Then a more brilliant thought struck me. I remembered that those
ivories were cashable at any time. Tomorrow! After the excitement had
died down. I scrambled for the abandoned table, scooped up two double
handfuls, then two more. It was our money, rightly.
I hightailed it for the exit. It took me a little time to get away.
Everyone else had the same idea. But I finally made it. There was no
use looking for Hank in that mob, so I grabbed a taxi to town, hoping
he'd be able to come home under his own power.
But he was already home when I got there. He was just finishing a
financial census at my desk, dreamily counting crisp, crunchy bills
into piles before him.
"--and seventy-eight, eight hundred and seventy-nine--" He saw me and
grinned. "Hi, Jim! Got part of what I deserved, anyhow. See? 'Bout six
thousan' bucks!"
I sniffed. "Chicken feed! I've got the rest of it. The _real_ stuff!
Ten buck chips!"
With a calm, superior smile I began to unload my colorful cargo beside
his pile of green. But Hank didn't look enthusiastic. I waited for the
ooohs and aaahs, and when none came I snapped,
"Well, what's the matter? You sore because I made out better than you
did?"
He shifted uncomfortably and refused to meet my eye. He said,
"Well, it ain't exactly that, Jim. Only--"
"Only what?"
"Only," he gulped, "them chips ain't gonna do much good, way I figger.
'Pears to me like after what happened tonight, that there place ain't
never gonna open up no more."
He was right, of course. Hank was always right. I still have two
hatfuls of roulette chips; you can have them, parcel post collect.
The College Clubbe folded the next morning, but the story of why it
collapsed got around. And Hank became something of a celebrity.
That's how, in spite of Doc MacDowell's pigheadedness, the rest of
the Midland University faculty got to hear about my rural protégé. To
hear was to visit; to visit was to listen with awe. They handed him
stumpers; he up-rooted them and handed them back with Q.E.D.'s tacked
on them.
[Illustration: With calm nonchalance Hank Cleaver answered the
questions of the incredulous scientists.]
At first, Horse-sense Hank was a sort of perambulating parlor game to
the professoriat. They came and tried out on him the trick questions
to which they--and presumably only they--knew the answers. No soap!
They asked him about the variable nature of light waves; he derived,
alone and unaided, a formula which Professor Hallowell of the Physics
Department identified as the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction.
* * * * *
They asked him about electronic structures. First they had to tell
him what an electron was; after that, he did the talking. He confused
me and practically everyone else present. He kept talking about
a "whatchamaycallit." Finally Dr. Enderby of the Blair Research
Foundation pinned him down as to the exact nature of this mysterious
something.
Blair grayed visibly when he discovered that Hank's "whatchamaycallit"
was identical in meaning, value and structure with _h_--that abstruse
physical concept known as Planck's constant.
Hank offered apologetically, "They ain't no word to describe it
exactly. It--well, it just _is_, that's all. I reckon if you wanted
to, you could say it was the diff'rence in energy values in them there
light rays we been talkin' about. But that ain't all. It's more'n that.
It's also the amount of diff'rence in the way things are. I mean, when
you bet or gamble, the whatchamaycallit comes into the picture."
Blair wept. "Heisenberg! The uncertainty factor! Identical with
Planck's constant!" He went home gibbering.
Then the graybeards realized that Hank was not just a freak; he was the
Answer Man in person. They started digging up toughies that had stymied
them for years. They served them in simple language and Hank dished up
replies in homespun.
Me, I don't pretend to understand half the stuff I heard them talking
about. So you'll have to overlook it if I botch the job of retelling. I
recall hearing an astronomer ask one night,
"Mr. Cleaver, what in your opinion is the explanation of the observed
fact that celestial bodies apparently always move in conic sections of
elliptic or infinite orbits?"
Hank twiddled his fingers and said, "Why, 'pears to me that's on
account of nature is lazy."