The Big Headache

I

"Do you think we'll have to use force on Macklin to get him to cooperate in the experiment?" Ferris asked eagerly.

"How are you going to go about forcing him, Doctor?" Mitchell inquired. "He outweighs you by fifty pounds and you needn't look to me for help against that repatriated fullback."

Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. "Guess I got carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down."

"I know," Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. "Somehow the men with the money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information gained from that study is vital in cancer research."

"When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a field test." Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his forehead. "I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor of all headaches."

Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression of demonic intensity. "Ferris, would you consider—?"

"No!" the smaller man yelled. "You can't expect me to violate professional ethics and test my own discovery on myself."

"Our discovery," Mitchell said politely.

"That's what I meant to say. But I'm not sure it would be completely ethical with even a discovery partly mine."

"You're right. Besides who cares if you or I are cured of headaches? Our reputations don't go outside our own fields," Mitchell said. "But now Macklin—"

Elliot Macklin had inherited the reputation of the late Albert Einstein in the popular mind. He was the man people thought of when the word "mathematician" or even "scientist" was mentioned. No one knew whether his Theory of Spatium was correct or not because no one had yet been able to frame an argument with it. Macklin was in his early fifties but looked in his late thirties, with the build of a football player. The government took up a lot of his time using him as the symbol of the Ideal Scientist to help recruit Science and Engineering Cadets.

For the past seven years Macklin—who was the Advanced Studies Department of Firestone University—had been involved in devising a faster-than-light drive to help the Army reach Pluto and eventually the nearer stars. Mitchell had overheard two coeds talking and so knew that the project was nearing completion. If so, it was a case of Ad astra per aspirin.

The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health.

Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen around the campus.