“I beg your pardon! I didn’t know you were looking for our office.”
“You are Dr. Martin Nagle?” the man said.
Mart nodded. “Toymaker extraordinary. Please come in.”
“Very extraordinary, I would say.” The man deposited his hat and offered his hand. “My name is Don Wolfe. I am chief engineer at Apex Aircraft. There are a few things I would like to talk over with you.”
Mart smiled and led the way to his own office. “Please sit down. If you’re here concerning the adaptability of the Nagle Rocket to aircraft propulsion, the answer is no. Not in its present form. And that being what you came to ask about I suppose you have had a long trip for nothing.”
“No, I think not,” said Wolfe. He laid his brief case on the corner of the desk and took the chair Mart indicated. “If I heard correctly you said, ‘not in its present form.’ I assume, then, that the mechanism has other and more adaptable forms.”
“Might be. You said it, I didn’t.”
Wolfe frowned and hunched forward a trifle in his chair. “My company is prepared to negotiate very generously with you in the utilization of this device. Naturally, you have had and will have other offers. I would like to be assured of an equal footing with others, and in turn assure you that we believe we can meet the best of them. Naturally, I say this upon the basis of our engineers’ examination of your toy. We have no doubt that it is what you say: an antigravity device.”
“I hope no one was hurt,” said Mart.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“I say, I hope no one was hurt when you tried to scale up the mechanism in order to increase its lifting power.”
Wolfe flushed and glanced down at his hands. “We did have a small accident,” he confessed. “No one was hurt, although much valuable equipment was destroyed.”
“I’m glad that was all. You had no right, you understand, to alter this patented device for commercial purposes without due permission.”
“We have the right to make improvements with a view to obtaining our own patents!”
“Of course. Of course,” said Mart. And you were able to make such improvements, I trust?”
“No, we have not,” said Wolfe. And now the tone of his voice began to change. “I do not understand you, Dr. Nagle. I am here to make a legitimate offer. I am here to ask you to name your price for a license to your patents.”
“Do you plan to go into the toy business?”
"Please, Dr. Nagle —”
“All right then. Listen to me: I have nothing to sell you. I have no patent that would be of any value to you whatever. Have you taken the trouble to read the patent issued on the Nagle Rocket?”
The engineer nodded. “Practically committed it to memory.”
“Then you have observed that the patent specifically details the precise mechanism that I have incorporated into my rocket toy. Nothing else. Is that clear? My patent covers nothing but that toy, and if you are not interested in toys, I have nothing to sell. I haven't anyway, because we're doing very nicely, thank you, with the present sale of the Nagle Rocket.”
Wolfe moved his hands rather helplessly. “But antigravity, it —”
“It should be able to power airplanes — and even spaceships.”
“Of course. You referred to a new Law of Nature in your patent. Obviously —”
“Yes. Obviously that is what you are interested in. But I'm afraid I can’t sell you a Law of Nature. Nobody gets patents on such things. Unfortunately, that has to come under the classification of Trade Secret.”
“That is hardly the attitude of the modern scientist towards his discoveries and his work,” said Wolfe stiffly.
Mart shrugged. “It’s my attitude. So now you know: The basic principle of the Nagle Rocket is completely unprotected. It is right there, lying wide open for you and your engineers to discover for yourselves. And when you do discover it you can build kites or liners to Mars.”
Wolfe made no move but continued to stare across the desk into the eyes of Martin Nagle. “You have a price,” said Wolfe. “What is your figure?”
“Yes,” Mart nodded slowly. “I have a price. But again, unfortunately, it is as unconventional as the rest of my attitude in this matter. It so happens that it is not denotable by figures.”
Wolfe picked up his brief case then and rose abruptly to his feet. “I repeat, I do not understand you, Dr. Nagle. You have either an unmitigated conceit regarding your own abilities or you take the rest of us for fools. I assure you, however, that I will take you at your own word. I shall discover for myself whatever principle underlies your toy, and make whatever utilization I care to. But it would seem far more fitting if you exhibited a willingness to co-operate in the exploitation of this discovery — or at least presented a valid reason for not doing so.”
Mart shrugged as he accompanied his visitor to the door. “It’s your baby. Let’s see you carry it off.”
Upon opening the office with Kenneth Berkeley, Mart had intensified his contacts with fellow researchers and former students who now held responsible positions in nearly every major industry. His contacts led as well into every Government laboratory employing specialists even remotely connected with basic physical research. As be expected, there began to be responses from these various points of communication. Among the first of these was one from Jennings out on the West Coast. Jennings had been with them on Levitation.
“The news of the Nagle and Berkeley enterprises,” he wrote, “makes me yearn for the good old days of Project Levitation. I didn’t know anything could be as foundationless as that project was when it started, but I believe you’ve topped it in that respect. The boys out here keep telling me you’ve gone off your rocker for sure, and I keep telling them you haven’t. When you get around to it I would appreciate some evidence to back up my defense.
“P.S. Yes, the Nagle Rockets are getting so thick in the air over our subdivisions out here that midair collisions are not infrequent, with resulting claims and counterclaims of damages from one small fry to another. Have you any legal recommendations?
“P.P.S. One corner of our physics lab was blown out the other day. Nobody got hurt, but some people are awfully mad. Seems to be some strong factions developing. There are those who would like to throw you in the clink, those who suggest you retire to the nearest booby hatch, and those who swear by all the windings of our local cyclotron that they're going to figure out just what you’ve built into these gadgets. Also had a note from Keyes advising me to stay firmly shut up regarding Project L. I trust I may be among the first to receive enlightenment.”
Mart chuckled as he showed the letter to Berk. “I can imagine what it must have cost Jennings to write that note,” he said. “He’ll go into a deep spin if he doesn’t get the answer pretty soon. I imagine that out of all those we have stirred up he is the most likely to find the gimmick.”
“How about that young fellow from Apex?” said Berk. “You said he was a pretty sharp type.”
“He’s an engineer. Whether that gives him more or less to overcome than a theoretical physicist I don’t know. I suspect, however, that we’ll be hearing again, one way or another, from Don Wolfe.”
Through his technological grapevine Mart learned that by the end of the sixth week of rocket sales a specimen had been dissected in nearly every university lab and in every corporation with more than five hundred dollars a year to spend on basic research. He learned also that Sam had received an order directly from the United States Bureau of Standards for one dozen Nagle Rockets. He was even more pleased when the grapevine came up with the dope that they were actually for trans-shipment to an AEC lab, and that the Bureau had bought its own rockets at the local five and ten.