He removed the little sign that said:
CHECK!
and dropped it into the drawer again. He moved his king aside with a contemplative smile. His queen was gone on the next move, he knew. So he had lost a major piece. So that other bird thought that losing a major piece was bad, huh? Well, winning battles does not count—it is a matter of who wins the last one.
He found the volume on the theory of monomolecular films and started to read with relish. Over coffee, at breakfast, Thomas made notations on the margin of the book with a pencil; checked some of the equations and though he found them balanced properly, the author was amiss in not considering the lattice-effect in his presumptions. No monomolecular film could follow that type of reaction simply because—well, it could follow it, but since the thing was to take place in a monomolecular film, the fission-reaction and the radiation byproducts that cause the self-sustaining nature could only be effective in a plane of molecular thickness. That meant a .999999% loss, since the radiation went off spherically. Fission-reaction might take place, but it would be most ineffective. Besides, the equations should have taken that into account.
He stopped by the desk and wrote for a half hour, filling seventeen pages full of text and mathematics, explaining the error in the author's presumption.
He sealed it up and mailed it with some relish. No doubt that letter would start a fight.
He found his letter in the letter file and read it. It was a request to indulge in some basic research at a fancy figure, but Thomas was not particularly interested. He was thinking of another particular line of endeavor. He dropped the letter into the wastebasket.
He went into the lab and took a look at his cyclotronic spectrograph. There was a letter hung on the front. Thomas opened it and read:
Dear Isaac Newton:
I don't particularly mind your laying out thirty-five hundred bucks for a mass spectrograph.