"Let him try that one, will he?" laughed Tom. The move was basic; in
checking the king and menacing the queen simultaneously, Tom had--or
would upon the next move--collect himself his opponent's queen with no
great loss.
At the shirt and necktie stage, Tom Lionel stood teetering on his heels
before the bookcase on the right of the fireplace. He took from the
case a slim volume and read the title with considerable distaste:
"Theory of Monomolecular Films
in Fission-Reaction"
By A. G. Rodan, Ph.D., M.M., LL.D.
"Yipe!" exploded Tom as he opened the book and glanced at the price:
$9.50. With ease he prorated the price against the thickness of the
volume and came to the estimate that the book had cost approximately
nineteen dollars per inch excluding covers. He riffled through the
pages and paused here and there to read, but the pages themselves were
a good average of four lines of text to the rest of the page full of
nuclear equations.
Tom Lionel snorted. He ran down through one of the arguments and
followed it to conclusion.
"Why can't he get something worth reading?" he yawned, putting the book
back in its place. "Darned impractical stuff." As usual with a man
who spends much time in his own company, Tom Lionel talked aloud to
himself--and occasionally was known to answer himself back. "The whole
trouble with the entire tribe of physicists per se is the fact that
once, someone told one of them that he was a theorist, an idealist,
and a dealer in the abstract. Now the bunch of them are afraid to do
anything practical because they're afraid if they do, people won't know
they're physicists. Physicists are a sort of necessary, end-product
evil."
* * * * *
During the breakfast section of Tom's morning duties, Tom read the
latest copy of the "Proceedings of the I.R.E." with some relish. A
paper on the "Crystallographic Generation of Microwaves" complete with
plainly manipulated differential calculus and engineering data occupied
most of his time. The rest of the time through coffee he was making
marks on the tablecloth with the egg-laden end of his fork and trying
to fit the crystallographic generation of microwaves into a problem
that made the article most timely; the solution for which he had been
seeking for a week.
The mail arrived. Three household bills were filed in the desk to
await the first of the month. Two advertisements were filed into the
wastebasket. One thick letter addressed to Thomas Lionel, Ph.D., M.M.,
was taken carefully between thumb and forefinger and deposited in a
letter file.
Tom then inspected the other letter file and found two letters
addressed to Tom Lionel, Consulting Engineer, which he opened and read.
One was from a concern in Cedar Rapids that wanted some information on
a method of induction heating glued joints selectively without waiting
for the normal drying time. The other was a letter from a medium-sized
town in Illinois pertaining to some difficulty they were having with
police-radio coverage of that area.
Both letters meant money, and Tom Lionel set the first aside while he
started to work on the second. From the engineering data supplied by
the local engineer, Tom decided that a change in antenna height and a
conversion from quarter-wave current fed to a one and one quarter-wave
current fed antenna would give the desired coverage. He concluded his
letter with four pages of calc, seven diagrams, and as a last measure
dropped a photograph of a similar installation in the envelope.
He gloated. That would net him a pretty penny. The guy who hung that
antenna on top of the water tank thought he was smart, getting all that
height. But the roof was metal, and therefore the radiation angle took
off from the rooftop as a basis rather than the true ground a hundred
feet below.
The tank top was greater than three wave lengths in diameter, and
conical to boot. Tom grinned at the maze of mathematics that solved
it--and as far as he was concerned it was solved, for Tom Lionel was a
top-flight engineer.
He checked on his calendar. Metal for the sonic job was not due for a
week yet; a minute casting was still being held up for the foundry's
pleasure; and the life-test of the bearing-jewel for the Watson
Instrument Corporation was still on. Good jewel that. No sign of
freeze-up or wear-out after twenty-seven million cycles.
"Theory of Monomolecular Films be hanged," he snorted. "He's the kind
of a guy that would try to analyze the brew that MacBeth's three
witches were cooking up. And don't ask why!"
What he objected to most was the other's unconcern at spending money.
Nine bucks and fifty cents for a book of the most questionable
theory--and nine fifty that the other didn't really earn. It was
getting worse. The other was really beginning to obtrude. He hadn't
minded, particularly, except for the mental anguish. He'd become
reconciled to it by sheer rationalization. Way, way down deep in his
heart he knew that he'd have enjoyed being a physicist himself. But
physicists were not particularly practical, and money was made with
practical things. He knew, and recognized, that his retreat from being
a physicist himself had given him a dislike for the breed, especially
when he knew that solution of a problem was theirs, but reduction
to practice was his. He was continuously being forced to take some
physicist's wild-haired scheme and making it cook meat, open cans,
or dig post holes. The physicist had all the fun of standing on the
threshold and delving into phenomena that abounded just over the line.
And then instead of working on the suggestion that the physicist had
located in the wilderness, the physicist just tossed it over his
shoulder into Lionel's lap and went on digging.
Obviously it must be fun to dig in the unknown, but why in the name of
sense--
"Theory of Monomolecular Films in Fission-Reaction," scowled Tom
Lionel. "A hypothesis on a theory for an idea, based upon a practical
impossibility, and directed at a problem solvable only by concentrated
masses. He should be working in a negative universe where nonmatter
repels nonmatter disproportionately to the nonmass and inversely
disproportional to the not-square of the not-distance between. Holy
Entropy."
* * * * *
Tom Lionel went out of the house, mentally tinkering with the
glue-joint heating problem. That shouldn't be hard, he thought,
high-frequency heating was no trick, though the furniture company
probably had no one in the place that knew what high frequency really
meant.
He'd take a chair, rip it apart at the joints, and start tinkering
with the big radio-frequency heater in the lab. Another fat consulting
fee--eminently practical and satisfying--from the simple engineering of
a means to accelerate the drying of glue by electronics.
Eminently practi--_hell_!
Lionel stared. The door closed slowly behind him as he walked ever
so slowly across the floor of the lab. There was his radio-frequency
heater, all right. But it was not in its usual place. It was across the
room nuzzling up against another piece of equipment--the latter new,
shining, and absolutely alien to the lab.
Tom went over to the set-up and inspected it with critical derision.
The alien piece of equipment had been a standard model of mass
spectrograph. Its sleek sides were gaping open, and the high-frequency
heater was permanently wired--piped--into the very heart of the
spectrograph. Peering into the maze of one-inch copper tubing that led
from the output of the high-frequency heater to the insides of the
spectrograph, Lionel saw at once what the reason was.
The spectrograph had been overhauled by the physicist. It now contained
a pair of "D" chambers.
Operating on the cyclotron principle, the spectrograph was using the
output of the high-frequency heater to energize the D chambers. Lionel
nodded. The frequency was about right; could be adjusted to the proper
value without any trouble at all. He felt an infinitesimally short
twitch of admiration for the idea before he started to roar in anguish.
His first impulse was to rip the gadget apart so that he could go to
work on something practical. But the engineer's admiration for the idea
stopped him.
But this was getting thick.
It had been getting thicker for a long time. It was getting
intolerable. He didn't mind too much having volumes of utterly
cock-eyed theory about the place, but when the physicist starts to
appropriate equipment for his screwball ideas, it was time to call a
halt.
Lionel left the laboratory, returned to his house, and called a
psychiatrist.
An hour later he was in Dr. Hamilton's office.
"Why are you here?" asked Hamilton pleasantly.
"I want to get rid of a physicist."
"Tell him to go away."
"Can't. Impossible."
"Nothing is impossible."
"Look, doctor, have you ever tried to light a safety match on a wet bar
of soap?"
"Suppose you tell me about it, then."
* * * * *
Tom Lionel was more than talkative for a half hour.
"A clear-cut case of split-personality. A most remarkable cleavage."
Lionel muttered something.
"What did you say?"
"I'd rather not repeat it," said Tom.
"Please--it may have a bearing on your case."
"I was merely thinking of an hypothetical case. Says the doctor to his
associate: 'Doctor, look at this magnificent tumor,' and his buddy
answers: 'Lovely, but you should see my case of angina; it's positively
beautiful.'"
"Oh?"
"So I'm a most remarkable case, huh?"
"You are. There seems to be a deep-seated liking for one another that
has been barred psychologically by certain factors in your youth. You
play chess. You respect one another's property--"
"That's what you say. The other bird just screwed up my dielectric
heater to fiddle up a cyclotronic spectrograph."
"Might try putting it to work," observed Hamilton.
"Oh, I will. After all, he can't get ahead of _me_."
"Then why the outcry?"
"Because who knows what he'll do next."
"He's appropriated things before?"
"Only to the extent of buying books."
"What manner of books?"
"The last one he purchased was entitled 'The Theory of Monomolecular
Films in Fission-Reaction.'"
"Mind explaining that? It sounds like Greek to me."
Lionel smiled tolerantly. "If you have a flat table and a pile of kid's
toy blocks, you can either build a structure or lay 'em on the table in
a single layer. Since molecules are often called the building-blocks
of the universe, the analogy is quite clear. The blocks in a single
layer form a monomolecular layer. Fission reaction is a self-sustaining
nuclear reaction."
"Sounds quite erudite."
"In the first place, no one with any sense would try to make use of it.
It is the type of volume that a physicist would write in the hope that
he will get letters pro and con on the subject which will be useful in
forming a later theory."
"Then it is not a complete waste of time."
"Any time I lay out nine bucks for a half-inch of paper--"
"Expensive, isn't it?" asked the doctor.
"Sure. Those things are not best sellers, usually. The publisher puts
it out in the name of science and must at least get his printing cost
out of the very limited edition."
"I see. And you want to get rid of this physicist?"
"Who wouldn't? After all, I had this body first. He's an interloper."
"Seems that way."
"It is--and it's annoying."
"We may be able to do something about it," said the psychiatrist.
"Permit me to think about this for a few days. We'll have another
consultation in a week. We may require another one before I make a
decision. But it seems to me that you are both intelligent, useful
citizens. Neither of you is irresponsible or dangerous. You have
enough money to afford schizophrenia for a while. Especially if the
personality B dreams up things that personality A makes practical,
financially advantageous use of. Ergo you need fear nothing for a few
weeks."
"Ugh. Means I'll have to go out and buy another high-frequency heater.
O.K., doctor. I'll lay low."
* * * * *
Thomas Lionel, Ph.D., M.M., awoke with a shake of his head. At once, he
was out of bed. He consulted first the calendar and then the clock.
The thought struck him funny. He hadn't been drinking, but the idea of
looking at a calendar upon awakening might be construed as an admission
that he didn't know what time of what day it was.
Or mayhap what month.
"I've been away again," he grunted.
He dressed by stages. At the trousers department, Thomas wandered out
into the living room and stood over the chessboard, studying the set-up.
He removed the little sign that said: