it wouldn't do any good. And
besides, despite his greatness, van Manderpootz is as modest and
shrinking as a violet." At this point he paused, and his broad red face
tried to look violet-like.

I suppressed a smile. I knew the eccentric genius of old, from the days
when I had been Dixon Wells, undergraduate student of engineering, and
had taken a course in Newer Physics (that is, in Relativity) under the
famous professor. For some unguessable reason, he had taken a fancy to
me, and as a result, I had been involved in several of his experiments
since graduation. There was the affair of the subjunctivisor, for
instance, and also that of the idealizator; in the first of these
episodes I had suffered the indignity of falling in love with a girl two
weeks after she was apparently dead, and in the second, the equal or
greater indignity of falling in love with a girl who didn't exist, never
had existed, and never would exist--in other words, with an ideal.
Perhaps I'm a little susceptible to feminine charms, or rather, perhaps
I used to be, for since the disaster of the idealizator, I have grimly
relegated such follies to the past, much to the disgust of various
'vision entertainers, singers, dancers, and the like.

So of late I had been spending my days very seriously, trying
wholeheartedly to get to the office on time just once, so that I could
refer to it next time my father accused me of never getting anywhere on
time. I hadn't succeeded yet, but fortunately the N. J. Wells
Corporation was wealthy enough to survive even without the full-time
services of Dixon Wells, or should I say even _with_ them? Anyway, I'm
sure my father preferred to have me late in the morning after an evening
with van Manderpootz than after one with Tips Alva or Whimsy White, or
one of the numerous others of the ladies of the 'vision screen. Even in
the twenty-first century, he retained a lot of old-fashioned ideas.

Van Manderpootz had ceased to remember that he was as modest and
shrinking as a violet. "It has just occurred to me," he announced
impressively, "that years have character much as humans have. This year,
2015, will be remembered in history as a very stupid year, in which the
Morell prize was given to a nincompoop. Last year, on the other hand,
was a very intelligent year, a jewel in the crown of civilization. Not
only was the Morell prize given to van Manderpootz, but I announced my
discrete field theory in that year, and the Univers