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“Oh, Jefferson! To think that you should do this! If your dear mother knew…”
“Sit down, Beulah,” Scanlon waved at another chair, “and don’t worry about my mother. She wouldn’t have minded.”
“No. Your father was a good-hearted simpleton, too. You’re just like him, Jefferson. First you spend all your money on silly machines that might blow the house up any day-and now you pick up that awful creature from the streets… Tell me, Jefferson,” there was a solemn and fearful pause, “are you thinking of keeping it?”
Scanlon smiled moodily. “I think I am, Beulah. I can’t very well do anything else.”
A week later Scanlon was in his workshop. During the night before, his brain, rested by the change in the monotony brought about by the presence of Max, had thought of a possible solution to the puzzle of why his machine wouldn’t work. Perhaps some of the parts were defective, he thought. Even a very slight flaw in some of the parts could render the machine inoperative.
He plunged into work ardently. At the end of half an hour the machine lay scattered on his workbench, and Scanlon was sitting on a high stool, eying it disconsolately.
He scarcely heard the door softly open and close. It wasn’t until the intruder had coughed twice that the absorbed inventor realized another was present.
“Oh-it’s Max.” His abstracted gaze gave way to recognition. “Did you want to see me?”
“If you’re busy I can wait, Mr. Scanlon.” The week had not removed his shyness. “But there were a lot of books in my room…”
“Books? Oh, I’ll have them cleaned out, if you don’t want them. I don’t suppose you do,-they’re mostly textbooks, as I remember. A bit too advanced for you just now.”
“Oh, it’s not too difficult,” Max assured him. He pointed to a book he was carrying. “I just wanted you to explain a bit here in Quantum Mechanics. There’s some math with Integral Calculus that I don’t quite understand. It bothers me. Here- wait till I find it.”
He ruffled the pages, but stopped suddenly as he became aware of his surroundings. “Oh say-are you breaking up your model?”
The question brought the hard facts back to Scanlon at a bound. He smiled bitterly. “No, not yet. I just thought there might be something wrong with the insulation or the co
“That’s too bad, Mr. Scanlon.” The Tweenie’s smooth brow wrinkled mournfully.
“The worst of it is that I can’t imagine what’s wrong. I’m positive the theory’s perfect-I’ve checked every way I can. I’ve gone over the mathematics time and time again, and each time it says the same thing. Space-distortion fields of such and such an intensity will smash the atom to smithereens. Only they don’t.”
“May I see the equations?”
Scanlon gazed at his ward quizzically, but could see nothing in his face other than the most serious interest He shrugged his shoulders. “There they are-under that ream of yellow paper on the desk. I don’t know if you can read them, though. I’ve been too lazy to type them out, and my handwriting is pretty bad.”
Max scrutinized them carefully and flipped the sheets one by one. “It’s a bit over my head, I guess.”
The inventor smiled a little. “I rather thought they would be. Max.”
He looked around the littered room, and a sudden sense of anger came over him. Why wouldn’t the thing work? Abruptly he got up and snatched his coat “I’m going out of here. Max,” he said. “Tell Beulah not to make me anything hot for lunch. It would be cold before I got back.”
It was afternoon when he opened the front door, and hunger was sharp enough to prevent him from realizing with a puzzled start that someone was at work in his laboratory. There came to his ears a sharp buzzing sound followed by a momentary silence and then again the buzz which this time merged into a sharp crackling that lasted an instant and was gone.
He bounded down the hall and threw open the laboratory door. The sight that met his eyes froze him into an attitude of sheer astonishment-stu
Slowly, he understood the message of his senses. His precious atomic motor had been put together again, but this time in a ma
He wondered stupidly if it were a nightmare or a practical joke, and then everything became clear to him at one bound, for there at the other end of the room was the unmistakable sight of a brush of silver hair protruding from above a bench, swaying gently from side to side as the hidden owner of the brush moved.
“Max!” shouted the distraught inventor, in tones of fury. Evidently the foolish boy had allowed his interest to inveigle him into idle and dangerous experiments.
At the sound, Max lifted a pale face which upon the sight of his guardian turned a dull red. He approached Scanlon with reluctant steps.
“What have you done?” cried Scanlon, staring about him angrily. “Do you know what you’ve been playing with? There’s enough juice ru
“I’m sorry, Mr. Scanlon. I had a rather silly idea about all this when I looked over the equations, but I was afraid to say anything because you know so much more than I do. After you went away, I couldn’t resist the temptation to try it out, though I didn’t intend to go this far. I thought I’d have it apart again before you came back.”
There was a silence that lasted a long time. When Scanlon spoke again, his voice was curiously mild, “Well, what have you done?”
“You won’t be angry?”
“It’s a little too late for that. You couldn’t have made it much worse, anyway.”
“Well, I noticed here in your equations,” he extracted one sheet and then another and pointed, “that whenever the expression representing the space-distortion fields occurs, it is always referred to as a function of x* plus y’ plus z”. Since the fields, as far as I could see, were always referred to as constants, that would give you the equation of a sphere.”
Scanlon nodded, “I noticed that, but it has nothing to do with the problem.”
“Well, I thought it might indicate the necessary arrangement of the individual fields, so I disco
The inventor’s mouth fell open. The mysterious rearrangement of his device seemed clear now-and what was more, eminently sensible.
“Does it work?” he asked.
“I’m not quite sure. The parts haven’t been made to fit this arrangement so that it’s only a rough set-up at best. Then there’s the constant error-”
“But does it work ? Close the switch, damn it!” Scanlon was all fire and impatience once more.
“All right, stand back. I cut the power to one-tenth normal so we won’t get more output than we can handle.”
He closed the switch slowly, and at the moment of contact, a glowing ball of blue-white flame leaped into being from the recesses of the central quartz chamber. Scanlon screened his eyes automatically, and sought the output gauge. The needle was climbing steadily and did not stop until it was pressing the upper limit. The flame burned continuously, releasing no heat seemingly, though beside its light, more intensely brilliant than a magnesium flare, the electric lights faded into dingy yellowness.
Max opened the switch once more and the ball-of flame reddened and died, leaving the room comparatively dark and red. The output gauge sank to zero once more and Scanlon felt his knees give beneath him as he sprawled onto a chair.
He fastened his gaze on the flustered Tweenie and in that look there was respect and awe, and something more, too, for there was fear . Never before had he really realized that the Tweenie was not of Earth or Mars but a member of a race apart. He noticed the difference now, not in the comparatively minor physical changes, but in the profound and searching mental gulf that he only now comprehended.
“Atomic power!” he croaked hoarsely. “And solved by a boy, not yet twenty years old.”
Max’s confusion was painful, “You did all the real work, Mr. Scanlon, years and years of it. I just happened to notice a little detail that you might have caught yourself the next day.” His voice died before the fixed and steady stare of the inventor.
“Atomic power-the greatest achievement of man so far, and we actually have it, we two.”
Both-guardian and ward-seemed awed at the grandeur and power of the thing they had created.
And in that moment-the age of Electricity died.
Jefferson Scanlon sucked at his pipe contentedly. Outside, the snow was falling and the chill of winter was in the air, but inside, in the comfortable warmth, Scanlon sat and smoked and smiled to himself. Across the way, Beulah, likewise quietly happy, hummed softly in time to clicking knitting needles, stopping only occasionally as her fingers flew through an unusually intricate portion of the pattern. In the corner next the window sat Max, occupied in his usual pastime of reading, and Scanlon reflected with faint surprise that of late Max had confined his reading to light novels.
Much had happened since that well-remembered day over a year ago. For one thing, Scanlon was now a world-famous and world-adored scientist, and it would have been strange had he not been sufficiently human to be proud of it. Secondly, and scarcely less important, atomic power was remaking the world.
Scanlon thanked all the powers that were, over and over again, for the fact that war was a thing of two centuries past, for otherwise atomic power would have been the final ruination of civilization. As it was, the coalition of World Powers that now controlled the great force of Atomic Power proved it a real blessing and were introducing it into Man’s life in the slow, gradual stages necessary to prevent economic upheaval
Already, interplanetary travel had been revolutionized. From hazardous gambles, trips to Mars and Venus had become holiday jaunts to be negotiated in a third of the previous time, and trips to the outer planets were at last feasible.
Scanlon settled back further in his chair, and pondered once more upon the only fly in his wonderful pot of ointment Max had refused all credit; stormily and violently refused to have his name as much as mentioned. The injustice of it galled Scanlon, but aside from a vague mention of “capable assistants” he had said nothing; and the thought of it still made him feel an ace of a cad.