“It does,” said Lamont savagely, his hands clearly balling into fists within his lab coat pockets. “It means Hallam and me. It means that fool-hero, Dr. Frederick Hallam and me. We’re different intelligences because when I talk to him he doesn’t understand. His idiot face gets redder and his eyes bulge and his ears block. I’d say his mind stops functioning, but I lack the proof of any other state from which it might stop.”
Bronowski murmured, “What a way to speak of the Father of the Electron Pump.”
“That’s it. Reputed Father of the Electron Pump. A bastard birth, if ever there was one. His contribution was least in substance. I know.”
“I know, too. You’ve told me often,” and Bronowski tossed another peanut into the air. He didn’t miss.
1
It had happened thirty years before, Frederick Hallam was a radiochemist, with the print on his doctoral dissertation still wet and with no sign whatever of being a world-shaker.
What began the shaking of the world was the fact that a dusty reagent bottle marked “Tungsten Metal” stood on his desk. It wasn’t his; he had never used it. It was a legacy from some dim day when some past inhabitant of the office had wanted tungsten for some long-forgotten reason. It wasn’t even really tungsten any more. It consisted of small pellets of what was now heavily layered with oxide— gray and dusty. No use to anyone.
And one day Hallam entered the laboratory (well, it was October 3, 2070, to be exact), got to work, stopped shortly before 10 a.m., stared transfixed at the bottle, and lifted it. It was as dusty as ever, the label as faded, but he called out, “God damn it; who the hell has been tampering with this?”
That, at least, was the account of Denison, who overheard the remark and who told it to Lamont a generation later. The official tale of the discovery, as reported in the books, leaves out the phraseology. One gets the impression of a keen-eyed chemist, aware of change and instantly drawing deep-seated deductions.