learned that the co-inventor of the method is now a mental wreck."

Next day, without telling Helen, I drew out our thirty thousand and Carter and I signed the partnership papers.

He'd kept Doc Kindler's name out, as he said. And he'd decided to call our firm the "Electro-Education Company."

Carter rented a small building up in the Bronx, and there we put up the apparatus that he assembled from the stuff I bought.

"How about those learning-tapes, Carter?" I asked him at the end of the week. "We've got to be able to sell people more than just French."

He grinned at me. "I've got a lot of tapes on every subject, all ready. You see, some of the best scientists and scholars in the world are on Gotham University's faculty. Under pretext of X-raying their brains, I used the scanner to make tapes of everything they know."

That kind of shocked me. "It sounds like stealing their knowledge, without them suspecting it. I don't want anything like that."

"Stealing?" Carter answered quickly. "Why, of course not! We'll pay them a fat royalty every time we use the tapes, of course."

We tried the tapes out on each other. They worked fine. I went home that night, bursting with a dozen professors' knowledge.

Helen had her brother Harry and his wife for dinner that night. Harry has always snooted me, on account I'm an electrician while he went to college and works in an office.

Tonight, I was loaded for bear when he started making one of his highbrow cracks to show off. It was a crack about astronomy.

"Harry, you're a million miles off base," I told him. "The Riemannian conception of space you're talking about is a dead pigeon. It's been proved mathematically—" and here I went into the equations.

Helen and Harry and his wife all looked at me bug-eyed. I kind of enjoyed it, and I carried on from there.

I delved into ancient history, gave some chatty remarks on modern biophysical theory, and then compared a Sanskrit drama with an old Greek tragedy by quoting yards of each in the original.

"Where in the name of all that's holy did you pick up all that, Pete?" gasped Harry.

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