Thomas took the cigarette case from his pocket and extracted a cigarette. He snapped the lighter and was amazed to see the colors on the case. They were scintillating, iridescent, and beautiful. They danced and changed as he moved the lighter, and the swift play of color across the surface of the case caught his fancy.
It also caught his scientific sense. He looked at the case carefully and swore. Tom had been using the ruling engine. The surface of the cigarette case was a mirror-grating and it was as good a job as the ruling engine could produce.
Thomas fumed. The idea! And then he smiled a bit. For the engineer's use of the ruling engine to decorate a cigarette case was a sort of prostitution of the machine, but it had not harmed the engine in any way. And it was certainly no worse on the physicist's nerves than the irrelevant mixture of precision and utter sloppiness that characterized the physicist's work.
It was, the physicist admitted, beautiful.
He returned to the engineering data.
A poltergeist!
The "throwing-ghost" of the ancient lore and myth. The fearsome manifestation of unrealism. Superstition!
Sheer superstition!
The physicist's mind rejected it, at first. But that which made him the physicist prodded neatly and patiently and quietly. "Where there's smoke, there's fire," it said. And it mentioned situations where, though exact engineering data had not been taken, certainly the observers were not incompetent. They were not trained, but they did attempt to give a valid picture.