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The juice doesn't flow long enough to burn anything out. It cuts itself off. There's nothing to maintain an arc. "The really tricky part," he said uncomfortably, "may be the stealing of a helicopter. But I guess I can manage it." He left Fran fishing and went down to the nearest town again to buy eccentric items of equipment. Copper foil. Strobe-light packs, two of them.
He could use foil instead of large-area heat-dissipating units, because the current would flow so briefly. He would get a terrific current, of course. Two strobe-light packs in series would give him four million watts of power for part of the wink of an eyelid. When he got back to the camp, Soames called to Fran. "We've got to get to work. I don't think we've got much time.
A bellowing thing came moving out, whirling huge black vanes against the sky. It boomed more loudly still, and lifted, and then drifted with seeming clumsiness across the level airfield while the night watchman shouted after it. Fran turned on the motorcycle headlight as he'd been told, and picked up the apparatus Soames had made to use strobe-light packs in.
Like a strobe-light. We took off with a light field. It's on now we have to keep it on. But I got hold of some pretty storage condensers. I hooked them up in parallel to get a momentary surge of high-amperage current when I shorted them through my field-making coils. Couldn't make it a steady current! Everything would blow! But I had a surge of probably six amps per square centimetre for a while."
I'm thinking suppose I made the field with a strobe-light power-pack or maybe a spot-welding unit. Even a portable strobe-light gives a couple of million watts for the forty-thousandth of a second. Suppose I fixed up a storage-pack to give me a field with a few billion watts in it? It might be practically like matter-transmission, though it would really be only high-speed travel.
The thing is that it must stop instantly. So we turn the whole business inside out. "Instead of making a terrific steady current and cutting it off, I'm going to start with it not flowing and use a strobe-light pack. Every amateur photographer has one. They give a current of eight hundred amperes and twenty-five hundred volts for the forty-thousandth of a second.
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