THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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it abrades. Throws out a rotary beam and works like a grinding-wheel, or
a buzz-saw."

"Well, could you get one down that hole?" Judge Ledue asked.

He laughed. "No. The thing is rather too large. In the first place,
there's a full-sized power-reactor, and a mass-energy converter. With
them, you produce negamatter?atoms with negatively charged protons and
positive electrons, positrons. Then, you have to bring them into contact
with normal positive-matter?That's done in a chamber the size of a
fifty-gallon barrel, made of collapsium and weighing about a hundred
tons. Then you have to have a pseudograv field to impart rotary motion
to your cosmic-ray beam, and the generator door that would lift ten
ships the size of the /Lester Dawes/. Then you need another fifty to a
hundred tons of collapsium to shield your cutting-head. The cutting-head
alone weighs three tons. The rotary beam that does[Pg 156] the cutting,"
he mentioned as an afterthought, "is about the size of a silver