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truck to run errands for the factory. The truck was never granted garage
privileges.
There was a full basement with a ten-foot ceiling, and I took that over for my
electronics lab. It was air-conditioned and the factory wasn't. Electronic
equipment works better at a constant temperature, and so do I. I'm one of those
people who think that sixty-five is a wonderful temperature, provided that I can
sit naked in front of a fan.
All told, the move was a big step up for all of us, and for me more than the
others.
We settled into our new quarters in a few weeks, although a month went by before
all of my oversized furniture arrived. I had to camp in my bedroom until then.
While the shop already had most of what Ian thought he would need, I had to put
together an electronics lab from scratch. It took two months before I got all
the big stuff in. I was another five weeks building the first breadboard
circuit, mostly awaiting parts. Havingalmost everything doesn't make it. Not in
electronics.
Cheop's Law: Everything costs more and takes longer.
But the very first time we tried the thing out from a quarter mile away it
worked perfectly, dutifully putting a thirty-yard hole in our back forty.
This meant that we could have gotten into the mining and tunneling business
almost immediately, but after a nine-hour-long meeting, we decided to hold off
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on that until we could develop the whole concept a bit further. We still didn't
know the basic principles that the gadget worked on, and without knowing those,
we'd be hard pressed to get an all inclusive patent.
If we started using or selling the circuit, well, I'd copied the thing easily
enough, and so could any other competent tech. Given a hint on what we were
doing, hundreds of outfits would soon be out there competing with us.
Competition might be a good thing for the economy as a whole, but it is a bad
thing for an underfinanced little company like ours was.
For the rest of that first year, we made solid steady progress. The field did
not have to be generated from a point source. We found out how to set up
steady-state fields, where a given volume was irradiated evenly and could be
transported through time without being sliced into sushi.
We found out how to shield the field, so we could send what we wanted to send
without cratering the landscape.
We learned how to operate it with the circuitry inside the field, so it acted
sort of like a car, taking its motive power with it. We also figured out how to
work it with the circuitry outside the field. We got to calling this the
"cannon" technique.
All this time, we were only putting things into the future. From a practical
point of view, we could have accomplished much the same thing by locking
whatever it was in a box, and taking it out of the box later. The real prize
would be to be able to send things into the past.
From everything we had been able to learn, it looked as though if you simply
reversed the phase in one section of the circuit, it should reverse the
circuit's total temporal effect.
A circuit thusly configured should have been able to send things back in time,
but when I tried it, the circuit overloaded, every time, and burned to a
blackened pile of ashes and melted metal. We had no idea what the problem was.
Coupled with it was the impossibility of just how a tiny, nine volt transistor
battery could possibly put out enough power to so thoroughly fry a good sized
epoxy-glass circuit board. Ian calculated that over its entire lifetime, such a
battery couldn't put out a thousandth of the power we saw repeatedly generated.
"So, gentlemen, it appears that in addition to everything else, you have
discovered a new source of industrial power!" Hasenpfeffer said one morning at
breakfast.
"A fucking expensive source of power, if you ask me," Ian said. "When you spend
thirty dollars worth of circuitry to generate thirty cents worth of power, you
aren't making a profit."
Nobody had a good way of answering that, and in the momentary silence,
Hasenpfeffer's lady of the night walked in, wearing one of his old housecoats.
She was a gorgeous, slender young thing, with long, straight blond hair, like
most of the others. Ian offered to make her breakfast, and since Hasenpfeffer
was here, she nodded acceptance. After that, it was as though Ian and I didn't
exist, as far as she was concerned. After a bit, we picked up our coffee cups
and drifted off, leaving the two lovers, or at least sex partners, alone.
We were used to it. The same sort of thing had been happening for seven years,
since we all were freshmen in college. But being used to something doesn't mean
that it no longer hurts. I couldn't help but look on Hasenpfeffer's success with
the ladies with mixed emotions, the most prominent of which was envy.
We settled into the family room, out of earshot of Hasenpfeffer's latest.
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