Part 3
Away with imagination! Be practical! Dispense with theory! Do nothing that cannot be justified and explained to perfection.
To succeed; to enjoy the wonderful practicality of the engineer--
PRESS HERE! Poltergeist Conversion Co., Ltd.
Tom blinked and got the idea at once. The engineer knew. The physicist had dreamed up this thing; it must contain some sort of thing that caused the shift in personality at the physicist's will.
He took hold of it and lifted.
It slipped out of his fingers.
He set both hands on it and lifted. It stayed on the table. He grunted and strained, and succeeded in getting it off the table by several inches. Then he gave up and returned it slowly to the top again, fearing to drop it lest it damage the desk top.
Metal, huh?
Must be practically solid, then.
What metal?
Tom thought. Must be tougher than a battleship's nose, for if entry were easy, the physicist knew he'd be rebuilding the thing every time he wanted to use it.
He took a cold chisel, set the edge against one corner and walloped it with a hammer. The edge of the cold chisel turned back in a neat Vee. Tom took a file, set the cutting edge against one corner and filed. The file slipped across the corner of the box with all the bite of a solid, slick bar of smooth steel.
An atomic hydrogen cutting torch stood nearby. Tom fired up and set the ultra-hot flame against the same corner that had defied his previous efforts. Nothing much happened excepting that the box got hotter.
That spoiled Tom's fun for the moment. The desk below the box started to smoke and then burst into flame. Tom grabbed a carbon tetrachloride extinguisher but stopped before he played the stream on the hot metal. It was charring the desk through.
The desk was ruined anyway, so Tom ignored it for the moment. He ran a bucket of water and slid it underneath the desk just in time to catch the ultra-hot box just as it passed through the table.
While it was sizzling in the bucket of water and sending forth great clouds of vapor, Tom busied himself with the extinguisher, putting out the fire on the desk.
Tungsten!
Well, tungsten or not, it must be ruined after immersion in water after being red-hot all over. Nothing on God's green earth--
Holy entropy! He'd said that before. It presented a couple of large, bright red question marks.
One. That thing was apparently tungsten clear through. Therefore, how had the physicist cast it?
Two. Granted that thing had been cast--what in the name of howling rockets had the physicist used for the inside circuits?
And three. If running molten tungsten into the mold hadn't ruined the guts of the box, how could heat and water do anything at all?
And, disquieting thought, was the pushbutton waterproof?
With much difficulty, Tom moved the box out from its watery bath below the bench and hauled it over to the high-power X-ray machine. He looked at the fluoroscope and grunted in disgust.
Naturally, tungsten would be completely and utterly blank-faced to any X-ray manipulation. He wanted to kick it, but he knew that kicking a sold slab of tungsten would be damaging only to the kickee.
A means of casting tungsten--something that they'd been seeking ever since the stuff was isolated. He had it--or at least, the physicist had it.
Utter frustration.
* * * * *
Thomas Lionel looked at the box and grinned. He knew what had happened. The engineer hadn't been able to guess--
He pressed the button again--
* * * * *
Tom Lionel removed his finger from the button and swore. He used an engineer's ability to remember and then to improvise and from there he took up the job of invention. His swearing did him good. At least he forgot to worry about the tungsten box. He'd find that one out eventually, anyway.
And, furthermore, its trial by fire and water had damaged it in absolutely no way.
Q.E.D., here he was again!
He looked further. It was not like the physicist to just do this. There must be other information pertaining to the problem that the engineer had left. He went into the living room of his house and sought the desk. There was more of it, anyway.
The title page of the manuscript read:
MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS OF OBSERVATIONAL DATA MADE DURING THE MANIFESTATION OF FORCES OPERATING IN A NEW FIELD OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE.
By Thomas Lionel, Ph.D., M.M. Consulting Engineer.
Tom lifted the manuscript from the desk--
And he got the squeamish feeling of being dropped in an ultra-high speed elevator that was accelerating at a terrific rate. He instinctively dropped the manuscript and clutched the edge of the desk. When the manuscript hit the desk, it caused the phenomenon to stop.
Tom felt the top page, ran around it with his fingers, and then carefully slid his hand beneath the last page, found the button on the desk top, and held it down while he removed the manuscript.
He lifted. It gave him the screaming willies, and instinctively, Tom pressed hard on the button.
His elevator changed direction. It gave him the effect of being hit on the head with a sand bag. It was now accelerating upward at a violent rate.
He let the button up slowly. The feeling ceased as he reached a pressure about even to the weight of the manuscript; stopping all at once. He compensated by dropping an equal number of blank pages from the desk on the button and took the manuscript to his easy chair to read.
It was one of those things. It couldn't be denied. He was going to be _forced_ into presenting this paper before the American Physical Society, using his full name and all of his degrees and the works. The physicist and his little tungsten box would see to it that he remained an engineer until the paper was presented, fully and completely. The physicist didn't have all the answers, of course, but he had solved some of the basic problems.
He finished the manuscript, and then found a letter. It said:
Dear Galileo:
The phenomenon of losing fifty pounds is the result of an antigravity field which I discovered from your data on the good old poltergeist. The trouble with the thing is simply this:
In order to make the thing function, it takes something like three tons of equipment to make the object within the field lose its fifty pounds.
I, as a physicist, do not care about the practicality of the device. I have made it work. You, as an engineer, will appreciate the possibilities behind the perfection of this device. I offer you the chance to start your Poltergeist Moving Company, providing, of course, that you can make something of this effect.
Incidentally, I have been unable to get or to predict antigravitational forces of less than fifty pounds regardless of how the equipment is set up.
I don't care, I will leave the rest to you.
Sincerely, Thomas Lionel, Ph.D., M.M.
Tungsten casting, antigravity, inefficiency and poltergeists! Tom's head whirled. With a last-hope gesture, he stalked over to the chessboard and studied the men.
It bothered him, he was completely frustrated. The room whirled a bit, despite Tom's fight against it. This was the last straw, this chess game.
Not that he himself was the absolute loser in this game of living chess. It was just that he had started something that threatened to boil over at the edges.
Fundamentally, he'd tried to exorcise the physicist. He'd gone to much trouble and effort to remove the low-down effect of physicist-thinking patterns from his immediate locale. Instead--by his supreme efforts to get rid of the theorist, aforementioned theorist had come up with a few problems of his own that tickled the imagination, offered all sorts of interesting problems, and--
Had basically shown how utterly impossibly foolish it would be to try and get rid of the physicist.
Thomas Lionel, Ph.D., M.M., knew too much to be immediately removed, obliterated, canceled, or even ignored.
How do you cast tungsten? How do you make antigravity--even on an inefficient scale? And if a poltergeist is--and you know his address, as the physicist seemed to, can you hire the throwing-ghost? Brother, did he have a lot of problems to reduce to practice! He'd have little time for getting rid of his pal.
Tom Lionel snarled at the chessboard. He'd made his gambit, and instead of ridding himself of a rather powerful threat to his own security, he'd--well, he reread the significant sign that presided over the chessboard and began to growl like an insulted cocker spaniel.
The sign said:
CHECKMATE!
THE END.
THE END.