Free Memoirs Of An Invisible Man by H.F. Saint

whose control system used outside power. It is important to listen to exactly what people are saying. Just out of good will or good citizenship I might have made Wachs focus on what was about to happen. Think it through. Thoughtless of me. Easy to see these things with hindsight, easy in retrospect to point to the flaw when you have already watched it shear open into a gaping crevasse. I couldn’t know what the consequences were. Still, if I had been a little more interested in doing Wachs a favor. Well, it doesn’t matter. Too late now. But I am sorry. For him as much as for myself. Although, really, the man was a lunatic. When they tried, with the help of his utterly uninformed colleagues and suppliers, to reconstruct what he had actually done in that laboratory, it seemed incredible that he had not long ago electrocuted himself and the entire staff of Micro-Magnetics. You can’t just pile together equipment like that, one idea on top of another.
    “It’s an absolutely structured process,” he was explaining to Anne, who had begun to grill him about licenses and federal safety standards. “Not like an explosion at all. If I took you through the mathematics, you’d be amazed. It’s absolutely beautiful. And really so simple, the whole thing. It’s amazing that no one has seen it before, although in a way it’s all right there in Maxwell—”
    “What I’m trying to understand,” I interrupted, “is whether this process, whatever it is, can generate more energy than just what it needs to maintain itself? Can you get more electricity out than you put in? Or is that some sort of theoretical limit?”
    “No, no, no. That’s not a theoretical limit at all. That’s the whole point. It wouldn’t be even a practical limit, if we just had the money for a full-scale generator.”
    People go about saying this sort of thing all the time. Usually the theory turns out to be all wrong, or the machine too expensive to build, or both; but you never know. Anyway, there is nothing to be gained by contradicting people.
    “Well, if what you say is true — or even arguable,” I assured him, “money shouldn’t be much of a problem for you from here on in. At the very least, you’ll have endless grants — if not fabulous wealth. Tell me, what sort of fuel does this thing use?”
    “Fuel?”
    “What sort of matter is it that is having its structure continuously altered or whatever—”
    “Dr. Wachs!” The receptionist had tracked us down. Her voice was like doom. “We’re going to be nearly fifteen minutes late getting started.” She glared.
    “Yes, yes,” he replied excitedly. “We should get in there right away.”
    He scurried out of the laboratory with me, Anne, and the receptionist chasing behind. We entered a long, narrow room at the end of the building. A large oval table had been pushed down to one end, and the remaining space had been filled with rows of folding chairs. In the back a slide projector had been set up. Anne insisted on sitting in the front row, which disappointed me since I was half hoping to sneak in a short nap, but she, I suppose, wanted to keep a close watch on the nuclear criminal.
    There were roughly two dozen people in the room. A few of them might conceivably have been journalists. More likely, however, all of them were academics. Probably they were all friends or colleagues of Wachs’s. Nevertheless, Wachs began by introducing himself and assuring us that he was not going to subject a nonacademic audience to a technical account of his work. A scholarly paper was in preparation and would in the course of time appear in an appropriate journal. And although normally publication of such an article would predate the sort of public announcement he was making today, the significance of his results and the need for support of ongoing research had induced him to present preliminary results informally.
    With no warning the lights went out and we found ourselves in total darkness. For an