"There's billions in it... if it works," Dick smiled over the table. "Billions for the farmers of the world, and perhaps a trifle of royalty for me... if it works." "But what is it?" O'Hay asked. "Music in the dairy barns to make the cows give down their milk more placidly?" "Every farmer his own plowman while sitting on his front porch," Dick baffled back. "In fact, the labor-eliminating intermediate stage between soil production and sheer laboratory production of food. But wait till you see it. Gulhuss, this is where I kill my own business, if it works, for it will do away with the one horse of every ten-acre farmer between here and Jericho." In ranch machines and on saddle animals, the company was taken a mile beyond the dairy center, where a level field was fenced squarely off and contained, as Dick announced, just precisely ten acres. "Behold," he said, "the one-man and no-horse farm where the farmer sits on the porch. Please imagine the porch." In the center of the field was a stout steel pole, at least twenty feet in height and guyed very low. From a drum on top of the pole a thin wire cable ran to the extreme edge of the field and was attached to the steering lever of a small gasoline tractor. About the tractor two mechanics fluttered. At command from Dick they cranked the motor and started it on its way. "This is the porch," Dick said. "Just imagine we're all that future farmer sitting in the shade and reading the morning paper while the manless, horseless plowing goes on." Alone, unguided, the drum on the head of the pole in the center winding up the cable, the tractor, at the circumference permitted by the cable, turned a single furrow as it described a circle, or, rather, an inward trending spiral about the field. "No horse, no driver, no plowman, nothing but the farmer to crank the tractor and start it on its way," Dick exulted, as the uncanny mechanism turned up the brown soil and continued unguided, ever spiraling toward the field's center. "Plow, harrow, roll, seed, fertilize, cultivate, harvest--all from the front porch. And where the farmer can buy juice from a power company, all he, or his wife, will have to do is press the button, and he to his newspaper, and she to her pie-crust." "All you need, now, to make it absolutely perfect," Graham praised, "is to square the circle." "Yes," Mr. Gulhuss agreed. "As it is, a circle in a square field loses some acreage." Graham's face advertised a mental arithmetic trance for a minute, when he announced: "Loses, roughly, three acres out of every ten."