[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] times over for that. I told you it looked like a two. Maybe I need my eyes examined, but it still looks that way." "Did you have any reason for not wanting the cavity to work?" "Now, look!" Hansen's anger suffused red through his face. "I'm paid to turn out screwball gadgets in this shop, not worry about whether they work or not." "Didn't it occur to you to check that boggled figure?" "I told you it looked all right!" Hansen turned angrily back to his lathe and resumed work. Reg watched the mechanic for a moment, then left the shop. The bunglers seemed to have no personal interest in their botch work, he decided. It must be something entirely subconscious as in the case of accident prones. That didn't make them any less dangerous, however. Without them on his project he would have been able by now to demonstrate the practicability of BW utilization. But, following this line of reasoning, why couldn't the teleportation equipment be made to work now? According to all this theory the equipment he had built should have been capable of acting as a pilot model for a larger unit and it should have been able to transfer hundred pound masses at least a thousand feet. Yet, it had failed completely. Granting that he himself was not a Person from Porlock. But could he grant that? Maybe the greatest blunders were his own. His failure to catch Dickson's mistake early enough, for example! That was the one premise he could not admit, however. It led to insolvable dilemma, rendered the problem completely indeterminate. He had to assume that he was not one of the bunglers. In that case, why did the equipment fail to work? It meant that some of the blunders introduced by the Persons from Porlock still remained in the equipment. Remove them, and it should work! He'd have to go over every equation, every design, every specification-point by point-compare them with the actual equipment and dig out the bugs. * * * * He went into his own lab. He dismissed the assistants and shut the door. He sat down with the voluminous papers which he had produced in the ten months of work on the project. It was hopeless to attempt to go over the entire mass of work in short hours or days. That's what should be done, but he could cover the most vulnerable points. These lay in the routine, conventional circuits which he had left to his assistants and in whose design the draftsman and model shop had been trusted with too many details. The first of these was the amplifier for the BW generator, whose radiation, capable of mass-modulation, carried the broken down components of the materials to be transported. The amplifier held many conventional features, though the wave form handled was radically unconventional. It contained two stages of Class A amplification which had to be perfectly symmetrical. Reg had never made certain of the correct operation of these two stages by themselves. Spence, his junior engineer, had reported them operating correctly and Reg had taken his word on so simple a circuit. He had no reason now to believe that anything was wrong. It was just one of those items left to a potential Person from Porlock. He disconnected the input and output of the amplifier and hooked up a signal generator and a vacuum tube voltmeter. Point by point he checked the circuit. The positive and negative peaks were equal and a scope showed perfect symmetry, but in the second stage they weren't high enough. He wasn't getting the required soup. The output of the tube in use should have been more than sufficient to produce it. Then he discovered the fault. The bias was wrong and the drive had been cut to preserve symmetry. Spence had simply assumed the flat tops were due to overloading. Reg sat in silent contemplation of the alleged engineering and poured on self-recrimination for trusting Spence. This was the reason for the apparent failure of the whole modulator circuit. Because of it, he had assumed his theory of mass modulation was faulty. Spence was obviously one of them, he thought. That meant other untold numbers of bugs throughout the mass of equipment. During the remainder of the morning and in the afternoon he adjusted the amplifiers and got the modulator into operation. He uncovered another serious bug in an out-of-tolerance dropping resistor in the modulator. He contemplated the probability of that one defective resistor among the hundreds of thousands of satisfactory ones the plant used-the probability of its being placed in exactly the critical spot. The figure was too infinitesimal to be mere chance. By quitting time he had the circuit as far as the mass modulator functioning fairly smoothly. He called Janice and told her he wouldn't be home until late. Then he worked until past midnight to try to get the transmission elements to accept the modulated carrier. The only result was failure and at last he went home in utter exhaustion. The next morning, refreshed, he was filled with an unnatural exuberance, however. He had the key to the cause of his failures and he felt success was only a matter of time. If he could just get that necessary time -- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl blacksoulman.xlx.pl