enport.
"Or, I should say, the thing that is supposed to look like a laser
component."

"Laser?" said Colonel Spaulding uncomprehendingly.

"It means 'light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation',"
Davenport explained. "Essentially, a laser consists of a gas-filled tube
or a solid ruby bar with parallel mirrors at both ends. By exciting the
atoms from outside, light is generated within the tube, and some of it
begins to bounce back and forth between the mirrors at the ends. This
tends to have a cascade effect on the atoms which have picked up the
energy from outside, so that more and more of the light generated inside
the tube tends to be parallel to the length of the tube. One of the
mirrors is only partially silvered, and eventually the light bouncing back
and forth becomes powerful enough to flash through the half-silvered end,
giving a coherent beam of light."

"Maybe that's what this is supposed to be," said the colonel.

Davenport chuckled dryly. "Not a chance. Not with an essentially circular
tube that isn't even silvered."

Lenny Poe, the colonel noticed, wasn't the only person around who didn't
care whether the thing he referred to as a "tube" was hollow or not.

"Is it doing anything?" Colonel Spaulding asked anxiously, trying to read
the meters over Davenport's shoulder.

"It's heating up," Davenport said dryly.

Spaulding looked back at the apparatus. A wisp of smoke was rising slowly
from a big coil.

A relay clicked minutely.

_WHAP!_

For a confused second, everything seemed to happen at once.

But it didn't; there was a definite order to it.

First, a spot on the ceramic tile wall of the room became suddenly
red, orange, white hot. Then there was a little crater of incandescent
fury, as though a small volcano had erupted in the wall. Following that,
there was a sputtering and crackling from the innards of the device
itself, and a cloud of smoke arose suddenly, obscuring things in the room.
Finally, there was the crash of circuit-breakers as they reacted to the
overload from the short circuit.

There was silence for a moment, then the hiss of the automatic fire
extinguishers in the testing room as they poured a cloud of carbon dioxide
snow on the smoldering apparatus.

"There," said Davenport with utter satisfaction. "What did I tell you?"

"You didn't tell me this thing was a heat-ray projector," said Colonel
Spaulding.

"What are you talking about?" Dr. Davenport said d