"I don't know, exactly," he replied. "Mallory, the biochemist, made it and brought it to me. He said he got a lot of chemicals spilled. One of them was a rare enzyme that he didn't want to lose, so he mopped up the mess and put it in a large flask and added some alcohol, getting ready to recover this valuable enzyme. Suddenly this stuff started to form on the sides of the flask, just like silver in the mirror coating process. But all the chemicals were pure hydro-carbons with no silver or other metal present. According to Mallory this stuff is some unknown hydro-carbon. I've been playing with it for two days now." Judson Taylor put the stuff back in his pocket and rose. "Let's go over to my lab. I want to show you some things I've found out about it." I gulped down the rest of my coffee and followed him. We crossed the campus of good old Puget U to the antique building which housed the physics department. We climbed the creaking stairs to the third floor which was devoted mostly to Jud's own private research and was filled with apparatus that he had accumulated during the thirty years he had been kingpin of this department. Jud crossed over to a bench on which there was a balance and some other stuff and placed the hunk of mystery on one tray of the balance. On the other tray he placed a ten-gram weight. The balance swayed a little and then came to rest on the zero mark, showing the stuff weighed exactly ten grams. Then he placed another ten-gram weight on the tray and the balance came to rest on the zero mark, showing the stuff weighed exactly twenty grams! "Now watch," he said. He placed the silver chunk on the same side as the two ten-gram weights, leaving the tray it had been in absolutely empty. The balance fluctuated a little and again came to rest on the zero mark, showing a minus twenty grams! By that time I had stopped believing what my eyes told me. "That's quite a trick," I said skeptically. "How do you work it?" And I stooped to look under the table, hoping to see a setup of magnets hidden there that would help restore my belief in my sanity. "I don't work it," Jud exclaimed irritably. "It acts that way itself." * * * * *