LIFE WORK OF PROFESSOR MUNTZ, by Murray Leinster
Nobody would ordinarily have thought of Mr. Grebb and Professor Muntz in the same breath, so to speak, yet their careers impinged upon each other remarkably. Mr. Grebb was a large, coarse person, with large coarse manners and large coarse pores on an oversized nose. He drove a beer truck for the Ajax Brewing Company, and his one dominant desire was to get something on Joe Hallix, who as head of the delivery service for Ajax, was his immediate boss.
Professor Muntz, on the other hand, was the passionately shy and mouselike author of The Mathematics of Multiple Time-Tracks, who vanished precipitately when he found himself famous. In that abstruse work he referred worriedly to experimental evidence of parallel time-tracks, and other physicists converged upon him with hopeful gleams in their eyes, and he fled.
Professor Muntz couldn’t talk to people. But they wanted to know about his experiments. They couldn’t make any. They didn’t know how to start, and to them the whole thing had been abstract theory. But he had made experiments and they wanted to ask about them, so he ran away in an agony of shyness.
That was that. No one human being could seem less likely to be affected by Professor Muntz’ life-work than Mr. Grebb, and no life-work could seem more certainly immune to Mr. Grebb than Professor Muntz’. But life is full of paradoxes, and the theory of multiple time-tracks is even fuller. Therefore…
Mr. Grebb waked when his alarm clock rang stridently beside his ear. His eyes still closed, he numbly reached out a large, hairy ham of a hand and threw the alarm clock fiercely, across the room. But it was a very tough alarm clock. It continued to ring in a far corner, battered and bruised, its glass long gone, and dented so that it had a rakish and completely disreputable appearance. But it rang defiantly. It rang stridently. It rang naggingly. Its tone seemed to have something of the quality of a Bronx cheer.
Its tumult penetrated to the sleep drugged recesses of what Mr. Grebb considered his brain. It reminded him of the hour. Of the bright and merry sunshine. It was a clarion call to duty and the service of the Ajax Brewing Company. And in that context it was a reminder of the existence of Joe Hallix, and it was a raspberry.
* * * *
Mr. Grebb opened one vaguely bloodshot eye. Rage appeared in it. The other eye opened. Fury developed. He swore heavily at the name and thought of Joe Hallix, who would have him docked if he were late. The alarm clock-rang on, jeering.
Mr. Grebb got out of bed, rumbling bitterly, and put on his clothes. He slept in his underwear, so he had merely to pull on his pants, slide into a brightly-checked flannel shirt, and pull on his shoes. He went down to breakfast, glowering.
His landlady discreetly served him coffee without even a good-morning. She presented a huge stack of pancakes and vast quantities of sausage. He ate, largely and coarsely. He finished up the pancakes with thick molasses, wiping up his plate. He drank more coffee. A certain gloomy peace descended upon him.
“Mr. Grebb—” said his landlady hopefully.
He scowled, then remembered that his board was paid. He relaxed and fumbled out a cigarette which looked very small in his hairy fingers. “Yeah?”
“I wondered if I could ask your advice,” his landlady went on. “I don’t know anything about machinery, Mr. Grebb, and I thought you’d know all about it, being you drive a truck.”
Mr. Grebb was pleased at the tribute.
“The lodger who had your room, Mr. Grebb,” said the landlady, “was a very nice little man. But one day he dodged a truck and jumped in front of a bus, and they took him to the hospital and he died there. And the police came and took his things to pay the hospital bill and to try to find his family. I don’t know if they did. And I was so flustered about him getting killed like that that I forget about him owing me a week’s board, and I didn’t think about the box until I went down in the cellar yesterday and noticed it.”
Mr. Grebb’s hand caressed his stomach. He loosened his belt a trifle.
“Yeah?” he said encouragingly.
“He had a box he asked to have put down in the cellar, and I forgot to tell the police about it. But he did owe me a week’s board. So yesterday when I noticed the box I peeked in between the slats, and it’s a sort of machine. So I thought I’d get you to look at it. If it’s valuable I’ll tell the police and they can sell it and maybe pay me what he owed me.”
“Huh!” said Mr. Grebb. “Them cops! Grafters, all of ’em! You keep the thing. Use it. What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know what it’s for,” said the landlady. “Would you look at it, Mr. Grebb?”
“Sure!” said Mr. Grebb amiably. “If it’s valuable I guess I know a place to sell it.”
As a matter of fact, he did not. But he figured that somewhere among his acquaintances he could find somebody who would know how to sell almost anything with no questions asked, and he estimated that this landlady would take his word for what he sold it for. Which should mean a quick buck or two. The thought was cheering.
“I got a coupla minutes,” he said generously. “I’ll look now.”
He followed his landlady down the rickety cellar stairs. He saw the crate. He did not bother to read the express tag on it, or he would have seen that it was addressed to Professor Aldous Muntz at this street and number. He wouldn’t have thought of The Mathematics of Multiple Time-Tracks at that, though. He knew nothing of abstruse speculations on the nature of space and time and reality. But the landlady turned on a drop-light and he poked at the paper wrapping inside the crate.
There were many wires. There were two or three radio tubes. There were transformer coils, and there was a row of dials marked, Milliamperes, Kilovolts, and so on.
He pulled away the crating boards. He saw that it was not a factory-made contrivance. It was not enclosed in a mass-production case. All the works were in plain view, though some were swathed in protective coverings. To Mr. Grebb it looked vaguely like a home-made radio. He was disappointed.
The doorbell rang upstairs. The landlady said: “I’d better answer the bell. You just look it over, Mr. Grebb.”
She went up. Mr. Grebb shook his head sadly. It was not something that could be sold at a standard hot-goods price, with a profit for himself. But he saw an extension cord with a bayonet plug at the end. He pulled it out and plugged it into the outlet of the dangling cellar light.
Nothing happened. There was a row of switches. He poked one or two, experimentally. Still nothing happened. He did not hear music or even an enthusiastic voice telling of the marvelous new product, Reeko, a refined deodorant and double your money back if your best friends can smell you. The machine remained inert and useless. He did not notice that a tiny dial went over to “20” on the milliampere scale and to “19.6” on the kilovolt dial.
He turned and lumbered upstairs, disgusted. Not a chance for a sudden buck. Which was just his kind of luck, he thought. Like having Joe Hallix for a boss.
“I ain’t got time to look it over good,” he told his landlady. “I’ll see about it later.”
He put on his hat and windbreaker and went out the front door. He saw the morning paper on the porch. He picked it up and stuffed it in his pocket. It belonged to his landlady, but she had not seen him take it. It would be convenient to read on the bus.
