“Let’s not waste any more time on my vanishing `blunt instrument.’ It was just curiosity. Let’s get on back.”
The clubhouse was a one-story frame building about twenty feet square. One wall was filled with Ross’s chemistry workbench with the usual clutter of test-tube racks, bunsen burners, awkward-looking, pretzel-like arrangements of glass tubing, and a double sink which looked as if it had been salvaged from a junk dealer. A home-made hood with a hinged glass front occupied one end of the bench. Parallel to the adjacent wall, in a little glass case, a precision balance’ of a good make but of very early vintage stood mounted on its own concrete pillar.
“We ought to have air-conditioning,” Ross told the doctor, “to do really good work.”
“You haven’t done so badly,” Cargraves commented. The boys had covered the rough walls with ply board; the cracks had been filled and the interior painted with washable enamel. The floor they had covered with linoleum, salvaged like the sink, but serviceable. The windows and door were tight. The place was clean.
“Humidity changes could play hob with some of your experiments, however,” he went on. “Do you plan to put in air-conditioning sometime?”
“I doubt it. I guess the Galileo Club is about to fold up.”
“What? Oh, that seems a shame.”
“It is and it isn’t. This fall we all expect to go away to Tech.”
“I see. But aren’t there any other members?”
“There used to be, but they’ve moved, gone away to school, gone in the army. I suppose we could have gotten new members but we didn’t try. Well . . we work together well and,. . . you know how it is.”
Cargraves nodded. He felt that he knew more explicitly than did the boy. These three were doing serious work; most of their schoolmates, even though mechanically minded, would be more interested in needling a stripped-down car up to a hundred miles an hour than in keeping careful notes.
“Well, you are certainly comfortable here. It’s a shame you can’t take it with you.” A low, wide, padded seat stretched from wall to wall opposite the chemistry layout. The other two boys were sprawled on it, listening. Behind them, bookshelves had been built into the wall. Jules Verne crowded against Mark’s Handbook of Mechanical Engineering. Cargraves noted other old friends: H.G. Wells’ Seven Famous Novels, The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, and Smyth’s Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. Jammed in with them, side by side with Ley’s Rockets and Eddington’s Nature of the Physical World, were dozens of pulp magazines of the sort with robot men or space ships on their covers.
He pulled down a dog-eared copy of Haggard’s When the Earth Trembled and settled his long body between the boys. He was beginning to feel at home. These boys he knew; he had only to gaze back through the corridors of his mind to recognize himself.
Ross said, “If you’ll excuse me, I want to run up to the house.” Cargraves grunted, “Sure thing,” with his nose still in the book. Ross came back to announce, “My mother would like all of you to stay for lunch.”
Morrie grinned, Art looked troubled. “My mother thinks I eat too many meals over here as it is,” he protested feebly, his eyes on his uncle. Cargraves took him by the arm. “I’ll go your bail on this one, Art,” he assured him; then to Ross, “Please tell your mother that we are very happy to accept.”
At lunch the adults talked, the boys listened. The scientist, his turban bandage looking stranger than ever, hit it off well with his elders. Any one would hit it off well with Mrs. Jenkins, who could have been friendly and gracious at a cannibal feast, but the boys were not used to seeing Mr. Jenkins in a chatty mood.
The boys were surprised to find out how much Mr. Jenkins knew about atomics. They had the usual low opinion of the mental processes of adults; Mr. Jenkins they respected but had subconsciously considered him the anachronism which most of his generation in fact was, a generation as a whole incapable of realizing that the world had changed completely a few years before, at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Yet Mr. Jenkins seemed to know who Doctor Cargraves was and seemed to know that he had been retained until recently by North American Atomics. The boys listened carefully to find out what Doctor Cargraves planned to do next, but Mr. Jenkins did not ask and Cargraves did not volunteer the information.