After Tom Outland graduated from the university, he and Dr. Crane worked side by side in the Physics building for several years. The older man had been of great assistance to the younger, without doubt. Though that kind of help, the result of criticism and suggestion, is not easily reckoned in percentages, still St. Peter thought Crane ought to get something out of the patent. He resolved to see Louie about it. But first he had better talk with Crane himself, and try to dissuade him from going to law. His brother-in-law, Homer Bright, would be tempted by the publicity which an action involving the Outland patent would certainly bring him. But he would lose the case, and Crane would get nothing. Whereas Louie, if he were properly approached, would be generous.
St. Peter looked at his watch. He would go home now, and after dinner he would walk over to the Physics building, where his colleague worked every night. He never went to see Crane at his house if he could help it. He lived in the most depressing and unnecessary ugliness.
XIII
At dinner Lillian asked him no questions about his interview with Mrs. Crane, and he volunteered no information. She was not surprised, however, when he said he would not stop for a cigar, as he was going over to the Physics laboratory.
He walked through the park, past the old house and across the north end of the campus, to a building that stood off by itself in a grove of pine-trees. It was constructed of red brick, after an English model. The architect had had a good idea, and he very nearly succeeded in making a good thing, something like the old Smithsonian building in Washington. But after it was begun, the State Legislature had defeated him by grinding down the contractor to cheap execution, and had spoiled everything, outside and in. Ever since it was finished, plumbers and masons and carpenters had been kept busy patching and repairing it. Crane and St. Peter, both young men then, had wasted weeks of time with the contractors, and had finally gone before the Legislative committee in person to plead for the integrity of that building. But nothing came of all their pains. It was one of many lost causes.
St. Peter entered the building and went upstairs to a small room at the end of a chain of laboratories. After knocking, he heard the familiar shuffle of Crane’s carpet slippers, and the door opened.
Crane was wearing a grey cotton coat, shrunk to a rag by washing, though he wasn’t working with fluids or batteries tonight, but at a roll-top desk littered with papers. The room was like any study behind a lecture room; dusty books, dusty files, but no apparatus—except a spirit-lamp and a little saucepan in which the physicist heated water for his cocoa at regular intervals. He was working by the glare of an unshaded electric bulb of high power—the man seemed to have no feeling for comfort of any kind. He asked his visitor to sit down, and to excuse him for a moment while he copied some entries into a notebook.
St. Peter watched him scribbling with his fountain pen. The hands that were so deft in delicate manipulations were white and soft-looking; the fingers long and loosely hung, stained with chemicals, and blunted at the tips like a violinist’s. His head was square, and the lower part of his face was covered by a reddish, matted beard. His pale eyes and fawn-coloured eyebrows were outbalanced by his mouth, his most conspicuous feature. One always remembered about Crane that unexpected, startling red mouth in a setting of kinky beard. The lips had no modelling, they were as thick at the corners as in the middle, and he spoke through them rather than with them. He seemed painfully conscious of them.
St. Peter saw no use in beating about the bush. As soon as Crane put down his pen, he remarked that Mrs. Crane had been to see him that afternoon. His colleague flushed, took up a large celluloid paper-knife, and began shutting and unshutting his hands about the blade.
“I want to know exactly how you feel about this, and what the facts are,” St. Peter began. “We’ve never discussed it before, and there may be things I know nothing about. Did Tom ever say that he meant you to have a share in his profits, if there were any?”
“No, not exactly. Not exactly that.” Dr. Crane moved his shoulders about in his tight coat and looked embarrassed and unhappy. “More than once he said, in a general way, that he hoped it would go, on my account as well as on his own, and that we would use the income for further experiments.”
“Did he talk much about the possible commercial value of the gas while he was trying to make it?”
“Not much. No, very seldom. Perhaps not more than half a dozen times in the three years he was working in my laboratory. But whenever he did, he spoke as if there would be something in it for both of us if our gas became remunerative.”
“Just how much was it ‘our gas,’ Crane?”
“Strictly speaking, of course, it wasn’t. The idea was Outland’s. He benefited by my criticism, and I often helped him
