He reasoned, “Between relatives a retainer is a formality. As a client and as an uncle, you owe me absolute loyalty. And besides, if you do not help me out I will tie your legs behind your neck and dribble you like a basketball.”

Well, as a lawyer, I am always susceptible to logic. I said, “I give up. I surrender. You win.”

He let me drop. And then – this is the part that seems most unbelievable to me when I look back at it all – I got an idea.

It was a whale of an idea. A piperoo. The one in a lifetime that everyone gets once in a lifetime.

I didn’t tell Uncle Otto the whole thing at the time. I wanted a few days to think about it. But I told him what to do. I told him he would have to go to Washington. It wasn’t easy to argue him into it, but, on the other hand, if you know my uncle Otto, there are ways.

I found two ten-dollar bills lurking pitifully in my wallet and gave them to him.

I said, “I’ll make out a check for the train fare and you can keep the two tens if it turns out I’m being dishonest with you.”

He considered. “A fool to risk twenty dollars for nothing you aren’t,” he admitted. He was right, too…

He was back in two days and pronounced the object focused. After all, it was on public view. It’s in a nitrogen-filled, air-tight case, but my uncle Otto said that didn’t matter. And back in the laboratory, four hundred miles away. the focusing remained accurate. My uncle Otto assured me of that, too.

I said, “Two things, Uncle Otto, before we do anything.”

“What? What? What?” He went on at greater length, “What? What? What? What”

I gathered he was growing anxious. I said, “Are you sure that if we bring into the present a piece of something out of the past, that piece won’t disappear out of the object as it now exists?”

My uncle Otto cracked his large knuckles and said, “We are creating new matter, not stealing old. Why else should we enormous energy need?”