"But—"
"No words," Professor Lightning said, raising a hand delicately. "Please. Allow me to tell you of my invention."
Charley sighed and lay back on the bed. "Invention, professor?" he said. "You mean sort of a machine?"
For some reason, Professor Lightning looked irritated. "It's not a machine," he said flatly. Then he sighed and his tone changed. "Charley, my boy," he said, "do you remember what I was telling you before? About how the world has entered a new Age of Science? How new inventions, new discoveries, are coming along every day?"
"Well, sure," Charley said. "The papers talk about it every once in a while. You know, I see the papers, or the Chicago American, anyhow. My mother sends it to me. She likes the columns."
"Why," Professor Lightning went on, as if he hadn't been listening at all, "right here in Wrout's Carnival Shows, we have things that just didn't exist ten or fifteen years ago. The electronic band. The Forever bulb."
"That's right," Charley put in. "And look at Joe Wicks. Why, he can do tricks with all those new things they got on cars, tricks nobody ever did before or even thought about in the old days."
"And more fundamental discoveries," the professor said. "Chadwick's Law of Dimensionality, Dvedkin and the Ontological Mean ... oh, I keep up with the literature. No matter what's happened to me, I keep up with the literature."
Charley sighed, very softly so as not to injure the professor's feelings. But he did hope the old man wasn't going to start on all those stories about his lost career again. Charley knew—everybody in the Wrout show did—that Professor Lightning had been a real professor once, at some college or other. Biology, or Biological Physics, or something else—he'd taught classes about it, and done research. And then there had been something about a girl, a student the professor had got himself involved with. Though it was pretty hard to imagine the professor, white-haired and thin the way he was now, chasing after a girl.
He'd been fired, or something, and he'd drifted for a while and then got himself an act and come with a Carnival. Charley knew the whole story. He didn't want to hear it again.