BRATTON'S IDEA

By MANLY WADE WELLMAN

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Comet December 40. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Old Bratton, janitor at the studios of Station XCV in Hollywood, was as gaunt as Karloff, as saturnine as Rathbone, as enigmatic as Lugosi. He was unique among Californians in professing absolutely no motion picture ambitions. Once, it is true, a director had stopped him on the street and offered to test him for a featured role, but old Bratton had refused with loud indignation when he heard that the role would be that of a mad scientist. Old Bratton was touchy about mad scientists, because he was one.

For a time he had been a studio electrician, competent though touchy; but then it developed that he had lied about his age—he was really eighty years old, and he had been fooling with electricity ever since Edison put apparatus of various sorts within the reach of everyone. Studio rules imposed pretty strict age limits on the various jobs, and so he was demoted to a janitorship.

He accepted, grumbling, because he needed money for the pursuit he had dreamed of when a boy and maintained from his youth onward. In his little two-room apartment he had gathered a great jumble of equipment—coils, transformers, cathodes, lenses, terminals—some of it bought new, some salvaged from studio junk, and a great deal curiously made and not to be duplicated elsewhere save in the eccentric mind of its maker. For old Bratton, with the aid of electricity, thought to create life.

"Electricity is life," he would murmur, quoting Dr. C. W. Roback, who had been venerable when old Bratton was young. And again: "All these idiots think that 'Frankenstein' is a romance and 'R.U.R.' a flight of fancy. But all robot stories are full of truth. I'll show them."

But he hadn't shown them yet, and he was eighty-two. His mechanical arrangements were wonderful and crammed with power. They could make dead frogs kick, dead birds flutter. They could make the metal figures he constructed, whether large or small, stir and seem about to wake. But only while the current animated them.

"The fault isn't with the machine," he would say again, speaking aloud but taking care none overheard. "It's perfect—I've seen to that. No, it's in the figures. They're too clumsy and creaky. All the parts are good, but 

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