His father looked serious—then he chuckled. "No doubt you would have done the same thing, if you could have. But I wonder why." He took Tommie's arm, somewhat gingerly. "Hm." He took the other arm. "He doesn't do it when we touch him. It must be her repellent personality, or some phase of it. Insincerity, do you suppose?"

Tommie himself guessed that was it. Mrs. Jones never said what she meant, and never meant what she said. That was what made Tommie writhe.

His mother and father talked it over, and in the end they didn't seem too worried about him. "We'll see," said his father, "what develops." Then his father began to walk around the yard, stretching and sunning like an orange oriole. He finally sat down in the lawn-chair, and Tommie's mother sat beside him, and that worried look came back on his father's face.

"I wish I knew what to say," he murmured absently. "It might be the chance of a lifetime. The man claims he's got a tube that will make it possible to send television around the earth. It's worth a lot of millions if it works."

"Can't you test it?"

Dad shook his head. "It would take twenty-five thousand to test it. We'd need a lot of equipment. And you can't take it to any of the big manufacturers, because you'd lose it fast if they discovered it would work. That's where the gamble comes in. I'd have to back it, sight unseen."

"There are lots of gyp artists going around," his mother suggested.

"Yes, but darn it, Gwynne, once in a while there's the real thing drops in your lap, too. Remember Clarence Fisher? He ran into the same kind of deal—a naive fellow from the country somewhere, had a new idea for automatic heat control in an electric circuit that did away with contacts. Something brand new. Clarence took a chance, and look at him now. Winters in Florida, summers in Acapulco. No worries about anything. Gosh!"

Tommie thought he'd rather live in the mountains, where he could smell the pine-trees.

"Can't you check up on Mr. Franklin?"

"I've checked. Not really much background. Claims he's been roaming a lot. Could be, too. The whole deal is, I guess, we've got a good little business making ordinary television tubes, and it's a question whether we want to be sure of a decent living or take a chance on a fortune."

"Maybe 

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