“You used to be one of my students, didn’t you?”
“Why, no, sir, I never had that honor.” Ordinarily when people think they have seen me before, I brush it off; this time I decided to exploit it if I could. “Perhaps you are thinking of my cousin, Doctor-class of `86. He studied under you at one time.”
“Possibly. What did he major in?”
“He had to drop out without a degree, sir. But he was a great admirer of yours. He never missed a chance to tell people he had studied under you.”
You can’t make an enemy by telling a mother her child is beautiful. Dr. Twitchell let me sit down and presently let me buy him a drink. The greatest weakness of the glorious old wreck was his professional vanity. I had salvaged part of the four days before I could scrape up an acquaintance with him by memorizing everything there was about him in the university library, so I knew what papers he had written, where he had presented them, what earned and honorary degrees he held, and what books he had written. I had tried one of the latter, but I was already out of my depth on page nine, although I did pick up a little patter from it.
I let him know that I was a camp follower of science myself; right at present I was researching for a book: Unsung Geniuses.
“What’s it going to be about?”
I admitted diffidently that I thought it would be appropriate to start the book with a popular account of his life and works, provided he would be willing to relax a bit from his well-known habit of shunning publicity. I would have to get a lot of my material from him, of course.
He thought it was claptrap and could not think of such a thing. But I pointed out that he had a duty to posterity and he agreed to think it over. By the next day he simply assumed that I was going to write his biography-not just a chapter, a whole book. From then on he talked and talked and I took notes . . . real notes; I did not dare try to fool him by faking, as he sometimes asked me to read back.
Finally I said, “Doctor, isn’t it true that if it had not been for a certain colonel who was once stationed here you would have had the Nobel Prize hands down?”
He cursed steadily for three minutes with magnificent style. “Who told you about him?”
“Uh, Doctor, when I was doing research writing for the Department of Defense–I’ve mentioned that, haven’t I?”
“No.”
“Well, when I was, I heard the whole story from a young Ph.D. working in another section. He had read the report and he said it was perfectly clear that you would be the most famous name in physics today . . . if you had been permitted to publish your work.”
“Hrrmph! That much is true.”
“But I gathered that it was classified. . . by order of this Colonel, uh, Plushbottom.”
“Thrushbotham. Thrushbotham, sir. A fat, fatuous, flatulent, foot-kissing fool incompetent to find his hat with it nailed to his head. Which it should have been.”
“It seems a great pity.”
“What is a pity, sir? That Thrushbotham was a fool? That was nature’s doing, not mine.”
“It seems a pity that the world should be deprived of the story. I understand that you are not allowed to speak of it.”
“Who told you that? I say what I please~”
“That was what I understood, sir . . . from my friend in the Department of Defense.”
“Hrrrmph!”
That was all I got out of him that night. It took him a week to decide to show me his laboratory.
Most of the building was now used by other researchers, but his time laboratory he had never surrendered, even though he did not use it now; he fell back on its classified status and refused to let anyone else touch it, nor had he permitted the apparatus to be torn down. When he let me in, the place smelled like a vault that has not been opened in years.