"Genius!" says Jode, beaming at me affectionate. "You take a load off my shoulders. Tomorrow Mr. Vachti and me we look over the rats and I bet you got the trick exact. The Prof is mighty cagey with his two centimetres of stuff." "Better let me make it for you real," I say, warning. "You stay outa this!" grunts Jode, scared again when he thinks of that hole in the sink and the floor. "And don't go mixing up any more poisons, hear me?" He is honest worried. He ain't a bad guy; he's a crook, of course, but in his way he's all right. Right now he's paying for me to stay at a plenty swank hotel, passin' for my uncle--which keeps me outa truant-officer trouble--and he tries earnest to make me appreciate _souffle marin avec pate de foie gras_ as superior to the hot dogs I eat a lot more frequent. But he is firm about me not making any more experiments. Well, I can handle that. I got a sailboat, ain't I? I fix up a locker with a padlock, and I start accumulatin' materials, duckin' into the library occasional to get more dope from translations of Hermes Trismigestus and Count Graby and Nicolas Flamel and so on. I get to be a expert on alchemy, which some ways is almost as interestin' as science fiction, only not so likely. It looks to me that with a good thick concrete screen and remote-control handling of materials to take care of radiation, it might be a good idea to see if the philosopher's stone formula does give nuclear fission. But right now I try something with immediate practical use. I go after the Elixir of Youth. 3 It is surprising how hard it is to get some things. Dragon's blood, which the formula calls for, ain't what you think and you don't buy it at a art store, either. And raw natron is not easy to get hold of. I am almost stumped by ashes of mandrake, though; there simply ain't any mandrake in the United States. But I hunt it up in the botany books, and I find a weed that's a close cousin, I spend two days off in the woods hunting it, and I find some and compare the leaves with those in the book. Then I got to reduce it to ash, and I'm drifting around in the bay with a terrific stink and plenty of smoke coming from my apparatus in the sailboat. It don't occur to me what it looks like, but all of a sudden there's a booming noise, and a fast motor-yacht is streaking up to me, and it looms up and a couple tough-looking guys are looking me over. One of 'em says: "You on fire, kid. Want us to douse it for you?" I say no thanks; I am cookin' lunch and it got scorched; they look me over curious and the motor-yacht goes on its way. I read the name on its stern and it's Mr. Vachti's yacht. Even the sailors on his yacht look like those guys he is keeping himself surrounded by--people who remind him of the happy past when he was a bootlegger baron and rode around in a bullet-proof car. They are tough-looking birds, those babies!