Thomas made a noise suggesting sympathy.

“I could stand it for myself alone,” said Pete gloomily. “Even Arthur, in his simple, kangaroo’s heart, bears up well. But Daisy! There’s the rub! Daisy!”

“Daisy, sir?”

“My fiancée,” said Pete. “She’s in the Green Paradise floor show. She is technically Arthur’s owner. I told Daisy, Thomas, that I had inherited a fortune. And she’s going to be disappointed.”

“Too bad, sir,” said Thomas.

“That statement is one of humorous underemphasis, Thomas. Daisy is not a person to take disappointments lightly. When I explain that my uncle’s fortune has flown off into the fourth dimension, Daisy is going to look absent-minded and stop listening. Did you ever try to make love to a girl who looked absent-minded?”

“No, sir,” said Thomas. “But about lunch, sir—”

“We’ll have to pay for it. Damn!” Pete said morbidly. “I’ve just forty cents in my clothes, Thomas, and Arthur at least mustn’t be allowed to starve. Daisy wouldn’t like it. Let’s see!”

He moved away from the desk and surveyed the laboratory with a predatory air. It was not exactly a homey place. There was a skeletonlike thing of iron rods, some four feet high. Thomas had said it was a tesseract—a model of a cube existing in four dimensions instead of three.

To Pete, it looked rather like a medieval instrument of torture—something to be used in theological argument with a heretic. Pete could not imagine anybody but his uncle wanting it. There were other pieces of apparatus of all sizes, but largely dismantled. They looked like the product of someone putting vast amounts of money and patience into an effort to do something which would be unsatisfactory when accomplished.

“There’s nothing here to pawn,” said Pete depressedly. “Not even anything I could use for a hand organ, with Arthur substituting for the monkey!”

“There’s the demonstrator, sir,” said Thomas hopefully. “Your uncle finished it, sir, and it worked, and he had a stroke, sir.”