“Let us all go,” Paula suggested, “and make a party of it. I’m dying to see it myself, Dick’s been so obscure about it.”
Sanctioned by Dick’s nod, she was ordering machines and saddle horses the next moment.
“What is it?” Graham queried, when she had finished.
“Oh, one of Dick’s stunts. He’s always after something new. This is an invention. He swears it will revolutionize farming—that is, small farming. I have the general idea of it, but I haven’t seen it set up yet. It was ready a week ago, but there was some delay about a cable or something concerning an adjustment.”
“There’s billions in it... if it works,” Dick smiled over the table. “Billions for the farmers of the world, and perhaps a trifle of royalty for me... if it works.”
“But what is it?” O’Hay asked. “Music in the dairy barns to make the cows give down their milk more placidly?”
“Every farmer his own plowman while sitting on his front porch,” Dick baffled back. “In fact, the labor-eliminating intermediate stage between soil production and sheer laboratory production of food. But wait till you see it. Gulhuss, this is where I kill my own business, if it works, for it will do away with the one horse of every ten-acre farmer between here and Jericho.”
In ranch machines and on saddle animals, the company was taken a mile beyond the dairy center, where a level field was fenced squarely off and contained, as Dick announced, just precisely ten acres.
“Behold,” he said, “the one-man and no-horse farm where the farmer sits on the porch. Please imagine the porch.”
In the center of the field was a stout steel pole, at least twenty feet in height and guyed very low.