But a coupla days later the liquid assets of the bank turn up in the mail addressed to him, because he has spent those long hours packing them neat in Manilla envelopes and mailing them in the mail-slot that is in the bank for the convenience of depositors. But, still, Jode feels that taking Mr. Vachti over the hurdles will crown his career. Mr. Vachti was a very big shot once, when his business staff included not only income-tax men and tommy-gun experts, but also gentlemen who specialize in putting people in barrels of concrete and dumping them in the Chicago River.
I meet old Jode when I am thumbing a ride towards the Coast. I have beat it from what you might call home after my old man works me over with a chair for spending money I earn on a gas-engine for a model aeroplane instead of giving it to him to get drunk on. I am not making out so good at hitch-hiking, because, being sixteen and not looking any older, I hafta dodge truant officers everywhere. But I get by; I fix a car-radio for a guy at a fillin'-station while old Jode is having his gas-tank filled up, and the guy says swell and gives me a half a buck. The job I done would cost him twelve sixty at a regular repair-shop. I says, "I could do with a lift to Phoenix," but the guy isn't going that way. Then old Jode wheezes cordial that he is, so I climb in his car.
He is fat and old and has danglin' red wattles, and he looks like he is made of money and hasn't a care in the world. Outside of havin' the cops of sixteen or eighteen states passionate interested in his whereabouts, he doesn't have no worries, and lookin' like a million dollars is his business. But I don't know that then; he talks to me cordial, and we get on to science, a subject in which he is interested but don't know beans about.
With him asking questions, grunting and respectful, I tell him the theoretic perfect fuel for space-ships, and the difference between a rocket and a jet, and what the Doppler effect is, and what's the difference between Oak Ridge and Hansford, Wash. I'm not showing off, you know; I explain that I read a lot of science magazines and he'd ought to try them. Special the science-fiction ones. And I tell him I'm headed for the Coast to get a job in a radio-repair shop, like I had back home after school and Saturdays, and I'm going to save up and have a private experimental laboratory. I got some ideas—science-fiction ideas—that I think I can make work out actual.
Old Jode gets thoughtful. Later on when I know him better I will know what that means. Right then, though, when he beams and says he would like to play a joke on a friend, and I seem a handy young man with tools, I just say modest that I'm pretty fair. He makes me a proposition. He'll stake me to grub and hotel expenses and a suit of clothes, and say I'm his nephew, if I'll fix him a trick television cabinet with a movie sound projector inside so he can fool a friend into thinkin' he's got a long-distance receiver that'll pick up from anywhere. I can do that with my hands tied behind my back; I take him up quick. I improve the idea; I suggest color-film, which will look like three-color television in action.
Mr. Vachti don't have anything to do with this deal. Neither does the Prof, who at that time is fumbling happy with a swell idea that he don't know how good it is. This is Phoenix, Arizona. So old Jode buys the stuff I say is needed—he acts like he is made of money—and I put it together in the hotel-room he gets for me next to his. It's a swell hotel, the best in town, and I eat fancy grub that I don't know the names of, being you have to order it in French. When the job's finished I figure on thumbing my way further, but old Jode says perish the thought. He will put me on salary as his technical assistant.
He waddles around town, wheezing and busy, while I catch up on my science reading. I'm knee-deep in magazines when he comes tiptoeing into the room and says joyous that his joke worked and he's beating it before his friend gets wise. So we light out, and he chuckles happy all the way up to Sun Valley—which is considerable of a ride—where he says he would like to rest a few days. When I get to know him better I find out that he shows what was apparently three-color television to some sharp business men in Phoenix; they get together and pull a fast business deal on him, and swindle him excessive by paying him only twenty thousand bucks for all rights in a epoch-making discovery. Which when they find out they been stuck they can't say a word, because their methods are at least unethical if not illegal.
Old Jode soaks up sun and fancier grub than ever at Sun Valley, which is a very swank place indeed, but I get restless. Then one day he comes in chucklin' and says that he will have great fun with his friend the president of Western Power if I can contrive something that looks like it is a receiver of beamed or wireless power, and can it be done? I says it will be phoney but if he wants a laugh, okay. So I make a set with a coupla thyratron tubes and this and that and it looks just like a science-fiction illustration. But the power it delivers so impressive comes from storage-batteries built in the work-bench it's built on.
I would like to see him play his joke, but he says no. I sneak a look in the window, anyhow, and I get the picture. I don't hear the actual dealing, but Western Power pays him plenty for full ownership of the gadget, with the agreement that they are going to smash it right where it sets and try not to have bad dreams about what it would do to their business.