I am Bill Halley. Some of the adolescent undergraduate brats at this
one-horse college have nicknamed me "Comet" and it burns me up every
time some pimply-faced baby waves his arm at me and says, "Hiya, Comet."
But I smile and don't let them know I don't like it, because if they
knew there would be no living with them. Jud is head of the physics
department and I am one of the three profs under him. When I first came
here last fall he looked at my papers, said "BILL HALLEY?" and since
then has treated me with the respect he reserves only for the gods of
Physics. Probably assumed I was a direct descendant of the Halley who
got his name plastered all over Halley's Comet.
Anyway, between classes this morning he had excitedly asked me to meet
him at the Campus Lunch during the noon hour and he would show me his
latest discovery--and here we were, wherever that was. I picked up the
hunk of metal and turned it over in the palm of my hand, sipping my
coffee from a cup held in my other hand, and tried to figure out why he
was so excited.
There was a peculiar warmth to the stuff. Maybe it was radioactive. But
no, it was too light to be one of the heavy elements. I tossed it back
to the table top and then nearly rose to the ceiling. The stuff hadn't
bounced with a metallic sound at all, but had settled slowly, coming to
rest with no sign of a bump.