ested in a thing like that--a fractional weight decrease in a
clumsy model, certainly not enough to lift the weight of the generator.
No one wrapped up in massive fuel consumption, tons of lift and such is
going to have time to worry about a crackpot who thinks he has found a
minor slip in Newton's laws."

"You think they will now?" the young man asked, cracking his knuckles
impatiently.

"I _know_ they will. The tensile strength of that thread is correctly
adjusted to the weight of the model. The thread will break if you try to
lift the model with it. Yet you can lift the model--after a small
increment of its weight has been removed by the coils. This is going to
bug these men. Nobody is going to ask them to solve the problem or
concern themselves with it. But it will nag at them because they know
this effect can't possibly exist. They'll see at once that the
magnetic-wave theory is nonsense. Or perhaps true? We don't know. But
they will all be thinking about it and worrying about it. Someone is
going to experiment in his basement--just as a hobby of course--to find
the cause of the error. And he or someone else is going to find out what
makes those coils work, or maybe a way to improve them!"

"And we have the patents...."

"Correct. They will be doing the research that will take them out of the
massive-lift-propulsion business and into the field of pure space
flight."

"And in doing so they will be making us rich--whenever the time comes to
manufacture," the young man said cynically.

"We'll all be rich, son," the older man said, patting him on the
shoulder. "Believe me, you're not going to recognize this old world ten
years from now."

Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from _Analog_ April 1962. Extensive research
did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors
have been corrected without note.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Toy Shop, by Henry Maxwell Dempsey

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