Arrhenial smiled into his vodka. "Didn't you know? Talbot was seventy-five years old when he wrote that article. I'm afraid you were a little too late for him."
"I didn't know," Arkadt replied.
"A shame," Findrun murmured. "It would have made him so happy."
The telephone rang and Arkadt answered it. His wife was calling, with unusual news. He had just received a letter from America. Imagine that. From a Henry Talbot.
Henry Talbot saw his face on the cover of Time magazine. He refused a request to appear on a television quiz program. (The contestant the network had had in mind to appear with Henry won his money nevertheless, in the category Theoretical Physics, by correctly naming the year in which Einstein first published his Theory of Relativity, the number of papers which comprised the entire theory, the language in which it was first published, the magazine in which it was first published, the year in which the magazine was first printed, the name of the first printer of the magazine, and the year in which he died.) Henry Talbot was termed "The Dean of American Men of Science" by the New York Times, which paper triumphantly reported that only thirteen people in the world understood his Warped Field Theory. When asked if there was now anything else for science to do, he replied, "Indubitably." When pressed for more details, he said that his housekeeper always removed his vodka from the refrigerator at three-thirty, and that if he did not immediately return home, it would become unbearably warm.
On the occasion of his ninety-fifth birthday, he was given a gigantic testimonial banquet by the Arnold Research Corporation, "under whose auspices the entire research which culminated in the justly famous Warped Field Theory was conducted."
The next week, when he requested the use of their massive cyclotron to run an experiment, he was told that the machine was in use at the time. A week later, his request was again shunted off. This happened twice more, and Henry went to see Larry Arnold, Jr.
The coordinator was affable, and told Henry that he had checked himself, and that unfortunately the machine was in use and that of course since he, Talbot, was actually at the lab on only a part-time basis, he could not expect to usurp the machine from full-time research workers.
Henry asked what kind of research was being done.