It flattened out suddenly, and was a disc. He tossed a small weight on
it, and it remained fixed, but began to radiate slightly. Arcot
readjusted his dials, and it ceased radiating, held perfectly
motionless. The sphere returned, and the weight dropped to the floor.
Arcot maneuvered it about for a moment more. Then he placed his friends
behind a screen of relux, and increased the radiation of the globe
tremendously. The heat became intense, and he stopped the radiation.

"No, Stel Felso Theu, we do not have this on our world," Arcot said.

"You do not have it! You look at my apparatus fifteen minutes, and then
work for an hour--and you have apparatus far more effective than ours,
which required years of development!" exclaimed the Talsonian.

"Ah, but it was not wholly new to me. This ship is driven by curving
space into peculiar coordinates. Even so, we didn't do such a hot job,
did we, Morey?"

"No, we should have--"

"What--it was not a good job?" interrupted the Talsonian. "You succeeded
in creating it in air--in making it stop radiating, in making a ball a
foot in diameter, made it change to a disc, made it carry a load--what
do you want?"

"We want the full possibilities, the only thing that can save us in this
war," Morey said.

"What you learned how to do was the reverse of the process we learned.
How you did it is a wonder--but you did. Very well--matter is
energy--does your physics know that?" asked Arcot.

"It does; matter contains vast energy," replied the Talsonian.

"Matter has mass, and energy because of that! Mass _is_ energy. Energy
in any known form is a field of force in space. So matter is ordinarily
a combination of magnetic, electrostatic and gravitational fields. Your
apparatus combined the three, and put them together. The result
was--matter!

"You created matter. We can destroy it but we cannot create it.

"What we ordinarily call matter is just a marker, a sign that there are
those energy-fields. Each bit is surrounded by a gravitational field.
The bit is just the marker of that gravitational field.

"But that seems to be wrong. This artificial matter of yours seems also
a sort of knot, for you make all three fields, combine them, and have
the matter, but not, very apparently, like normal matter. Normal matter
also holds the fields that make it. The artificial matter is surrounded
by the right fields, but it is evidently not able to hold the fields, as
normal matter does. That was