Books › Blue Book v085 n06 [1947-10], 1947 › scan 4
Scan 4
Blue Book v085 n06 [1947-10], 1947
21 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1LIGHT
3He said: "I'm transferring the recording cylinder to the projector. If you'll help me steady it—"
5through my inattention: "…come in for you Thursday at two, then."
6I said: "Thursday at two will be all right for me. I'll be free all the rest of the day."
7"My idea exactly," Court asserted. "Give you a chance to catch up on your reading."
8"Miss Newell does not go out with strange gentlemen," I said. "Such ideas are repugnant to her."
9Mona laughed. "But Ian, this once? Court has a marvelous machine. He is going to record my personality. And then show it to me. The personality, I mean."
10Court ran a hand through his shock of yellow hair. I saw, with surprise, that he was under strong repressed excitement. "I've got hold of something big, Ian. Big, I tell you! By heaven, I don't know, myself…. But wait till you see! And I want Mona to make the first recording."
11He had already turned back to her, and she to him. And watching their faces, I began to wonder whether it had been clever of me to give either of them a look at the other.
12"All right," I said. "This once."
14The next five times I tried to get hold of Mona, she was out. But they did stop by to pick me up on Thursday.
15The laboratory, when we ascended to it that afternoon, displayed a drastic reorganization. Everything from the central floor area had been uprooted, moved to the side walls, and packed there in disarray: small stuff chinked into the spaces between larger units. The effect was unmistakably that of a ruthless scrapping; and again I sensed the importance this new development, whatever it was, had in Court's mind.
16At the far end of the cleared space were two machines. I walked over to look at them. The left-hand one was the larger, and would have occupied most of a ten-foot cube. They were somewhat similar in appearance, since the outer case of each was merely a screen of close-woven wire of some silvery metal. Each had a large horn of material resembling bakelite, perhaps two feet in diameter at the outer end and eighteen inches at the inner end. These pointed toward the cleared floor space. These horns, also, were sheathed with fitted screens of the silvery wire; but a mechanism had been provided for swinging aside the circular section covering their mouths.
17Court flicked the wire shield of the larger machine with his finger-nail. "This is the recorder. That other one's a projector. It still needs a minor adjustment or two, so I can't show you any results today. But we'll go ahead with the recording."
19I HAVE called these things "machines" for want of a better word; but they were not machines, in the sense of having many moving parts. They were collections of electrical apparatus, complexly interconnected: Enormous, contorted vacuum tubes containing tiny plates and filaments; grilles, screens, and grids of wiring; spidery structures of glass, copper, and aluminum—a maze as incomprehensible to me as a cyclotron to a savage.
20Mona had come to stand beside us. Court turned a switch on an enameled steel box bolted to the wall, and something began to revolve inside it. He stood watching a dial on which a needle wavered slowly, first to one side of the zero mark, then to the other.
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