Tom Lionel went out of the house, mentally tinkering with the glue-joint heating problem. That shouldn't be hard, he thought, high-frequency heating was no trick, though the furniture company probably had no one in the place that knew what high frequency really meant.
He'd take a chair, rip it apart at the joints, and start tinkering with the big radio-frequency heater in the lab. Another fat consulting fee—eminently practical and satisfying—from the simple engineering of a means to accelerate the drying of glue by electronics.
Eminently practi—hell!
Lionel stared. The door closed slowly behind him as he walked ever so slowly across the floor of the lab. There was his radio-frequency heater, all right. But it was not in its usual place. It was across the room nuzzling up against another piece of equipment—the latter new, shining, and absolutely alien to the lab.
Tom went over to the set-up and inspected it with critical derision.
The alien piece of equipment had been a standard model of mass spectrograph. Its sleek sides were gaping open, and the high-frequency heater was permanently wired—piped—into the very heart of the spectrograph. Peering into the maze of one-inch copper tubing that led from the output of the high-frequency heater to the insides of the spectrograph, Lionel saw at once what the reason was.
The spectrograph had been overhauled by the physicist. It now contained a pair of "D" chambers.
Operating on the cyclotron principle, the spectrograph was using the output of the high-frequency heater to energize the D chambers. Lionel nodded. The frequency was about right; could be adjusted to the proper value without any trouble at all. He felt an infinitesimally short twitch of admiration for the idea before he started to roar in anguish.
His first impulse was to rip the gadget apart so that he could go to work on something practical. But the engineer's admiration for the idea stopped him.