CHECK!
"Let him try that one, will he?" laughed Tom. The move was basic; in checking the king and menacing the queen simultaneously, Tom had—or would upon the next move—collect himself his opponent's queen with no great loss.
At the shirt and necktie stage, Tom Lionel stood teetering on his heels before the bookcase on the right of the fireplace. He took from the case a slim volume and read the title with considerable distaste:
"Theory of Monomolecular Films in Fission-Reaction"
By A. G. Rodan, Ph.D., M.M., LL.D.
"Yipe!" exploded Tom as he opened the book and glanced at the price: $9.50. With ease he prorated the price against the thickness of the volume and came to the estimate that the book had cost approximately nineteen dollars per inch excluding covers. He riffled through the pages and paused here and there to read, but the pages themselves were a good average of four lines of text to the rest of the page full of nuclear equations.
Tom Lionel snorted. He ran down through one of the arguments and followed it to conclusion.
"Why can't he get something worth reading?" he yawned, putting the book back in its place. "Darned impractical stuff." As usual with a man who spends much time in his own company, Tom Lionel talked aloud to himself—and occasionally was known to answer himself back. "The whole trouble with the entire tribe of physicists per se is the fact that once, someone told one of them that he was a theorist, an idealist, and a dealer in the abstract. Now the bunch of them are afraid to do anything practical because they're afraid if they do, people won't know they're physicists. Physicists are a sort of necessary, end-product evil."
During the breakfast section of Tom's morning duties, Tom read the latest copy of the "Proceedings of the I.R.E." with some relish. A paper on the "Crystallographic Generation of Microwaves" complete with plainly manipulated differential calculus and engineering data occupied most of his time. The rest of the time through coffee he was making marks on the tablecloth with the egg-laden end of his fork and trying to fit the crystallographic generation of microwaves into a problem that made the article most timely; the solution for which he had been seeking for a week.