"Can you—steer the boat?" he demanded insanely.

"Yes, suh!" That was the boy's voice again.

"I'm right where the road to your house turns off," said Murfree. He was acutely aware of the absurdity of standing in fog on a lonely country road, speaking conversationally to the sky. "I'm going to turn in now. Can you follow my headlights?"

"Yes, suh!"

"Then try it," said Murfree. "I'll stop and call up every so often."

He got back in his car and turned into the woods-road. This was not common-sense, but things connected with Bud Gregory rarely were. Bud Gregory could make things. Once he'd made a device which stopped neutrons cold. Period. That was to get even with somebody who'd threatened to sue him.

Once he'd made a device which turned heat-energy into kinetic energy, to make his rickety car pull up the Rockies in his flight from Murfree's knowledge of his abilities, and Murfree's intention to make him work. Once he'd made a gadget which stopped bullets—and guided missiles—and then threw them unerringly back where they started from.[2] And he'd made a device which was a sort of tractor-beam which drew to itself selected substances only.

A bit of iron at one end of a curiously-shaped coil made the device draw to itself all iron in the direction in which it was pointed. But a bit of gold in the same place made it draw gold. Lead, or stone or water or glass, anything placed as a sample at one end of the coil made even the most minute distant particle of the same substance move toward it with an irresistible attraction. Murfree was using that device, now, in Ocean Products, Inc.'s Maryland-coast establishment, and Dr. Murfree was getting much more than ten dollars a day out of it.

But nothing that had happened previously gave him quite as queer a sensation as this. He drove into the trail, winding and twisting through the fog and among growing brush and spindling trees.

From time to time he called upward. Each time a voice answered happily from the emptiness overhead.

Something hammered at his mind, telling him that this was the answer to his journey across the continent, but he was a sane man, after all, and this happening was not sane. He almost drove into Bud's house, in his agitation. He braked just in time as peeling, curling clapboards materialized out of the mist 

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