George O. Smith

“ And both he and the engineer knew that the chances were more than possible that a high-order physical effect might be the basic cause. An effect for which mankind had no instruments; radio as a natural phenomenon would be inexplicable to a race that had never discovered a means of detection; the mathematical prediction of radio occurred years before the original experiments.
So—
The physicist set his mind against frustration. To change over to the engineer without an answer would be an admission of defeat. ”

“ You awoke with a stripping hammer in your hand, unpacking scientific equipment that the physicist bought. He, obviously, became quite worried about the financial situation upon viewing the stuff he bought and could face it no more."
"Sounds reasonable."
"Now consider again. Neither of you is dangerous. You are both interesting and valuable to society. The only thing that is at all bothersome is the fact that you, per se, are not happy. You need an integration of personality. ”

“ It might be that I am a useful citizen in spite of what the engineer says."
"The engineer's opinion is that no physicist is worth an unprintable."
"The physicist's opinion is that all engineers are frustrated physicists." ”

“ 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.
Tom Lionel snarled at the chessboard. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Science knew that the poltergeist was a problem—but like the man who does not care to go crazy because of the insoluble problem, science shrugged, admitted that it was stumped—intelligently enough, under the circumstances—and then remarked that after finding the next decimal place, it would, perhaps, take a look into the natural phenomena of things that were thrown by nothing. ”

“ Both you and your ... physicist ... are sensible, useful citizens. Both of you can contribute much to civilization. Both of you can and will be respectable people, for which other people will have admiration.
"I am in the middle," said the doctor, "I can be no more than a referee. I see both sides. I believe the cleavage came as a result of frustration on your part—you know the details—and as such, you become him when you are frustrated. The reason why he becomes you is also clear. Whenever he finds himself in straits due to the necessity of practical thought, the slip-over occurs. ”

“ Life is too interesting. My main regret with life is that I was born a hundred years too soon. My only compensation is that I may live to be a hundred, so that I can see what I've missed by being born too soon. ”

“ The engineer was forced into being a practical man because money lies in that direction. Upon getting out of college, there was a heavy debt. It was paid off by hard work—a habit formed and never broken. Bad habits, you know, are hard to break."
"Interesting."
"Well, the desire to delve into the physicist's realm stayed with the engineer, but people who had heavy purses were not interested in new ways to measure the ether-drift or the effect of cosmic radiation on the physical properties of carbon. ”

“ Yet he has his point. You, like other physicists, are not interested in making money. How, then, do you propose to live?"
"A physicist—or an engineer—can always make out well. The bank account at the last sitting was something like ninety-four thousand, six hundred seventeen dollars and thirty-four cents."
"That's quite a lot of money."
"The engineer considers it a business backlog," said Thomas. "Equipment is costly. Ergo—see?"
"I see. Seems you laid out a large sum of money for a mass spectrograph." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Over coffee, at breakfast, Thomas made notations on the margin of the book with a pencil; checked some of the equations and though he found them balanced properly, the author was amiss in not considering the lattice-effect in his presumptions. No monomolecular film could follow that type of reaction simply because—well, it could follow it, but since the thing was to take place in a monomolecular film, the fission-reaction and the radiation byproducts that cause the self-sustaining nature could only be effective in a plane of molecular thickness. ”

“ Money wants more perfect pencil sharpeners, ways of automatically shelling peas, and efficient methods of de-gassing oil. All these things are merely applications in practice of phenomena that some physicist has uncovered and revealed and put on record so that some engineer can use the effect to serve his ends.
"At any rate, the desire to be a physicist is strong, strong enough to cause schizophrenia. I, Dr. Hamilton, am a living, breathing, talking example that an engineer is but a frustrated physicist. He is the troubled one—I am the stable personality. ”

“ As usual with a man who spends much time in his own company, Tom Lionel talked aloud to himself—and occasionally was known to answer himself back. "The whole trouble with the entire tribe of physicists per se is the fact that once, someone told one of them that he was a theorist, an idealist, and a dealer in the abstract. Now the bunch of them are afraid to do anything practical because they're afraid if they do, people won't know they're physicists. Physicists are a sort of necessary, end-product evil." ”

“ Tom roared through the house, took a look at the chessboard and with a savage movement, took the physicist's queen with his knight. He'd get even with that physicist if it took—
Well, almost anything.
Fifteen minutes later he was in Dr. Hamilton's office, pounding on the desk.
"Look," he roared, "that physicist just clipped me for my entire bankroll and then dropped me into debt by sixteen grand. I want him clipped!"
"Now take it easy," said the doctor. "Remember you are talking about yourself." ”

“ 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. ”

“ And the line-voltage ripple present in the high-frequency generator made a particular mess out of the spectrograph separation. But electronic heaters do not normally come luxuriously equipped with rectifiers and filters so that the generator tubes were served with pure direct current—the circuit was self-rectified which would give a raucous signal if used as a radio transmitter. That generated a ripple-varied signal for the D plates and it screwed up the dispersion. The omission of refinement satisfied Thomas. So it wasn't perfect. It would be by the time Tom Lionel got through with it. ”

“ Tom Lionel returned home, thinking furiously.
"May the best man win, huh?"
It was seven solid weeks by the calendar. Seven solid weeks of hard, backbreaking work during which everything went fine and dandy for Tom Lionel, Consulting Engineer.
The balance of his debt was paid off when Americal Electric purchased the rights and royalties of the cyclotronic spectrograph. The equipment in Tom's laboratory had been kept in good shape, polished and even used occasionally. ”

“ To him, no real problem exists. He'd have no truck with a production department in the first place, and in the second, shaping metals isn't particularly of interest to a physicist, excepting when the shape itself is important. ”

“ Then he gave up and returned it slowly to the top again, fearing to drop it lest it damage the desk top.
Metal, huh?
Must be practically solid, then.
What metal?
Tom thought. Must be tougher than a battleship's nose, for if entry were easy, the physicist knew he'd be rebuilding the thing every time he wanted to use it. ”

“ From what I've heard, the trouble lies in the fact that physicists are not too interested in the practical details, whilst the engineer resents the physicist's insistance upon getting that last point zero two percent of performance. ”

“ But it seems to me that you are both intelligent, useful citizens. Neither of you is irresponsible or dangerous. You have enough money to afford schizophrenia for a while. Especially if the personality B dreams up things that personality A makes practical, financially advantageous use of. Ergo you need fear nothing for a few weeks."
"Ugh. Means I'll have to go out and buy another high-frequency heater. ”

“ 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. ”