On the hot road Madson began to stride briskly. His nostrils flared. "Smell the morning air," he commanded. "It's good, good!"
Ellenby, matching his stride with longer if older legs, looked at him with mild wonder.
"Smell the hot sour grass," Madson continued. "It's things like this man was meant for, not machines and formulas. Look at the dew. Have you seen the dew in years? Look at it on that spiderweb!"
The physicist paused obediently to observe the softly twinkling strands. "Perfect catenaries," he murmured.
"What?"
"A kind of curve," Ellenby explained. "The locus of the focus of a parabola rolling on a straight line."
"Locus-focus hocus-pocus!" Madson snorted. "Reducing the wonders of Nature to chalk marks. It's disgusting."
Suddenly each tiny drop of dew turned blood-red. Ellenby turned his back on the spiderweb, whipped a crooked little brass tube from an inside pocket and squinted through it.
"What's that?" Madson asked.