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In the engineering control center of Space Lab One, the Confusor churkled quietly and continued to pit its mosquito might against its now nearly seventy-eight million pound antagonist, as the protons and electrons of the plastic that was center to its forces did their inertial best to occupy that position in space towards the north star in which the warped fields around them forced them to belong the mosquito strained its six hundred forty pound thrust against its giant in the per second per second acceleration that was effective only in the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a centimeter in the first second, but that compounded its fractions per second.
Mike hadn't checked to find out. Bessie and her relief operators were watching the prisoners through a video display on the Sacred Cow's console, and would report anything unusual that went on to Captain Andersen. Mike, Ishie, Millie, Paul and Tombu had completed the new Confusor drive units, and they were nearly installed.
They had, to all intents and purposes, carte blanche to work out the construction of the device they would need for an enlarged Confusor with a real thrust, even though they would have to appear to co-operate with a multitude of other interested parties. Mike and Ishie were both becoming adept students of the mythical Dr.
Mike do you know what this means?" His eyes were alight. His voice was reverent. He sprang from the bunk and knelt before the rack that held the churkling Confusor. "My pretty," he said. "My delicate pretty. What you have done! Mike, we've got a space drive!" "Ishie. Don't you realize? We wiped out Thule!" "Thule, schmule Mike, we've got a space drive!" Mike grinned to himself.
Churkling to itself, the device continued applying its alternate fields and warps and strains. "It's a Confusor out of Confusion by Ishie, who is probably as great a creator of Confusion as you could ask," Mike told himself, forgetting his own part in the matter, watching intently, waiting for the concept to come clear in his mind.
The two began to talk, interrupting each other, incoherently outlining the Confusor and the various forces it exerted, and the what Mike kept calling the inertial fish hook. Finally Mike took over. "To put it simply," he said, "our pet didn't do at all what we expected it hooked in on inertia and it took us off. A confusing little Confusor but Millie it's a space drive!
His eyes strayed across the various panels and racks and came to rest in the one hundred twelve degree area. A number of vacant racks, some holding the testing equipment he had moved there not too many hours before and churkling quietly in its rack near the floor, Ishie's Confusor of Confusion. Mike contemplated the device with awed respect, then phrased another question for the Cow.
Running the field strength down and the pressure up, and again arriving at sixteen hundred pounds, he turned off the Confusor, waited a few moments, and turned it back on. The reading remained zero. Apparently, then a decrease in field strength would cause an increase in thrust; but the original field strength was necessary in order to initiate the thrust field.
In the Confusor itself, a tiny chunk of plastic, four by four inches square and one-half inch thick, resting in the middle of the machine between the carefully aligned pole-faces of the magnet, was subjected to the cumulatively devised stresses, a weird distortion of its own stresses and of the inertia that was its existence.
The captain himself was finishing a plastic-bottle of coffee, while he wrote up his log. It was exactly nine minutes since the Confusor had come into full operation. The fractions of fractions of centimeters had added on the square of the number of seconds; and the sixty-four million pounds of mass of Space Lab One has moved over thirteen meters.
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