th the power of broken atoms, but he was beginning to
believe rather bitterly, they would never do so.

Buck went on to his offices, and the main calculator room. There were
ten calculator tables here, two of them in operation now.

"Hello, Devin. Getting on?"

"No," said Devin bitterly, "I'm getting off. Look at these results." He
brought over a sheaf of graphs, with explanatory tables attached.
Rapidly Buck ran through them with him. Most of them were graphs of
functions of light, considered as a wave in these experiments.

"H-m-m-m--not very encouraging. Looks like you've got the field--but it
just snaps shut on itself and won't work. The lack of volume makes it
break down, if you establish it, and makes it impossible to establish in
the first place without the energy of matter. Not so hot. That's
certainly cock-eyed somewhere."

"I'm not. The math may be."

"Well"--Kendall grinned--"it amounts to the same thing. The point is,
light doesn't. Let's run over that theory again. Light is not only
magnetic; but electric. Somehow it transforms electric fields cyclically
into magnetic fields and back again. Now what we want to do is to
transform an electric into a magnetic field and have it stay there.
That's the first step. The second thing, is to have the lines of
magnetic force you develop, lie down like a sheath around the ship,
instead of standing out like the hairs on an angry cat, the way they
want to. That means turning them ninety degrees, and turning an electric
into a magnetic field means turning the space-strain ninety degrees.
Light evidently forms a magnetic field whose lines of force reach along
its direction of motion, so that's your starting point."

"Yes, and _that_," growled Devin, "seems to be the finishing point.
Quite definitely and clearly, the graph looped down to zero. In other
words, the field closed in on itself, and destroyed itself."

"Light doesn't vanish."

"I'll make you all the lights you want."

"I simply mean there must be something that will stop it."

"Certainly. Transform it back to electric field before it gets a chance
to close in, then repeat the process--the way light does."

"That wouldn't make such a good magnetic shield. Every time that field
started pulsing out through the walls of the ship it would generate
heat. We want a permanent field that will stay on the job out there. I
wonder if you couldn't make a conductor device that would open that
field out--some spec