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In the second place, do you think I'm crazy enough to patent this thing, or let some big transportation company get their hands on it? There'd be leaks, I'd be out in the cold before I could whistle and the big boys would be off and running."
    Paranoid, he seemed to be. I dropped my first idea of selling him out to General Transportation, and he went on.
    "What do you think I'm offering you your interest for? I can tell you now, it's not for your smile or your legal abilities. I want you to promote this, sell a forty percent interest to a group which isn't in transportation now, but which would like to be if it could get a big enough piece. That's your job—to raise the money. If you can't do it, tell me now and we'll stop wasting each other's time."
    I thought for a while as Mattin sat and fidgeted. It might be possible. We'd need a working model—the group I had in mind would need pretty good proof that they were onto a good thing. And I'd need to know a lot more about it before I began. I had already seen enough of Mattin to agree that I would have to be the salesman. I nodded slowly.
    "Maybe. How much money do you need to get things going?"
    "A million credits—maybe a million five."
    "That's to set up the whole transportation company?" I asked.
    He laughed. "No way. That's to do the full-scale tests—after that we'll need big money."
    He was insane, I decided. A million credits for a test. He saw my expression and backed off a little.
    "Look, Carver, you have to know more about this thing. It's a completely new principle. It's only energy-free, exactly, for transfers in a strictly Lorentzian space-time. Where there's curvature—matter—you need some energy even if the Link transfer points are on timelike geodesies. You need a lot more energy if the transfer points are not on timelike geodesies but are on a Newtonian equipotential surface—and you need an impossible amount of energy unless the configuration is perfectly symmetrical with respect to all Link transfer points."
    At the time, and for a long time afterwards, that speech was complete gibberish to me. I don't have total recall, but I do know Mattin's exact words—I learned long ago to record in full all conversations in my office. That has saved my skin more than once in the past. I shook my head at Mattin.
    "I hear you, Mr. Mattin, but I can't make head or tail of what you are saying. Tell me in English, please."
    He shouted back at me. "English, you dummy! I already put it in really simple-minded language for your benefit." He controlled himself and swallowed hard. "I'll put it even simpler for you. To set up the Mattin Link system on the surface of the Earth is the end objective, but it's going to take tremendous energy to establish and a lot of money. We just can't tackle that first. It's not possible to set up a practical system out in space, because the relative distances of the Link entry points keep changing.
    "What we have to do is test it in space, for the simplest case—four entry points, in a regular tetrahedron. It will still be quite a trick to get the distances just right for long enough to do the transfer, but it can be done—I've calculated it. Then when we've demonstrated it in space we'll be able to get backing easily for the operational big system here on Earth."
    I was getting the idea, vaguely, and I didn't like the sound of it. Mattin had no working model. So, no model to show the backers. A million credits before we could demonstrate anything. Space work—always a fine way to run up the costs. I wondered if I was the madman, listening to Mattin at all.
    "Can't you make just a small working model, here on Earth?" I asked. "Just to show off the general idea?"
    "Out of the question. The Earth-based system has to have all the entry points practically symmetrical with respect to the center of mass—I told you, they've got to be on an equipotential, and perfectly symmetrical with respect to each other." He shook his head firmly. "Even