“Well,” said Harold, “you understand that Mr. Untz is a busy man. It’s my job to check propositions people have for him. Suppose you tell me about these beasts of yours.”
Mildume shrugged. “Doubt 52 if you’ll understand it any better than Untz will. But it’s no more complicated than television when you boil it right down. You’re familiar, I take it, with the basic principle of television?”
“Oh, sure,” said Harold, brightening. “Keep things moving. Have a master of ceremonies who keeps jumping in and out of the act. Give something away to the audience, if possible, to make them feel ashamed not to tune in.”
“No, no, no, no, no!” said Mildume. “I mean the technical principles. A photo-electric beam scans the subject, translates light and dark into electrical impulses, which eventually alter a cathode ray played upon a fluorescent screen. Hence, the image. You grasp that roughly, I take it?”
“Roughly,” said Harold.
“Well,” continued Mildume, “just as spots of light and dark are the building blocks of an image, so sub-atomic particles are the building blocks of matter. Once we recognize this the teleportation theory becomes relatively simple. There are engineering difficulties, of course.
“We must go back to Faraday’s three laws of electrolysis—and Chadwick’s establishment in nineteen thirty-one of the fact that radiation is merely the movement of particles of proton mass without proton charge. Neutrons, you see. Also that atomic weights are close integers, when hydrogen is one point zero zero eight. Thus I use hydrogen as a basis. Simple, isn’t it?”
Harold frowned. “Wait a minute. What’s this you’re talking about—teleportation? You mean a way of moving matter through space, just as television moves an image through space?”
“Well, not precisely,” said Mildume. “It’s more a duplication of matter. My Mildume beam—really another expression of the quanta or light energy absorbed by atoms—scans and analyzes matter. The wave variations are retranslated into form, or formulae, at a distant point—the receiving point.”
Harold lowered one eyebrow. “And this really works?”