Page 3131

He'd never really given it much thought until now. It hadn't felt all that strange until it was no longer there.

Why wasn't it there? Had he ever felt this before?

Hmm. Maybe.

That time when Rasalased had reset his materialization--that had kind of felt like this. Sort of.

But this wasn't that. His ability hadn't reset.

There was something else.

This was more like... ah. Yeah. This was more like when he tried to materialize something into a solid object. It didn't work, because materialization couldn't accumulate within a physical space that was already occupied by something else.

That was one of the fundamentals of materialization. It was why he couldn't materialize an iron spike already in the ground, for example. He had to materialize it first, then puncture.

So was that what this was, then?

Hector circled around the tube as he contemplated, sizing his work up and down. Voreese was saying something, but he wasn't listening, even with a spare thought process. All of his mind was devoted to the problem in front of him.

He'd been thinking that he could just keep growing the iron inward, continually compressing the air therein to greater and greater extremes, but perhaps that had been foolish. Maybe once the pressure passed a high enough threshold, materialization within that space became impossible, no different than if it were a solid object.

Yeah, that would make sense, he supposed.

If so, then it kinda poked a giant hole in the viability of his experiment. The tensile strength of iron could be too high compared to the maximum compression that he could achieve with this technique.

Hmm. So no explosive decompression, then?

Dammit. That sucked.

Well. All hope wasn't lost just yet, Hector supposed.

He still hadn't integrated temperature into the equation yet. The plan had been for a heat-assisted pressurization chamber, after all.