And he got the squeamish feeling of being dropped in an ultra-high
speed elevator that was accelerating at a terrific rate. He
instinctively dropped the manuscript and clutched the edge of the desk.
When the manuscript hit the desk, it caused the phenomenon to stop.
Tom felt the top page, ran around it with his fingers, and then
carefully slid his hand beneath the last page, found the button on the
desk top, and held it down while he removed the manuscript.
He lifted. It gave him the screaming willies, and instinctively, Tom
pressed hard on the button.
His elevator changed direction. It gave him the effect of being hit on
the head with a sand bag. It was now accelerating upward at a violent
rate.
He let the button up slowly. The feeling ceased as he reached a
pressure about even to the weight of the manuscript; stopping all at
once. He compensated by dropping an equal number of blank pages from
the desk on the button and took the manuscript to his easy chair to
read.
It was one of those things. It couldn't be denied. He was going to
be _forced_ into presenting this paper before the American Physical
Society, using his full name and all of his degrees and the works. The
physicist and his little tungsten box would see to it that he remained
an engineer until the paper was presented, fully and completely. The
physicist didn't have all the answers, of course, but he had solved
some of the basic problems.
He finished the manuscript, and then found a letter. It said:
Dear Galileo:
The phenomenon of losing fifty pounds is the result of an
antigravity field which I discovered from your data on the good
old poltergeist. The trouble with the thing is simply this:
In order to make the thing function, it takes something like three
tons of equipment to make the object within the field lose its
fifty pounds.
I, as a physicist, do not care about the practicality of the device.
I have made it work. You, as an engineer, will appreciate the
possibilities behind the perfection of this device. I offer you the
chance to start your Poltergeist Moving Company, providing, of
course, that you can make something of this effect.
Incidentally, I have been unable to get or to predict
antigravitational forces of less than fifty pounds regardless of
how the equipment is set up.