Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net MIRACLE BY PRICE BY IRVING E. COX, JR. _They said old Doctor Price was an inventive genius but no miracle worker. Yet--if he didn't work miracles in behalf of an over-worked little guy named Cupid, what was he doing?_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] MEMO TO: Clayton, Croyden and Hammerstead, Attorneys ATTENTION: William Clayton FROM: Walter Gordon Dear Bill: Enclosed is the itemized inventory of the furnishings of the late Dr. Edward Price's estate. As you requested, I personally examined the laboratory. Candidly, Bill, you needed a psychiatrist for the job, not a graduate physicist. Dr. Price was undoubtedly an inventive genius a decade ago when he was still active in General Electronics, but his lab was an embarrassing example of senile clutter. You had an idea, Bill, that before he died Price might have been playing around with a new invention which the estate could develop and patent. I found a score of gadgets in the lab, none of them finished and none of them built for any functional purpose that I could discover. Only two seemed to be completed. One resembled a small, portable radio. It was a plastic case with two knobs and a two-inch speaker grid. There was no cord outlet. The machine may have been powered by batteries, for I heard a faint humming when I turned the knobs. Nothing else. Dr. Price had left a handwritten card on the box. He intended to call it a Semantic-Translator, but he had noted that the word combination was awkward for commercial exploitation, and I suppose he held up a patent application until he could think of a catchier name. One sentence on that card would have amused you, Bill. Price wrote, "Should wholesale for about three-fifty per unit." Even in his dotage, he had an eye for profit. The Semantic-Translator--whatever that may mean--might have had possibilities. I fully intended to take it back with me to General Electronics and examine it thoroughly. The second device, which Price had labeled a Transpositor, was large and rather fragile. It was a hollow cylinder of very small wires, perhaps a foot in diameter, fastened to an open-faced console crowded with a weird conglomeration of vacuum tubes, telescopic lenses and mirrors. The cylinder of wires was so delicate that the motion of my body in the laboratory caused it to quiver. Standing in front of the wire coil were two brass rods. A kind of shovel-like chute was fixed to one rod (Price called it the shipping board). Attached to the second rod was a long-handled pair of tongs which he called the grapple.