“Yes, isn’t it? I knew that would go to your hearts.”
The Professor had expressed his emotion only by lifting his heavy, sharply uptwisted eyebrows.
“Let me explain, Sir Edgar,” Marsellus went on eagerly. “We have named our place for Tom Outland, a brilliant young American scientist and inventor, who was killed in Flanders, fighting with the Foreign Legion, the second year of the war, when he was barely thirty years of age. Before he dashed off to the front, this youngster had discovered the principle of the Outland vacuum, worked out the construction of the Outland engine that is revolutionizing aviation. He not only invented it, but, curiously enough for such a hotheaded fellow, had taken pains to protect it by patent. He had no time to communicate his discovery or to commercialize it—simply bolted to the front and left the most important discovery of his time to take care of itself.”
Sir Edgar, fork arrested, looked a trifle dazed. “Am I to understand that you are referring to the inventor of the Outland engine?”
Louie was delighted. “Exactly that! Of course you would know all about it. My wife was young Outland’s fiancée—is virtually his widow. Before he went to France he made a will in her favour; he had no living relatives, indeed. Toward the close of the war we began to sense the importance of what Outland had been doing in his laboratory—I am an electrical engineer by profession. We called in the assistance of experts and got the idea over from the laboratory to the trade. The monetary returns have been and are, of course, large.”
While Louie paused long enough to have some intercourse with the roast before it was taken away. Sir Edgar remarked that he himself had been in the Air Service during the war, in the construction department, and that it was most extraordinary to come thus by chance upon the genesis of the Outland engine.