"No soap," said Sherman. "Too slow. They'll be all set for that, anyway. It's right along the line they think. No, what we've got to have is something along a new line, and I'm thinking it can't be anything like a gun, either. They're onto that now." He closed the door to the inner office with a bang. "By the way," asked Gloria, "why don't the Australians send some airplanes up there to the Catskills and shoot up the Lassan headquarters?" "Didn't you know?" asked Ben. "They tried it. They dumped about a hundred tons of explosives all over the joint, and it might have been so much mud for all the good it did. Then they ran a railroad gun up there and tried to shell the door, but that wasn't any good, either. They've got a signal station up there watching, waiting for them to come out, and we'll just have to wait for that. Sherman"--he indicated the door behind which the aviator had retired--"is nearly bughouse. They've got his girl a prisoner in there." "Tough break," commented Gloria. "Wish I could do something for the lady." They talked about minor matters for a time, Ben speaking absently and cudgeling his brains for a line on which to work toward the new weapon. It is not easy to sit down and plan out a new invention without anything to start on beyond the desire to have it. Suddenly, the inner door was flung open. In the aperture they saw Sherman, his face grinning, a small piece of metal in his hand. "I've got it, folks!" he cried. "A gravity beam!" CHAPTER XIX The Gravity Beam "A gravity beam!" they ejaculated together in tones varying from incredulity to simple puzzlement. "What's that?" "Well, it'll take quite a bit of explaining, but I'll drop out the technical part of it.... You see, it's like this--You remember old man Einstein, the frizzy-hair Frisian, demonstrated that magnetism and gravity are the same thing down underneath? And that some of the astronomers and physicists have said that both magnetism and light are the same thing? That is, forms of vibration. Well, one of the things I picked up from the lads in this Lassan city was that light, matter, electricity, gravitation, magnetism and the whole works, are the same thing in different forms. "They've just jumped one step beyond Einstein. Now, they've got a way of producing, or mining, pure light, that is, pure matter in its simplest form. When it's released from pressure it becomes material and raises hell all over the shop. How they get the squeeze on it, I can't say. Anyway, it isn't important." "Very interesting lecture--very," commented Gloria, gravely. "You pipe down and listen to your betters till they get through," Sherman went on. "Children should be seen, not heard. But what I've got here is a piece of permalloy. Under certain magnetic conditions it defies gravity. Now if we can screen gravity that way, why can't we concentrate it, too?" "Why not? Except that nobody ever did it and nobody knows how," said Ben Ruby.