What he objected to most was the other's unconcern at spending money. Nine bucks and fifty cents for a book of the most questionable theory--and nine fifty that the other didn't really earn. It was getting worse. The other was really beginning to obtrude. He hadn't minded, particularly, except for the mental anguish. He'd become reconciled to it by sheer rationalization. Way, way down deep in his heart he knew that he'd have enjoyed being a physicist himself. But physicists were not particularly practical, and money was made with practical things. He knew, and recognized, that his retreat from being a physicist himself had given him a dislike for the breed, especially when he knew that solution of a problem was theirs, but reduction to practice was his. He was continuously being forced to take some physicist's wild-haired scheme and making it cook meat, open cans, or dig post holes. The physicist had all the fun of standing on the threshold and delving into phenomena that abounded just over the line. And then instead of working on the suggestion that the physicist had located in the wilderness, the physicist just tossed it over his shoulder into Lionel's lap and went on digging. Obviously it must be fun to dig in the unknown, but why in the name of sense-- "Theory of Monomolecular Films in Fission-Reaction," scowled Tom Lionel. "A hypothesis on a theory for an idea, based upon a practical impossibility, and directed at a problem solvable only by concentrated masses. He should be working in a negative universe where nonmatter repels nonmatter disproportionately to the nonmass and inversely disproportional to the not-square of the not-distance between. Holy Entropy." * * * * * Tom Lionel went out of the house, mentally tinkering with the glue-joint heating problem. That shouldn't be hard, he thought, high-frequency heating was no trick, though the furniture company probably had no one in the place that knew what high frequency really meant. He'd take a chair, rip it apart at the joints, and start tinkering with the big radio-frequency heater in the lab. Another fat consulting fee--eminently practical and satisfying--from the simple engineering of a means to accelerate the drying of glue by electronics. Eminently practi--_hell_! Lionel stared. The door closed slowly behind him as he walked ever so slowly across the floor of the lab. There was his radio-frequency heater, all right. But it was not in its usual place. It was across the room nuzzling up against another piece of equipment--the latter new, shining, and absolutely alien to the lab. Tom went over to the set-up and inspected it with critical derision.