WHEN AN EXPLOSION takes place lots of bits and
pieces fly all over the scenery. The greater the wallop
the larger the lumps and the farther they travel.
These are fundamental facts known to every schoolchild
old enough to have some sneaky suspicions
about the birds and the bees. They were not known
or perhaps they were not fully realized by Johannes
Pretorius van der Camp Blieder despite the fact that
he was fated to create the biggest bang in human history.
Johannes Etc. Blieder was a lunatic of the same order
as Unk (who first made fire), Wunk (who designed
the wheel), Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, the Wright
Brothers and many others who have outraged orthodoxy
by achieving the impossible. He was a shrimp
of a man with a partly bald head, a ragged goatee
beard and weak, watery eyes hugely magnified by
pebble-lensed spectacles. He shuffled around on
splayed feet with the gait of a pregnant duck, had
been making glutinous sniffs since birth and never
knew where to put his hand on a handkerchief.
Of academic qualifications he had none whatever.
A spaceship bound for the Moon or Venus could thunder
overhead as such ships had done for a thousand
years and he would peer at it myopically without the
vaguest notion of what pushed it along. What's more,
he wasn't the least bit interested in finding out. Four
hours per day, four days per week, he sat at an office
desk. The rest of his time was devoted wholly and with
appalling single-mindedness to the task of levitating
a penny. Wealth or power or shapely women had no
appeal to him. Except when hunting a handkerchief
his entire life was dedicated to what he deemed the
ultimate triumph, namely, that of being able to exhibit
a coin floating in midair.
A psychologist might explain this obsession in
terms of an experience that Blieder had suffered while
resting in his mother's womb. An alienist might define
it as the pathological desire of a sniffy-nosed little
man to rise high in the world and look big. If he had
been capable of self-analysis -- which he was not --
Blieder may have confessed the thwarted ambition
to become an accomplished vaudeville artist. Though
he knew nothing and cared less about the wonders
of science he did nurse a mighty admiration for professional
magicians and illusionists. To him, the greatest
glory would be to hold the stage and dumbfound
an audience with a series of clever stunts that were
not faked, but real.
The actual truth, perhaps, was that bountiful Providence
had chosen him to get somewhere in much the
same way that other creative imbeciles have been
chosen. Therefore he was animated by a form of precognition,
a subconscious knowledge that success was sure if he kept after it long enough. So for fifty
years he strove to levitate a penny by methods mental,
mechanical or just plain loopy.
Upon his seventy-second birthday he succeeded.
The coin positioned itself three-eighths of an inch
above a pure cobalt disc that represented the output
stage of a piece of apparatus bearing no relation to
anything that made sense. He did not rush outdoors,
yell the news all over town, get blind drunk and paw
a few elderly virgins. Instead he blinked incredulously
at the penny, sniffed a couple of times, sought
in vain for a handkerchief. Then he stacked a dozen
more pennies on top of the floater. It made no difference.
The column remained poised with a threeeighths
gap between the bottom coin and the cobalt
disc.
Removing the coins, he substituted a heavy paperweight.
The gap did not decrease by a hairbreadth.
So he took away the weight and the penny, wondered
whether a different metal would produce a different
effect, tried it with his gold watch. That also sat threeeighths
of an inch above the disc. He fiddled around
with his apparatus, making minor alterations here and
there in the hope of widening the gap. At one stage
the watch vibrated but did not rise or fall. He concentrated
on that point, adjusting and readjusting, until
he was rewarded with a sound like a sharp spit. The
watch vanished, leaving a small hole in the ceiling
and a matching hole in the roof.
Softcover, 5¼" x 8¼", 230+ pages
Perfect-Bound