Dissociates H_{2}O into hemi-quasi-stable H and O, furnishing a
serviceable fuel-and-oxydizer mix for most motorcycles,
automobiles, trucks, motorboats, airplanes, stationary motors,
torque-twisters, translators, and rockets (exhaust velocity up to
6000 meters per second). Operates safely within and outside of all
normal atmospheres. No special adaptor needed on
oxygenizer-atmosphere motors.
_Directions_: Place one pinch in fuel tank, fill with water. Add
water as needed.
A-F Catalyst should generally be renewed when objective tests show
fuel quality has deteriorated 50 per cent.
_U.S. and Foreign Patents Pending_
After reading that several times, with suitable mind-checking and
eye-testing in between, Ernie took up a little of the white powder on
the end of a nailfile. He had thought of tasting it, but had instantly
abandoned the notion and even refrained from sniffing the stuff--after
all, the human body is mostly water.
After reducing the quantity several times, he gingerly dumped at most
four or five grains on the flat edge of the washbowl and then used the
broad end of the nailfile to maneuver a large bead of water over to
the almost invisible white deposit. He closed the box, put it and the
nailfile carefully on the window ledge, lit a match and touched it to
the drop, at the last moment ducking his head a little below the level
of the washbowl.
Nothing happened. After a moment, he slowly withdrew the match,
shaking it out, and looked. There was nothing to see. He reached out to
touch the stupid squashed ovoid of water.
Ouch! He withdrew his fingers much faster than the match, shook them
more sharply. Something was there, all right. Heat. Heat enough to hurt.
* * * * *
He cautiously explored the boundaries of the heat. It became noticeable
about eighteen inches above the drop and almost an inch to each
side--an invisible slim vertical cylinder. Crouching close, eyes level
with the top of the washbowl, he could make out the flame--a thin
finger of crinkled light.
He noticed that a corner of the drop was seething--but only a corner,
as if the heat were sharply bounded in that direction and perhaps as if
the catalyst were only transforming the water to fuel a bit at a time.
He reached up and tugged off the light. Now he could see the
flame--ghostly, about four inches high, hardly thicker than a string,
and colored not blue but pale green. A spectral green needle. He blew
at it softly. It shimmied gracefully, but not, he thought, as much as
the flame of a match or candle. It had character.
He switched on the light. The drop was more than half gone now; the
part that was left was all seething. And the bathroom was markedly
warmer.
"Ernie! Are you going to be much longer?"
The knock hadn't been loud and his widowed sister's voice was more
apologetic than peremptory, but he jumped, of course.
"I am testing something," he started to say and changed it mid-way. It
came out, "I am be out in a minute."
He turned off the light again. The flame was a little shorter now and
it shrank as he watched, about a quarter inch a second. As soon as it
died, he switched on the light. The drop was gone.
He scrubbed off the spot with a dry washrag, on second thought put a
dab of vaseline on the washrag, scrubbed the spot again with that--he
didn't like to think of even a grain of the powder getting in the
drains or touching any water. He folded the washrag, tucked it in his
pocket, put the blue box--after a final check of the lettering--in his
other coat pocket, and opened the door.
"I was taking some bicarb," he told his sister. "Thuringer sausage at
lunch."
She nodded absently.
* * * * *
Sleep refused even to flirt with Ernie, his mind was full of so many
things, especially calculations involving the distance between his
car and the house and the length of the garden hose. In desperation,
as the white hours accumulated and his thoughts began to squirm, he
grabbed up the detective story he'd bought at the corner newsstand. He
had read thirty pages before he realized that he was turning them as
rapidly as he could focus just once on each facing page.
He jumped out of bed. My God, he thought, at that rate he'd finish the
book under three minutes and here it wasn't even two o'clock yet!
He selected the thickest book on the shelf, an overpoweringly dull
historical treatise in small print. He turned two pages, three, then
closed it with a clap and looked at the wall with frightened eyes.
Ernie Meeker had discovered, inside the birthday box that was himself,
the first of the Big Gifts.
The trouble was that in that wee-hour, lonely bedroom, it didn't
seem like a gift at all. How would he ever keep himself in books, he
wondered, if he read them so fast? And think how full to bursting his
mind would get--right now, the seven pages of fine-print history were
churning in it, vividly clear, along with the first chapters of the new
detective story. If he kept on absorbing information that fast, he'd
have to be revising all his opinions and beliefs every couple of days
at least--maybe every couple of hours.
It seemed a dreadful, literally maddening prospect--his mind would
ultimately become a universe of squirming macaroni. Even the wallpaper
he was staring at, which imitated the grain of wood, had in an instant
become so fully part of his consciousness that he felt he could turn
his back on it right now and draw a picture of it correct to the
tiniest detail. But who would ever want to do such a thing, or want to
be able to?
It was an abnormal, dangerous, temporary sensitivity, he told
himself, generated by the excitement of the crazy discovery he'd made
in the bathroom. Like the thoughts of a drowning man, riffling an
infinity-paneled adventure-comic of his life as he bolts his last rough
ration of air. Or like the feeling a psychotic must have that he's
on the verge of visualizing the whole universe, having its ultimate
secrets patter down into the palm of his outstretched hand--just before
the walls close in.
Ernie Meeker was not a drinking man, then. A pint had stood a week on
his closet shelf and only been diminished three shots. But now he did a
good job on the sturdy remainder.
Pretty soon the unbearable, edge-of-doom clarity in his mind faded,
the universe-macaroni cooked down to a thick white soup uniform as
fog, and the words of the detective story were sliding into his mind
individually, or at most in strings of three and four. Which, if it
wasn't as it ideally should be in an ambitious man's mind, was at least
darn comfortable.
He had not rejected the Big Gift of Page-at-a-Glance Reading. Not
quite. But he had dislocated for tonight at least the imposed nervous
field on which it depended.
* * * * *
For want of a better place, Ernie dropped the rubber tube from the
bathtub spray into the scrub bucket half full of odorous pink fluid and
stared doubtfully at the uncapped gas tank. The tank had been almost
empty when he'd last driven his car, he knew, because he'd been waiting
until payday to gas up. Now he had used the tube to siphon out what
he could of the remainder (he still could taste the stuff!) and he'd
emptied the fuel line and carburator, more or less.
Further than that, in the way of engine hygiene, Ernie's strictly
kitchen mechanics did not go, but he felt that a catalyst used in
pinches shouldn't be too particular about contaminants. Besides, the
directions on the box hadn't said anything about cleaning the fuel
tank, had they?
He hesitated. At his feet, the garden hose gurgled noisily over the
curb into the gutter; it had vindicated his midnight estimate, proving
just long enough. He looked uneasily up and down the dawning street
and was relieved to find it still empty. He wished fervently, not for
the first time this Saturday morning, that he had a garage. Then he
sighed, squared his shoulders a little, and lifted the box out of his
pocket.
Making to check the directions the umpteenth time, he received a body
blow. The white lettering on the box had disappeared. The box didn't
proclaim itself sodium bicarbonate again--there was just no lettering
at all, only blue background. He turned it over several times.
Right there died his tentative plan of eventually sharing his secret
with some friend who knew more than himself about motors (he hadn't
decided anyway who that would be). It would be just too silly to
approach anyone he knew with a more-than-wild story and featureless
blue box.
For a moment, he came very close to dropping the box between the
wide-set bars of the street drain and pouring the pink gas back in the
tank. It had hit him, in a way for the first time, just how _crazy_
this all was, how jarringly implausible even on such hypotheses as
practical jokes, secret product perhaps military, or mad inventor
(except himself).
For how the devil should the stuff get into his bathroom disguised as
bicarb? That circumstance seemed beyond imagination. Green flames ...
vanishing letters ... "torque-twisters, translators" ... a box that
talked....
* * * * *
At that point, simple faith came to Ernie's rescue: in the same
bathroom, he _had_ seen the green flame; it had burned his fingers.
Quickly he dipped up a little of the white powder on the edge of a
fifty-cent piece, dumped it in the gas tank without quibbling as to
quantity, rapped the coin on the edge of the opening, closed and
pocketed the blue box, and picked up the spurting hose and jabbed it
into the round hole.
His heart was pounding and his breath was coming fast. That had taken
real effort. So he was slow in hearing the footsteps behind him.
His neighbor's gate was open and Mr. Jones stood open-mouthed a few
feet behind him, all ready for his day's work as streetcar motorman and
wearing the dark blue uniform that always made him look for a moment
unpleasantly like a policeman.
Ernie swung the hose around, flipping his thumb over the end to make
a spray, and nonchalantly began to water the little rectangle of lawn
between sidewalk and curb.
The first things he watered were the bottoms of Mr. Jones's pants legs.
Mr. Jones voiced no complaint. He backed off several steps, stared
intently at Ernie, rather palely, it seemed to the latter. Then he
turned and made off for the streetcar tracks at a very fast shuffle,
shaking his feet a little now and then and glancing back several times
over his shoulder without slowing down.
Ernie felt light-headed. He decided there was enough water in the gas
tank, capped it, and momentarily continued to water the lawn.
"Ernie! Come on in and have breakfast!"
He heeded his sister's call, telling himself it would be a good idea
"to give the stuff time to mix" before testing the engine.
He had divined her question and was ready with an answer.
"I've just found out that we're supposed to water our lawns only before
seven in the morning or after seven in the evenings. It's the law."
* * * * *
It was the day for their monthly drive out to Wheaton to visit Uncle
Fabius. On the whole, Ernie was glad his sister was in the car when he
turned the key in the starter--it forced him to be calm and collected,
though he didn't feel exactly right about exposing her to the danger
of being blown up without first explaining to her the risk. But the
motor started right up and began purring powerfully. Ernie's sister
commented on it favorably.