The Portable Quantum Tunnelling Device
It makes two apertures. One of them is here and one of them is somewhere else, and the distance between them is a matter of complete indifference to whatever is standing in the first one. Six years in development, eleven thousand recorded transits, and one word we are no longer permitted to print.
Here is what it does. You point it at a wall and you pull the handle and there is now a hole in that wall. You walk twenty feet and you point it at a second wall and you pull the handle again and there is now a hole in that wall as well. The two holes are the same hole. Step into one of them and you come out of the other one, in the same posture, at the same speed, holding the same sandwich.
I have been told by counsel that the preceding paragraph contains four words I am not allowed to use and that I have used one of them six times. The permitted word is aperture. It is on the letterhead, so it will have to do, and I would remind the reader that we chose that word in 1943 because it made a shower curtain sound hygienic and it has been earning its keep ever since.
An aperture, then. Two of them. Arbitrarily far apart and sharing one interior. That interior is not a room, it is not a corridor, it has no length and it has no inside, and the only honest thing to say about it is that a man goes in one side and comes out the other and takes rather less time about it than a man ought to.
Momentum Is Conserved
This is the single most important sentence in this catalogue and I want it read twice. Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out. The device does not slow anything down. It does not catch anything. It has no opinion whatsoever about what happens after the second aperture, which is a matter for the customer, the floor, and in three documented cases the ceiling.
Purchasers who intend to place the second aperture above the first are advised that they have just built a machine for making a man go faster and faster in a circle forever, and that Aperture Science Innovators sells that machine separately, at a markup, as the Aerial Faith Plate, and would appreciate the business.
It Is Not A Toy
The handheld unit weighs eighty-nine pounds. It is tethered by forty feet of armoured cable to a generator cabinet the size of an icebox, and the cabinet is not portable, and the word “portable” in the product name refers to the emitter and to nothing else. Two men operate it. One carries and aims. One watches the tether. The man who watches the tether has the more important job and the Enrichment Center pays him accordingly.
The emitting surface must be conductive. Ordinary rock, ordinary brick and ordinary plaster will not take an aperture and will not be persuaded to. What takes an aperture is a wall prepared with conversion gel, which is ground lunar substrate in suspension, which we own more of than any government on this continent. That is not an accident of procurement. That is a moat.
Specification — Model ASI-202/B
- Emitter mass
- 89 lb, dry
- Tether
- 40 ft, armoured, non-detachable
- Generator cabinet
- 1,140 lb. Not portable.
- Aperture diameter
- 44 in. nominal, oval
- Apertures per unit
- Two. Never one. Never three.
- Maximum separation
- Not yet found
- Minimum separation
- 11 in. Below eleven inches the two apertures are one aperture.
- Emitting surface
- Lunar-substrate conductive preparation
- Operators required
- Two
- Price, complete
- $14,750, f.o.b. Upper Michigan
He tells the shareholders eleven. It is twelve. The twelfth was the fourteenth of March, he came back up alone, and he sat in the outer office for an hour without saying anything, and he has never once in thirteen years sat anywhere for an hour. — C.
A Note On Nomenclature, Not Written By Me
In February the Legal Department came up to the third floor with a list. I am printing the list because I was told not to print the list, and because a customer reading this catalogue is entitled to know why the copy on this sheet reads like a man walking around a hole in his own floor.
Interoffice Memorandum
Counsel has reviewed the 1958 catalogue copy and the correspondence arising from it. The following nouns are withdrawn from all Aperture Science Innovators printed matter, advertising, signage, invoicing and telephone enquiry with immediate effect. The reasons are given so that the President will stop asking for them.
Schedule A — nouns, and their standing.
| Noun | Standing | Reason Given By Counsel |
|---|---|---|
| Door | Forbidden | A door is a fixture with a duty of care attached to it in nine states. |
| Gate | Forbidden | Implies a keeper, a toll, and a thing on the other side that wishes to come through. |
| Portal | Forbidden | Ecclesiastical. Attracts a class of correspondence the company cannot answer. |
| Passage | Forbidden | Implies duration. Nothing about this product has a duration. |
| “The thing” | Forbidden | Used by the President in a public address on 4 January. Counsel would rather not. |
| Hole | Discouraged | Accurate. That is the difficulty with it. |
| Aperture | Permitted | It is the name of the company. Counsel cannot be sued by the letterhead. |
| Wound | Struck | Proposed by Applied Sciences. Counsel agrees it is the most precise of the seven. |
Schedule A is binding on all printed matter. Schedule B, concerning verbs, is not yet agreed.
Counsel notes for the record that the President responded to this schedule by having the words Not A Door cut into a rubber stamp, and that the stamp appears at the head of this very sheet.
“Fine. It is not a door. It is an aperture. Now get out of my office through the aperture.”
Measured Performance, Test Shaft 09
Selected transit trials, 1958 and the first quarter of 1959. Velocities measured at the plane of each aperture.
| Trial | Separation | Entry, ft/sec | Exit, ft/sec | Observation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 58-114 | 22 ft | 4.1 | 4.1 | Walking pace. Unremarkable and therefore excellent. |
| 58-140 | 310 ft | 31.8 | 31.8 | Dropped mass. Momentum conserved to the instrument. |
| 58-207 | 1.9 miles | 31.8 | 31.8 | Distance makes no difference. It has never made any difference. |
| 58-311 | 41 miles | 12.0 | 12.0 | Second aperture struck in a rented barn outside Marquette. Farmer compensated. |
| 59-006 | 11 in. | 3.0 | — | Minimum separation trial. See ASI-401 and do not attempt this. |
| 59-018 | Not yet found | 3.0 | 3.0 | Volunteer reported the second chamber smelled of salt water. There is no salt water in this facility. |
| 59-022 | 60 ft | 0.0 | 0.0 | Weighted storage cube. The cube has no observations to offer. |
Compiled by Applied Sciences from the chamber logs. Trial 59-006 is retained in the record at the President’s insistence and against the recommendation of the department.
Handling, Siting & The Two-Man Rule
Before Each Use
- Generator cabinet earthed to the shaft rail.
- Tether inspected along its full forty feet.
- Both intended surfaces prepared and cured.
- Second man in position and in voice contact.
- Separation confirmed greater than eleven inches.
- All metal removed from any person who may transit.
- Nobody standing in the second surface.
- Nobody standing in the first surface either. This has happened.
The device is sold to industry, to the mining trade, to two railroads and to every branch of the armed forces except the Navy, who have bought nothing whatever from this company since 1956 and who know perfectly well why. It is not sold to households. It is not sold to schools. Three enquiries from schools have been received and all three were answered by Sales with a catalogue and a very short letter.
Site the second aperture where you can see it. That is the whole of the siting instruction and it is the one customers ignore. An aperture you cannot see is an aperture into a place you have not inspected, and the company’s position on places that have not been inspected is set out at length in Form ASI-900 and is not cheerful reading.
Volunteers pass through under supervision, in a chamber, in daylight, having been paid. Sixty dollars, cash, same day. If you would like to be one of them the form is two sheets along and it is the size of a phone book and it is worth every page.
Cut Here — Enquiry Card, Applied Sciences
- Model
- ASI-202/B, tethered, portable
- Fixed emplacement
- ASI-202/A, $6,200, surfaces prepared by us
- Conductive preparation
- $41 per square foot, minimum forty feet
- Replacement tether
- $18 per foot. Do not splice a tether.
- Demonstration
- Free of charge, at our facility, on a Tuesday
- Territory
- The Republic and its possessions, excepting New Mexico
Cave JohnsonPresident & FounderForm ASI-202, fourth revision. Approved for printing, nomenclature and all.