He shook his head, and went into his office. There were copies of his own published works there, as well as magazines he hadn't yet seen. He dropped down to fill in the flaws his memory had developed.
Paraphysics was tricky stuff. For a long time men had known no other spectrum but the electromagnetic, running from heat up through cosmic rays. When atomic particles moved from one energy level to another, they produced quanta of energy in that spectrum, which was limited to the speed of light.
The kinetogravitic spectrum began with gravity and moved up through nuclear binding force toward some unknown band. Apparently it was the product of the behavior of some sub-particle finer than any known, and its speed of propagation was practically infinite. Other spectra were being considered, but no order or logic had fitted yet.
He found an article by a Japanese scientist that suggested there might be a spectrum related to the behavior of atoms in the molecule—with crystals in some cases acting on one level due to the electron drift, and on another due to atomic strains within the molecule. Colloids, polymers and even the encephalograph waves were dragged in, but the mathematics seemed sound enough.
Norden caught his breath, and began digging into the equation. The third manipulation suggested that magnetism might somehow be involved, and that would mean....
He couldn't dig the idea out. Just when it seemed about to open before him, his mind shied away and drifted off to other things. He was still working on it when Pat came in, and dropped a sheaf of papers on the table. Strips of tape had been pasted together to form a crude book.
"The whole thing," she reported. "But most of it's nonsense. There's a page or two about some secret asteroid where the survivors of the fifth planet are waiting for men to mature before bringing the Great Millenium—or pages where Hardwick worked on the numerology of your name before he discovered your middle name had no H in it—or little notes to himself about buying a gross of Martian sand lizards. I had the machine go through it, strike out all meaningless matter, and come up with this."
It was a clip of five sheets. Norden skimmed through them, and groaned. The shield he had tested for Hardwick had been made of genuine mummy cloth, ground mandrake and a glue filled with bat blood.
"Yet you did live," Pat pointed out. "And he was right about their being able to detect life. We sent out sterile neoprene balloons loaded with live rabbits, and others with dead rabbits. Every balloon with the live rabbits was blasted—and none with the dead animals. We could use the same test to find out whether any one of those things worked—or any combination of them."
"We'll have to," he decided. "And then it may have been the closet instead of the shield—or an accident to their detector that saved me. Pat, have they got some kind of library here?"