Away with imagination! Be
practical! Dispense with
theory! Do nothing that
cannot be justified and
explained to perfection.
To succeed; to enjoy the
wonderful practicality
of the engineer--
PRESS HERE!
Poltergeist Conversion Co., Ltd.
Tom blinked and got the idea at once. The engineer knew. The physicist
had dreamed up this thing; it must contain some sort of thing that
caused the shift in personality at the physicist's will.
He took hold of it and lifted.
It slipped out of his fingers.
He set both hands on it and lifted. It stayed on the table. He grunted
and strained, and succeeded in getting it off the table by several
inches. Then he gave up and returned it slowly to the top again,
fearing to drop it lest it damage the desk top.
Metal, huh?
Must be practically solid, then.
What metal?
Tom thought. Must be tougher than a battleship's nose, for if entry
were easy, the physicist knew he'd be rebuilding the thing every time
he wanted to use it.
He took a cold chisel, set the edge against one corner and walloped it
with a hammer. The edge of the cold chisel turned back in a neat Vee.
Tom took a file, set the cutting edge against one corner and filed.
The file slipped across the corner of the box with all the bite of a
solid, slick bar of smooth steel.
An atomic hydrogen cutting torch stood nearby. Tom fired up and set the
ultra-hot flame against the same corner that had defied his previous
efforts. Nothing much happened excepting that the box got hotter.
That spoiled Tom's fun for the moment. The desk below the box started
to smoke and then burst into flame. Tom grabbed a carbon tetrachloride
extinguisher but stopped before he played the stream on the hot metal.
It was charring the desk through.
The desk was ruined anyway, so Tom ignored it for the moment. He ran a
bucket of water and slid it underneath the desk just in time to catch
the ultra-hot box just as it passed through the table.
While it was sizzling in the bucket of water and sending forth great
clouds of vapor, Tom busied himself with the extinguisher, putting out
the fire on the desk.
Tungsten!
Well, tungsten or not, it must be ruined after immersion in water after
being red-hot all over. Nothing on God's green earth--
Holy entropy! He'd said that before. It presented a couple of large,
bright red question marks.
One. That thing was apparently tungsten clear through. Therefore, how
had the physicist cast it?
Two. Granted that thing had been cast--what in the name of howling
rockets had the physicist used for the inside circuits?
And three. If running molten tungsten into the mold hadn't ruined the
guts of the box, how could heat and water do anything at all?
And, disquieting thought, was the pushbutton waterproof?
With much difficulty, Tom moved the box out from its watery bath below
the bench and hauled it over to the high-power X-ray machine. He looked
at the fluoroscope and grunted in disgust.
Naturally, tungsten would be completely and utterly blank-faced to any
X-ray manipulation. He wanted to kick it, but he knew that kicking a
sold slab of tungsten would be damaging only to the kickee.
A means of casting tungsten--something that they'd been seeking ever
since the stuff was isolated. He had it--or at least, the physicist had
it.
Utter frustration.
* * * * *
Thomas Lionel looked at the box and grinned. He knew what had happened.
The engineer hadn't been able to guess--