Page:Fantastic v08n11 1959-11.djvu/80

ter with Mr. Espy yesterday but she decided she certainly would tonight.

Serious thinking is always apt to be a somewhat chilling business. The more Ronald applied his mind to the problem of how to make money out of one small and presumably irreplacable gravitic and antigravitic battery, the chillier the prospects came to look to him.

One thing he was fatalistically certain of from the start: that if he reported his find to any "proper authorities" (military, scientific, industrial, academic, governmental—authorities are always governmental to the end) he would get nothing whatever for himself except trouble. To begin with—the governmental authorities would know very well whether one of their secret projects had or had not started to manufacture gravitic batteries. In either case they would grab the battery—either for safekeeping or for feverish secret research into its mysteries—and at the same time loudly proclaim that it did not exist. Ronald's protests would be laughed at. He would be left out in the cold or, more likely, grabbed himself and awarded a lifetime of protective custody and unending interrogation. Where a discovery of such fabulous military importancee as antigravity was concerned, an individual's rights just wouldn't count.

Perhaps he could investigate the battery himself, carefully open it and find out what made it work? Ronald's reaction to this idea was simply to shudder. True, he fancied a bit his talent for scientific thinking, but he wasn't that egotistical. Cutting or prying the battery open in hope of discovering its secrets struck Ronald as some seven degrees more unpromising than an infant taking apart a gold wristwatch to find out what made it work. This seemed particularly to the point as Ronald now inclined more and more to the theory that the battery was something that had been spontaneously generated in his aunt's basement by complex cycles of temperature change or the like—which also brought him back once more to the fact that he only had one battery, that as far as he knew there was only one on Earth. And if that were the case, why the chances were that the properest scientific authorities in the world wouldn't be any too successful in probing the battery's