Gallegher whistled. "I'm impressed. But it seems like a waste of a good Chiralitron just to phone yourself in the future." He reached for the Chiralitron's lever. "Can I try something with it?"
Lew slapped Gallegher's hand away. "Not likely. Requisition it yourself. But you could keep an eye on those gauges for me: I need to monitor the gravitational effect."
Gallegher cheerfully manned the control panel. "Now if you could phone yourself in the past, that would be something. You could clean up at the races."
Lew snorted. "Sure, why don't you do that experiment? I'm sure Zappencackler would love it. I don't think it's possible, but before this year I didn't think that faculty advisors were possible, either."
Gallegher's face dissolved into a dreamy smile. "I'd love to prove that Zappencackler's impossible," he agreed.
Lew aimed the Chiralitron through the lattice and trained it on the floating block of inertrium. "Ready?" Gallegher nodded.
The Chiralitron warmed up and emitted a narrow beam at the inertrium block. Its steady hum was the only sound in the lab as the block began to drift downwards. "Thirty per cent," Gallegher reported.
"Eighty per cent." Lew kept playing the Chiralitron's beam on the block as it sank and finally came to a stop, floating in the exact center of the inertrium sphere. "One hundred per cent.... and holding." Lew switched the Chiralitron off, and they both stepped up to the lattice. Lew smiled. "That's done it," he said. "The Chiralitron's changed the inertrium molecules to their left-handed state, so instead of repelling gravity, the block's become supermassive."
Gallegher ran his hand along the sphere's framework. "...and the unaltered inertrium around it balances the effect. Swell!"
Lew stepped toward the phone. "Now when I transmit a call through the inside of the sphere the signal should be accelerated by the distortion inside, and because its local time's moving at a slower rate the call will arrive about ten minutes later."
Everything was going just perfectly until the phone ran
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March 8th, 2011 at 12:08 am
Wow, you’re good. Three paragraphs and I already know quite a bit about Gallegher’s personality. Nicely done.
March 8th, 2011 at 1:25 pm
Well, I hope it do it right at least part of the time, and when you do it right, I think, your characters do the heavy lifting for you. They’ve just got to be who they are, and then the rest of it works itself out.
