the
concept came towards the surface, it sank back as he tried to pull it
into consciousness.

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.

Presently he went over to his console, to his pads of paper and
pencils, and began sketching rapidly, drawing the interlocking and
repulsing fields, the alignments, mathing out the stresses--in an
attempt to visualize just what it was that the Confusor would now be
doing....

* * * * *

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.

Each proton and electron within the plastic felt an urge to be where
it wasn't--felt a pseudo-memory, imposed by the outside stresses, of
having been traveling at a high velocity towards the north star, on
which the machine chanced to be oriented; felt the new inertia of that
velocity....

Each proton and electron fitted itself more snugly against the north
pole face and pushed with the entire force of its newly-imposed
inertial pattern.

Forty pounds to the square inch six hundred forty pounds over the
surface of the block, the plastic did its best to assume the motion
that the warped laws of its existence said that it already had.

It was only one times ten to the minus five of a gravity that the four
by four by half inch piece of carefully machined plastic presented to
the sixty-four million pound mass of Space Lab One.

But the force was presented almost exactly along the north-south axis
of the hub of the ship, and in space a thrust is cumulative and
momentum derives per second per second.

The Confusor churkled quietly as the piece of plastic exerted its tiny
mass in a six hundred forty pound attempt to take off towards the
north star. And, since the piece itself was rigidly mounted to its
frame, and the frame to the ship, the giant bulk of five million cubic
feet of water, thirty-two million pounds of mass; and the matching
mass-bulk of t