"We need still yet another test that we have not provided. A strain gauge to find out how much thrust a mosquito puts out. There's one in the physics lab. I'll run get it."
"You will not," said Mike. "Genius you may be, but proton-proof you're not. We can rig that right here."
Walking over to the spare parts locker, Mike brought back a complete readout display panel, a spare from one of the Cow's bridge consoles; and quickly connected it in to the data link on which the vocoder operated. Then, carefully instructing the computer as to the required display, he settled back.
"That'll do it," he said. "The Cow can tell us all we need to know right on that panel—about acceleration, lack of it, or change of it that we may cause by changing the parameters of our experiment. Those racks were checked out to stand up under eighty gees," he added. "Typical overspecification. They never said what would happen to the personnel under those conditions."
Ishie turned the Confusor off and then back on, and watched the display gauge rise to the six hundred forty mark, and then show the fraction above it .12128. Then carefully, ever so infinitesimally, he adjusted a knob on the device. The readout sank back towards zero, coming to rest reading 441.3971.
"We'll have to put a vernier control on this phase circuit," Ishie said to himself. "It jumped thirty per-cent, and I scarcely breathed on it."
After a few more checks on the operation of the phase control, he turned to the power control for the magnetic field. Carefully, Ishie lowered the field strength, eye on the readout panel. As the field strength lowered, the reading increased.
The indication was that by lowering the field strength only ten per cent, he had increased the thrust to sixteen hundred pounds—which, he felt, was close to the tolerance of the machine structure.
Carefully he increased the field strength again. Faithfully the reading followed it down the scale.
Then he had another thought. Running the field strength down and the pressure up, and again arriving at sixteen hundred pounds, he turned off the Confusor, waited a few moments, and turned it back on.