“It takes study to understand the chemical symbols,” Roger said.
“Yeh. And they have so many things that sound safe, and they’re dynamite in disguise. Like a guy wanted some citric acid, and I got picric acid, and I spilled some and was swabbing it up with cotton, and I used it to swab up something else—I forget what, but when I was going to chuck it in the furnace, they almost had a fit. It had turned into lyddite or some other sort of explosive. Looked like the same cotton to me.”
“I never could get them sodium calorides straight, neither,” Potts took up the complaint against chemistry’s “cheating” symbols. “They say it’s made out of a gas in the ocean. And the ocean’s water, and here comes gas, and they put metal, mind you—sodium—on top of it, and it turns out to be common table salt.”
“It’s sodium chloride,” Roger corrected him, “not caloride.”
“And they talk the craziest lingo, here,” Toby insisted. “Mr. Ellison asked for motor brushes, so I looked, and the only brush I could find was what we sweep up dust with, so I took that. Was he mad!”
Roger’s return to his duties in charge of stock was acceptable!
Grover, when the celebrations were concluded and routine had been resumed, sat down in the private “thinking den” as Roger called his office, and chatted.
“We have quite a few new interests,” he gave information. “Mr. Ellison has perfected his speed camera with stroboscopic lamps so strong that they beat sunshine. He can’t use a shutter: nothing mechanical can be made to work as fast as he wants it to. So he uses alternate flashes of the lamp, and his film runs so fast past the aperture that not even daylight fogs it. Of course you know he was busy with it, but you don’t know that he has succeeded in perfecting it, and is studying some amazing chemical and other operations of Nature.
“Mr. Zendt has brought in rather an unusual man for us. He was an astrologer—a man who reads ‘destiny’ in the planets by making a chart of the zodiac for the moment a person was born. He used to sell his ‘fortunes’ at so-much a ‘destiny’ on a Coney Island boardwalk.
“Now, though, he has turned scientist.”