Explore "Tricky Tonnage" by Malcolm Jameson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
WHEN YOU'VE lived across the fence from an amateur inventor, you come to expect anything. When the wind was right we used to get some of the awfullest chemical stinks from the Nicklheim barn, and we got so used to hearing explosions that they didn't bother us any more than automobile backfires. We just took it for granted when we'd see Elmer, the boy next door, walking around with his eyebrows singed off and the rest of him wrapped up in bandages.
When Elmer was a little tad, he was a great enthusiast for scientific fiction. You hardly ever saw him unless he was lugging some Jules Vernian opus around, and he ate up all he read with dead earnestness. With that yen for science it might have been expected that he would shine at school, but it did not work out that way. He wouldn't go along in the rut laid out for the run-of-the-mine student. The physics prof finally had him kicked out for some crazy stunt he pulled with the school's equipment. Elmer hooked it all together in a very unorthodox way, and the resulting fireworks was quite a show.