I meet old Jode when I am thumbing a ride towards the Coast. I have beat it from what you might call home after my old man works me over with a chair for spending money I earn on a gas-engine for a model aeroplane instead of giving it to him to get drunk on. I am not making out so good at hitch-hiking, because, being sixteen and not looking any older, I hafta dodge truant officers everywhere. But I get by; I fix a car-radio for a guy at a fillin'-station while old Jode is having his gas-tank filled up, and the guy says swell and gives me a half a buck. The job I done would cost him twelve sixty at a regular repair-shop. I says, "I could do with a lift to Phoenix," but the guy isn't going that way. Then old Jode wheezes cordial that he is, so I climb in his car. He is fat and old and has danglin' red wattles, and he looks like he is made of money and hasn't a care in the world. Outside of havin' the cops of sixteen or eighteen states passionate interested in his whereabouts, he doesn't have no worries, and lookin' like a million dollars is his business. But I don't know that then; he talks to me cordial, and we get on to science, a subject in which he is interested but don't know beans about. With him asking questions, grunting and respectful, I tell him the theoretic perfect fuel for space-ships, and the difference between a rocket and a jet, and what the Doppler effect is, and what's the difference between Oak Ridge and Hansford, Wash. I'm not showing off, you know; I explain that I read a lot of science magazines and he'd ought to try them. Special the science-fiction ones. And I tell him I'm headed for the Coast to get a job in a radio-repair shop, like I had back home after school and Saturdays, and I'm going to save up and have a private experimental laboratory. I got some ideas--science-fiction ideas--that I think I can make work out actual. Old Jode gets thoughtful. Later on when I know him better I will know what that means. Right then, though, when he beams and says he would like to play a joke on a friend, and I seem a handy young man with tools, I just say modest that I'm pretty fair. He makes me a proposition. He'll stake me to grub and hotel expenses and a suit of clothes, and say I'm his nephew, if I'll fix him a trick television cabinet with a movie sound projector inside so he can fool a friend into thinkin' he's got a long-distance receiver that'll pick up from anywhere. I can do that with my hands tied behind my back; I take him up quick. I improve the idea; I suggest color-film, which will look like three-color television in action. * * * * *