This was sheerest exaggeration, of course, for nothing could have kept the Lensman from watching the construction of that first apparatus. He watched the erection of a spherical shell of loosely latticed truss-work some twenty feet in diameter. He watched the installation, at its six cardinal points, of atomic exciters, each capable of transforming ten thousand pounds per hour of substance into pure energy. He knew that those exciters were driving their intake screens at a ratio of at least twenty thousand to one; that energy equivalent to the annihilation of at least six hundred thousand tons per hour of material was being hurled into the center of that web from the six small mechanisms which were in fact, super-Bergenholms. Nor is that word adequate to describe them. They were engines at whose power the late Dr. Bergenholm himself would have quailed; demons whose fabrication would have been utterly impossible without Medonian conductors and insulation. He watched the construction of a conveyor and a chute and looked on intently while a hundred thousand tons of refuse--rocks, sand, concrete, scrap iron, loose metal, débris of all kinds--were dropped into that innocuous-appearing sphere, only to vanish as though they had never existed. "But we ought to be able to see it by this time, I should think!" Kinnison protested once. "Not yet, Kim," Master Technician LaVerne Thorndyke informed him. "Just forming the vortex--microscopic yet. I haven't the faintest idea of what is going on in there; but man, dear man, _am_ I glad that I'm here to help make it go on!" "But _when_?" demanded the Lensman. "How soon will you know whether it's going to work or not? I want to do a flit." "You can flit any time--now, if you like," the technician told him, brutally. "We don't need _you_ any more--you've done your bit. It's working now. If it wasn't, do you think we could pack all that stuff into that little space? But we'll have it done long before you'll need it." "But I want to see it work, you big lug!" Kinnison retorted, only half playfully. "Come back in three-four days--maybe a week; but don't expect to see anything but a hole." "That's exactly what I want to see, a hole in space," and that was precisely what, a few days later, the Lensman did see. The spherical framework was unchanged, the machines were still carrying easily their incredible working load. Material--any and all kinds of stuff--was still disappearing; instantaneously, invisibly, quietly, with no flash or fury to mark its passing.