Now he told me.
"It would have too much energy required. I did not wish the university to inquire what was in here going on. But don't worry! My mathematics cannot wrong be."
I prayed silently that his mathematics not wrong were.
The light grew brighter and there was a humming that filled the laboratory with raucous noise. My uncle Otto turned a knob, then another, then a third.
Do you remember the time a few weeks back when all of upper Manhattan and the Bronx were without electricity for twelve hours because of the damndest overload cut-off in the main power house? I won't say we did that, because I am in no mood to be sued for damages. But I will say this: The electricity went off when my uncle Otto turned the third knob.
Inside the lab, all the lights went nut and I found my self on the floor with a terrific ringing in my ears. My uncle Otto was sprawled across me.
We worked each other to our feet and my uncle Otto found a flashlight.
He howled his anguish. "Fused. Fused. My machine in ruins is. It has to destruction devoted been."
"But the signatures?" I yelled at him. "Did you get them?"
He stopped in mid-cry. "I haven't looked."
He looked, and I closed my eyes. The disappearance of a hundred thousand dollars is not an easy thing to watch.
He cried, "Ah, ha!" and I opened my eyes quickly. He had a square of parchment in his hand some two inches on a side. It had three signatures on it and the top one was that of Rutton Gwinnett.
Now, mind you, the signature was absolutely genuine. It was no fake. There wasn't an atom of fraud about the whole transaction. I want that understood. Lying on my uncle Otto's broad hand was a signature indited with the Georgian hand of Rutton Gwinnett himself on the authentic parchment of the honest-to-God, real-life Declaration of Independence.
It was decided that my uncle Otto would travel down to Washington with the parchment scrap. I was unsatisfactory for the purpose. I was a lawyer. I would be expected to know too much. He was merely a scientific genius, and wasn't expected to know anything. Besides, who could suspect Dr. Otto Schlemmelmayer of anything but the most transparent honesty.
We spent a week arranging our story. I bought a book for the occasion, an old history of colonial Georgia, in a secondhand shop. My uncle Otto was to take it with him and claim that he had found a document among its leaves; a letter to the Continental Congress in the name of the state of Georgia. He shrugged his shoulders at it and held it out over a Bunsen flame. Why should a physicist be interested in letters? Then he became aware of the peculiar odor it gave off as it burned and the slowness with which it was consumed. He beat out the flames but saved only the piece with the signatures. He looked at it and the name Button Gwinnett had stirred a slight fiber of memory.
He had the story cold. I burnt the edges of the parchment so that the lowest name, that of George Walton, was slightly singed.
"It will make it more realistic," I explained. "Of course, a signature, without a letter above it, loses value, but here we have three signatures, all signers.
My uncle Otto was thoughtful. "And if they compare the signatures with those on the Declaration and notice it is all even microscopically the same, won't they fraud suspect?"
Certainly. But what can they do? The parchment is authentic. The ink is authentic. The signatures are authentic. They'll have to concede that. No matter how they suspect something queer, they can't prove anything. Can they conceive of reaching through time for it? In fact, I hope they do try to make a fuss about it. The publicity will boost the price."
The last phrase made my uncle Otto laugh.
The next day he took the train to Washington with visions of flutes in his head. Long flutes, short flutes, bass flutes, flute tremolos, massive flutes, micro flutes, flutes for the individual and flutes for the orchestra. A world of flutes for mind-drawn music.
"Remember," his last words were, "the machine I have no money to rebuild. This must work."
And I said, "Uncle Otto, it can't miss."
Ha!
He was back in a week. I had made long-distance calls each day and each day he told me they were investigating.
Investigating.
Well, wouldn't you investigate? But what good would it do