Then the drawings Lenny had made had had to be translated into English and the piece carefully made to specifications. Now here it was, all hooked up and, presumably, ready for action. Colonel Spaulding fervently hoped there would _be_ some action; he didn't like the smug look on Dr. Amadeus Davenport's face. * * * * * The device was hooked up on a testing-room circuit and controlled from outside. The operation could be watched through a heavy pane of bulletproof glass. "With all that power going into it," Davenport said, "I don't want anyone to get hurt by spatters of molten metal when those field coils blow." They went outside to the control console, and Dr. Davenport flipped the energizing switch. After the device had warmed up on low power, Davenport began turning knobs slowly, increasing the power flow. In the testing room, the device just sat there, doing nothing visible, but the meters on the control console showed that something was going on. A greenish glow came from the housing that surrounded the Q-shaped gadget. "Where the Russians made their mistake in trying to fool anyone with that thing was in their design of that laser component," said Dr. Davenport. "Or, I should say, the thing that is supposed to look like a laser component." "Laser?" said Colonel Spaulding uncomprehendingly. "It means 'light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation'," Davenport explained. "Essentially, a laser consists of a gas-filled tube or a solid ruby bar with parallel mirrors at both ends. By exciting the atoms from outside, light is generated within the tube, and some of it begins to bounce back and forth between the mirrors at the ends. This tends to have a cascade effect on the atoms which have picked up the energy from outside, so that more and more of the light generated inside the tube tends to be parallel to the length of the tube. One of the mirrors is only partially silvered, and eventually the light bouncing back and forth becomes powerful enough to flash through the half-silvered end, giving a coherent beam of light." "Maybe that's what this is supposed to be," said the colonel. Davenport chuckled dryly. "Not a chance. Not with an essentially circular tube that isn't even silvered." Lenny Poe, the colonel noticed, wasn't the only person around who didn't care whether the thing he referred to as a "tube" was hollow or not. "Is it doing anything?" Colonel Spaulding asked anxiously, trying to read the meters over Davenport's shoulder. "It's heating up," Davenport said dryly. Spaulding looked back at the apparatus. A wisp of smoke was rising slowly from a big coil. A relay clicked minutely. _WHAP!_ For a confused second, everything seemed to happen at once. But it didn't; there was a definite order to it.