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 COMPANYif 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 forCorny 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.
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 forCorny 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 withoutsomesatisfactory 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!
Away with imagination! Bepractical! Dispense withtheory! Do nothing thatcannot be justified andexplained to perfection.
To succeed; to enjoy thewonderful practicalityof 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 OBSERVATIONALDATA MADE DURING THE MANIFESTATION OF FORCESOPERATING 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 beforcedinto 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.
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.