Nobody had--and it wasn't easy. During the rest of the term, even through final exams, I devoted every spare moment to the Cooling Effect. Even so, it took another two months' hot sweat--the summer vacation's practically gone now--to get those final diagrams onto my drawing board. But once I did, there it was, at least its basic circuits and components. All I needed was to juggle them around, coax them into a slim, tubular case, put a carved butt on it containing the "A" battery and give it a push-button trigger. With that data, any good bench-hand in an electrical repair shop could have done the job. I fashioned it out of plastic and odds and ends in my basement laboratory. A glance in the telephone Red Book gave me the number of a local breeding farm and a call soon brought a pair of fat, inquisitive guinea pigs in a small, wire-screened carrying cage. Beyond the patio wall, my house sides directly on open pasturage, and beyond that, lower in the valley, the alfalfa field begins. With a brisk pacing off of a base-line and some rough, splay-thumbed triangulation, I soon determined my new weapon's effectiveness from point-blank range to a thousand yards--on guinea pigs, that is. At nine hundred yards, it still knocked them over for the count. At a thousand yards, it had no effect whatever, so far as I could determine through field glasses. The animals gave no sign that they even noticed it. That, plus the nature of the mechanism, indicates its application is definitely limited. Whether you make it small enough to fit a lady's purse or as big as an atomic cannon, its maximum effective range will still remain 900 yards. And not just on guinea pigs. I already knew from my own experience what it does to a man at close range. Blowing the fuses on the whole campus had been the real danger there, however. Had it been the slightest bit different, even to the position of my foot in that big machine, I should certainly have been electrocuted that night. That was the first time it almost killed me. * * * * * The Cooling Effect is worthless as an anesthetic for surgery. While the sleeping guinea pigs don't awaken when I pick them up out of their cage and handle them, even pulling their legs, they do struggle. They resist, like sleeping animals, not wanting to be disturbed. Still, I pinched them and bounced them and they invariably slept through an approximate half-hour. It's shock, and it isn't. It's sleep, and it isn't. But I certainly knew it was a weapon. A new weapon. And man alive, _what_ a weapon! I turned the guinea pigs loose in the patio, let them scamper, then tumbled them both with a quick sweep of the beam. * * * * * One man in ambush could knock over a whole company of marching troops!