perfectly, dutifully putting a thirty-yard hole in our back forty.
This meant that we could have gotten into the mining and tunneling business almost immediately, but after a nine-hour-long meeting, we decided to hold off on that until we could develop the whole concept a bit further. We still didn't know the basic principles that the gadget worked on, and without knowing those, we'd be hard pressed to get an all inclusive patent.
If we started using or selling the circuit, well, I'd copied the thing easily enough, and so could any other competent tech. Given a hint on what we were doing, hundreds of outfits would soon be out there competing with us.
Competition might be a good thing for the economy as a whole, but it is a bad thing for an underfinanced little company like ours was.
For the rest of that first year, we made solid steady progress. The field did not have to be generated from a point source. We found out how to set up steady-state fields, where a given volume was irradiated evenly and could be transported through time without being sliced into sushi.
We found out how to shield the field, so we could send what we wanted to send without cratering the landscape.
We learned how to operate it with the circuitry inside the field, so it acted sort of like a car, taking its motive power with it. We also figured out how to work it with the circuitry outside the field. We got to calling this the "cannon" technique.
All this time, we were only putting things into the future. From a practical point of view, we could have accomplished much the same thing by locking whatever it was in a box, and taking it out of the box later. The real prize would be to be able to send things into the past.
From everything we had been able to learn, it looked as though if you simply reversed the phase in one section of the circuit, it should reverse the circuit's total temporal effect.
A circuit thusly configured should have been able to send things back in time, but when I tried it, the circuit overloaded, every time, and burned to a blackened pile of ashes and melted metal. We had no idea what the problem was. Coupled with it was the impossibility of just how a tiny, nine volt transistor battery could possibly put out enough power to so thoroughly fry a good sized epoxy-glass circuit board. Ian calculated that over its entire lifetime, such a battery couldn't put out a thousandth of the power we saw repeatedly generated.
"So, gentlemen, it appears that in addition to everything else, you have discovered a new source of industrial power!" Hasenpfeffer said one morning at breakfast.
"A fucking expensive source of power, if you ask me," Ian said. "When you spend thirty dollars worth of circuitry to generate thirty cents worth of power, you aren't making a profit."
Nobody had a good way of answering that, and in the momentary silence, Hasenpfeffer's lady of the night walked in, wearing one of his old housecoats. She was a gorgeous, slender young thing, with long, straight blond hair, like most of the others. Ian offered to make her breakfast, and since Hasenpfeffer was here, she nodded acceptance. After that, it was as though Ian and I didn't exist, as far as she was concerned. After a bit, we picked up our coffee cups and drifted off, leaving the two lovers, or at least sex partners, alone.
We were used to it. The same sort of thing had been happening for seven years, since we all were freshmen in college. But being used to something doesn't mean that it no longer hurts. I couldn't help but look on Hasenpfeffer's success with the ladies with mixed emotions, the most prominent of which was envy.
We settled into the family room, out of earshot of Hasenpfeffer's latest.
"Over the years, he's got to have had two hundred of them over," Ian said.
"Counting college, yeah, it has to have been be at least that."
"Well, you'd think that at least one of them would want to have something to do with at least one of us."
"It seems
This meant that we could have gotten into the mining and tunneling business almost immediately, but after a nine-hour-long meeting, we decided to hold off on that until we could develop the whole concept a bit further. We still didn't know the basic principles that the gadget worked on, and without knowing those, we'd be hard pressed to get an all inclusive patent.
If we started using or selling the circuit, well, I'd copied the thing easily enough, and so could any other competent tech. Given a hint on what we were doing, hundreds of outfits would soon be out there competing with us.
Competition might be a good thing for the economy as a whole, but it is a bad thing for an underfinanced little company like ours was.
For the rest of that first year, we made solid steady progress. The field did not have to be generated from a point source. We found out how to set up steady-state fields, where a given volume was irradiated evenly and could be transported through time without being sliced into sushi.
We found out how to shield the field, so we could send what we wanted to send without cratering the landscape.
We learned how to operate it with the circuitry inside the field, so it acted sort of like a car, taking its motive power with it. We also figured out how to work it with the circuitry outside the field. We got to calling this the "cannon" technique.
All this time, we were only putting things into the future. From a practical point of view, we could have accomplished much the same thing by locking whatever it was in a box, and taking it out of the box later. The real prize would be to be able to send things into the past.
From everything we had been able to learn, it looked as though if you simply reversed the phase in one section of the circuit, it should reverse the circuit's total temporal effect.
A circuit thusly configured should have been able to send things back in time, but when I tried it, the circuit overloaded, every time, and burned to a blackened pile of ashes and melted metal. We had no idea what the problem was. Coupled with it was the impossibility of just how a tiny, nine volt transistor battery could possibly put out enough power to so thoroughly fry a good sized epoxy-glass circuit board. Ian calculated that over its entire lifetime, such a battery couldn't put out a thousandth of the power we saw repeatedly generated.
"So, gentlemen, it appears that in addition to everything else, you have discovered a new source of industrial power!" Hasenpfeffer said one morning at breakfast.
"A fucking expensive source of power, if you ask me," Ian said. "When you spend thirty dollars worth of circuitry to generate thirty cents worth of power, you aren't making a profit."
Nobody had a good way of answering that, and in the momentary silence, Hasenpfeffer's lady of the night walked in, wearing one of his old housecoats. She was a gorgeous, slender young thing, with long, straight blond hair, like most of the others. Ian offered to make her breakfast, and since Hasenpfeffer was here, she nodded acceptance. After that, it was as though Ian and I didn't exist, as far as she was concerned. After a bit, we picked up our coffee cups and drifted off, leaving the two lovers, or at least sex partners, alone.
We were used to it. The same sort of thing had been happening for seven years, since we all were freshmen in college. But being used to something doesn't mean that it no longer hurts. I couldn't help but look on Hasenpfeffer's success with the ladies with mixed emotions, the most prominent of which was envy.
We settled into the family room, out of earshot of Hasenpfeffer's latest.
"Over the years, he's got to have had two hundred of them over," Ian said.
"Counting college, yeah, it has to have been be at least that."
"Well, you'd think that at least one of them would want to have something to do with at least one of us."
"It seems
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