Wait for Weight

frustration overtook him and he subsided, speechless. He was at a loss to say or do anything except mumble that 281.6% was impossible.

* * * * *

Dr. Ferber came over and took the paper with the results from him. Everyone in the lab watched while he checked the calculations patiently.

A delegation minutely checked the apparatus the two doctors had used; it was faultless. One person even went so far as to cast a suspicious look at the big automatic micro-balance standing on its pedestal in the center of the room. He weighed a piece of paper, wrote his name on it in pencil and reweighed it. The difference was satisfactory. For a few moments, they all just stood and looked at each other. Then the whole lot of them set to work.

A junior technician headed for the spectrograph, came back in three minutes with a freshly developed spectral photograph and a puzzled look. He spent some time comparing both of them with the illustrations in a manual entitled Structural Formulae as Indicated