Everyone in the room could tell by its sound when the mechanical pump was 
finished with its leg of the relay. The vapor pressure of its own oil had been 
reached. The assistant closed a valve that isolated it from the rest of the 
system, and then they switched over to the nanopumps, which made no noise at 
all. They were turbines, just like the ones in jet engines but very small and 
lots of them. Casting a critical eye over Dr. X's vacuum plumbing, Hackworth 
could see that they also had a scavenger, which was a cylinder about the size 
of a child's head, wrinkled up on the inside into a preposterous surface area 
coated with nanodevices good at latching onto stray molecules. Between the 
nanopumps and the scavenger, the vacuum rapidly dropped to what you might 
expect to see halfway between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Then
Dr. X himself quivered up out of his chair
and began shuffling around the room, powering up a gallimaufry of contraband 
technology.