"Gentlemen of the Cabinet: I have here a new machine that my laboratory has developed. I will demonstrate its action first." The light was switched on, throwing a brilliant shaft of light against the ceiling. Then Waterson snapped on the switch of the new machine, and there appeared a strange beam of blueish, ionized air. But unlike any other known ionizing beam, it was shot through with streamers of red fire, long, hair-thin streamers that wavered and flickered in the blue tube of the ionized air. It reached out, touched the light generator, and passed on, through a series of plates of different materials. But the instant that strange beam struck the light-machine, it went out. Then a moment later, when the new machine was turned off, the light snapped back on. "Gentlemen, this machine will produce a field, directional in this case, that will so modify the properties of space as to make it utterly impossible to disintegrate matter into energy. There is some tendency to fix energy as matter. I think that will be interesting to us in the event that this war is successfully concluded. But at present we are interested in the properties of the beam in that it will stop the disintegration of matter. The process depends on the modification of the properties of space. It is well known that in ordinary space, such as we know, there are twenty coefficients of curvature. In ordinary empty space, ten of these have zero values, and the ten principal coefficients have certain non-zero values. This machine so affects space that it makes all the coefficients of space have non-zero values, and fixes these values to suit its own purposes. The results are amazing. I have done some things with this machine that makes me truly afraid. But we are interested in it because certain of the values we can assign operate to force space to take such curvatures, that any change of the condition of matter to condition of energy is impossible. On release of the ray, the space returns to its normal curvature. "Working out the theory of this machine has been a tremendous task. Even the great calculating machine, the new integraph developed last year, and it is a far cry from that first one that M.I.T. developed in 1927, required many weeks of work to solve the problem in twenty coefficients of space. In so doing at one stage we had to assume a space of twenty dimensions in order that the correct values in the four true dimensions might be determined. "But there is still a great deal of work to be done. We must develop practical machines of a range of many miles. There is no difficulty in using the ray, since, as it is a condition of space, not a vibration, it is impossible to stop it by any shield. There is only one way to work with it, to create it directionally. We make the field by projecting certain strains along a beam, then once started the field follows that line to a distance dependent on the strength of the generator.