It was one of those things. It couldn't be denied. He was going to
be _forced_ into presenting this paper before the American Physical
Society, using his full name and all of his degrees and the works. The
physicist and his little tungsten box would see to it that he remained
an engineer until the paper was presented, fully and completely. The
physicist didn't have all the answers, of course, but he had solved
some of the basic problems.
He finished the manuscript, and then found a letter. It said:
Dear Galileo:
The phenomenon of losing fifty pounds is the result of an
antigravity field which I discovered from your data on the good
old poltergeist. The trouble with the thing is simply this:
In order to make the thing function, it takes something like three
tons of equipment to make the object within the field lose its
fifty pounds.
I, as a physicist, do not care about the practicality of the device.
I have made it work. You, as an engineer, will appreciate the
possibilities behind the perfection of this device. I offer you the
chance to start your Poltergeist Moving Company, providing, of
course, that you can make something of this effect.
Incidentally, I have been unable to get or to predict
antigravitational forces of less than fifty pounds regardless of
how the equipment is set up.
I don't care, I will leave the rest to you.
Sincerely,
Thomas Lionel, Ph.D., M.M.
Tungsten casting, antigravity, inefficiency and poltergeists! Tom's
head whirled. With a last-hope gesture, he stalked over to the
chessboard and studied the men.
It bothered him, he was completely frustrated. The room whirled a bit,
despite Tom's fight against it. This was the last straw, this chess
game.
Not that he himself was the absolute loser in this game of living
chess. It was just that he had started something that threatened to
boil over at the edges.
Fundamentally, he'd tried to exorcise the physicist. He'd gone to much
trouble and effort to remove the low-down effect of physicist-thinking
patterns from his immediate locale. Instead--by his supreme efforts to
get rid of the theorist, aforementioned theorist had come up with a
few problems of his own that tickled the imagination, offered all sorts
of interesting problems, and--
Had basically shown how utterly impossibly foolish it would be to try
and get rid of the physicist.
Thomas Lionel, Ph.D., M.M., knew too much to be immediately removed,
obliterated, canceled, or even ignored.
How do you cast tungsten? How do you make antigravity--even on an
inefficient scale? And if a poltergeist is--and you know his address,
as the physicist seemed to, can you hire the throwing-ghost? Brother,
did he have a lot of problems to reduce to practice! He'd have little
time for getting rid of his pal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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