Garvers looked pained. "When Busch had finished his demonstration, he carelessly tossed the device on my desk. The thing skidded and hit my paperweight so that the switch was thrown on again. So now the device and my desk are both untouchable. "Go over to the desk and try to touch it," said Garvers dryly. His friend got up and ambled over to the desk. There he saw a small black box resting near a paperweight. Its toggle switch was at the "on" position, and it was lying on its side. He tried to pick the box up, but his hand slid effortlessly through it as if it were so much air. "_Well_!" Max said. He passed his hand through the desk again. "Well, well. Are you sure Busch told you everything?" "Busch! He honestly wants to help and we have taken him through the mill. Pentathol, scopolamine and the like; hypnotism and the polygraph. We've dug that man deeper than we have ever dug anybody before." "And have you conducted any experiments of your own?" "Certainly. That's what is so frustrating. We try to X ray the thing, and we don't get a thing. We bombarded it with every radiation we could think of, from radio to gamma and it just reflected them. We can detect no radiation coming out of it. Magnetic fields don't effect it, nor do heat and cold. Nuclear particles are ignored by it; it just _sits_ there thumbing its nose at us. And we can't even wait for it to run down. According to Busch, the power requirements of the thing are funny and once the field is established, it takes no additional energy to maintain it. And the collapsing power remains indefinitely until it is time to turn the machine off, but it's unreachable by any means we have. "It's pure frustration. There's no way we can analyze it until we can handle it, and no way we can handle it until we can turn it off. And there's no way we can turn it off until we have analyzed it. If it were alive, I'd think that it was laughing at us. "Do _you_ have any ideas?" asked Garvers hopefully. "Nothing that would help a solution at present," said Max. "But do you remember the legend of King Tantalus?" "Slightly. What about it?" "Well ... if _he_ were here," said Max thoughtfully, "he'd ... sympathize." THE END