and dropped it into the drawer again. He moved his king aside with a
contemplative smile. His queen was gone on the next move, he knew. So
he had lost a major piece. So that other bird thought that losing a
major piece was bad, huh? Well, winning battles does not count--it is a
matter of who wins the last one.
He found the volume on the theory of monomolecular films and started
to read with relish. Over coffee, at breakfast, Thomas made notations
on the margin of the book with a pencil; checked some of the equations
and though he found them balanced properly, the author was amiss in not
considering the lattice-effect in his presumptions. No monomolecular
film could follow that type of reaction simply because--well, it could
follow it, but since the thing was to take place in a monomolecular
film, the fission-reaction and the radiation byproducts that cause the
self-sustaining nature could only be effective in a plane of molecular
thickness. That meant a .999999% loss, since the radiation went off
spherically. Fission-reaction might take place, but it would be most
ineffective. Besides, the equations should have taken that into account.
He stopped by the desk and wrote for a half hour, filling seventeen
pages full of text and mathematics, explaining the error in the
author's presumption.
He sealed it up and mailed it with some relish. No doubt that letter
would start a fight.
He found his letter in the letter file and read it. It was a request to
indulge in some basic research at a fancy figure, but Thomas was not
particularly interested. He was thinking of another particular line of
endeavor. He dropped the letter into the wastebasket.
He went into the lab and took a look at his cyclotronic spectrograph.
There was a letter hung on the front. Thomas opened it and read:
Dear Isaac Newton:
I don't particularly mind your laying out thirty-five hundred bucks
for a mass spectrograph.
Appropriating my high-frequency generator didn't bother me too much.
Nor did your unsymmetrical wiring and haywire peregrinations in and
about the two of them annoy (too acutely) my sense of mechanical
and electrical precision.
But the idea of your using the ##&&%!! spectrograph only once--just
for pre-change calibration--makes me madder than mad!
Sincerely,
Tom Lionel,
Consulting Engineer
Thomas grinned boyishly and picked up the notebook on top of the
high-frequency heater. It was Tom's, and the physicist riffled through
it to the last-used pages. He found considerable in the way of notes
and sketches on the cyclotronic spectrograph. Cut in size by about one
quarter, the thing would be not only a research instrument of value,
but would be of a price low enough to make it available to schools,
small laboratories, and perhaps production-lines--if Tom Lionel could
find a use for a mass spectrograph on a production line.
Thomas grinned again. If it were possible, Tom would certainly have it
included on _some_ production line, somewhere.
He looked the spectrograph over and decided that it was a fine piece
of apparatus. So it wasn't the shining piece of commercial panel and
gleaming meters. The high-frequency plumbing in it had the touch of a
one-thumbed plumber's apprentice after ten days' drinking and the D
plates were soldered together with a heavy hand. But it did work--and
that's all he cared. The knobs and dials he had added were sticking
out at all angles, but they functioned.
And the line-voltage ripple present in the high-frequency generator
made a particular mess out of the spectrograph separation. But
electronic heaters do not normally come luxuriously equipped with
rectifiers and filters so that the generator tubes were served with
pure direct current--the circuit was self-rectified which would give
a raucous signal if used as a radio transmitter. That generated
a ripple-varied signal for the D plates and it screwed up the
dispersion. The omission of refinement satisfied Thomas. So it wasn't
perfect. It would be by the time Tom Lionel got through with it.
And for the time being, Thomas would leave it alone. No use trying
to make it work until Tom made an engineering model out of the
physicist's experiment.
Smiling to himself, Thomas went to work in the laboratory. He ignored
Tom's experiments and started a few of his own accord.
* * * * *
Some hours later, the doorbell rang and Thomas went to the door to
find a letter, addressed to Thomas Lionel, Ph.D. It was from an Arthur
Hamilton, M.D.
"Hm-m-m," said Thomas. "Is there something the matter with me?" He
slit the envelope and removed a bill for consultation.
"Consultation? Consultation? What in the name of all that's unholy
is he consulting a doctor about? Or is the doctor consulting--no,
the bill is rendered in the wrong direction. I know my consulting
engineer."
The physicist put on his hat and headed forth. It was not much later
that he was sitting again in the same chair, facing Hamilton.
"You're back."
"Nope," smiled Thomas. "I'm here, not back."
"But you were here last week."
"That was another fellow. Look, Hamilton, I think I require your
assistance. I have an engineer that is no end of bother."
"Want to get rid of him, huh?" answered Hamilton. The suppressed smile
fought valiantly and won, and the doctor's face beamed and then he
broke into laughter. "What am I, anyway? Man, I can't take money from
both sides. That's ... that's ... barratry, or something."
"I'm the same man."
"Nope. You are not."
"Well, by and large, I thought it might be of interest to you to hear
both sides. It might be that I am a useful citizen in spite of what
the engineer says."
"The engineer's opinion is that no physicist is worth an unprintable."
"The physicist's opinion is that all engineers are frustrated
physicists."
"Might challenge him to a fight."
"Have. But chess isn't too satisfying. I want blood."
"It's your blood."
"That's the annoying part of it all. He seems entirely a different
fellow."
"The cleavage is perfect. You would think him a separate entity."
Hamilton paused, "But neither of you refer to the other by name. That
indicates a psychological block that may be important evidence."
"O.K., what do we do?"
"I must discover the reason for the split personality."
"I can give you that reason. The engineer was forced into being a
practical man because money lies in that direction. Upon getting out
of college, there was a heavy debt. It was paid off by hard work--a
habit formed and never broken. Bad habits, you know, are hard to
break."
"Interesting."
"Well, the desire to delve into the physicist's realm stayed with the
engineer, but people who had heavy purses were not interested in new
ways to measure the ether-drift or the effect of cosmic radiation on
the physical properties of carbon. Money wants more perfect pencil
sharpeners, ways of automatically shelling peas, and efficient methods
of de-gassing oil. All these things are merely applications in
practice of phenomena that some physicist has uncovered and revealed
and put on record so that some engineer can use the effect to serve
his ends.
"At any rate, the desire to be a physicist is strong, strong enough to
cause schizophrenia. I, Dr. Hamilton, am a living, breathing, talking
example that an engineer is but a frustrated physicist. He is the
troubled one--I am the stable personality. I am happy, well-adjusted,
and healthy."
"I see. Yet he has his point. You, like other physicists, are not
interested in making money. How, then, do you propose to live?"
"A physicist--or an engineer--can always make out well. The bank
account at the last sitting was something like ninety-four thousand,
six hundred seventeen dollars and thirty-four cents."
"That's quite a lot of money."
"The engineer considers it a business backlog," said Thomas.
"Equipment is costly. Ergo--see?"
"I see. Seems you laid out a large sum of money for a mass
spectrograph."
"I did."
"And what did he do?"
"He made notes on it and is going to peddle it as a commercial
product. He'll probably make fifty thousand dollars out of it."
"I suggested that," admitted the psychiatrist.
"That's all right. I don't mind. It sort of tickles me, basically. I
do things constantly that make him roar with anguish. And then his
only rebuttal is to take it and make something practical out of it."
"I see."
"That, you understand, is the game that has been going on for some
time between all physicists and engineers."
"If you'd leave one another alone, you'd all be better off," said
Hamilton. "From what I've heard, the trouble lies in the fact that
physicists are not too interested in the practical details, whilst the
engineer resents the physicist's insistance upon getting that last
point zero two percent of performance."
"Are you willing to give me my answer?"
"What answer?"
"How do I get rid of the engineer? One of us has got to go, and being
the stable, happy one, I feel that all in all I am the best adjusted
and therefore the most likely to succeed. After all, I am the ideal
personality according to the other one. He'd like to be me. That's why
he is, from time to time."
"Sort of a figment of your own imagination."
"That's me."
"Then I wonder--Yet, I did accept his case, not yours."
"Whose case?"
"Um ... ah ... I--Look, if you frustrate him to the extreme, he'll
retreat into you more and more until he does not appear. Follow?"
"I get it. O.K., doctor. He'll be the most frustrated engineer in the
world. And I am just the guy to do it."
* * * * *
Tom Lionel, Consulting Engineer, looked foolishly at the claw hammer
in one hand and wondered about it. About him in the laboratory were
stacks of huge packing cases.
Unpacked already were several monstrous bits of equipment. Lionel
shook his head. Where had this mess come from? He hadn't ordered it--
Or,
Had he?
Lionel left the laboratory on the dead run. He tripped once and fell
flat on his face and as he started up again, the top of his head came
with a sharp bang against the unyielding bottom of a ruling engine.
"A grating engine," yelled Tom.
On the desk, in plain sight, was a pile of bills-of-lading. Tom
riffled through them, consulted packing lists, and a catalog of
ordered equipment. In his own handwriting, too.
Grand total outlay $94,617.34; balance to be paid within thirty days:
$16,750.00.
"Not only broke," grunted Tom, "but bleeding too."
His handwriting was his handwriting. Not a chance in the world of
refuting the order, or packing the stuff up and sending it back. He
was stuck with it.
But the conglomeration that Thomas had picked out. A sort of
aggregation of large and small parts that would have made a small
college laboratory figuratively drool at the thought; but which would
only grow dust, rust, and corrosion in any manufacturing plant.
With the possible exception, of course, of a manufacturer of
scientific equipment for colleges and laboratories.
What production line could make use of a ruling engine?
And if one could, could it use a micro-densitometer in the same
process?
Of course, the micro-vacuum pump could be used in vacuum tube
manufacture, in a pinch. Vacuum tube companies normally used
large-volume pumps instead of the little super-efficient exhaustion
pump that could take a few cubic centimeters down to a few
millimicrons of mercury.
The electron microscope was a nice hunk of stuff, but the thing was
not applicable to anything except research.
And the instantaneous X-ray gadget was tricky as the devil--and
adapted mostly to the job of taking pictures of bullets under fire as
they passed up through the rifling of a gun.
One pile of stuff was directed--according to Tom's designation--only
at the problem of investigating the Earth's gravitational field as for
strength, direction, and conflicting urges.
A transit. Now what in the name of sin would a radio engineer want
with a transit? Nice piece of stuff, and far superior to the little
dumpy-level that Tom used to lay out antenna arrays and directive
antennas of one sort or another. But, a transit!
And so the list went. $111,367.34 worth of the most interesting,
best made, neatly assembled hunks of utterly impractical scientific
machinery ever collected under one roof.
A solid vista of impracticality as far as the eye could reach.
The ton of bricks that broke the camel's back.
Tom roared through the house, took a look at the chessboard and with a
savage movement, took the physicist's queen with his knight. He'd get
even with that physicist if it took--
Well, almost anything.
* * * * *
Fifteen minutes later he was in Dr. Hamilton's office, pounding on the
desk.
"Look," he roared, "that physicist just clipped me for my entire
bankroll and then dropped me into debt by sixteen grand. I want him
clipped!"
"Now take it easy," said the doctor. "Remember you are talking about
yourself."
"Doc, if I commit suicide am I liable for murder?"
"Yup. Going to try?"
"Nope. Life is too interesting. My main regret with life is that I was
born a hundred years too soon. My only compensation is that I may live
to be a hundred, so that I can see what I've missed by being born too
soon. Follow?"
"You sound mentally healthy enough."
"Thanks. But what about him? You've seen him."
"I have. He came to me about you."
"And what are you doing about it ... us?"