Berk threw back his head and laughed. 'Keyes will love you, boy. He's been afraid he wouldn't find a single top John in the country who would really try.'
Dunning's place was in the shabby, once fashionable sector of town where the owners of the gingerbread monsters were no longer able to meet the upkeep or sell them to anyone who was.
It had been learned that the house actually belonged to an uncle of Dunning, but so far he had not been located.
A guard was on duty at the front entrance. He nodded as Berk and Mart showed their passes.
'Dunning's laboratories and shops are on the first floor,' said Berk. 'Upstairs, is his library. He slept in one of the third-floor bedrooms, but the rest are vacant. A lot of cooking seemed to have been done in the back kitchen. He left a well stocked larder. Where do you want to start?'
'A quick look through the labs to begin. I want to get the feel of the layout.'
On the right of the entrance hallway, they came into a small but extremely well equipped chemistry laboratory. The place seemed well used, but immaculate. A complex fractionating set up was on the worktable.
'Almost the only piece of writing in the whole place was found on a small pad here,' said Berk. 'A bit of scratch work computation without any formulas or reactions.'
Mart grunted and moved on to the adjacent room. Here was the more familiar hodgepodge of the electronic experimenter, but even in this there was instantly apparent the mark of a careful workman. Breadboard layouts were assembled with optimum care. Test leads were carefully made of rubber-covered or shielded wire and equipped with clips instead of being the usual random lengths of coloured connecting wire hastily stripped and tied to a terminal.
A sizeable bank of rack and panel mounted equipment was not recognizable at once as to function. It appeared to be a set-up that might belong to any careful experimenter who had no regard for his bank account.
This would need further study, but Mart continued moving through to the next room, a machine shop, as well equipped for its functions as the previous rooms. A six-inch lathe, a large drill press, and a milling machine were the chief items.
Mart whistled softly as he stood in the middle of the room and looked back the way they had come.
'When I was a kid in high school,' he said, 'this is exactly the kind of a place I thought Heaven would be.'
'And it had to belong to a person like Dunning, eh?' said Berk with a slow smile.
Mart turned sharply. His voice became low and serious. 'Berk — whatever Dunning may have been, he was no jug-head. A paranoid, maybe, but not a jug-head. He could do things. Look at this.'
He picked up a weird looking assembly from a nearby-table and held it up in the light. It gleamed with a creamy sheen. A silver-plated bit of high-frequency plumbing.
'That's beautiful,' said Mart. 'There're not more than three or four university shops in the whole country that can turn out a piece like that. I've had to fight for weeks to get our machinists to come up with anything that complex and then it would be way out of tolerance.'
He hefted the piece of plumbing lightly. He knew it was just right. It had the feel of being made right.
Berk led the way across the hall. He opened the door for Mart. There, against the walls of the room, were panels of a compact digital computer, and on the other side an analogue computer.
'But you haven't seen anything yet,' said Berk. 'The surprise of your life is upstairs.'
Gravity was a force, Mart thought as he climbed the stairs. You only lick force with force — in the world of physics, at least. In politics and human relations, force might yield to something more subtle, but if Dunning had licked gravity it was with some other — and presently known — force. Physics was at least aware of every force that existed. There were no gaps except perhaps the one temporarily occupied by the elusive neutrino.
Dunning's machine was ingenious. But it could be nothing but a clever application of well-known laws and forces. There was no miracle, no magic in it. Having decided this on a slow, verbal basis, Mart felt somewhat more at ease. He followed Berk into the library.
There was not simply one room of it, but an entire suite had been converted and shelved. There were certainly several thousand volumes in the place.
'This is the one that may interest you most.' Berk stepped into the nearest room on his left. 'A is for Astrology,' he said. He gestured towards a full section of shelving.
Mart scanned the titles:
He hopefully pulled the latter volume from the shelf against the possibility it might be an astronomy text. It wasn't. He quickly put it back with its fellows.
