A couple of hours later when Pendexter breezed back into the office, he found the two of them still at it, with the talk switching back and forth about magnetic rotations and cycles and frequency, about multiplying powers and symmetry and resonance.
“Looks like you two sort of speak the same language,” rumbled the Doctor. “Didn’t mean to leave you at it all day but got a patient up there. Had to stop—”
“Why, it’s—it’s late!” Lee looked dazed at the passage of time. “Your work, I didn’t mean to keep you from it—” and the boy leaped up.
“I like to talk about electricity. Come again and we’ll jaw some more.” Lanky, long John Akerly shook hands heartily.
Lee’s mind fairly seethed with the information it had tried to absorb about coils and codes and induction and what-not. Electricity was a language that Dr. William Pendexter spoke too, and the twenty miles back to King’s Cove fairly slid by.
As they drove up to the high sagging porch of the old Renaud place, the little grizzled Doctor started pulling a wooden box out of the back of his car. Lee put a willing shoulder to it, and involuntarily grunted a little. Just a little old box—but gosh, it was heavy!
“Not in here,” roared the Doctor, as Lee started to ease the thing down in his Great-uncle Gem’s room. “Go on upstairs.”
Breathing hard, Lee lugged it on, and following directions, slid it down in a corner of his workshop.
“That’s right! Good place for it. Some junk I’m going to leave with you,” rumbled Pendexter. “Get the lid off.”
The next moment Lee Renaud was on his knees beside the box, touching the contents as though they were gold and diamonds. A code book, some tattered pamphlets full of sketches and diagrams, and these well mixed in with coils of copper wire, screws, an old sounder still bearing its precious electromagnets, some scrap glass and brass. It might all have looked like trash to somebody else, but not to Lee Renaud.