She led me through a corridor toward a heavy steel door, which she unlocked.
"You are the first person besides myself to go into this room in the past five years," Trella added.
I scarcely know what I had expected to see. What would anyone expect to see, if he was told he was going to be shown a machine that neither walked, glided nor rolled? Such a contraption is beyond human experience.
It was a long, hollow tube, large enough to hold a human body. It was made of quartz and on each side was a cylindrical, low power atomic energy machine.
"This," Trella said, "is the translator."
"The what?"
"I call it my space-time translator, which someday will make the rocket as obsolete for space travel as the horse for surface travel. It will take an object from one point in space-time to another instantly."
"Instantly?"
"There is a small lapse of time," Trella confessed. "You see the machine has two motors, one for starting the operation and the other for completing it. It takes about one second's time to switch the motive power from one motor to the other."
The machine, except for the motors, was made entirely of quartz and silver. On the right side of the machine was a long strip of silver running the full length of the tube. It was about three inches wide and it was connected with a knife-like blade of silver on the left side of the tube by a strand of silver wire. Silver was used, of course, because it was the best known conductor of electricity and other forms of energy.