_Call who?_ the physicist wondered, and then forgot about it. He wanted
desperately to dig into the sky car. He wanted to find out where the
engineer had packed five tons of equipment. He wanted to see what made
the wheels go around. No doubt the thing could be returned to its
owners without calling in the police. The thing was probably recorded
in the precisely kept engineering notebook of the physicist's alter ego.
* * * * *
The pilot model was not completely out of sight before Thomas had
the power cowls off, and the whole model stripped of its servicing
doors. They had done an excellent job of design; the sky car without
its servicing panels was but a skeleton frame, with every line, every
connection, and every control rod open for easy servicing.
And it was then and there that the physicist understood what the
engineer had been doing.
Instead of the low-voltage high-current supply lines, with their
attendant heavy busbars, thin pipes ran about the sky car. Seamless
aluminum tubing carried the energizing current. Or, rather the space
inside of the tubing carried it. At the generator end, a ten megawatt
microwave generator supplied high power at ultra high frequency. At the
terminus, rectifiers brought the ultra high frequency down to direct
current for operation of the force-field generators.
Thomas nodded. It was not the final tenth of one percent job. It
was not direct current. The diagravitic force was not constant. It
operated only seven tenths of the time, and was turned off and on
fifteen or twenty million million times per second. Nothing short of
high-definition test equipment would ever tell the difference, however.
Gone were the massive electromagnetic deflection field coils. In their
place was a set of seventy kilovolt electrostatic plates.
Missing entirely were the variable-speed motor generators. In their
place was a simple crystalline formation under permanent magnetic
stress. "Artificial radio-activated crystals," muttered Thomas. "Good
for a couple of years."
But the feed lines. _The feed lines._ The current carrying ability
of space itself--not the metallic conductor--did the trick. Using
the ultra high frequency bands, the busbars had been replaced with
cylindrical wave guides. The depth of penetration was measured in
microns at those frequencies--and as long as the guides were properly
designed, they offered little loss in power. The current went down the
wave guides by virtue of the magnetic fields created throughout the
guides--magnetic fields generated in the space inside of the tubular
guides.
The generator itself was one of the new crystal microwave generators
and the rectifiers at the receiving end were of the same ilk.
And the five tons of equipment had vanished in a puff of tubular
guides, electrostatic plates, and intermittent operation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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