Give me back the—”
But before she could ask him, Tiny had bounded to Mrs. Forsythe, taken the book gently out of her hands, and carried it to his mistress. Alistair smiled at her paling mother, took the book, and read until Tiny suddenly seemed to lose interest. He went back to his station by the kitchen cabinet and lay down, yawning.
“That’s that,” said Alistair, closing the book. “In other words, class dismissed. Well, Mum?”
Mrs. Forsythe opened her mouth, closed it again, and shook her head. Alistair loosed a peal of laughter.
“Oh, Mum, Mum,” she gurgled through her laughter. “History has been made. Mum, darling, you’re speechless!”
“I am not,” said Mrs. Forsythe gruffly. “I…I think well, what do you know! You’re right! I am!”
When they had their breath back—yes, Mrs. Forsythe joined in, for Alistair’s statement was indeed true—Alistair picked up the book and said, “Now look, Mum, it’s almost time for my session with Tiny. Oh, yes; it’s a regular thing and he certainly is leading me into some fascinating byways.”
“Like what?”
“Like the old impossible problem of casting tungsten, for example. You know, there is a way to do it.”
“You don’t say! What do you cast it in—a play?”
Alistair wrinkled her straight nose. “Did you ever hear of pressure ice? Water compressed until it forms a solid at what is usually its boiling point?”
“I remember some such.”
“Well, all you need is enough pressure, and a chamber that can take that kind of pressure, and a couple of details like a high-intensity field of umpteen megacycles phased with…I forget the figures; anyhow, that’s the way to go about it.”
“‘If we had some eggs we could have some ham and eggs if we had some ham,’” quoted Mrs. Forsythe. “And besides, I seem to remember something about that pressure ice melting pretty much right now, like so,” and she snapped her fingers. “How do you know your molded tungsten—that’s what it would be, not cast at all—wouldn’t change state the same way?”
“That’s what I’m working on now,” said Alistair calmly. “Come along, Tiny. Mum, you can find your way around all right, can’t you? If you need anything, just sing out. This isn’t a séance, you know.”
“Isn’t it, though?” muttered Mrs. Forsythe as her lithe daughter and the dog bounded up the stairs. She shook her head, went into the kitchen, drew a bucket of water, and carried it down to her car, which had cooled to a simmer. She was dashing careful handfuls of it onto the radiator, before beginning to pour, when her quick ear caught the scrunching of boots on the steep drive.
She looked up to see a young man trudging wearily in the midmorning heat. He wore an old sharkskin suit and carried his coat. In spite of his wilted appearance, his step was firm and his golden hair was crisp in the sunlight. He swung up to Mrs. Forsythe and gave her a grin, all deep blue eyes and good teeth. “Forsythe’s?” he asked in a resonant baritone.
“That’s right,” said Mrs. Forsythe, finding that she had to turn her head from side to side to see both of his shoulders. And yet she and he could swap belts. “You must feel like the Blue Kangaroo here,” she added, slapping her miniature mount on its broiling flank. “Boiled dry.”
“You cahl de cyah de Blue Kangaroo?” he repeated, draping his coat over the door and mopping his forehead with what seemed, to Mrs. Forsythe’s discerning eye, a pure linen handkerchief.
“I do,” she replied, forcing herself not to comment on the young man’s slight but strange accent. “It’s strictly a dry-clutch job and acts like a castellated one. Let the pedal out, she races. Let it out three thirty-seconds of an inch more, and you’re gone from there. Always stopping to walk back and pick up your head. Snaps right off, you know. Carry a bottle of collodion and a couple of splints to put your head back on. Starve to death without a head to eat with. What brings you here?”
In answer he held out a yellow envelope, looking solemnly at her head and neck, then at the car, his face quiet, his eyes crinkling with a huge enjoyment.
Mrs. Forsythe glanced at the envelope. “Oh. Telegram. She’s inside. I’ll give it to her. Come on in and have a drink. It’s hotter than the hinges of Hail Columbia, Happy Land. Don’t go wiping your feet like that! By jeepers, that’s enough to give you an inferiority complex! Invite a man in, invite the dust on his feet, too. It’s good, honest dirt and we don’t run to white broadlooms here. Are you afraid of dogs?”
The young man laughed. “Dahgs talk to me, ma’am.”
She glanced at him sharply, opened her mouth to tell him he might just be taken at his word around here, then thought better of it. “Sit down,” she ordered. She bustled up a foaming glass of beer and set it beside him. “I’ll get her down to sign for the wire,” she said. The man half lowered the glass into which he had been jowls-deep, began to speak, found he was alone in the room, laughed suddenly and richly, wiped off the mustache of suds, and dove down for a new one.
Mrs. Forsythe grinned and shook her head as she heard the laughter, and went straight to Alistair’s study. “Alistair!”
“Stop pushing me about the ductility of tungsten, Tiny! You know better than that. Figures are figures, and facts are facts. I think I see what you’re trying to lead me to. All I can say is that if such a thing is possible, I never heard of any equipment that could handle it. Stick around a few years and I’ll hire you a nuclear power plant. Until then, I’m afraid that—”
“Alistair!”
“—there just isn’t…hm-m-m? Yes, Mother?”
“Telegram.”
“Oh. Who from?”
“I don’t know, being only one fortieth of one per cent as psychic as that doghouse Dunninger you have there. In other words, I didn’t open it.”
“Oh, Mum, you’re silly! Of course you could have—oh, well, let’s have it.”
“I haven’t got it. It’s downstairs with Discobolus Junior, who brought it. No one,” she said ecstatically, “has a right to be so tanned with hair that color.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Go on down and sign for the telegram and see for yourself. You will find the maiden’s dream with his golden head in a bucket of suds, all hot and sweaty from his noble efforts in attaining this peak without spikes or alpenstock, with nothing but his pure heart and Western Union to guide him.”
“This maiden’s dream happens to be tungsten treatment,” said Alistair with some irritation. She looked longingly at her work sheet, put down her pencil, and rose. “Stay here, Tiny. I’ll be right back as soon as I have successfully resisted my conniving mother’s latest scheme to drag my red hairing across some young buck’s path to matrimony.” She paused at the door. “Aren’t you staying up here, Mum?”
“Get that hair away from your face,” said her mother grimly. “I am not. I wouldn’t miss this for the world. And don’t pun in front of that young man.
