Part 2

"A grating engine," yelled Tom.

On the desk, in plain sight, was a pile of bills-of-lading. Tom riffled through them, consulted packing lists, and a catalog of ordered equipment. In his own handwriting, too.

Grand total outlay $94,617.34; balance to be paid within thirty days: $16,750.00.

"Not only broke," grunted Tom, "but bleeding too."

His handwriting was his handwriting. Not a chance in the world of refuting the order, or packing the stuff up and sending it back. He was stuck with it.

But the conglomeration that Thomas had picked out. A sort of aggregation of large and small parts that would have made a small college laboratory figuratively drool at the thought; but which would only grow dust, rust, and corrosion in any manufacturing plant.

With the possible exception, of course, of a manufacturer of scientific equipment for colleges and laboratories.

What production line could make use of a ruling engine?

And if one could, could it use a micro-densitometer in the same process?

Of course, the micro-vacuum pump could be used in vacuum tube manufacture, in a pinch. Vacuum tube companies normally used large-volume pumps instead of the little super-efficient exhaustion pump that could take a few cubic centimeters down to a few millimicrons of mercury.

The electron microscope was a nice hunk of stuff, but the thing was not applicable to anything except research.

And the instantaneous X-ray gadget was tricky as the devil--and adapted mostly to the job of taking pictures of bullets under fire as they passed up through the rifling of a gun.

One pile of stuff was directed--according to Tom's designation--only at the problem of investigating the Earth's gravitational field as for strength, direction, and conflicting urges.

A transit. Now what in the name of sin would a radio engineer want with a transit? Nice piece of stuff, and far superior to the little dumpy-level that Tom used to lay out antenna arrays and directive antennas of one sort or another. But, a transit!

And so the list went. $111,367.34 worth of the most interesting, best made, neatly assembled hunks of utterly impractical scientific machinery ever collected under one roof.

A solid vista of impracticality as far as the eye could reach.

The ton of bricks that broke the camel's back.

Tom roared through the house, took a look at the chessboard and with a savage movement, took the physicist's queen with his knight. He'd get even with that physicist if it took--

Well, almost anything.

* * * * *

Fifteen minutes later he was in Dr. Hamilton's office, pounding on the desk.

"Look," he roared, "that physicist just clipped me for my entire bankroll and then dropped me into debt by sixteen grand. I want him clipped!"

"Now take it easy," said the doctor. "Remember you are talking about yourself."

"Doc, if I commit suicide am I liable for murder?"

"Yup. Going to try?"

"Nope. Life is too interesting. My main regret with life is that I was born a hundred years too soon. My only compensation is that I may live to be a hundred, so that I can see what I've missed by being born too soon. Follow?"

"You sound mentally healthy enough."

"Thanks. But what about him? You've seen him."

"I have. He came to me about you."

"And what are you doing about it ... us?"

Dr. Hamilton laughed. "Mind if I speak bluntly?"

"Not at all. I can take it."

"Then consider. Both you and your ... physicist ... are sensible, useful citizens. Both of you can contribute much to civilization. Both of you can and will be respectable people, for which other people will have admiration.

"I am in the middle," said the doctor, "I can be no more than a referee. I see both sides. I believe the cleavage came as a result of frustration on your part--you know the details--and as such, you become him when you are frustrated. The reason why he becomes you is also clear. Whenever he finds himself in straits due to the necessity of practical thought, the slip-over occurs. You awoke with a stripping hammer in your hand, unpacking scientific equipment that the physicist bought. He, obviously, became quite worried about the financial situation upon viewing the stuff he bought and could face it no more."

"Sounds reasonable."

"Now consider again. Neither of you is dangerous. You are both interesting and valuable to society. The only thing that is at all bothersome is the fact that you, per se, are not happy. You need an integration of personality. He needs the same. I might hope for a coalescing of you two, but at the moment--and possibly for all time--it is impossible. All I can tell you is the same thing that I told him. Frustration to the extreme will exorcise the other personality. He tried it by running you into debt; by purchasing a laboratory full of things that you, as an engineer, can see no practical use for. You frustrated him--or tried to--by making something commercial out of his last experiment. That, unfortunately, was not frustration for him.

"You must--if you wish to freeze him out--develop something that will frustrate the physicist and still be possible to rationalize in your own personality."

"Um."

"An insolvable problem would do it--if you can shun the problem yourself."

"That might be difficult."

"Especially when the two of you are inclined to become the other when faced with a problem that does not fit in your psyche."

"The problem--I wonder."

"What do you do when you are faced with a tough or impossible problem in physics?"

"I don't get 'em, usually."

"Well, supposing some company required a casting of tungsten metal, for instance."

"I'd ask that they show me exactly why the tungsten couldn't be formed in another manner."

"Supposing they demanded that it be cast?"

"There isn't anything on God's green earth that could be used to handle molten tungsten. Tungsten metal can be shaped, forged, machined, or cold-rolled. But you can't cast it. Ergo, if I were offered that problem I'd merely ask why they needed it. If they require a tungsten shape, I'd recommend shaping or machining, for instance, depending upon how the shape is. If they merely want a tungsten casting for the sake of wanting a tungsten casting, I'd laugh at them and tell 'em it was impossible as I close the door behind them."

"And your physicist?"

"He wouldn't even consider it. To him, no real problem exists. He'd have no truck with a production department in the first place, and in the second, shaping metals isn't particularly of interest to a physicist, excepting when the shape itself is important. And then he doesn't give a howling hoot how it gets in that shape as long as it is shaped properly."

"Well, as I see it, you must evolve something that will frustrate the physicist while holding his interest. He must be compelled to consider this insolvable problem by sheer interest alone. It also must be something that you can see no interest in save as a problem for him, otherwise you may find yourself biting your mutual fingernails over your own devilish plan."

"Um--that's a large order."

"That's it," said Hamilton. "And in the meantime, I'd suggest that you tinker around with some of the stuff you bought. It will lessen the shock of your problem of the bankroll."

"That bank of junk might be the means to his own frustration," grinned Tom. "Every time I look at it, I get a feeling of what can be done about it that is practical, and that may force him into existence and keep him there."

"Well, good luck. And remember, I am just a sort of referee. One of you will become the stronger. One will succeed. I can hope for coalescence, but I doubt that it will take place. Lacking that, all I can hope for is that eventually you will become reintegrated and that the lesser personality will be frozen out."

Tom Lionel returned home, thinking furiously.

"May the best man win, huh?"

* * * * *

It was seven solid weeks by the calendar. Seven solid weeks of hard, backbreaking work during which everything went fine and dandy for Tom Lionel, Consulting Engineer.

The balance of his debt was paid off when Americal Electric purchased the rights and royalties of the cyclotronic spectrograph. The equipment in Tom's laboratory had been kept in good shape, polished and even used occasionally. It was all connected for operation, and though the laboratory had changed from a spacious building into a place where aisles and areas abounded between banks of equipment, it did make an impressive sight.

Even the transit came into use.

And then at the end of the seventh week, Tom Lionel looked at his notebook and started to consider in all of its aspects the rather improbable phenomenon recorded there. He not only let it prey on his mind; he stopped hourly and invited his mind to consider the evidence. At first his mind rejected it on the basis that science was not equipped to consider it, and then as the evidence seemed definite and leading, his mind accepted the fact that this problem did exist and that it was a real and utterly baffling problem.

Then his mind rejected it on the basis of impracticality. It would be nice--but.

No known physical effect could possibly explain it in a satisfactory manner.

Tom went to sleep.

* * * * *

And Thomas Lionel, Ph.D. M.M., awoke. His first consideration was the chessboard. It baffled him. He didn't really think that the engineer would capture his queen. It was too easy. Obviously, there was more to the set-up than appeared. For offering the trap of the double-check and subsequent loss of his queen, Thomas had opened the row blocked by the knight. That left him in the desirable position of capturing the engineer's rook, after which if the engineer was not more than careful in his counterattack, he would find himself staring a checkmate in the face. Either the engineer was blind to the trap, or he had a more complicated trap to spring once the physicist started to move in.

He had time. He wanted to consider the whole thing. He was going to be darned sure that he was right before he moved.

He dressed slowly, and as he entered his kitchenette to prepare breakfast, he saw a new notebook on the table. He picked it up, riffled the pages first, and then read the lettering on the front page.

PHYSICAL DATA AND OBSERVATIONS MADE ON THE OCCURRENCE OF THE MANIPULATION OF NATURAL FORCES WHICH HAVE NO EXPLANATION IN THE KNOWN REALM OF PHYSICS.

Contents:

173 pages of text. 77 pages of calculations. 48 tables of figures. 67 photographs. 13 statements made by unbiased--but not trained--observers. 7 similar incidents not given scientific attention. 29 graphs and curves. 25 pages of description and data pertaining to: meteorological conditions. terran constants--gravity and magnetism. sunspot activity. chemical analyses of earth at discrete intervals near the occurrence. analysis of atmosphere during phenomena.

Accompanying information and data are samples of earth mentioned above. Atmospheric samples were contaminated during analysis and have therefore been destroyed.

"Little Tommy has been a busy lad," mused the physicist. "'No explanation' huh? That's a laugh. _Anything_ can be explained. Well, my engineering friend, let's see what you have cooked up for me."

Thomas Lionel started to read the "173 pages of text" and got down as far as the bottom of the first page. He blinked, did a double take, and reread it.

"Great howling entropy," he grunted. "The unmitigated screwball has spent weeks in the compilation of data on his own, personal observations of a _poltergeist_ in action!"

Thomas took the cigarette case from his pocket and extracted a cigarette. He snapped the lighter and was amazed to see the colors on the case. They were scintillating, iridescent, and beautiful. They danced and changed as he moved the lighter, and the swift play of color across the surface of the case caught his fancy.

It also caught his scientific sense. He looked at the case carefully and swore. Tom had been using the ruling engine. The surface of the cigarette case was a mirror-grating and it was as good a job as the ruling engine could produce.

Thomas fumed. The idea! And then he smiled a bit. For the engineer's use of the ruling engine to decorate a cigarette case was a sort of prostitution of the machine, but it had not harmed the engine in any way. And it was certainly no worse on the physicist's nerves than the irrelevant mixture of precision and utter sloppiness that characterized the physicist's work.

It was, the physicist admitted, beautiful.

He returned to the engineering data.

* * * * *

A poltergeist!

The "throwing-ghost" of the ancient lore and myth. The fearsome manifestation of unrealism. Superstition!

Sheer superstition!

The physicist's mind rejected it, at first. But that which made him the physicist prodded neatly and patiently and quietly. "Where there's smoke, there's fire," it said. And it mentioned situations where, though exact engineering data had not been taken, certainly the observers were not incompetent. They were not trained, but they did attempt to give a valid picture.

Well, so there might be something to it. So the poltergeist might be something.

This case was no flash in the pan. It was real and valid. For nine full days it had persisted. For nine full days, stones passed through the air at the direction of--the poltergeist. Pictures of the stones in full flight. A step-by-step, frame-by-frame sequence picture of a stone leaving the ground and speeding away gave Thomas a wriggly feeling up and down his spine.

Barometric pressure 29.77 inches, temperature 84.66 degrees, both rising slightly. A graph gave the pressure and temperature throughout the nine days. The total number of stones and the masses, individual and aggregate. The district, with a map of both the entire township and a close-up map-diagram of the area, with motion-traces across it, each labeled, notated, numbered, and keyed to the text.

Physical data on the gravitational field. Maps of the magnetic field, both transverse and vertical. Wind direction during each passage of the stones.

A faked report.

Couldn't be real. Absolutely impossible. Ridiculous, and the work of a frantic mind, working avidly to create a situation.

And yet the engineer was a good engineer. He couldn't--it was psychologically impossible for him--to present fake data.

Ergo this report must be real.

Thomas considered the reports of peculiar activity. Mostly the newspapers reported them as small boys throwing stones as a method of exerting their ability to be annoying to the police and duly constituted authority.

There were reports, he knew. About twelve authentic reports per year, which considering the possibility of having the poltergeist phenomena present when no observer was there--how many times had he heard small stones rattling from the roof or rattling noises of one sort or another--meant that the poltergeist was a rather common phenomenon. There were cases he recalled wherein earthquake temblor had been blamed for the upsetting of a grand piano. He'd wondered about that one--a grand piano is stable, positionwise--and how it could have been rolled across the room and dumped upside down.

Poltergeist phenomena.

Ah yes. It might be advisable to get slightly soused tonight. But Thomas was a physicist. He did not quail or get slightly panicky at the idea of the unknown, even though the unknown was known to have tossed a slab of marble--appropriately, a tombstone--several hundred feet through a caretaker's shed.

To be sure, it was slightly running against the grain to sit there in the broad daylight and read about things that according to all physics from Archimedes to Einstein claimed impossible, racial superstition, and old wives' tales. It was very disquieting to read of stones--dead, inert, lifeless, immobile bits of granite--that took off from Mother Earth with no visible means of support, to go whizzing through the thin daylight air at speeds that raised bruises, cut nicks in trees, and shattered windows. It bothered the sense of propriety. It was not right. It was like seeing Lake Louise in violent flame, or watching Niagara go tumbling up from the whirling pools to the ledge that flanked Goat Island. It was crushing chrome-vanadium test-bars between your fingers just after removal from a tensile strength machine that failed to fracture them at fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. It was watching phosphorus lying inert in an atmosphere of pure oxygen.

It was all wrong.

And yet, thought the physicist, what must the Ancient One have thought when he considered the act of fire melting hard metal? They did strange things, in those days. They invented phlogiston, and spent centuries trying to isolate it. Galileo and his telescope, looking through it to Jupiter, must have been startled at the concept as well as the sight of a planetary system in operation.

Science knew that the poltergeist was a problem--but like the man who does not care to go crazy because of the insoluble problem, science shrugged, admitted that it was stumped--intelligently enough, under the circumstances--and then remarked that after finding the next decimal place, it would, perhaps, take a look into the natural phenomena of things that were thrown by nothing.

Until that date, it could look the other way and claim that small boys were throwing stones.

Little boys that they could not see.

Little green men--

* * * * *

Uh-huh, well, here before Thomas Lionel was a veritable wealth of intelligent observations and data on the complete operation, including evidence to substantiate the fact that neither small boys or little green men were involved.

The evidence and engineering measurements were made with impersonal directness. The engineer, recognizing that he knew nothing of the cause, recorded the effect with court-stenographic impartiality. A stone of so many grams left point A in a rising parabola and proceeded to point B where it landed and rolled to point C. It took X seconds, attained Y velocity at peak, and covered Z feet. Graph 1 represents acceleration and deceleration, and equation XXVII is the mathematical representation of the space-curve described by this stone of so many grams.

And bottle VQ contained the stone.

It was all wrong, but it was interesting. It pointed the way to madness--and unless it could be rationalized, the pathway to madness would be a one-way street. Thomas knew at that point that his feet were on that path. He could never retreat until he carried back with him an answer--and from the data presented, his answer must be right.

The engineer, he knew, had done it deliberately. As a means of frustration it was more than air-tight. It was perfect. Show a physicist something that floats between two plates, and he'll go crazy until he knows why. And the engineer had shown the physicist any number of things that floated--sped, indeed--through the air between heaven and earth, like Mohammed's coffin.

Without the benefit of mirrors.

Well, Thomas Lionel, are you licked?

He found a letter that removed all doubt as to the reason. He opened it and read:

Dear Archimedes:

Since you so gallantly presented me with this aggregation of things to measure the last three decimal places of everything, I have decided to put it to work. I have had some fun, thanks to you, in measuring things that I believe have never been set to music before. I have spent some time collecting and presenting data.

This data I do not pretend to understand. I don't intend to try. I am merely an impartial observer. To harness this power would be a boon to civilization. I can see a small truck full of equipment bearing the sign:

POLTERGEIST MOVING COMPANY

if you can only unravel the information contained in my data. You, as a physicist, surely must be able to explain the manifestation in terms that satisfy all and sundry. Once you decide what makes, I'll be interested. Until that date I am stumped, admit it, and happy that I am able to hand the problem to one who by all the evidence, has the personality and character that will not permit these pages of painstaking data to molder in the dust.

Please--old fellow, tell me what's with a poltergeist.

And don't refer vaguely to space warps or fourth dimensional animals. That's strictly for _Corny Stories or Vulturesome Tales_.

Interestedly, Tom Lionel, Consulting Engineer.

P.S. That junk you bought made it possible to make these measurements. Surely the same stuff should enable you to figure out the answer. You and your monomolecular films.

You and your monomolecular films, Thomas snorted.

* * * * *

That was the start. Then, for eight solid weeks, the laboratory lights burned by night, and the machinery turned at all and odd hours of the clock. Measurements were conducted on all sorts of things; including at one instance, the astronomical data pertaining to planetary line-up of the solar system. That one was stamped with a large reject sign; not only it didn't apply, but it didn't make sense either. Trips to the library were frequent, and many's the ancient tome that Thomas read until his eyes burned.

The equations, graphs, and tabulations came in for their study and he located a percentage of dispersion in them. It was either experimental error or true dispersion of effect.

The engineer had done his work well. He had compiled his information, and then had presented it in such a manner that left no doubt. And it proved conclusively that something was there and at the same time pointed out that if there was something there, it could be analyzed, and possibly reproduced.

The physicist knew that no answer would be satisfactory until the phenomenon could be reproduced.

And both he and the engineer knew that the chances were more than possible that a high-order physical effect might be the basic cause. An effect for which mankind had no instruments; radio as a natural phenomenon would be inexplicable to a race that had never discovered a means of detection; the mathematical prediction of radio occurred years before the original experiments.

So--

The physicist set his mind against frustration. To change over to the engineer without an answer would be an admission of defeat. At least without _some_ satisfactory answer.

He mulled his problem by the hour, by the day, and by the week. He did take enough time out to consider the chess problem daily. He figured all the possible moves and finally, one night, he smiled, shrugged his shoulders and decided to plunge ahead.

He slid his rook down from one king row to the other through the square formerly covered by the knight which had been protected by a bishop. All the way across the board he went, and as he arrived at his opponent's king row, he took out the little sign and stood it on the center of the board.

* * * * *

Tom Lionel blinked and removed his finger from the pushbutton. He shook his head. This was all wrong. And, besides, what in the name of entropy was this little box? He didn't recall putting a finger on that button--but here he was, removing his hand after holding the button down.

It was a small metal box about eight by seven by four inches. The edges were all die-straight and the surfaces were as optically flat as Tom could determine without testing. The pushbutton was set flush with the surface, and made of the same metal as the box.

No other projection was evident.

But the button was accompanied with engraving cut in the metal of the front surface. It said:

BE AN ENGINEER!