"Oh," Malone said. "Of course. Sure. But this other factor—"
"It is what might be called the ... ah ... volume of attention," Dr. O'Connor said. "That is, the actual amount of space that can be conceived of and held by the subject, during the time he is concentrating."
Malone blinked.
"For most people," Dr. O'Connor said, "the awareness of the space surrounding them is limited to a few inches of moving space, no more. To put this in a purely physical matrix: one might say that the 'teleportation field' doesn't extend more than a few inches beyond the skin of the subject. Thus, it would be difficult to teleport anything really large unless one were able to increase the volume of attention, or awareness. However, it is difficult to express this notion mathematically."
"I'll bet," Malone said.
Dr. O'Connor shot him a frozen glance. "One of our early attempts," he said, "was simply to put this in as a volume factor, so that the left-hand side of the equation, below the line, would read—" He scribbled again on the paper and held it up:
| md | = | K |
| d3ft2 |
"Unfortunately, as you can perhaps see," Dr. O'Connor said, "the equation would not stand up under dimensional analysis."
"Oh, sure," Malone said, adding sympathetically: "That's too bad. But does that put a limit on how much a man could carry with him? I mean, he couldn't take a whole building along, or anything like that, could he?"