“You down there, Uncle Jack?”
“Yep/”
I felt my way down the stairs. My uncle is as cheap as he is eccentric, and though you’d think a man with a flair for machinery could change light bulbs, he likes to wait until he can’t tell a copper wire from his vise grips.
“Still hunting the next great invention?”
“Nope.”
This sounded curt, even for him. But he seemed quite normal, eyes glaring at his workbench over the tops of tape-mended glasses. “Really? Giving up technological marvels?”
“Nope.”
I looked him over. “What, then?”
“Hunting one I lost.”
“An invention? Did it fall on the floor? It’s always so dark down here….”
“Didn’t lose it that way.”
“How, then?”
“Built it. Plastic and tin, this and that, with a screen.” He waved a hand over the debris on the tabletop. “New digital thermometer: quicker, more accurate.”
I nodded. “A lot of use to that. Still using those old digital elements you bought up when the Calculator Ranch went out of business?”
“That and the stuff from the old high school tech lab. Programmed the screen to adjust to a target temperature and beep if your temperature is over that.”
“Just the thing these days.”
“Had a regular old mercury thermometer to check it by. It said I was 99.1. Tried the new one: set the Adjust screen to 98.6, so it would beep. Didn’t beep.”
“Mm-hmm.” This sounded like a lot of his inventions.
“Said my temperature was 98.6. So I checked the old mercury one again. Now it said I was 98.6.”
“You’d cooled off on the idea.”
He didn’t laugh. I never have heard him laugh. “Had a thought. Took mine, set Adjust to 98 even. Tried it. Still didn’t beep.”
“So?”
“I checked. The mercury thermometer said my temperature was 98.”
“Could be normal variations.”
He glanced up over those glasses and back down. “Smart kid. So I took my iced tea.”
A hand swung toward his glass. That glass of tea has sat on a cabinet next to the workbench for as long as I can remember. It was clear once, but it’s never been emptied, only refilled, and is now fogged with decades of tea stain. “Ice cubes melted. Lukewarm. I set Adjust to 33 and put it in the glass. It didn’t beep.”
I studied the ancient brew. “So your thermometer doesn’t beep at all?”
He shook his head. “Cold tea.”
“So you think your Adjust adjusts the actual temperature of what it’s in? People with fevers alone would want….”
“Switched Adjust to 65 and held it up in the air. Felt goosebumps: not just because the room was getting cold.”
“You could use that for a thousand things!”
“Set it to 200 degrees and stuck it in the tea again. Nearly scalded my hands picking up the glass.”
“Didn’t the thermometer get hot, too?”
“Not the handle. Just the tip.”
“And you lost it? How big was it? Where did you see it last?”
“Wondered how far it would go. Nice and small for a cutting torch. Set Adjust at six thousand: see if I could cut metal.” He nodded to an old car door that he’s had next to the bench since before automatic transmissions. I didn’t see any cuts in it.
“And?”
“Melting point of tin is 449.5.” He glared at me over his glasses again, and then at an irregular disc of metal on the floor. ”Jumped back. Dropped the handle and screen into the puddle.”
He took up a little bundle of wire. A stack of similar bundles littered the workspace. “If I could remember what I put in there in the first place….”
I groped my way back to the stairs and started up. This didn’t seem the right time to ask if he wanted to buy band candy.
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