Mart laughed. 'Don't get me wrong. Consider this flow. I don't know what properties it might have. It would have to take place through four of the dimensions involved. But when we get through, we'll develop the expression for the curl of such a flow through material substance.
'Suppose such a curl exists. Whirlpools appear. It's crude analogy. Your mind can't get hold of it. We need the math. But perhaps we can show that the curl is in such a direction as to cause a reduction of spatial displacement between masses causing the curl. Could that make sense?'
Jennings had been sitting very still. Now he smiled and spread his hands on the desk top. 'It could. The curl of an eight-dimensional flow would be fairly complex. But if it develops all right, what then?'
'Then we build a device to streamline matter through this flow, so that curl will not develop.'
Jennings sat back in his chair as if suddenly limp. 'Holy smoke, you've got it all figured out! But wait a minute, that would simply nullify gravity. How about anti-gravity?'
Mart shrugged. 'We find a way to introduce a reverse curl vector.'
'That does it, boy, that does it.'
Mart laughed and walked to the door with him. 'Yeah, I know how the thing sounds, but, look — I'm really not kidding. If this gravitational flow expression works out, the rest of it could follow. It could, Jennings.'
Jennings faced him with all amusement gone out of his face. 'I'm not laughing, Mart,' he said, 'not at you, anyway. If we get the answer to this whole thing it's going to be something like that. It's just that everything we've postulated up to now has so completely blocked any thinking of this kind that a man has to be prepared to consider himself slightly rocky to even talk about it.'
It was a day later when Berk called him. 'Hey, Mart, why didn't you let us know right away about Dykstra? If Jennings hadn't called, we might have got to him too late.'
'What do you mean?'
'This story he's been giving about the project's being a fraud. I hope you weren't bothered by it.'
'Not much. Are you going to kick him off the project?'
'That follows, naturally. He's in a rest home now. His mind was so congealed that be couldn't accept the reality of Dunning's work. He flipped his lid in a mild sort of way. He'll be all right in a few weeks and can go back to teaching.'
'I'm sorry about it. We almost have the answer he was afraid to face, I believe.'
Impatiently, Mart threw his thesis open to the whole seminar that day. It was a bit hard to take for some who had been inclined somewhat in Dykstra's direction, but the maths was clean enough to appeal to all of them. They pitched in almost as a solid unit to try to obtain a formulation convertible to metal and electrons and fields.
Jennings was the one who carried it all the way. He rushed into Mart's office three days later without knocking and slapped some sheets on the desk.
'You were right, Mart,' he exclaimed. 'Your field does show curl in the presence of material substance. We're on our way to Dunning's flying belt!'
But when it came, Mart was dismayed. The entire group worked in a thirty-six hour seminar to whip the work into final shape. The result was that an anti-gravity machine could be built. But it would be the size of a hundred-ton cyclotron!
Mart told Keyes what they had. 'It's a far cry from Dunning's flying belt,' he said. 'We'll continue trying to boil it down if you want us to, or we can submit a practical design that will work now in the shape we've got it in.'
Keyes glanced at the sketches Mart had prepared. 'It isn't exactly what we'd expected, but I think we'd better build it. The important thing right now is to get a practical anti-gravity machine functioning. Refinements can come later. The shops are yours. How long will it take?'
'It depends on what you wish to put into it in the way of men and machines. With a round-the-clock crew I believe the model could be ready in about three weeks.'
'It's yours,' said Keyes. 'Build it.'
It was actually over four weeks before the first demonstration was scheduled in the big machine shop protected by the triple security seal that had shrouded the whole project.
Those in attendance were the ones present at the first conference plus a few of the workmen who had helped build the massive device.
The demonstration was simple, almost anti-climactic after the hectic seminars they had sweated out the past weeks. Mart stepped to the switchboard that seemed diminutive under the high, steel-arched ceiling of the shop. He threw the main power switches and then adjusted slowly a number of dials.
Almost imperceptibly, and without wavering, the enormous disc-like mass rose in the centre of the shop. It hovered without visible support three feet above the floor.
The disc was thirty feet in diameter and three feet thick. Its tonnage was evident in the long crack in the concrete floor beneath the I-beams laid temporarily to support it.
