years."

"Schizophrenic? That's tough." I wondered what it meant. "I guess the old man was a pretty big shot in science, huh?"

"We had just completed the greatest discovery in the history of psychology," Carter said. "He was tops in the field."

I kept on working at the generator, while young James Carter walked up and down the laboratory looking pretty moody.

He kept staring at a big machine in the corner. It was nothing I could recognize, for I'm a good electrician but these crazy scientific hookups are way over my head. To me, it looked something like a permanent wave machine, with a metal cap like the dames put over their heads.

Carter spoke as though he was talking to himself, gritting his teeth as he looked at that big machine.

"A discovery that means millions, billions! If I only had enough money to develop and exploit it!"

I pricked up my ears at that. Scientific discoveries don't interest me so much, but millions interest anybody.

"What is the thing?" I asked. "Some new kind of rig for atomic power?"

"No, no, it's nothing like that," Carter muttered. "It deals with the mind. I could revolutionize the world with this thing if I had money enough to develop improved apparatus."

"Won't the university put up the dough for the stuff you need?" I asked him.

He laughed kind of sour. "Of course they would. But they would also then appropriate all title to it. Whereas if I could develop it myself, it would make me the richest man in history."

That interested me a lot. Here was I, Pete Purdy, with ambitions for Helen and the family we planned to have, and maybe I'd stumbled on a chance to get in on the ground floor of something big.

I got up and went over to Carter and looked at the machine with him.

"How much dough would you need for new apparatus?" I asked. "And what is the discovery, anyway?"

Carter looked at me, his eyes narrowing a little as though he saw me for the first time.

"You mean that you might be interested in investing in it, Birdy?"

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