The fourth object looked like a bicycle helmet. It was head sized and vented like most bicycle helmets, but it was made of metal. There was a hole in one side of the helmet that appeared to be the size of the little gold eggs.
John eased one of the eggs from the foam. It was heavy, but not as heavy as solid gold would be. He held it up and watched the light reflect off the gems.
Pretty, but certainly not diamonds. Diamonds wouldn’t reflect rainbow patterns that way.
“It’s a telephone.”
John looked at Caitlin. Her eyes were misty like she’d been near the point of crying.
“A telephone?” he asked and raised the egg to his ear.
“What are you doing?”
“Listening for a dial tone.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You’re the one who said it was a telephone.”
“It’s not that kind of phone,” she said.
“So I gather. You want to tell me what’s in the letter?”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and nodded. “It’s from Scott. He gives a very brief description of this thing and talks about what it does.”
“Did he say anything about how he got involved or who these people are who want it?”
She shook her head. Reaching into the box, she took out the other oval and turned it over in her hand.
“He says the file he sent me contains a full schematic and manufacturing details necessary to build the helmet. The disk in the box contains the details on the eggs themselves.”
“So it is a helmet. If the eggs are telephones, then what’s the helmet, a switchboard?”
Caitlin lifted the helmet out of the box and turned it over. The underside had a smooth transparent layer covering an intricate circuit layout.
“It’s the encoder,” she said.
“You’re going to have to expand on that. What does it encode?”
“He didn’t go into much detail. He expected me to get everything from the files, but he said that you just load one of the eggs into the helmet.” She turned it over and indicated the slot John had noticed. “Then you put the helmet over your head. It encodes the egg to your particular brain waves.”
“Brain waves? What does that have to do with a telephone?”
“It’s a little more than a telephone, that’s just the way he describes it. In fact, he calls it an ultraphone.”
“Ultraphone?”
“He said the inventor came up with the name. It’s a translating interneural transceiver.”
“That’s a mouthful, but wouldn’t that be a tit-phone?”
She almost smiled, then nodded, and wiped at her eyes. “We are not calling it a titphone. The egg can translate brain waves into intelligent signals, and then a source inside the egg transmits those signals to another unit.”
“What? Are you kidding me? This thing can transmit thoughts?”
“Something like that. Scott says it transmits thoughts from the speech center, not just anything you happen to be thinking. It only picks up thoughts that would become verbal after being processed and sent to the vocal cords. It really is more like a telephone than a thought transmitter.”
John stared at the egg in his hand. “Caitlin, is this some kind of flimflam?”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“You know, flimflam, as in deception, a ruse. Could this be some kind of scheme to rip off investors?”
Her voice was both angry and hurt. “How could you say something like that? Scott may have had faults, but he wasn’t a crook.”
“I’m sorry, but I find it hard to believe that they could put that sort of technology into this small a package. Hell, it’s hard enough to believe that anyone has come up with the technology at all. They’ve been studying brain waves for generations, and I’ve never seen any reports that they might be able to translate brain waves into speech without using the brain to do it.”
“So? Just because you haven’t read about it doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible. A lot of research goes on without the intermediate results winding up in open literature.”
“Granted, but this ... It hardly seems likely that someone could develop both the technology and the packaging simultaneously. Usually, the technology is around for years before the package is ready to market. Hell, look at HDTV. That technology was around forever before they finally settled on a standard and started manufacturing the things.”
“Every company had their own standard they wanted to be used until the government got them together to decide on a particular one. Maybe this time someone wanted to avoid letting other companies have access to the standard. This way they can bring the product to market without any competitors. By the time someone else can develop the technology; they’ll have the patent and have a lock on the system.”
Her eyes widened, as she seemed to realize the importance of something. “My God, it’ll be just like the telephone system in the early days. One company will control the entire market. This could make telephones obsolete; the market value of this product is beyond comprehension.”
He put a hand on her arm. “Whoa now. Don’t you think you're a little over reactive? So it could replace phones, there will still be the need for the infrastructure that’s already set up. Even if they work, you’ll still need switchboards, satellite relays, and even operators. It’ll be like when cellular phones were introduced. Sure there was a tremendous market, but it didn’t affect the existing market.”
“But this time there won’t be a hundred different companies trying to set up local service. There’ll only
