Beyond the Barrier

Начало книги

The banked, fan-shaped classroom was silent with attention.

“And now,” said Professor Gordon Naismith, “watch closely.

I drop the charged particle into the tank.” He tripped the release of the mechanism suspended over the big glass tank, and saw a silvery spicule drop, almost too quickly to follow, into the clear liquid.

“Contact with other partially charged molecules releases the time energy,” said Naismith, watching a sudden silvery cloud spread from the bottom of the tank, “and, as you see—”

The silvery cloud grew rapidly, advancing on a wave front, a beautifully symmetrical curve that was determined by two factors: gravity, and the kinetic loss of the conversion process.

It was perfect beauty, far beyond any curve of flesh or any line drawn by an artist, and Naismith watched it with a painful tightness in his throat, although he had seen it a hundred times before.

Now the change was complete. The tank was full of silvery fluid, opaque, mirror-bright and luminous. “All the liquid has now been raised to a higher temporal energy level,” Naismith told the class, “and is in the state you may have heard described as ‘quasi-matter.’ Tomorrow, when we begin our experiments on this tank, we will see that it has some very odd physical properties. However, that concludes today’s demonstration. Are there any questions?”

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