Kingman leaned back in his chair and put both of his feet on the desk.
"I don't mind telling you," he said gloatingly. "Venus Equilateral is
going to have the name of having invented and developed the matter
transmitter and matter duplicator. That's fine. It will carry quite
an honor, that reputation, up to the time that the big crash comes,
when people realize they're being trapped. Terran Electric, selling
duplicators for home use at a song, will emerge as the savior of
mankind. All I'm going to gain out of this is security for Mark Kingman
and a big black eye for Venus Equilateral."
Channing swore. He stood up. "You fool," he snapped, "you blind,
bigoted fool. A little co-operation on your part would save a lot of
trouble, but you prefer to let a petty quarrel ruin the entire economic
system immediately. We could work this out sensibly, Kingman. Will you
help?"
"No. Nothing you can say will convince me that I'm doing wrong."
"But why fire your help? That's what is going to hurt."
"I don't need a production line full of people, Channing, to sit around
and watch a duplicator turn out vacuum cleaners, complete in their
packing cartons."
Channing took Kingman's under ankle where they were crossed on the edge
of the desk. He lifted, and the pudgy attorney went over backwards
with a roaring crash, hitting his head on the carpet and spilling
over backwards out of the chair onto the floor behind his desk. He
arose with a roar of hate, but the door slammed behind Channing before
Kingman could become coherent.
Channing returned to Venus Equilateral immediately, a trip that
took four days. In touch with events by driver beam, Don heard the
news-advertising agencies announcing the Terran Electric Duplicator of
a size suitable for a medium home, complete with a recording attachment
and a supply of disks. Channing gritted his teeth and stepped up the
drive of the _Relay Girl_ another notch. His first query upon reaching
the Station was to Wes Farrell.
"Nothing yet, Don," answered Wes. "We've been running some very
interesting experiments, though."
Channing was interested in nothing but the non-duplicatable material,
but he nodded. Wes Farrell's sideline experiments often paid off more
than the main line of research.
"By inserting a filter circuit in the transmission beam, we can filter
out other responses," said Wes. "Meaning that we can take a cube of
regular iron, for instance, and run it through. The integrated iron in
the receiver is pure iron, the purity of which is dependent upon the
band-pass of the filter. Using alloy selectivity disks for filters in
the circuits, we can make iron that is 99.99997% pure."
"Might be useful for metallurgical work, and so forth," mused Don.
"Nine-nines iron is valuable and almost impossible--and it takes a
gadget that destroys value to make it. Nice paradox, that."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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