"I’m going to telephone this minute and get a warrant for that fellow - trespass and assault - we'll see!” The little man was shaking with baffled rage and humiliated dignity. "Right in the middle of the fair green, too! How can we play that fifth hole, I’d like to know?”
"I say, play it as 'ground under repair,'" panted Mr. Judson, who was just getting his breath.
" 'Ground under repair!’ " echoed Mr. Tassifer scornfully. "There isn’t any ground under repair. It’s got to be played as 'a rub of the green!' ” He glared furiously at Judson.
"Ground under repair!” repeated the other stubbornly.
"Rub of the green!” shouted Mr. Tassifer,
A sound of heavy footfalls came from behind them, and they turned to see the man from the flying machine coming up the steps. He had taken off his helmet and looked very pale and tired and quite tame.
"Excuse me,” he said huskily. "Can I telephone to the ob-servatory from here? My name’s Hooker and we’ve just come down from Ungava - five hours. Simply had to land on your course - nowhere else! You couldn’t let me have a cigarette, could you?”
II
The morning after the successful descent of the Flying Ring among the bunkers and hazards of the golf-course of the Chevy Chase Club, at Washington, Professor Benjamin Hooker awoke to find himself not only famous but, beyond peradventure, the most interesting human being upon the terrestrial globe. Equipped with a marvelous engine capable of navigating space and of discharging a lavender ray which could annihilate any-thing from a fleet of battle-ships to a mountain-range, he was justly acclaimed "The First Citizen of the World.” He, or the nation to which he should give his allegiance, could, it was properly assumed, control the destinies of mankind.
It had been universally known that the nations involved in the world-war had concluded a treaty of peace only under the threat of the mysterious being known as "Pax” to shift the axis of the globe and turn Europe into an arctic waste. It was now, therefore, generally believed that Hooker was himself none other than Pax, and that, having brought about the end of the war, he had returned with his aerial monster to pursue further scientific investigations under the auspices of the national government.
At any rate, Professor Benjamin Hooker, hitherto the most modest of all the retiring inhabitants of Cambridge, Massachu-setts, now found himself in the spotlight of publicity, and hailed not only as the arbiter of world-politics but as the dictator of human destiny, True to his instincts, however, Profes-sor Hooker paid no attention to this surfeit of adulation. The day after his arrival, having reported himself at the office of the Secretary of State, he retired to the Congressional Library to prepare his statement for the Smithsonian Institution, and, having rented a hall bedroom in a quiet lodging-house on H Street, resumed the unpretentious existence of a scientific investigator.
By arrangement with the government, the Flying Ring was moved to a large aerodrome beyond the city, where its mysteries were protected from public curiosity by a steel fence, thirty feet high, outside which, both by day and night, armed guards were constantly on patrol. For, in the Flying Ring and in Professor Hooker, the government of the United States realized that it possessed not only the key to permanent peace but to the safety and prosperity of mankind as a whole. It may be said quite confidently that the head on anybody other than Professor Hooker would have been completely turned. Daily there arrived at his boarding-house various ambassadorial representatives of foreign nations, who conferred upon him, in the name of their governments or monarchs, the highest decorations in their gift. But, as became a true American, he thought little of these decorations, and simply threw their crosses and other insignia into an empty and not very clean bureau drawer. All this fuss and feathers took, in his opinion, a confounded lot of time and interfered with the serious business of life. Yet his very modesty operated to increase his notoriety. Here was a shabby little man, with tousled brown hair, double-lensed spectacles, and a protruding Adam’s apple - the most famous man in the world; nay, the most celebrated man since the creation - who, for simplicity and dif-fidence, surpassed both U. S. Grant and Admiral Dewey, who was content to go on wearing the same very baggy eighteen-dollar suit of clothes for years, and to live in a three-dollar-a-week hall bedroom, when his picture hung in every kitchen from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific coast.
But, to speak accurately, Bennie Hooker was not so much disregardful of these things as he was oblivious of them, for when he was not working in the Congressional Library or the Smithsonian Institution, he was wandering around Washington with his eyes on the ground or in the air, engrossed in working out some spatial problem and totally unaware that he was being pointed out at every corner as: "That’s him! That’s Hooker!”
Thus, pondering on the mysteries of space and rime, of infinity, eternity, and the riddle of the universe - or, to be exact, upon an equation which he was figuring out on the seventeenth leaf of his note-book - Professor Benjamin Hooker wandered into Dupont Circle and absent-mindedly seated himself on the south-east end of a green park bench upon the northwest corner of which reclined a young lady dressed in a tan tailor-made suit. Professor Hooker did not know that he was in Dupont Circle; he did not even know that he was on a green park bench, and, if he had, he would not have known upon which end of it he was. Needless to say, he was entirely ignorant of the presence of the young lady in the tan tailor-made suit. The equation was a very annoying one, and, for some reason or other, he found it impossible to integrate it. With his note-book on his knee, Professor Hooker chewed viciously the rubber tip of his lead-pencil and cursed the devil that was in the figures. And, as he was thus engaged, a clear, well-modulated young voice, which appeared to emanate from a point directly over his right shoulder, remarked,
”Why don't you write x in its exponential form, Professor Hooker?”
So far as its arousing Professor Hooker to a consciousness of his physical existence was concerned, the voice might have been the murmur of the night breeze. To him, it was less than the voice of conscience.
"That’s so,” mused Professor Hooker. "Of course. Why didn’t I think of that before?”
And this, as he thought, he proceeded to do. But still the solution would not come.
"But you didn’t think of it at all, and you haven’t even done what I suggested!” declared the voice.
Then, for the first time, he looked up over his shoulder.
The girl in the tailor-made suit had moved along the bench and was now sitting next him in the closest proximity possible without actual contact. As she sat there, she was slightly taller than Professor Hooker, who, unfortunately, was too preoccupied to be conscious of the trim slenderness of her athletic figure, her alluring cheeks and chin, the long black lashes of her large gray eyes, her low, wide forehead, of the whimsical smile that played about her softly curving lips.
He saw none of these things, but he, somehow, received an impression of vigor, poise, certainty, and comprehension. In oth-er words, his reaction was entirely intellectual and not in the slightest degree physical, which made it very much easier for Professor Hooker to sit as he did on that green park bench and say:
’'Plague take the thing! Got any idea what’s the matter with it?”
”Let me have your note-book,” ordered the young lady, and, without waiting for a reply, removed it genially from his reluctant fingers and annexed the pencil. "There!” she said. "Now, it’s simple enough - don’t you see? X has the significance of the real part of the complex,”