“Name your day this summer,” said Evans, “and I’ll take you on.”
“I’m scheduled for a vacation the first of August. How would that suit you?”
“That suits me fine. My boat will be in the harbor; just come to my laboratory and we’ll go aboard.”
“That’s a date,” said Mortimer; “don’t forget.”
On August first Mortimer appeared at the Physics Building and asked for Evans. A crotchety diener in faded overalls showed him to a room in the basement far removed from the light of day. Within, the sight which met his eye was what appeared to be a hopeless snarl of junk. There was a maze of glass tubing bent into all sorts of bizarre shapes, some of it covered with crumpled bits of sheet lead or tinfoil from the wrapping of a cake of chocolate; there were wires leading every which way with no apparent vestige of order; there were old wooden packing-boxes serving as supports, rusty nails bent upward for hooks, nondescript objects tied together with twine or stuck together with wax. Yet within this crazy jumble were instruments whose construction required the highest refinement of manual skill that can be found in all the world. The entire set-up was the culmination of years of patient planning, designing, and assembling. Crude as it appeared, it was in reality the key to some of the profoundest secrets of Nature; and no man on earth save Evans knew how to use it. In the midst of this strange assortment of matter, Evans sat on an empty packing-box, his eye glued to the eye-piece of an optical instrument.
“Well, Jim, are you coming sailing?”
Before answering, Evans scribbled some figures on a scrap of paper. Then he turned to Mortimer.
“Good Lord, Sam, is it the first of August already? I’d clean lost track of time.”
“That’s what it is; and there’s a fine sailing breeze.”
“Sailing breeze or no, I can’t knock off now. I’ve been sweating all summer to get this experiment going right, and it’s going at last to the Queen’s taste.”