it, he tossed one end of the spring into it.
He drew it back. He repeated the operation. He moved to one side.
Again he swung the gold-colored ribbon. He dangled it back and forth.
Then he drew back yet again and wrapped his left hand and wrists with
many turns of the thin bronze spring, carefully spacing the turns. He
moved forward once more.

He came back, his expression showing no elation at all.

"No good," he said unhappily. "In a way, it works. The spring acts as
an aerial and picks up more of the beam than my hand. But I tried to
make a Faraday cage. That will stop most electromagnetic radiation,
but not this stuff! It goes right through, like electrons through a
radio tube grid."

He put the spring back in his pocket.

"Well," he grimaced. "Let's go on again. I had a little bit of hope,
but some smarter men than I am haven't got the right gimmick yet."

They started off once more. And this time they did not choose a path
for easier travel, but went up a steep slope that rose for hundreds of
feet to arrive at a crest with another steep slope going downhill. At
the top Lockley said sourly, "I did discover one thing, if it means
anything. The beam leaks at its edges, but it's only leakage. It
doesn't diffuse. It's tight. It's more like a searchlight beam than
anything else in that way. You can see a light beam at night because
dust motes scatter some part of it. But most of the light goes
straight on. This stuff does the same. It's hard to imagine a limit to
its range."

He trudged on downhill. Jill followed him. Presently, when they'd
covered two miles or more with no lightening of his expression, she
said, "You said you understand how it works. Radio and radar beams
don't have effects like this. How does this have them?"

"It makes high frequency currents on the surface of anything it hits.
High frequency doesn't go into flesh or metal. It travels on the
surface only. So when this beam hits a man it generates high frequency
on his skin. That induces counter currents underneath, and they
stimulate all the sensory nerves we've got--of our eyes and ears and
noses as well as our skin. Every nerve reports its own kind of
sensation. Run current over your tongue, and you taste. Induce a
current in your eyes, and you see flashes of light. So the beam makes
all our senses report everything they're capable of reporting, true or
not, and we're blinded and deafened. Then the nerves to our muscles
report to them that