Page:Fantastic v08n11 1959-11.djvu/71

As soon as Ronald Flecker fully convinced himself that he had discovered in his eccentric aunt's cluttered basement a small battery that stored the force of gravity instead of electricity—a battery that held in complete essence the power of fuelless spaceflight, levitation, and any number of lesser marvels—he sat down to do some very serious thinking.

The discovery had come about while he was repairing his aunt's doorbell—one of the innumerable small tasks she hesitantly but in the end always rather firmly set him, although she had more than enough money to hire professional household mechanics, and that Ronald in any case always felt obliged to discharge in return for the privilege of sleeping over her garage. He had found the thin wires in a monstrous tangle close under the dusty rafters. It turned out the system wasn't even worked by a stepdown transformer but by dry cells and some idiot had hooked up the cells in parallel rather than series, accounting in large part for the doorbell's feeble performance. His aunt recalled that the last person before Ronald to revive the doorbell had been the kindly but abstracted and rather smelly Dr. Yorn, the second-to-last in her unending series of spiritual counselors—a yogi, medium, hypnotist, dynamic psychologist, something like that. Mrs. Wycherly liked variety and versatile men. Dr. Yorn's successor, the gleaming-eyed and dap-