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"Here!" he said as he passed it to me. I grasped, but couldn't hold it. It slipped out of my fingers as it had ball bearings all around its surface. I tried to pick it off the floor. What a hopeless endeavor that was. Lifting a fish out of a stream would have seemed easy in comparison. That thing was as smooth as nothing ever had been that I had seen. No dirt could stick to it.
He began to laugh.
"What the hack is it?" I asked. "It's a solid piece of metal, isn't it?"
He said nothing, but smiled. I gave up trying to lift it off the floor, but fondled it with awe, thinking of my bearings, how crude they were compared to it.
"Zirconium based, with platinum implanted?" I asked.
"Come on! Zirconium! Platinum! You know yourself that it isn't made of something that crude!" He picked it up, effortlessly, and threw it hard towards the window.
God! I thought my heart would stop. If the window shattered that separated us from space....
Well, it didn't.
The window was a nineteen-meter wide sheet of optical glass, ten feet deep and a few inches thick, mounted in the floor below the mirror. Before I could faint out of sheer freight that the window would break, I realized that the metal object had passed clean through it without leaving a mark. I could see it floating away from the ship into space. There wasn't as much as a scratch on the window.
I must have sat there with my mouth and eyes open for minutes, totally stunned. I couldn't even formulate the simple question as to what had happened, or who he really was.
"Hey buddy, I'm from Ohio," he replied as though I had asked him. "My name is Martin, Edward Bandford, the son of the farmer Drake Bandford of Bellbrock, south of Dayton."
I just stared at him and shook my head repeatedly, and more so as I watched him moments later in utter disbelief, as he retrieved the object again. With a simple gesture of his hands he caused the object to return, just like a father might summon a child from a playing field. It obeyed! It floated back to us, right through the window and into his hand.
I still couldn't utter a word.
"I can explain this," he grinned.
"No! Nothing can explain this," I replied slowly as I gained control of my senses.
"Certainly I can. It is very simple, really."
"No! You can't explain what is impossible to happen."
"Except you have seen it happening, have you not?"
"I saw a mirage, a dream...."
He shook his hand and made a gesture like a priest might make. "You have seen the Bohr/Miller effect in action!"
I still shook my head. "...The what?"
He gave me the metal object once more. He placed it in my lap.
I found that I could cradle it with my hands, and that if I grasped it with both hands, forming a cup with each so that it could not slip out, I was able to lift it. I was determined to test this thing by throwing it against the window as he had done.
"Don't! Are you mad!" he shouted. "You break the window."
I lowered it again.
"It isn't that easily done," he sort of sighed.
"Then explain!"
He said that this was exactly what he had done all along when he talked about stars, although the Bohr/Miller effect had really nothing to do with the stellar universe. "The stellar universe just happens to be the most graphic example of a universal reaction based on a particular law that is understood as the law of matter. While most everything you see appears to correspond to this law, there are exceptions."
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