Toy Shop | Page 3

the older man asked.
"I think so, I caught a few Air Force officers and a colonel in missiles
one day. Then there was one official I remembered from the Bureau of
Standards. Luckily he didn't recognize me. Then those two professors
you spotted from the university."
"Then the problem is out of our hands and into theirs. All we have to do
now is sit back and wait for results."
"What results?! These people weren't interested when we were
hammering on their doors with the proof. We've patented the coils and
can prove to anyone that there is a reduction in weight around them
when they are operating...."

"But a small reduction. And we don't know what is causing it. No one
can be interested in a thing like that--a fractional weight decrease in a
clumsy model, certainly not enough to lift the weight of the generator.
No one wrapped up in massive fuel consumption, tons of lift and such
is going to have time to worry about a crackpot who thinks he has
found a minor slip in Newton's laws."
"You think they will now?" the young man asked, cracking his
knuckles impatiently.
"I know they will. The tensile strength of that thread is correctly
adjusted to the weight of the model. The thread will break if you try to
lift the model with it. Yet you can lift the model--after a small
increment of its weight has been removed by the coils. This is going to
bug these men. Nobody is going to ask them to solve the problem or
concern themselves with it. But it will nag at them because they know
this effect can't possibly exist. They'll see at once that the
magnetic-wave theory is nonsense. Or perhaps true? We don't know.
But they will all be thinking about it and worrying about it. Someone is
going to experiment in his basement--just as a hobby of course--to find
the cause of the error. And he or someone else is going to find out what
makes those coils work, or maybe a way to improve them!"
"And we have the patents...."
"Correct. They will be doing the research that will take them out of the
massive-lift-propulsion business and into the field of pure space flight."
"And in doing so they will be making us rich--whenever the time
comes to manufacture," the young man said cynically.
"We'll all be rich, son," the older man said, patting him on the shoulder.
"Believe me, you're not going to recognize this old world ten years
from now."

Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from Analog April 1962. Extensive research
did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have
been corrected without note.

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