The Quy Effect by Arthur Sellings

Author:Arthur Sellings [Sellings, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

He spent the intervening time in the backyard, rigging up a contraption that looked like a sled. It was about six feet wide, something over two feet wide and made of heavy angle iron. He hired a welding kit from the garage up the road. From a government surplus store he got a petrol engine with a name on it that he recognized as makers of marine engines, an electric generator, Field Model Mark IV, and a transformer. It made a pretty clumsy power unit but it would have to do.

He welded them into the top of the frame. Underneath it, a foot or so from the ground, he fixed a dural plate through which, heavily sheathed, two cables led from the generator to thick terminals. He walked around it for a day, then went back to the surplus store, got a walkie-talkie set, stripped it down, and made a radio control unit out of it. He welded the receiving half of that, too, onto the frame and connected it up. And covered the lot with a tarpaulin. Finally, he staked the tarpaulin down, linked the stakes to a crude but effective alarm circuit and tucked the bell of the alarm under the stretched tarpaulin. The whole assembly was too weighty, and of too little value—except to him and his hopes—to be worth stealing, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

And then he waited—for that was all there was to do.

He tried to get down to scraps of projects from the past, anything to keep his mind engaged, but it was no use. His mind kept returning to the suspended project in hand. He started to go to the public library every day, asking Norman to keep an ear cocked—for both the callbox phone and the burglar alarm.

Neither sounded. It was a long, yawning summer. By the end of July his patience was wearing thin, and he couldn’t stand the sight of any more books. “The blasted human brain’s like a bathtub,” he grumbled, frustration squeezing heresy out of him. “If you add a gallon of facts from the tap, a gallon that’s already there slops over down the overflow. What precious facts am I sending down the waste pipe?”

Sometime during that hot dry summer a brightly colored card came from Alan from Austria, and a week later one from Yugoslavia. Then, one morning at the beginning of August, the lad himself turned up, his legs brown in brief lederhosen, his face even browner under hair bleached almost white.

Old Quy was standing by the callbox at the end of the passageway—a favorite haunt of his these past few days. He was too startled at the apparition to notice the look of misery on the boy’s face for a moment. Then it registered.

“What’s up, son?”

“I got back from Europe last night to find my exam results waiting for me. I failed.”

“Oh.”

“I passed Math easily. I knew I would; I told you. And I got through Physics. But I failed English, French and Chemistry.

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