"How did you ... no! Wait a minute. Don't say a word. Officer, go and
tell my men to prevent anyone from approaching or leaving this place."
The patrolman almost saluted, thought better of it, and left grumbling
about being left out of what must be something big.
Solomon told the civilians of matching vacuum in intake manifolds to
pressure from exhaust manifolds. A logical way to make an engine that
would run on pressure, like satellite engines he'd read about in
newspapers. It worked on a cracked engine block, so he'd used scrap
manifolds to get rid of old cars no one would buy. It hadn't hurt
anything, had it?
* * *
Well, no, it hadn't. But as you can imagine, things happened rather
fast. They let Solomon get clean denims and his razor. Then without a
bye-your-leave, hustled him to the Ontario airport where an unmarked jet
flew him to Washington and a hurriedly arranged meeting with the
President. They left guards posted inside the fence of Solomon's yard,
so they'll cause no attention while protecting his property. A rugged
individual sits in the office and tells buyers and sellers alike, that
he is Solomon's nephew. "The old man had to take a trip in a hurry."
Because he knows nothing of the business, they'll have to wait until
Solomon returns.
Where's Solomon now? Newspaper stories have him in Nevada showing the
Air Force how to build gigantic intake and exhaust manifolds, which the
Strategic Air Command is planning to attach to a stratospheric
decompression test chamber. They figure if they can throw it into the
sky, they can move anything up to what astronomers now call Solomon's
Orbit, where at last count, sixteen of the seventeen cars are still
merrily circling the earth. As you know, one recently hit the Russian
television satellite.
The Russians? We're told they're still burning their fingers trying to
orbit a car. They can't figure how to control vacuum and pressure from
the manifolds. Solomon didn't tell many people about the shingles he
uses for control panels, and the Russians think control is somehow
related to kitchen matches a newspaper reporter found scattered behind a
station wagon in Solomon's junk yard.
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from _Analog Science Fact Science Fiction_
November 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling
and typographical errors have been corrected without note.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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