Trouble

During the breakfast section of Tom's morning duties, Tom read the latest copy of the "Proceedings of the I.R.E." with some relish. A paper on the "Crystallographic Generation of Microwaves" complete with plainly manipulated differential calculus and engineering data occupied most of his time. The rest of the time through coffee he was making marks on the tablecloth with the egg-laden end of his fork and trying to fit the crystallographic generation of microwaves into a problem that made the article most timely; the solution for which he had been seeking for a week.

The mail arrived. Three household bills were filed in the desk to await the first of the month. Two advertisements were filed into the wastebasket. One thick letter addressed to Thomas Lionel, Ph.D., M.M., was taken carefully between thumb and forefinger and deposited in a letter file.

Tom then inspected the other letter file and found two letters addressed to Tom Lionel, Consulting Engineer, which he opened and read. One was from a concern in Cedar Rapids that wanted some information on a method of induction heating glued joints selectively without waiting for the normal drying time. The other was a letter from a medium-sized town in Illinois pertaining to some difficulty they were having with police-radio coverage of that area.

Both letters meant money, and Tom Lionel set the first aside while he started to work on the second. From the engineering data supplied by the local engineer, Tom decided that a change in antenna height and a conversion from quarter-wave current fed to a one and one quarter-wave current fed antenna would give the desired coverage. He concluded his letter with four pages of calc, seven diagrams, and as a last measure dropped a photograph of a similar installation in the envelope.

He gloated. That would net him a pretty penny. The guy who hung that antenna on top of the water tank thought he was smart, getting all that height. But the roof was metal, and therefore the radiation angle took off from the rooftop as a basis rather than the true ground a hundred feet below.

The tank top was greater than three wave lengths in diameter, and conical to boot. Tom grinned at the maze of mathematics that solved it--and as far as he was concerned it was solved, for Tom Lionel was a top-flight engineer.

He checked on his calendar. Metal for the sonic job was not due for a week yet; a minute casting was still being held up for the foundry's pleasure; and the life-test of the bearing-jewel for the Watson Instrument Corporation was still on. Good jewel that. No sign of freeze-up or wear-out after twenty-seven million cycles.

"Theory of Monomolecular Films be hanged," he snorted. "He's the kind of a guy that would try to analyze the brew that MacBeth's three witches were cooking up. And don't ask why!"

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.

The alien piece of equipment had been a standard model of mass spectrograph. Its sleek sides were gaping open, and the high-frequency heater was permanently wired--piped--into the very heart of the spectrograph. Peering into the maze of one-inch copper tubing that led from the output of the high-frequency heater to the insides of the spectrograph, Lionel saw at once what the reason was.

The spectrograph had been overhauled by the physicist. It now contained a pair of "D" chambers.

Operating on the cyclotron principle, the spectrograph was using the output of the high-frequency heater to energize the D chambers. Lionel nodded. The frequency was about right; could be adjusted to the proper value without any trouble at all. He felt an infinitesimally short twitch of admiration for the idea before he started to roar in anguish.

His first impulse was to rip the gadget apart so that he could go to work on something practical. But the engineer's admiration for the idea stopped him.

But this was getting thick.

It had been getting thicker for a long time. It was getting intolerable. He didn't mind too much having volumes of utterly cock-eyed theory about the place, but when the physicist starts to appropriate equipment for his screwball ideas, it was time to call a halt.

Lionel left the laboratory, returned to his house, and called a psychiatrist.

An hour later he was in Dr. Hamilton's office.

"Why are you here?" asked Hamilton pleasantly.

"I want to get rid of a physicist."

"Tell him to go away."