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The fact is, I had spent her money as well as my own not on dissipation, I hasten to say, but on dinner and an installment of my roomrent. This was embarrassing, but I looked upon it merely as an advance quite as if I'd had the customary drawingaccount to be charged against my next commissions. My acceptance of the advance merely indicated my faith in the future of the Metamorphizer.
I was very anxious myself to see what would happen here so I suggested, since I could take him to the discoverer of the Metamorphizer any time, that we'd better stay and get the Dinkman story first.
Even if I had devoted my life to pure science perhaps even more certainly then patterning myself on a medieval monastic, faithful to vows of poverty and singleness of purpose; even if I had not, for an apparently laudable end, betrayed my efforts to a base greed; even if I had never picked for a moment's use such an unworthy do not be insulted again, Weener, unworthiness is a fact, insofar as there are any facts at all such an unworthy tool as yourself; even if I had never compounded the Metamorphizer; even if I had been a biologist or an astronomer even then I should be guilty of ruining the Dinkmans and making them homeless, just as you are guilty and the reporter here is guilty and the garbageman is guilty and the pastor in his pulpit is guilty."
I had certainly been right up on my toes in picking the Metamorphizer as a winner in spite of Miss Francis' kitchen and her lack of aggressiveness. Instinct, the unerring instinct of a wideawake salesman for the right product and for the right market. I mustnt forget that.
Give me leave to throw away my retorts and testtubes and bunsen burners by revealing the other element besides sodium Cynodon dactylon refuses. For every mistake there is another mistake which supplements it. Sodium was the blindspot in the Metamorphizer; when I find the balancing blindspot I shall know not only the second element which the Grass cannot absorb but one which will be poison to it."
I couldnt see outside, because instead of a window I was facing a sickly leaf unaccountably preserved in a jar of alcohol. I said nothing. "Metaphorically, of course. Wheatfields. Acres and acres of wheat. Bread, wheat, a grass. And cornfields. Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois not a state in the Union without corn. Milo, oats, sorghum, rye all grasses. And the Metamorphizer will work on all of them."
The remark about gluttonous abdomens was disturbing. "And of course there will be no further sale of the Metamorphizer," she concluded, her eyes now totally concerned with the farmer who was opening the turtle with the air of a man expecting to be unpleasantly astonished. Mr Barelli came as to a deathbed, a consoling but hopeless smile widening his narrow face only inconsiderably.
"Oh, shut up. What do you want to know?" "First," said Gootes briskly, "what is this stuff?" "The Metamorphizer?" He nodded. "You want the chemical formula?" "Wouldnt do me or my readers the least bit of good and you wouldnt give it to me if I asked. Why should you? No, enlighten me in English." "It is a compound on the order of colchicine, acting through the somaplasm of the plant.
Inoculation by the Metamorphizer might be compared to cutting off a man's leg or transplanting part of his brain. Albert what happens when you cut off a man's leg?" I was tired of being talked to like a grammarschool class. Still, I humored her. "Why, then he has only one leg," I answered agreeably if idiotically. "True. More than that, he has a onelegged disposition.
"No, Weener, it won't do I can't trade in my vision as a downpayment on a means to encourage a waste of ground, seed and water. You may think I lost such rights when I thought up the name Metamorphizer to appeal on the popular level, but there's a difference." That was a clincher. Anyone who believed Metamorphizer had salesappeal just wasnt all there.
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