"How do I get rid of the engineer? One of us has got to go, and being the stable, happy one, I feel that all in all I am the best adjusted and therefore the most likely to succeed. After all, I am the ideal personality according to the other one. He'd like to be me. That's why he is, from time to time." "Sort of a figment of your own imagination." "That's me." "Then I wonder--Yet, I did accept his case, not yours." "Whose case?" "Um ... ah ... I--Look, if you frustrate him to the extreme, he'll retreat into you more and more until he does not appear. Follow?" "I get it. O.K., doctor. He'll be the most frustrated engineer in the world. And I am just the guy to do it." * * * * * Tom Lionel, Consulting Engineer, looked foolishly at the claw hammer in one hand and wondered about it. About him in the laboratory were stacks of huge packing cases. Unpacked already were several monstrous bits of equipment. Lionel shook his head. Where had this mess come from? He hadn't ordered it-- Or, Had he? Lionel left the laboratory on the dead run. He tripped once and fell flat on his face and as he started up again, the top of his head came with a sharp bang against the unyielding bottom of a ruling engine. "A grating engine," yelled Tom. On the desk, in plain sight, was a pile of bills-of-lading. Tom riffled through them, consulted packing lists, and a catalog of ordered equipment. In his own handwriting, too. Grand total outlay $94,617.34; balance to be paid within thirty days: $16,750.00. "Not only broke," grunted Tom, "but bleeding too." His handwriting was his handwriting. Not a chance in the world of refuting the order, or packing the stuff up and sending it back. He was stuck with it. But the conglomeration that Thomas had picked out. A sort of aggregation of large and small parts that would have made a small college laboratory figuratively drool at the thought; but which would only grow dust, rust, and corrosion in any manufacturing plant. With the possible exception, of course, of a manufacturer of scientific equipment for colleges and laboratories. What production line could make use of a ruling engine? And if one could, could it use a micro-densitometer in the same process? Of course, the micro-vacuum pump could be used in vacuum tube manufacture, in a pinch. Vacuum tube companies normally used large-volume pumps instead of the little super-efficient exhaustion pump that could take a few cubic centimeters down to a few millimicrons of mercury. The electron microscope was a nice hunk of stuff, but the thing was not applicable to anything except research. And the instantaneous X-ray gadget was tricky as the devil--and adapted mostly to the job of taking pictures of bullets under fire as they passed up through the rifling of a gun.