Crime almost vanished from the Scythian Highlands.
Brozz began, perhaps inevitably, by saying that Natura vacuum abhorret (thus spake Aristotle — or would have, had Aristotle spoken Latin); then he said that Nature didn’t either Abhor a Vacuum ... or, perhaps, it was not quite clear, Nature used to abhor a vacuum but had been persuaded by scientific argument not to abhor one all that much. And he spoke about the Column of Mercury and the Column of Water and the Lift-Pump and about Galileo and Viviani and Toricelli and Pascal lather and Pascal son and Air Pressure and Hydrostatics and Hydraulics and Equilibrium and the Experiment in the River and the Sea of Air and von Guericke and the Magdeburg Hemispheres and the Total Force and the Weight of Water and Athanasius Kircher and —
— and he spoke about the three kinds of well-known wheels and the vertical turbine and the hydraulic ram and something called “the Pelton wheel” which was anyway still in the planning stage —
— and Eszterhazy felt himself sitting on a bench in the Great Lecture Hall and listening again to the famous old Professor Kugelius delivering his famous old lecture series On the Reconciliation of Aristotle and Plato, concluding that, when all was said and done, Aristotle and Plato could not really be reconciled. . . .
Was Engineer Brozz more or less dotty than Gumm? His voice was monotonous, but his voice was clear. His gestures may have been a bit jerky, but they were moderate gestures, and his words were those of someone speaking sanely on a sane subject — even if not quite persuasively. And the gestures directed attention to this feature and that of a model machine, small but functioning, which ... when all was said and done and span and spun ... wound a string which pulled a weight. And let it down. And pulled it up. And — After Brozz had said his say he was a moment silent. A flow of water was heard purling, somewhere very near. “Partly,” Brozz began again, “the machinery which you see is on such a small scale because the supply of running water is on such a small scale. Partly, it is because I lack capital to do anything on a larger scale.” De Metz again turned his bird-bright gaze upon Eszterhazy. Investment possibility, said the bird-bright gaze. “The ancient problem of the Archimedean Screw,” said Brozz, “before it was made practicable, I have so to speak turned inside-out. What was its fault, I have made into a strength. The rush of the water works the tuned harmonic turbine which then works the vacuum pump, and thence the compressed-air machine; the compressed-air machine is so clean;” but he began to repeat himself; and besides, his scientific principles seemed . . .
“ ‘Tuned harmonic turbine!’ ” exclaimed De Metz. “Music! Mathematic! Marvelous!”
“ Well, Engineer Brozz! This is most interesting. Have you a printed brochure?” Had he not seen the man?
Engineer Brozz looked at him as though he had asked if he had a piece of the moon. Next he said, No he had not. And then, as an obvious afterthought, he said, But he had a letter-press copy of his Statement. Letterpress ink was liberally laced with sugar to keep it from drying rapidly, the paper thus written was covered with another sheet, of different paper, and the press .. . well... pressed. The ink made, of course, a reverse, a mirror- image, on the second sheet: but the paper of the second sheet was so thin that the copy was read from the obverse, as though it had been right-side up. The alternative was to photograph the original, which was technically possible but so tedious that it was seldom done — or, simply, to copy the copy. With pen and ink. Ordinary ink. Brozz did agree to allow Eszterhazy to have the letter-press copy transcribed. But he did not seem at all pleased to have to do so. De Metz might feel bright about the investment possibility involved, but, although Brozz had indeed mentioned being hampered by a lack of capital, he did not seem at all concerned with ways of meeting the problem. Eszterhazy was quite sure that the engineer was not engaged in cozenage of any sort, not playing the innocent sitting unsuspecting on a fortune. And Eszterhazy was now quite sure that he had seen him before.
“Engineer Brozz has shown me some of the figures involved,” De Metz said now. “Some of the physical calculations. I am sure they might form the basis of an extraordinary composition . . . though not one, of course, likely to be familiar to those of purely conventional musical taste. Harmony!
Tune! Turbine!”
Somewhere the town-clock sounded. Even in Klejn TinkeldorfF, Time did not stand still. And as Dr. Eszterhazy did not care to dismiss the matter by saying something along the lines of, You are both too naif to be left at large for long, and as he could think of nothing else to say to Brozz which would be neither a lie nor an insincerity, he now said, “You asked me to remind you, cher maitre De Metz, to tell me a very amusing story about... a Gypsy and a —?”
At once the musician’s mask broke into a thousand lines of laughter. “Ah yes!” he cried. “Ah yes! I forget just when it happened. It happened around here, in this picturesque little hamlet. A certain family had a Gypsy working for it and he had his chores and one of them was to skim cream from the milk-pans in the spring-house and ladle it into the crock. You understand. And of course he was most very strictly forbidden to drink any of the cream himself. So. So one day he comes into the spring-house and what does he discover, he discovers that a mouse has gotten into the milk-pan! And drowned! What does he do?” Eszterhazy, smiling, lightly shook his head to indicate his inability to guess what does the Gypsy do; De Metz began to show what, by gesture and by mime. First the Gypsy showed puzzlement. Then surprise. Then — something must after all be done — resolution. De Metz, in the character of Yanosh, leaned over, picked up an invisible mouse by its invisible tail, began to throw it away, and then, bringing it level with his face, thrust out his tongue, and — slurp! slurp — and then threw it away.
“Oh ho ho! Ah ha ha! First he licked the cream offit! And then he threw it away! Oo hoo hoo!”
Eszterhazy chuckled. Engineer Brozz observed, “These Gypsies, they are all such children of nature.” A faint, very faint smile, creased his thin and rather weary-looking features. What [it asked], what are Gypsies, mice, and cream to one who lacked capital to prove the larger capacities of the tuned harmonic turbine and compressed-air pump, so potentially efficient in getting energy out of small mountain streams with very high heads of water?
One more call to make. Some of the houses were painted white, some chocolate-brown, some blue, pink, green. And in one of the white ones, with blue trim around the carved window-frames, dwelt the doctor’s grandmother’s first cousin, Christina Augusta, Tanta Tina. God knows what she might do, were he to ride past her house and not go in. Wait till the christening of his first-born child (he was not married) and then appear to utter murrains on everyone’s cattle, and blights on all their crops; perhaps. Tanta Tina belonged to an age gone by in more than mere generation; she dressed in the costume of her youth; she had few teeth; she had moles and a slight, white moustache. She and the Emperor Ignats Louis were god-sib. She called him “Loysheck.” He called her “Sissy.” She did not ever go to Court. And she did not know a word of French.
Well, that is not entirely correct. She knew three.
First she embraced him, then she blessed him, then she fondly stroked his beard. “My dearest little cousin-child,” she said, at length, “I shall bring you a cup of cafe au lait. And a piece of gingerbread.”