perweight. Its toggle switch was at the "on"
position, and it was lying on its side. He tried to pick the box up, but
his hand slid effortlessly through it as if it were so much air.

"_Well_!" Max said. He passed his hand through the desk again. "Well,
well. Are you sure Busch told you everything?"

"Busch! He honestly wants to help and we have taken him through the
mill. Pentathol, scopolamine and the like; hypnotism and the polygraph.
We've dug that man deeper than we have ever dug anybody before."

"And have you conducted any experiments of your own?"

"Certainly. That's what is so frustrating. We try to X ray the thing,
and we don't get a thing. We bombarded it with every radiation we could
think of, from radio to gamma and it just reflected them. We can detect
no radiation coming out of it. Magnetic fields don't effect it, nor do
heat and cold. Nuclear particles are ignored by it; it just _sits_ there
thumbing its nose at us. And we can't even wait for it to run down.
According to Busch, the power requirements of the thing are funny and
once the field is established, it takes no additional energy to maintain
it. And the collapsing power remains indefinitely until it is time to
turn the machine off, but it's unreachable by any means we have.

"It's pure frustration. There's no way we can analyze it until we can
handle it, and no way we can handle it until we can turn it off. And
there's no way we can turn it off until we have analyzed it. If it were
alive, I'd think that it was laughing at us.

"Do _you_ have any ideas?" asked Garvers hopefully.

"Nothing that would help a solution at present," said Max. "But do you
remember the legend of King Tantalus?"

"Slightly. What about it?"

"Well ... if _he_ were here," said Max thoughtfully, "he'd ...
sympathize."

THE END

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