"Let me show you something," Farnsworth said. He set his near-empty
drink--a Bacardi martini--on the mantel and waddled out of the room
toward the basement.
I sat in my big leather chair, feeling very peaceful with the world,
watching the fire. Whatever Farnsworth would have to show to-night
would be far more entertaining than watching T.V.--my custom on other
evenings. Farnsworth, with his four labs in the house and his very
tricky mind, never failed to provide my best night of the week.
When he returned, after a moment, he had with him a small box, about
three inches square. He held this carefully in one hand and stood by
the fireplace dramatically--or as dramatically as a very small, very
fat man with pink cheeks can stand by a fireplace of the sort that
seems to demand a big man with tweeds, pipe and, perhaps, a saber
wound.
Anyway, he held the box dramatically and he said, "Last week, I was
playing around in the chem lab, trying to make a new kind of rubber
eraser. Did quite well with the other drafting equipment, you know,
especially the dimensional curve and the photosensitive ink. Well, I
approached the job by trying for a material that would absorb graphite
without abrading paper."
I was a little disappointed with this; it sounded pretty tame. But I
said, "How did it come out?"
* * * * *
He screwed his pudgy face up thoughtfully. "Synthesized the material,
all right, and it seems to work, but the interesting thing is that it
has a certain--ah--secondary property that would make it quite awkward
to use. Interesting property, though. Unique, I am inclined to
believe."
This began to sound more like it. "And what property is that?" I
poured myself a shot of straight rum from the bottle sitting on the
table beside me. I did not like straight rum, but I preferred it to
Farnsworth's rather imaginative cocktails.
"I'll show you, John," he said. He opened the box and I could see that
it was packed with some kind of batting. He fished in this and
withdrew a gray ball about the size of a golfball and set the box on
the mantel.
"And that's the--eraser?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. Then he squatted down, held the ball about a half-inch
from the floor, dropped it.
It bounced, naturally enough. Then it bounced again. And again. Only
this was not natural, for on the second bounce the ball went higher in
the air than on the first, and on the third bounce higher still. After
a half minute, my eyes were bugging out and the little ball was
bouncing four feet in the air and going higher each time.