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CHAPTER 5
THE BUILDING OF THE TIME-CAR
It is not my intention to relate here the details of the work that occupied our attention in the following weeks. It has been dealt with at length in two technical treatises by Lantin and myself. The theoretical side of our work has been very fully discussed in those two books, but the concrete details are purposely slurred over. The most valuable part of our achievement, the time-wave itself, is hardly mentioned in them.
There is a reason for this, and that reason is the firm intention of Dr. Lantin and myself not to impart any information that would enable anyone to duplicate our own experiment. Thus it is of necessity that parts of this present record are vague and indefinite.
I may say, though, unquestionably, that without the notes that were left us by Cannell, we could never have achieved the success we did achieve. Those notes, brief and unsatisfactory as they were, were yet enough to set our feet on the right path, in our quest of the time-traveling secret. To us, then, the problem was one of accelerating electronic activity, and all our experiments were directed toward that goal.
Fortunately, Lantin had virtually a free hand at the Foundation, and we were able to use the matchless resources of its great laboratories to further our quest. Working constantly together and maintaining complete secrecy regarding the object of our experiments, we sought for some force capable of controlling the movement and speed of electrons, at will.
The weeks dragged by, and we seemed no nearer success than ever. And at the Foundation, some curiosity was being evinced regarding our work, which ill-fitted with our desires. We had made trial of every form of vibration, it seemed, and all without success, for none affected the electronic movement in the way we wished. In the end, it was by a combination of electro-magnetic waves and light rays that we finally achieved success.
I say "we," but it was Lantin's triumph. He had the inspiration to combine high-frequency Hertzian vibrations and light-rays, merging the two dissimilar vibrations into a single wave, which we called "the time wave" and which had power to affect the very electronic structure of matter, all electronic movement within its radius being stimulated and accelerated by it. And with it, we proved the correctness of Cannell's theory, for when we turned the wave upon small objects on the laboratory table, they vanished, reappearing a few seconds later, having been driven into the future for those few seconds by the force of the time-wave.
By reversing the action of the wave, the electronic movement was reversed also, and thus the basis of our needs was found and we had a force that could sweep all things in its radius into past or future at will. Then it was that Lantin began to speak of a car, a car containing a time-wave projector powerful enough to convey the car and all its occupants into past or future. It was vitally necessary, he thought, that such a car should be able to move in space, as well as time, and to acquire this power we had recourse to a discovery accidentally made in the course of our experiments.
In our efforts to change the movement of electrons, we had found that when a stream of them was shot out in a concentrated ray, in any one direction, it produced an invisible but powerful repulsion. It was on this fact that Lantin relied to move our car in space, directing electron-streams toward the ground to raise and hold us in space, and directing other rays obliquely down toward earth, to move the car from side to side in any direction.
The work went on. Six weeks after the seizure of Cannell, our car was nearing completion, and a strange-appearing vehicle it was. It was a short, thick cylinder of steel, tapering to a point at each end, its greatest diameter some five feet and with a total length of fifteen, from point to point. Windows of heavy glass were set at regular intervals along its length, and entrance into the car's interior was through a circular door or manhole in its upper surface, the car being quite air-tight when this was closed.
Inside, the cylinder's bottom was flat-decked and covered with upholstery, since the small diameter of the cylinder made it necessary for us to either sit or lie on that floor, when operating the car. The time-wave apparatus, covered by a metal shield, was placed in the fore end of the cylinder, with the mechanism that produced the repulsion ray beside it. A small, square switch-board held the centered controls of both these.
In the back end of the car was an oxygen-producing apparatus, which gave us independence of outside air for some hours, though normally our car was intended to be ventilated from the outside. A small heater held place beside this, and it was our intention to place what equipment we took with us in that end of the car.
Complete, the car weighed several thousand pounds. We had kept to secrecy in the making of it, having the main shell and other parts of it made for us by different firms, and assembling them in a room of Lantin's apartment. The actuating mechanisms we installed ourselves, and finally the car lay complete on the roof of the building, secured from prying eyes or hands by a padlocked cover of heavy wood.
One trial we made of the car's abilities, testing its power to move in space. Waiting until darkness concealed our trial, we entered the car and rose easily some five hundred feet above the city, the heavy car easily upheld and moved by the powerful repulsion rays. Then, circling once or twice, Lantin pointed the car east and opened up the power. A whistling gale rose outside as we rocketed across the Atlantic with tremendous speed, attaining a velocity of almost five hundred miles an hour, speeding through the atmosphere like a pointed bullet. We made no trial of the time-wave apparatus, postponing that until our real start, and returned to the roof of Lantin's apartment building without being sighted.
In a few days after that test flight, we had gathered our outfit and placed it in the car. Besides a complete but very compact camping outfit, we carried compressed foods that would be sufficient for a long period to keep us from starving. Our weapons were two high-power repeating rifles, with ample ammunition. Besides the rifles, we each carried a heavy automatic in a belt-holster.
Our last preparation was to stow away in the car apparatus with which it would be possible to construct a duplicate of the time-wave mechanism of the car. We intended taking no chance of being stranded in some age of the future.
Every detail of the car's working mechanism was given a final test and found satisfactory, a leave of absence from the Foundation was asked for and granted, and so, at last, two months after the seizure of Cannell, our preparations were completed and we stood on the very threshold of our unparalleled adventure.