Then, staring at the food in the kitchen locker, he blinked. An idea
had occurred to him. He was blankly astonished at it. He went over and
over it in his mind. His expression became dubiously skeptical, and
then skeptically amazed. But his eyes remained intent as he thought.
Presently, looking very skeptical indeed, he went out of the house
and unwound more copper wire from the remnant of the disassembled
generator. He came back to the kitchen. He took an emptied tin can
and cut it in a distinctly peculiar manner. The cuts he made were
asymmetrical. When he had finished, he looked at it doubtfully.
A long time later he had made a new gadget. It consisted of two open
coils, one quite large and one quite small. Their resemblance to each
other was plain, but they did not at all resemble any other coils that
had been made for any other purpose whatsoever. If they looked like
anything, it was the "mobiles" that some sculptors once insisted were
art.
Lon stared at his work with an air of helplessness. Then he went out
again. He returned with the forked stick that had proved to be a
generator. He connected the wires from that improbable contrivance to
the coils of the new and still more unlikely device. The eccentrically
cut tin can was in the middle, between them.
There was a humming sound. Lon went out a third time and came back with
a mass of shrubbery. He packed it in the large coil.