The Transpositor was, I think, an outgrowth of Price's investigation of the relationship between light and matter. You may recall, Bill, the brilliant technical papers he wrote on that subject when he was still working in the laboratories of General Electronics. At the time Price was considered something of a pioneer. He believed that light and matter were different forms of the same basic element; he said that eventually science would learn how to change one into the other. I seriously believe that the Transpositor was meant to do precisely that. In other words, Price had expected to transpose the atomic structure of solid matter into light, and later to reconstruct the original matter again. Now don't assume, Bill, that Price was wandering around in a senile delusion of fourth dimensional nonsense. The theory may be sound. Our present knowledge of the physical world makes the basic structure of matter more of a mystery than it has ever been. Not that I think Price achieved the miracle. Even in his most brilliant and productive period he could not have done it. As yet our accumulation of data is too incomplete for such an experiment. I believe that Price created no more than a very realistic illusion with his arrangement of lenses and mirrors. I saw the illusion, too; I used the machine. There were two dials on the front of the console. One was lettered "time", and the other "distance". The "time" dial could be set for eons, centuries or hours, depending upon the position of a three-way switch beneath it; the "distance" dial could be adjusted to light years, thousand-mile units, or kilometers by a similar device. Since there was no indication which position would produce what results, I left the dials untouched. I plugged the machine into an electric outlet and pushed the starter button. The coil of wire blazed with light and the chute slid rapidly in and out of the cylinder. That was all, at first. The starter button was labeled "the shipper", and I gathered that Price had visualized the practical application of the Transpositor as a device for transporting goods from one point to another. I looked around the lab for something I could put into the chute. There was a card, written in red, warning me not to load beyond the dimensional limits of the chute. The only thing I saw that was small enough was the little radio-like gadget Price had called a Semantic-Translator. Loaded horizontally, it just barely fit the chute. I pushed the shipper button a second time. Again there was a blaze of light, brighter than before, which temporarily blinded me. For a moment I saw the Semantic-Translator in the heart of the fragile, wire cylinder. It had the glow of molten steel, pouring from a blast furnace. Then it was gone. The chute shot back to the front of the machine. The tray was empty. Was it an illusion? I believe that, Bill, because later on, when I thought of using the grapple.... * * * * *