"May the best man win, huh?"
It was seven solid weeks by the calendar. Seven solid weeks of hard, backbreaking work during which everything went fine and dandy for Tom Lionel, Consulting Engineer.
The balance of his debt was paid off when Americal Electric purchased the rights and royalties of the cyclotronic spectrograph. The equipment in Tom's laboratory had been kept in good shape, polished and even used occasionally. It was all connected for operation, and though the laboratory had changed from a spacious building into a place where aisles and areas abounded between banks of equipment, it did make an impressive sight.
Even the transit came into use.
And then at the end of the seventh week, Tom Lionel looked at his notebook and started to consider in all of its aspects the rather improbable phenomenon recorded there. He not only let it prey on his mind; he stopped hourly and invited his mind to consider the evidence. At first his mind rejected it on the basis that science was not equipped to consider it, and then as the evidence seemed definite and leading, his mind accepted the fact that this problem did exist and that it was a real and utterly baffling problem.
Then his mind rejected it on the basis of impracticality. It would be nice—but.
No known physical effect could possibly explain it in a satisfactory manner.
Tom went to sleep.