The Material Emancipation Grill
A doorway with a standing objection. The man goes through. What the man is carrying does not, and the schedule of what constitutes carrying has been revised three times, upward, each time by the grill.
Every test chamber in Test Shaft 09 has two doors and I have never had a moment’s worry about the first one. The trouble is the second. A man finishes a chamber, and a man who has finished a chamber has in his hand a piece of the chamber, because that is what men are, and by Thursday you have a warehouse full of nothing and a volunteer in Marquette with a portable aperture in his coat pocket showing it to a barman.
So we hung a grill in the doorway. It is a fluted lattice of ground lunar substrate in a steel frame, it draws eleven kilowatts, it hums at a pitch the commissary can hear through two floors, and it takes off a man anything the chamber wants back. He does not stop. He does not turn out his pockets. He walks through the door at his own pace whistling whatever he has been whistling, and the cube he was carrying is on the floor behind him, and he does not always notice, and noticing is not required.
We call it emancipation because that is what it is. The object is freed of the man. Legal preferred “recovery” and Legal was outvoted by me, which is how voting works in this building. The lab boys call it the grill, the volunteers call it the buzzer, and one man in Materials calls it the collection plate, and I have not stopped him, because he is right.
Now. I am going to set out on this sheet, in order, what the grill has been observed to consider an object. I want you to read the list in the order printed. It was written in that order. It was not written all at once.
Specification
- Designation
- Grill, Material Emancipation, chamber pattern. Applied Sciences No. 209.
- Aperture
- Thirty-six inches wide, eighty-four inches high. One man, unhurried, with his hat on.
- Bars
- Seven, horizontal, fluted. Nine on the freight pattern. Never an even number; ask Applied Sciences why and set an afternoon aside.
- Active medium
- Ground lunar substrate, sealed. See Form ASI-205. The seal is the expensive part and the seal is not optional.
- Draw
- 11 kilowatts standing. The grill has no off position and no switch to look for.
- Transit time
- One second and a half at a walk. Faster if you run, which is not faster.
- Direction
- One. The grill is fitted to the far door and only to the far door.
- Recovery
- Objects fall to a tray on the chamber side. The tray is emptied nightly into lost property, Sub-Level 3, and lost property is open Tuesdays.
- Selectivity
- Excellent, within Classes I through III. Applied Sciences describes it as improving, which is the department’s word and not mine.
- Personnel rating
- One transit per person per day. See the Notice below, which is on this sheet because it had to be.
- Fitted price
- $2,410.00 the chamber pattern; $3,180.00 the freight pattern. Substrate charged separately at the price on Form ASI-205.
- Guarantee
- The grill will take the object. That is the whole of the guarantee and it has never been claimed against.
“I did not ask you to search him. I asked you to build a door he cannot carry anything through.”
The Schedule Of Classes
When Applied Sciences hung the first grill in Shaft 04 in 1951 they wrote a list of what it would take, and the list had one line on it, and the line said test apparatus. That is Class I. Everything below Class I was added afterwards, by observation, which is a polite way of saying that a man walked through a doorway and something happened that was not on the list and somebody wrote it down.
Schedule of Classes, as revised. Applied Sciences, current to March 1959.
| Class | Added | Constitutes an object | Departmental note |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | 1951 | Test apparatus. Cubes, spheres, hand tools, the portable device, chamber signage. | The class the grill was built for. Behaves perfectly. |
| II | 1952 | Personal metal. Coins, keys, wristwatches, spectacle frames, wedding rings, a hip flask. | Returned on application at lost property, Sub-Level 3, Tuesdays. |
| III | 1954 | Fastenings. Buttons, buckles, hooks and eyes, zip fasteners, braces, boot eyelets. | The Commissary now keeps a tin of safety pins by the elevator. Take two. |
| IV | 1957 | Dental. Amalgam fillings, gold inlays, bridgework, plates, pins, and one crown of the volunteer’s own manufacture. | Added by Medical over the objection of Applied Sciences, who held that a filling is part of a man. The grill held otherwise. See the advisory below. |
| V | 1959 | Matter which Applied Sciences classes as carried and which Medical classes as the volunteer. Four instances since January. Three of the four men completed the afternoon and went home and could not afterwards say what had been taken, only that something had, and the tray agrees with them. | Under review. The review is being conducted by the department that wrote the class. |
Classes are cumulative and have only ever been added to. Applied Sciences has never removed a class and has been asked twice whether it could.
The Dental Advisory
In November of 1957 a gentleman from Escanaba, a fine volunteer, a former sergeant, walked out of Chamber 6 in Shaft 09 with a wristwatch, a bunch of keys, a wedding ring and eleven amalgam fillings on the floor behind him and no idea whatsoever that anything had occurred. We gave him back the ring. The rest is in the tray. He asked for a cup of coffee and got one.
Medical wrote me a memorandum about it and Medical was extremely put out, and I read the memorandum twice and then I did the arithmetic that Medical had not done, which is that this company now had a dental problem of exactly the size it could afford to fix. So we fixed it. That is the origin of the finest dental plan in the Upper Peninsula, it covers every man, woman and volunteer who goes below the surface, and it is described in full on Form ASI-502, and I am proud of it, and I will not have it called compensation.
The advisory itself is short. Come to the gate with your mouth as the good Lord left it, or come to the gate having told the man at the gate what is in it. He has held that job since 1951 and he has heard worse.
Before You Enter A Chamber
- Wristwatch, keys and coin left at the gate house.
- Wedding ring left at the gate house, or declared.
- Dental work declared to the man at the gate.
- Spectacles: one spare pair lodged with the observation room.
- Braces exchanged for the Enrichment Center belt. Buttons are Class III.
- Anything you would be sorry to see in a tray.
Drawer 4 in lost property has been full since 1957 and I have stopped writing to next of kin, because three of the letters came back marked no such person at that address and one came back opened. If somebody in Applied Sciences will tell me whose the small things are I will do the letters myself, on my own time, and I will not put it through Accounting. — C.
Installations & Industrial Use
Forty-one grills are presently in service, thirty-four of them in Shaft 09 and the remainder in Shaft 04, where the trials were run and where two of the original 1951 frames are still hung and still drawing. Outside this company the grill sells to any concern that has a gate and a reason to doubt what goes through it: tool rooms, bonded stores, assay offices, one bank in Milwaukee, and a mint I am not permitted to name on a sheet that leaves the building.
Grills in service and material recovered, by location. Quarter ended March 1959.
| Location | Grills | Items recovered | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shaft 09, chamber doors | 31 | 2,904 | Chiefly Class I. The product working as sold. |
| Shaft 09, Chamber 6 | 1 | 418 | Classes I to IV. The chamber with the cube and the button. |
| Shaft 09, Chamber 8 | 1 | 77 | Nothing has been sent through Chamber 8 this quarter. The tray is emptied nightly all the same and it is not empty. |
| Shaft 09, elevator lobby | 1 | 61 | Fitted at my instruction after the barman in Marquette. |
| Shaft 04, emancipation corridor | 5 | 1,190 | Two frames of 1951 manufacture. Corridor has two clocks and they have never agreed. |
| Sub-Level 3, lost property (outward door) | 1 | 8 | Fitted 1958. Applied Sciences has been asked to explain the eight and has not. |
| Customer installations, all territories | — | Not reported to us | Nor should it be. See the fine print. |
Recovered items are logged by class and by chamber. They are not logged by owner. The company has never held that an emancipated object had an owner at the moment of emancipation.
Interoffice Memorandum
The Division confirms that the grill at the Chamber 8 door has been continuously energised since its fitting in August 1958 and that no test has been scheduled through that door in the intervening period.
The Division records that the tray beneath it has been emptied on one hundred and ninety-four occasions and has not on any occasion been found empty. The Division has catalogued the recovered material by class where a class applies. Seventy-seven items are held. Fourteen of the seventy-seven are Class III.
The Division requests authorisation to de-energise the fitting for one hour, at a time of the President’s choosing, with the corridor cleared, in order to establish what the door does when the grill is not in it.
Denied. It stays lit. Empty the tray and stop counting the buttons. — CJ
Cut Here — Lost Property, Sub-Level 3, Tuesdays Only
Claim Of Recovered Property.
What The Grill Will Not Take
- Clothing, entire. Fastenings only, which is worse.
- Paper, ink, and the chamber log, which is why the log walks out and the pen does not.
- Water, coffee, and the commissary sandwich.
- Anything the chamber does not have a register entry for, which is the whole world outside the door.
- The volunteer.
Posted At Every Grilled Doorway
- One transit. One direction. One man at a time.
- Do not stop in the plane of the bars.
- Do not reach back through for it. It is not yours on that side.
- Do not pass an object to another man through the bars.
- If the hum changes pitch, keep walking.