Time Travail Read Online Free Page A

wonders,” was his blanket verdict on
them all. But what did he know about the subject? He’d look at
girls slyly and quickly away when they looked back. To my knowledge
he never came closer to a girl than with those quick sly glances or
listening, absorbed, to my paid stories of hot involvement. Once in
the street, though, his mother collapsed and I remember how he
cried, “Momma! Momma!” and helped her up, her face filled with pain
from the sprained ankle and joy at his outcry.
    That was the only emotional response to
another human being I ever witnessed in him. But maybe he kept it
hidden as I did the photo of Wendy.
    So I made allowances for his compensation,
the way he tended to shove his top-heavy intellectual weight about.
When he did it a little too contemptuously I’d do a Lenny on him.
I’d seen Of
Mice and Men six times.
I’d go slack-jawed, glassy-eyed, dangly-armed and say very loudly:
“Aw, talk United States, George. I like rabbits, George.” When I
did it in a crowded street he’d walk much faster muttering: “Cut it
out, you moron,” but I’d lope after him bellowing: “I like to pet
rabbits and girls, George. But then they don’t move no more. How
come they don’t move no more, George, huh?”
     
    The bond between us was science. We were into
science back in the days when pre-teenagers could duplicate most of
the great scientific breakthroughs with stuff swiped from hardware
stores or picked up from junk-heaps. Even a feeble-minded kid could
build an operating radio-set with a crystal of lead-ore (it comes
back now: galena, PbS) and a wire (a “cat’s-whisker” it was
called). Everything was easier in those days. There were no
computers or TV sets to demoralize us, to say nothing of prodigious
things like Mark I Particle Detectors.
    I remember the Static Electricity Machine he
rigged up. Great disks of varnished glass revolved in counter
movement. Wires led to big jars lined inside and outside with tin
foil. “Leyden-jars,” they were called. The machine was powered by
my feet via a stationary bike. My scalp would start crawling as the
charge built up. Finally there came a crackle and a miniature bolt
of lightning between the brass balls.
    With the discharge I would slump panting over
the handlebars. It could kill you, he said and it nearly did me,
indirectly, each time I manufactured the bolt. I didn’t feel like
Zeus. Already at that age he was playing around with death and I
was assisting him in a subaltern capacity.
    For an easier source of high-potential
electricity, we built a Ruhmkorff Coil. The name and the
rattlesnake sound of the circuit-breaking vibrator made me think of
some dangerous Russian serpent coiled ready to spring with
electric-spark fangs. It took four months to construct with miles
of fine copper wire intricately wound about a core of iron rods.
Hooked up to four big dry cells, this induction coil spat out a
two-inch spark and an acrid smell of ozone. We also built motors,
condensers and finally a big DC dynamo.
    With that dynamo and my leg-muscles we
produced hydrogen and chlorine through electrolysis of brine. The
bubbles of hydrogen that rose from one of the carbon electrodes
made satisfying popping sounds in contact with a lighted match.
With the chlorine that bubbled up from the other electrode we
killed white mice. It was his idea. But I lent myself to it and
possibly enjoyed the mouse’s reaction to the yellow-green gas. He
himself didn’t enjoy it. He was too busy measuring the exact dose
that proved lethal.
    Electrolysis got us on to chemistry. There
was enough land about our shack for violent experiments involving
gun cotton (easy: cotton dipped in a mixture of sulfuric and nitric
acid) and thermit incendiary-bombs of the sort the Luftwaffe would soon be distributing all
over London: ferrous oxide I think and aluminum powder. Even the
fuse was spectacular: a ribbon of magnesium producing an intense
blue-white star hissing down to the bomb.
    You