Manning started the car. "It'll take six months for the Bureau to get
around to it. And in the meantime, our wise friend will be making hay
while the sun shines."
Wheeler laughed. "Hell, he'll be lucky if he makes his rent. Didn't
seem like a bad guy, though."
Manning's hands tightened on the wheel. "He's a huckster, Ray. A cheap,
grafting little huckster who's too damn big for his britches. And I'm
going to see that he gets exactly what he deserves."
Wheeler looked worried. "Don't ever get too personal about it, Fred.
You gotta have an objective viewpoint all the time."
Maybe he was making too much of it, Manning thought coldly. But when
everything else went to pot you liked to ... bury yourself in your work.
* * * * *
"More coffee, Fred?"
"Yeah. Cream and sugar it, Judy." He poked at the thing on the table
with a pencil. "What do you think of it, Ray?"
Wheeler nibbled at his sandwich, looking like a slightly overstuffed
beaver. "I don't make a damn thing out of it. It doesn't look like
anything I've ever seen before. What did you take it apart for?"
"See what makes it tick--if it does. And I wanted to know who made it.
A lot of manufacturers stamp their parts either with a trademark or
some other kind of identifying symbol."
But the pieces that lay on the table before him didn't have identifying
marks of any kind on them. They were beautifully machined, Manning
thought. Nice machining and lots of chrome and the tolerances must have
been out of this world. And so what?
His wife came back with a steaming cup of coffee and Manning dangled a
doughnut in it. The simple things, he thought abstractly. That was what
made life worth living, that was what he was going to miss.
"You got any idea how it works?" Wheeler asked.
Manning shook his head. "I don't think it works at all. A convincing
hunk of machinery, something that looks pretty but does nothing."
Wheeler pointed a stubby forefinger at a small cube of metal,
approximately three inches on the side, that was apparently the heart
of the carburetor. "What do you think that's for?"
"I don't know. It's a sealed unit, something like they have in
refrigerators and washing machines. Exactly what it does, I couldn't
tell you."
"This doesn't look like the ordinary gadget racket to me," Wheeler
said uneasily. "I think we ought to call the Bureau in on it."
Manning shrugged. "National will find out all about it when we submit
our report."
"You going to open up the sealed unit?"
Manning hesitated, then shook his head. "No. If we open it before we
test the whole thing, then Forsythe would say we tampered with the
gadget and naturally it wouldn't perform as he claimed."
He reassembled it, then pushed it across the table to Wheeler. "It's
your baby, Ray. You test it. I've got something else to do."
Wheeler carefully wrapped the gadget in a chamois and stuffed it back
in the box. He cornered another doughnut and sloshed it around in the
bottom of his cup. "What did you have in mind?"
"I'm curious about Forsythe," Manning said. "I want to know more about
him. Who he is, where he comes from, that sort of thing. There might be
more to this than just Forsythe, you know. He's just the sales front; I
think there's an organization behind him."
"You want to be a hero, Fred?"