Yes, it has beena long time. Partially because I'm just about ready to release a book to Amazon (not on this subject, 1930s magic fun). I'm also going to be using some new plotting methods on the second part of this story, which means a lot of writing. If you're a writer, I firmly suggest you look at Jamie Gold's worksheets for writers -- they areuseful in plotting books and I wish I'd had 'em before. I'll let everyone know when my book is out, so you all can by at least 1,000 copies apiece. Or laugh. Writer's are more used to the latter than former.“Unrefined skycrystals,” Jacob William’s muttered. He’d started out working on A-bombs…and then had been called in to this.Then he’d been brought in to talk to some crazy alien who believed inAnd who had promptly demonstrated that magic or not, he could do things no human or technology any human knew of could do. And that there wereof humans in the galaxy, many of them peasants, some of them mages…and many of those latter would be hostile to earth.The big lizard, Savastan, had told them that unrefined crystals were useless until complex magical rituals were used to infuse them into the body of a skyship. The Russian’s had found a bunch in the hold of the slaver, and in return for access to Savastan and the only silver lane that evidently ended up in a friendly place, had provided some of them to the United States.And so here he was, a physicist out at Oak Ridge, trying to figure out what made magic crystals tick.he thought. As strange as that was, their guests swore to it— a skyship that was capable of floating 100 feet above the ground couldn’t go to 101 feet.Why?Jacob figured he was going to start fucking hating that word.The crystals had weird spectra, not really giving them any clue as to what they were made of, except that it didn’t appear on the periodic table. They were partially-conductive, and had a slight blue glow, but produced neither heat nor non-visible radiation. They also soaked up X-rays like nobodies business, but the lizard couldn’t tell them why.The crystals themselves were neutral in weight— until you lifted them more than 20 feet above the ground, whereupon they acted like normal stones.Why?Apparently, unless you did magic stuff with them to put them into the wood, probably involving a dead chicken, they stayed like that. Kids played with them.So now it was time to see what happened when you put them in a centrifuge.Normally, only an idiot would do that with a crystal, but the bosses had decided to just throw every test they could at the thing.So, he clamped the crystal into the centrifuge.Jacob thought as he threw the switch.It didn’t take long to realize something was wrong. The centrifuge started to quiver on the table top.Jacob reached forward to turn it off, but before his hand touched the centrifuge, it wasn’tanymore. There was a tremendous smashing sound as the thing shot up, hit the ceiling and put ain it. Shouts of alarm sounded from the floors above, and moments later, there was an anticlimactic crashing sound as the battered centrifuge fell back through the whole it had made.***“And that’s the long and short of it, Mr. President,” James Killian said. “We retested the crystals in the centrifuges and they developed a dramatically increased ability to lift objects against our gravity—certainly enough to lift very large objects, although it doesn’t produce any sort of forward thrust.Eisenhower nodded, frowning as he looked at the report. “And they still had an absolute ceiling.”“Yes, sir,” Killian looked around the oval office. “A few tests indicate that running a current through the crystal dramatically increases that altitude, but it’s still and absolute limit, based on…” he sighed. “Magic. According to Savastan, the limit doesn’t take non-natural masses into account, so a ship couldn’t simply fly “over” a city…”“Did we tell him about this?” Eisenhower asked.“No. And none of the researchers working on it will have any contact withof our visitors…” Killian frowned. “Mr. President, this is still very early, but this… not only is it something that can help us develop the technology, it is something that couldoverturn their own geopolitical order. Nobody uses skyships in serious combat because they’re an investment defined in terms of decades and centuries. But if this works, if we can…”“Turn out skyships like Detroit does cars?” Dulles asked.“Exactly. But equally, the Traders, or at least Savastan, seem to be our friends right now. Are they doing to stay our friends if we overturn their entire system of trade? Remember, it takes amage to open a silver lane, so they can still just cut off trade with us.”“Speaking of that,” Eisenhower said. “They understand that their trade ship must exist at the coordinates we provided.”“Yes Mr. President— but I don’t think we’ll be able to sit on this for much longer,” Killian said.“I don’t intend to, but we’ve only talked with Savastan. I want to see what the rest of the traders are like before we make a decision. Remember that some of the British missionaries they sent into Africa were quite nice people. Didn’t help the Africans when the Empire showed up.”“Yes Mr. President.”