* * * * * Blair inhaled on the cigarette, laughed a little and felt better. Sometimes he knew he sounded like a college kid trying to tell his father what was wrong with the world, but that was why he liked Carl. Carl let him talk, knew it was his way of blowing off the pent-up steam. "You know what, chum?" They were running smoothly along the highway now, the engine a reassuring hum of power, the interior of the sedan warm and relaxing. The rain was letting up a little, but dirty banks of fog had started gathering at the roadside like ghosts of all the work of the day, tenuous, without substance. "What, Carl?" "You should've stuck with the M.I.T. degree after all. Hell with your brain you'd've made that try for the Moon a success last month instead of another near-miss." "Maybe you're right. Those boys know what they're doing though. I'll stick to puttering." "Puttering the man calls it. 'He hath a lean and hungry look--such men are dangerous....' Myself, I think that gadget you 'putter' with in that cellar of yours is some kind of a gismo to hypnotize all the states-righters into doing something intelligent like dropping dead without being told!" "With ingenuity such as yours, my friend, I think I could really accomplish something in that cellar of mine at that! That's the trouble. You writers and newsmen have all the good ideas--slide-rules don't think worth a damn! Instead of a wonderful creation such as you suggest, what have I got? A pile of junk that may, if it works in any degree at all, turn out to be a fairly good television set...." "You wouldn't kid an old friend. That martini you were putting away the other night said that it was an experiment with something called tired light." "Exactly. Television." "Look, the quality of curiosity is not strained, it droppeth as a gentle ten-ton truck from twenty stories up! You said--or the martini said anyway--that if this little gimcrack of yours works, it'd be able to bring back pictures of things that happened in the past. You're guilty until proven innocent, Galileo. Start talking." "Off the record--" "I should broadcast it and get dunked in a witch's chair." "Well--the martini had it a little balled up, but the essential idea's there I guess. Anyway, it isn't everybody who has a space-warp for a household pet." "Or Einstein for a hobby." "Blah, this is strictly Blair. That's why it won't work, and I'd be only sensationally nuts if I ever thought it would. But some men take Scotch for their nerves, and I take Scotch with electronics. More of a jolt that way." "Yuk, yuk." * * * * *