"I thought you knew him well. It is a surprise to me to find that there
is any prominent man who is not an especial friend of yours. At any rate
you know him as well as anyone of the staff, so I'll give you the
assignment."

"What's he up to now?" I asked.

"He's going to try to punch a hole in the heaviside layer."

"But that's impossible," I cried. "How can anyone...."

My voice died away in silence. True enough, the idea of trying to make a
permanent hole in a field of magnetic force was absurd, but even as I
spoke I remembered that Jim Carpenter had never agreed to the opinion
almost unanimously held by our scientists as to the true nature of the
heaviside layer.

"It may be impossible," replied McQuarrie dryly, "but you are not hired
by this paper as a scientific consultant. For some reason, God alone
knows why, the owner thinks that you are a reporter. Get down there and
try to prove he is right by digging up a few facts about Carpenter's
attempt. Wire your stuff in and Peavey will write it up. On this one
occasion, please try to conceal your erudition and send in your story in
simple words of one syllable which uneducated men like Peavey and me can
comprehend. That's all."

* * * * *

He turned again to his desk and I left the room. At one time I would
have come from such an interview with my face burning, but McQuarrie's
vitriol slid off me like water off a duck's back. He didn't really mean
half of what he said, and he knew as well as I did that his crack about
my holding my job with the Clarion as a matter of pull was grossly
unjust. It is true that I knew Trimble, the owner of the Clarion, fairly
well, but I got my job without any aid from him. McQuarrie himself hired
me and I held my job because he hadn't fired me, despite the caustic
remarks which he addressed to me. I had made the mistake when I first
got on the paper of letting McQuarrie know that I was a graduate
electrical engineer from Leland University, and he had held it against
me from that day on. I don't know whether he really held it seriously
against me or not, but what I have written above is a fair sample of his
usual manner toward me.

In point of fact I had greatly minimized the extent of my acquaintance
with Jim Carpenter. I had been in Leland at the same time that he was
and had known him quite well. When I graduated, which was two years
after he did, I worked for about a year in his laboratory, a