“I shall. Andi it is a secret. Let me caution you about that. What I have to tell you is top secret, hush-hush.”
“I'll pass the word along to my vocal cords,” I promised. “Now what say you get down to the nitty-gritty?”
“Very well. About a week ago a man walked into the U. S. Patent Office here in Washington. He had a small invention with him, a gadget, but no blueprints. When the clerk in charge told him he’d have to present plans as well as the invention itself in order to obtain a patent, he became very annoyed. He became loud and made several derogatory statements about bureaucratic red tape.”
“Did they throw him out?”
“No. He left under his own steam. But not before he’d managed to antagonize most of the personnel and draw a great deal of attention to himself. Anyway, after leaving the Patent Office, as well as we’ve been able to determine, he stopped off in a bakery in the neighborhood and purchased a loaf of stale bread.”
“Why stale bread?"
“You’ll see. I’m coming to that in a minute. Anyway, the bakery proprietor remembers him for two reasons. The first was his insistence that the bread be really stale enough. The second was the fact that while he was standing there waiting for the proprietor to get through serving other customers, the man kept muttering insulting things about the Patent Office.”
“He hadn’t cooled down yet,” I summed up.
“Exactly. To continue, from the bake shop he took a bus to Rock Creek Park. Here he spent about an hour studying various birds through field glasses and making notes in a small notebook. Then he sat down on a park bench and crumbled up the stale bread. This done, he began feeding the birds with the bread crumbs.”
“Bread crumbs?”
“Bread crumbs.”
“I see. But how do you know all this?" I wanted to know. “Did you have the man under surveillance?”
“No. But his bird-watching activities attracted the attention of another man who was passing the time of day sunning himself on a park bench. This second man was later bemused by the birds scrambling for the bread crumbs. He strolled over to the bench where the first man was feeding them and struck up a conversation with him.”
“First man, second man—I’m getting confused,” I told Putnam. “Don’t these people have names?”
“Yes. The first man, the inventor, has been identified us one Anthony Bowdler Cromwell. Is that name familiar to you, Mr. Victor?” Putnam added as he noted the flicker of recognition which crossed my face.
“It is,” I nodded, struggling to remember why it should be. “But I’m not quite sure in what context at the moment. Go on with your story.”
“Try to recall where you know the name from; it could be important. Meanwhile, I’ll continue. Where was I? Ah yes, names. Well, the second man, the one who’d been idly watching Cromwell and then fell into conversation with him, as Knute Hajstrom. He’s an aeronautical engineer on loan to the U. S. government space program from a university in Sweden. One of the top men in his field, he’s an integral part of our long-range project to put a man on the moon. He’s currently in Washington for top-level conferences at the Pentagon. This particular day in the park, he was killing time between two such conferences.”
“What’s all that got to do with our bread-crumby friend?”
“Quite a lot, Mr. Victor, as you shall see. After a while, Cromwell began griping to Hajstrom about the treatment he’d received at the Patent Office. Hajstrom is a very kindly man. He figured Cromwell for some kind of a nut, but he listened anyway. However, when Cromwell showed him the gadget itself, Hajstrom revised his opinion in a hurry.”
“Don’t tell me; let me guess. This do-it-yourself putterer invented a moon rocket in his own backyard workshop.”
“No. But in a vague way you’re on the right track. The actual gadget he’d been trying to patent was of very doubtful worth, but -”
“Then how am I on the right track?” I wanted to know. “And what was the gadget?”
“A mousetrap.”
“A mousetrap?”
“A mousetrap!”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I am not kidding,” Putnam assured me. “Cromwell had invented a mousetrap.”
“A better mousetrap?” I asked.
“I’m in no position to judge that.”
“I was just trying to determine if the world was beating a path to his door,” I apologized.
“Somebody beat a path to his door and made off with the cheese.” Putnam smiled drily. “But I’m getting ahead of my story. What excited Hajstrom’s interest was not the mousetrap itself, but what had been done to the material of which it was made.”
“What was it made of?”
“Aluminum. But no ordinary aluminum. This aluminum was harder than steel. Also, it had more resistance to heat; Cromwell had evidently developed some completely new process for tempering it. That process, in Hajstrom’s judgment, could chop ten years off the time needed to put us on the moon if we had it. The resistance of the metal Cromwell showed him makes it ideal for space travel.”
“How could Hajstrom tell all this from just looking at the thing?”
“For one thing, the use of metal alloys in space is his particular specialty. For another, he was able to evaluate its qualities from observing the difficulty Cromwell had in trying to destroy it.”
“Destroy it? Why should he do that?”
“Evidently Cromwell was really playing the dog in the manger. The more he told Hajstrom about his experiences with government bureaucracy, the madder he got. Finally he said the devil with the whole thing, if nobody appreciated his invention he was going to destroy it and leave Washington and go back where he came from. Hajstrom tried to dissuade him, but it was no use. By then Cromwell was all but frothing at the mouth.”
“How did he destroy it?”
“It wasn’t easy. He picked up a loose brick and tried to pound the mousetrap to bits. It was no use. The brick crumbled; the mousetrap was intact. Then he tried to set fire to it with his cigarette lighter. It wouldn’t burn. Finally he walked over to the lake with Hajstrom beside him and still trying to talk him out of it. But it was no use. Cromwell flung the thing as far out as he could, and it sank.”
“If it’s as important as you say it is, why not drag the lake for the mousetrap?”
“We’re doing that. But the chances of recovering it are slim. The lake has a strong undercurrent. This comes from a deep underground stream. Once the mousetrap is sucked into it, the chances are against our ever finding it. And then there’s some question as to just how much use it would be to us if we did find it.”
‘What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s Hajstrom’s feeling that even if we had the object we might never be able to determine the process by which the alloy was developed.”
“Why not simply ask Cromwell?”
“Brilliant, Mr. Victor!” There was grating sarcasm in the way Putnam said it. “There’s only one trouble. Cromwell has disappeared.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. After throwing the mousetrap in the lake, he parted company with Hajstrom. He said he was going back to his hotel. When Hajstrom said he might want to reach him, Cromwell told him he was staying at the Windsor. Hajstrom went straight to the Pentagon and told certain very important people about the qualities of the metal Cromwell had shown him. It was decided to send for Cromwell immediately. It was about ten at night when an agent from the Pentagon arrived at Cromwell’s rooms. Cromwell wasn’t there. And he hasn’t been back since. That was a week ago. It’s as if the earth had swallowed him up.”
“He didn’t check out of the hotel?”
“No. The desk clerk saw him come in at about five o'clock—which fits in with the time he left Hajstrom. There were a few incoming phone calls between then and eight-thirty, when he and his wife were seen leaving the hotel together. However, there were no outgoing mils made.”