The red color had vanished from the wire as the blue had vanished from the flame. The wire was shining. It wasn't silvery, it wasn't white. There was no hint of color, just a refractive blur that told him the wire was there. Colorless reflection. And that meant perfect reflection! The most perfect reflectors reflect little more than 98 per cent of the light incident and the absorption of the two per cent colors those reflectors as copper or gold or chromium. But the imperm wire within that force field that had been flame a moment before, was reflecting all light.
He had cut the wire with a pair of shears and it had still hung, unsupported, in the air, unchanging within the shimmer that constituted something no man had ever seen before.
"You can't put energy in,” said Page, talking to himself, chewing the bit of his pipe. “You can't take energy out. It's still as hot as it was at the moment the change came. But it can't radiate any of that heat. It can't radiate any kind of energy."
Why, even the wire was reflective, so that it couldn't absorb energy and thus disturb the balance that existed within that bit of space. Not only energy itself was preserved, but the very form of energy.
But why? That was the question that hammered at him. Why? Before he could go ahead, he had to know why.
Perhaps the verging of the field toward Field 349? Somewhere in between those two fields of force, somewhere within that almost non-existent border-line which separated them, he might find the secret.
Rising to his feet, he knocked out his pipe.
"Harry,” he announced, “we have work to do."
Smoke drooled from Wilson's nostrils.
"Yeah,” he said.