* * *
It was the click of the door latch that made Jonas Glebe glance up quickly. He blinked, surprised to notice how much the gloom of the winter afternoon had closed in. The small living room was cold and full of grey shadows. Against the solitary window with its faded net curtains the rain was battering relentlessly.
“Why, dad, what on earth’s the idea?” Margaret Glebe came into the gloomy room and switched on the light. Her father blinked in the abrupt glare and Margaret, her wet rainproof gleaming, observed him in concern.
“Anything the matter, dad?” She came over to him quickly. “You’re not—not ill or anything?”
“Bless you, dear, no. I was just lost in thought. I sort of forgot everything.”
Margaret gave a little sigh of relief. “Oh well, if that’s all! Y’know, you’re a terrible one to look after yourself. Fire’s not on, and you were sitting in the dark. Next thing we know you’ll be catching bronchitis. Do you realise it’s nearly six o’clock? I got home a little earlier this evening: Mary’s taking the cash-desk for me.”
“Oh— Six o’clock? Is it?” Jonas Glebe stirred stiffly and squinted at the clock on the mantelshelf. “I hadn’t realised. I suppose one doesn’t when thinking.”
“No, dad, I suppose not.” By this time Margaret had pulled off her rainproof and switched the kettle in the adjoining kitchen. She turned to look through the open doorway and said quietly: “I just wish your thinking did you some good, that’s all. You’ve been at it for years, ever since I was a little girl anyway, and I can’t remember how much benefit it brought you beyond a cheque for a gadget maybe.”
Her father was silent, absently studying her. She was good-looking after a fashion—dark, as her mother had been with straight features and a practical chin. She had none of her father’s abstractedness, and certainly none of his inner scientific genius. Her present occupation was that of cashier at a cinema: her ambition, to find a young man who could take a load from her shoulders.
“I suppose I am a bit of a nuisance,” her father sighed, getting to his feet.
“Maybe I should have married earlier then you wouldn’t have such an old father. I’m pretty much in your way, dear, aren’t I?”
“Dad how can you say such a thing!” Margaret kissed him gently, and then gave him a serious look. “You’re never in my way! You’ve misconstrued what I mean. I think you don’t get a just reward for the things you can do. You’re one of the best scientists in the country—in the world in fact—and what happens? They say you’re too old to join a scientific organization—too old at sixty-two—and your best ideas you forget to patent or something, and somebody else nets a fortune on them whilst you get a pittance. It isn’t right, dad. I don’t want to sound as though I’m lecturing you, but you ought to wake up.”
“And do what, my dear?”
“Well—something.” Margaret looked vaguely about her. “Some kind of quiet job perhaps, and do your scientific dabbling in your spare time.”
Jonas Glebe shook his head. “Believe me, Marg, if I took a job it wouldn’t be doing my employer a service, or myself either. I’d be thinking of other things all the time and my paid work would suffer in consequence. No, once you’re a scientist there’s nothing else you can do properly; not when you get to my age, anyhow. I realise that a job might improve our surroundings, but is that so very important. We’re happy, aren’t we?”
“Yes, we’re happy, but—” Margaret fell silent, her eyes on the untidy little living room. Then she glanced towards the doors that led to the two small bedrooms.
“A man doesn’t need anything more than a roof over his head where he can work out his problems,” Jonas Glebe said. “A youngster like you needs much more of course, but you have it. You’re out all day, and in the evening too if you wish. You don’t sec much of this flatlet of ours. If you think it worries me, it doesn’t. A man can have thoughts which blind him to his surroundings.”
The girl went across to the kettle as it clicked off. Busy with her own thoughts she made the tea, and then set out the table. During the process her gaze travelled to the stacks of notes on the little bureau at which her father invariably worked. She had seen notes like that for as long as she could remember and it assaulted her practical mind that nothing ever seemed to come of them.
“Just what line of thought prompted you to sit in the dark with the electric fire switched off?” she asked, when she and her father were seated at the simple tea.
“That? Oh, I had the dim beginnings of an idea, only I’m not sure whether I should go ahead with it. It’s an idea so simple and yet so diabolical I’m almost afraid to speculate further.”
“Simple yet diabolical?” Margaret gave a frown. “How could it be?”
“It’s a bomb,” her father explained simply, buttering a slice of teacake.
“Oh! Don’t you think the world’s had enough of bombs and slaughter without adding more? Anyway, what else can there be in bombs? We’ve already got the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. Don’t tell me you’ve thought of one that’s even more horrible?”
“No. My bomb has nothing to do with a particular explosive: that could be left to the organisation buying the bomb. It’s just an empty case to start with and you can put in it what you like, from plutonium to ordinary gunpowder. Just the same it’s—fiendish.”
Margaret puzzled the business out to herself as her father became momentarily silent, musing to himself. Then he stirred a little as he realised his daughter’s eyes were upon him.
“It’s so tremendously simple,” he said. “I can’t think why it never occurred to me before—or if not to me then to an inventor of armaments somewhere.”
“You’re not being frightfully explicit, dad!”
Jonas Glebe smiled. “Sorry, dear. That’s because I haven’t worked out the details. Not much use me claiming I have something wonderful and starting to explain it until I’m sure, is there?”
“Then you do intend to go ahead with this thing, diabolical or otherwise?”
“I think somehow that I should.” Jonas Glebe looked absently in front of him. “Don’t ask me why: just an impulse. After all, even if the notion is diabolical it doesn’t say the bomb will ever be used, does it? It might become such a deterrent to war that no one will ever start one again. That would be quite an achievement! That I, Jonas Glebe, should be the man who stopped war.”
Margaret shook her head slowly. “You’re a dreamer, dad, plain and simple. Neither you nor anybody else will ever stop war as long as there are human beings. There’ll always be somebody trying to be top dog. If I were you I’d forget all about the idea, and invent something simple—like an automatic teapot which brews and pours itself for instance.”
Jonas Glebe only smiled. He did not comment. The far-away look was back in his eyes and Margaret knew what that meant. She gave up the argument and turned her attention to finishing her tea. After it was over she cleared away, and then departed to her bedroom. Half-an-hour later she reappeared to find her father seated by the fire, figuring industriously.
“Don’t mind if I go out, dad?” she asked. “I’ve a date
