Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 122: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The space liner Delilah sped on. She traveled, now, at some two thousand times the speed of light. In a day she covered nearly twice the average distance between solar systems. In a week she would go from one star cluster to another. In a month from one quadrant to another. In a year she would travel farther than mankind had expanded in the first two thousand years of space travel. Presently, almost reluctantly, Brent and Kit moved back toward the passengers’ quarters. In the airlock that led in they were again pressed closely together. But this time Brent bent down hungrily to the face lifted up to him. Later in Den Harlow’s cabin, Brent closed and locked the door. He took the second of the two essential cases from his pocket. “This is a microwave relay,” he explained. “I was working on ships out in the Cephis cluster, you remember. This is a gadget used to test circuits when you don’t want to be right on the spot. The relay box is out near the ship’s skin. This controls it. I've got a dozen different circuits lined in to that box, and from here | can work with any one of them. As long as | have this in my hand, | should be able to run the ship from anywhere in it, only since | can’t see outside the ship, it’s no use for navigating.” He explained the manner of his rewiring job. Of course the ancient practice of bulky insulation had long since been abandoned. Nowadays, dipped in dun lacquer, a wire became insulated by a transparent, almost infinitesimal film which was proof against any voltage. He recounted the Thommasson Law, which explains the Superconductivity of mercury and tin and other metals at four degrees Kelvin. He explained that he had made his connections to his relay box by first painting a stripe of insulation along the ship’s girders, and then had painted a narrower stripe of dissolved superconductor in the middle. A Superconductor has literally no electrical resistance at all. A thread the size of a spider’s web will carry a hundred CORniclooo SS CO