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