Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 21: what you’re looking at

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

About noon on the day of which I am speaking, he called me into his “holy of holies,” where he had been working since long before I met him, on some project unknown even to me, who had come to be closest to him in every other task. ; | “Tack,” he broke out, “we will grant the existence of an ether.” “With pleasure,” I grinned. “There is something there that carries light and the rest of the vibrations as air carries sound, or rather, as a wave is carried in a long, taut wire or a string, for light waves are transverse rather than longitudinal vibrations. What it is, we don’t Rnow. It may be a substance, it may be another vibra- tion, it may be—geometry—as some believe, but it’s there, at least so far as our minds can fathom. Most men call it ether. That’s good enough for me.” “Suits me, too, Doc. I won’t argue the point.” “Light, heat, radio waves, X-rays, all are transverse waves in ether, or have the properties of such waves. You know that. Any fool does, or should. What is more, matter is a vibration too. The electrons and protons, or, more probably, the sub-electrons and sub-protons, if they exist, are little foct of infinitesimal waves, ether waves, so tiny that they seem solid. We are not really sure that it is so, we can never be, I believe, for we can not see them, but electrons behave as if it were, and I don’t care very much so long as I can do what I want with them. Who cares whether his candy is flavored with natural wintergreen, so long as it tastes as he expects it to? I can make matter act as it would, if it were built up of tiny waves, and practically that is.as much as I care to know. So let us call them waves. “In our plane, our system I call it, we can see waves with frequencies of from 370 million million to 770 million million—roughly, from the deepest red to the darkest violet. The infra-red waves, the heat radiations, extend from 370 million million down to 950 thousand million. The ultra-violet runs from the visible violet up to about 6 million million million. Farther yet are the X-rays, in the region about 3000 million million million million. And somewhere beyond lies our fundamental, our ‘matter-wave.’ Why, if we were to take the diameter of an electron for a wavelength, which I am per- fectly sure it is not, the resultant frequency would be approximately 75_ | heptillions—seventy-five with twenty-one zeros following along after it. And the actual frequency must be greater, far greater than that! But you know all that. I have been talking as if you were some tabloid reporter. “Of what lies beyond we know nothing, have known nothing. For years I have hoped to explore the gaps on either side of our fundamental. Now I believe that I have succeeded, that I can cause our matter-units, whatever | they may be, to vibrate in resonance with any frequency desired. You, Jack, could be a blob of green light or a bunch of radio waves, probably static, if you wanted to. Yet, because of the relativity of the universe, you would | note no difference in yourself. If I were to step you down four hundred tril- lion vibrations or so a second, those gorgeous lavender suspenders and your sage knickers would be all I could see of you. But I could feel the heat 19