He came back, his expression showing no elation at all. "No good," he said unhappily. "In a way, it works. The spring acts as an aerial and picks up more of the beam than my hand. But I tried to make a Faraday cage. That will stop most electromagnetic radiation, but not this stuff! It goes right through, like electrons through a radio tube grid." He put the spring back in his pocket. "Well," he grimaced. "Let's go on again. I had a little bit of hope, but some smarter men than I am haven't got the right gimmick yet." They started off once more. And this time they did not choose a path for easier travel, but went up a steep slope that rose for hundreds of feet to arrive at a crest with another steep slope going downhill. At the top Lockley said sourly, "I did discover one thing, if it means anything. The beam leaks at its edges, but it's only leakage. It doesn't diffuse. It's tight. It's more like a searchlight beam than anything else in that way. You can see a light beam at night because dust motes scatter some part of it. But most of the light goes straight on. This stuff does the same. It's hard to imagine a limit to its range." He trudged on downhill. Jill followed him. Presently, when they'd covered two miles or more with no lightening of his expression, she said, "You said you understand how it works. Radio and radar beams don't have effects like this. How does this have them?" "It makes high frequency currents on the surface of anything it hits. High frequency doesn't go into flesh or metal. It travels on the surface only. So when this beam hits a man it generates high frequency on his skin. That induces counter currents underneath, and they stimulate all the sensory nerves we've got--of our eyes and ears and noses as well as our skin. Every nerve reports its own kind of sensation. Run current over your tongue, and you taste. Induce a current in your eyes, and you see flashes of light. So the beam makes all our senses report everything they're capable of reporting, true or not, and we're blinded and deafened. Then the nerves to our muscles report to them that they're to contract, and they do. So we're paralyzed." "And," said Jill, "if there's a way to generate high frequency on a man's skin there's nothing that can be done?" "Nothing," said Lockley dourly. "Maybe," said Jill, "you can figure out a way to prevent that high frequency generation." He shrugged. Jill frowned as she followed him. She hadn't forgotten Vale, but she owed some gratitude to Lockley. Womanlike, she tried to pay part of it by urging him to do something he considered impossible. "At least," she suggested, "it can't be a death ray!" Lockley looked at her. "You're wrong there," he said coldly. "It can."