Toy Shop

'I still think it's a screwy idea,' the young man said. 'One week getting fallen arches, demonstrating those toy ships for every brat within a thousand miles. Then selling the things for three bucks when they must have cost at least a hundred dollars apiece to make.'

'But you did sell the ten of them to people who would be interested?' the older man asked.

'I think so, I caught a few Air Force officers and a colonel in missiles one day. Then there was one official I remembered from the Bureau of Standards. Luckily he didn't recognize me. Then those two professors you spotted from the university.'

'Then the problem is out of our hands and into theirs. All we have to do now is sit back and wait for results.'

'What results?! These people weren't interested when we were hammering on their doors with the proof. We've patented the coils and can prove to anyone that there is a reduction in weight around them when they are operating....'

'But a small reduction. And we don't know what is causing it. No one can be interested in a thing like that—a fractional weight decrease in a clumsy model, certainly not enough to lift the weight of the generator. No one wrapped up in massive fuel consumption, tons of lift and such is going to have time to worry about a crackpot who thinks he has found a minor slip in Newton's laws.'

'You think they will now?' the young man asked, cracking his knuckles impatiently.

'I know they will. The tensile strength of that thread is correctly adjusted to the weight of the model. The thread will break if you try to lift the model with it. Yet you can lift the model—after a small increment of its weight has been removed by the coils. This is going to bug these men. Nobody is going to ask them to solve the problem or concern themselves with it. But it will nag at them because they know this effect can't possibly exist. They'll see at once that the magnetic-wave theory is nonsense. Or perhaps true? We don't know. But they will all be thinking about it and worrying about it. Someone is going to experiment in his basement—just as a hobby of course—to find the cause of the error. And he or someone else is going to find out what makes those coils work, or maybe a way to improve them!'

'And we have the patents....'

'Correct. They will be doing the research that will take them out of the massive-lift-propulsion business and into the field of pure space flight.'

'And in doing so they will be making us rich—whenever the time comes to manufacture,' the young man said cynically.

'We'll all be rich, son,' the older man said, patting him on the shoulder. 'Believe me, you're not going to recognize this old world ten years from now.'