooling Effect worked and why—though I may never learn what it is. Hypnosis? Artificially induced, instantaneous sleep? (Victims can be handled without awakening.) Of course, I was curious. I'd have gone through it step by step for my own satisfaction, even if somebody else had already done it before.
Nobody had—and it wasn't easy. During the rest of the term, even through final exams, I devoted every spare moment to the Cooling Effect. Even so, it took another two months' hot sweat—the summer vacation's practically gone now—to get those final diagrams onto my drawing board.
But once I did, there it was, at least its basic circuits and components. All I needed was to juggle them around, coax them into a slim, tubular case, put a carved butt on it containing the "A" battery and give it a push-button trigger. With that data, any good bench-hand in an electrical repair shop could have done the job. I fashioned it out of plastic and odds and ends in my basement laboratory.
A glance in the telephone Red Book gave me the number of a local breeding farm and a call soon brought a pair of fat, inquisitive guinea pigs in a small, wire-screened carrying cage. Beyond the patio wall, my house sides directly on open pasturage, and beyond that, lower in the valley, the alfalfa field begins. With a brisk pacing off of a base-line and some rough, splay-thumbed triangulation, I soon determined my new weapon's effectiveness from point-blank range to a thousand yards—on guinea pigs, that is.
At nine hundred yards, it still knocked them over for the count. At a thousand yards, it had no effect whatever, so far as I could determine through field glasses. The animals gave no sign that they even noticed it. That, plus the nature of the mechanism, indicates its application is definitely limited. Whether you make it small enough to fit a lady's purse or as big as an atomic cannon, its maximum effective range will still remain 900 yards. And not just on guinea pigs.
I already knew from my own experience what it does to a man at close range. Blowing the fuses on the whole campus had been the real danger there, however. Had it been the slightest bit different, even to the position of my foot in that big machine, I should certainly have been electrocuted that night.
That was the first time it almost killed me.