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he was illustrating terminal velocity. He jumped out of the open third story window, horrifying the class, until they learned he'd rigged a canvas life net on the floor below. Or the time he let a mouse loose among the female students to illustrate chain reaction. Or the afternoon he played boogie-woogie on the Huyler Memorial Carillon.
"The absorption of knowledge," he used to say, "increases in direct proportion to the sense of humor--the belly laugh, measured in decibels, being constant."
He could say a thing like that and make it sound funnier than anybody else could. It was partly the way he looked--tall and mournful and sly, with wispy hair that had once been blond, drooping like a tired willow over his forehead.
But for all his vaudeville tactics he was by no means a second-rate scientist. Which was why he had gained his position at Southwestern Tech in the first place. He refused to work directly for the government (no sense of humor, just initials, he said) but this way he could at least be called upon for consultation at the nearby Air Force Development Center, just at the foot of the mountains to the west.
Now the AFDC, as it was called, didn't advertise what sort of thing it was developing--but everybody knew that Lyman Dane was an expert on reactive propulsion of rocket motors. He could tell you--and frequently would without being asked--exactly what mass ratio, nozzle diameter and propulsive velocity would be needed for the first trip to the Moon. He knew how many hours a round trip would take, both for landing there or merely circling the body of the satellite.
He had the courses to Mars and Venus thoroughly charted--but considered a trip to Jupiter somewhat impractical. So, what with Dane's presence and the mysterious white streaks that so often shot up into the sky like fuzzy yarn from the AFDC base, it wasn't hard to guess what was going on.
Nevertheless Professor Dane was surprised and somewhat offended when the young man from the Federal Bureau of Inve