Letters and telephone calls reported an increasing frenzy building up in all these laboratories as the scientists tinkered with the little gadget, trying to find out its basis of operation and scale it up to useful load size. He didn’t get too much from the AEC labs, but he was pretty sure the personnel there were participating in the maddening frustration reported from the Bureau of Standards and elsewhere.
With apprehension too, he waited for reports of injuries resulting from imprudent attacks on the problem. With evident good fortune, however, the grapevine had carried the news of the West Coast minor disasters and precautions were being taken. An occasional flash burn and destruction of carelessly placed equipment were all that came to his attention.
By Christmas the sale of the Nagle Rocket and the scientific frustration created by it had reached a peak. Joe Baird continued to throw occasional dark hints of vast, sinister doings on the part of the toy’s creator. Sam Marvenstein had doubled the size of his plant not once but twice. Up to two days before Christmas he was shipping rockets in carload lots.
And then it was over. With the end of the Christmas season, the frantic production wheezed to a halt. Through the offices of St. Nick and Sam Marvenstein, virtually every potential customer for a Nagle Rocket had his wants satisfied.
The day after New Year’s, Mart called Sam down to the offices of Research Consultants. As the manufacturer sat down by the desk, Mart handed him a cagelike dingus about six inches in diameter.
“The successor to the Nagle Rocket,” Mart said.
Sam looked puzzled. He turned the contraption over in his hands a couple of times and shifted so the light from the window fell through the spaces between the wires to better advantage.
“I suppose it’s really quite clever,” sighed Sam. “But exactly what does it do?”
“We’re tentatively calling it the Teleport,” said Mart. “I imagine you can think up a name with more sales appeal. You may remember reading about teleportation in a science-fiction magazine you mentioned when we first met.”
Sam’s face brightened. “Sure... I remember now! That’s the story where the fellow sends his girl across the country by radio and she comes out the other end twins so that everybody is happy and don’t need to fight over her any more.”
“Roughly,” said Mart. “Just roughly. So here’s what the gadget does. You see that this aluminum disk bisects the spherical cage and that a wire goes through the hole in the center of the disk. On one side there is a bead on the wire. Now I push the button at one pole of the sphere, where the cage wires come together with the single wire through the middle. Now the bead is on the other side of the disk.”
He handed the gadget back to Sam. “Try it yourself. Press the little button at the pole of the sphere.”
Sam took it again, a look of disappointment verging on repugnance showing on his face. “I don’t get it,” he said. “There’s nothing to that. Pushing a bead along the wire that goes through the hole in a piece of metal —”
“Look closely, Sam, and push the button.”
Sam did so, settling the device in a shaft of sunlight again and squinting through the wires of the cage. He pressed with his thumb. Instantly, the bead on the interior wire vanished from one side of the disk and appeared on the other.
“I still don’t see,” said Sam in disappointment. Then he stopped. “Hey, wait a minute! How did that bead get through there? There’s no hole for it to go through. The wire fills up the hole!”
Mart nodded benignly. “Right. Do you think that might be a sort of flash in the pan gadget that would interest the small fry — and maybe their older brothers and sisters — to the tune of a couple of hundred thousand copies?”
“Yeah, I guess maybe it would sell,” Sam muttered as he continued staring into the wire framework, pressing the button at first one pole and then the other. “But there’s gotta be a hole in the disk! There’s gotta be a way for the bead to get through,” he said. “You gotta tell me!”
III.
It wasn’t expected that the Teleport would have the same magnitude of success as the rocket had enjoyed. They advertised the new toy for a dollar and placed one-inch ads in the mail-order sections of the home owners’ and mechanics’ magazines as well as the comic books. The results were better than expected.
Mart would have been content with a couple gross well placed sales. And the grapevine told him that these were made very early in the history of the Teleport. They were the ones made to the laboratories already investigating the rocket.
As soon as he was certain that the second toy was being dismantled and investigated by the right people, Mart left all details of its manufacture and sales to Sam Marvenstein and turned his attention to the third project.
He and Berk were prepared to embark upon a career of professional gambling.
As if they had not already done that some time ago — Carolyn Nagle reminded them during their endless dinnertime discussions of the project.
It would be difficult for a single gambling house to add much, percentage-wise, to the glitter of the Las Vegas night, and the Volcano Club didn’t try — not very hard anyway. There was a medium-size neon sign atop the building, supposedly reminiscent of the last days of Pompeii, with neon waves of lava washing down the sides of the darkening cone and bits of fire popping out like bright balls from the Volcano’s mouth. It was a good sign, but it had to be searched for in the ever-present glow that hung over the city like the nebulous hopes of a gambler about to make his final tilt with the one-armed bandits.
It was a little out of the way, too, being at the end of the block on Bandit Alley in an old building that used to house a drugstore. Not being gamblers by nature, Mart and Berk had not wanted to sink a lot of money into the initial project, but at the end of the first two weeks they were genuinely disappointed.
They stood on the sidewalk outside their nearly empty club, watching the prancing, beckoning lights farther uptown. “It’s the location,” said Berk gloomily. “I told you we should get a spot closer to the center of things. A new game in an out-of-the-way location is an almost impossible combination. The gamblers are a mob. You don’t attract the individual, you attract the group.”
“Let’s hold out for a few more days,” said Mart. “If business doesn’t pick up by then, we’ll make some kind of a change. Maybe we should have hired some better looking dames.” He glanced inside at the girls taking bets from the scattering of customer. "I don’t see how we could have done much better, though. Carolyn is kicking about them now. She claims the proper type of character for the job is a sourdough in a cracked, green eyeshade.”
“Let’s move out of the doorway. Looks like this might be a customer.”
They watched with mild satisfaction as the approaching stranger stopped, glanced a moment at the sign hanging above, then moved inside the club. Their satisfaction vanished as he emerged a moment later. He looked about and seemed to spot them with some difficulty.
“Mr. Nagle —?” he said as he moved toward them.
“Yes,” said Mart. It was apparent now that the man had been drinking somewhat and was just barely over the edge of feeling high.
“I want to know how this thing works. I won’t use it until you tell me how it works.”
“Of course, be glad to,” said Mart. He sighed and took the man’s arm.
Inside, they moved around to the side of the Volcano where they would not obscure the vision of any customer seated in the amphitheater around the gambling device. The lights of the room were dim, most of the illumination coming through the plastic Volcano cone. It was as massive as three or four juke boxes and easily topped them in the garishness of its lighting. Waves of light rippled down the sides of the cone, and inside, a dozen brightly colored balls danced madly on a diaphragm across the bottom of the hole that pierced the axis of the cone.