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.The one break was not repeated, and still Dad would not give in.Five of our females laid eggs and soon I had over fifty of the creatures on my hands.“What shall we do with them?” I demanded.“Kill them off,” he said.Well, I couldn't do that, of course.Henri, is it almost ready? Good.We had reached the end of our resources when it happened.No more money was available.I had tried everywhere, and met with consistent rebuffs.I was even glad because it seemed to me that Dad would have to give in now.But with a chin that was firm and indomitably set, he coolly set up another experiment.I swear to you that if the accident had not happened the truth would have eluded us forever.Humanity would have been deprived of one of its greatest boons.It happens that way sometimes.Perkin spots a purple tinge in his gunk and comes up with aniline dyes.Remsen puts a contaminated finger to his lips and discovers saccharin.Goodyear drops a mixture on the stove and finds the secret of vulcanization.With us, it was a half-grown dinosaur wandering into the main research lab.They had become so numerous I hadn't been able to keep track of them.The dinosaur stepped right across two contact points which happened to be open-just at the point where the plaque immortalizing the event is now located.I'm convinced that such a happenstance couldn't occur again in a thousand years.There was a blinding flash, a blistering short circuit, and the Chrono-funnel which had just been set up vanished in a rainbow of sparks.Even at the moment, really, we didn't know exactly what we had.All we knew was that the creature had short-circuited and perhaps destroyed two hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment and that we were completely ruined financially.All we had to show for it was one thoroughly roasted dinosaur.We were slightly scorched ourselves, but the dinosaur got the full concentration of field energies.We could smell it.The air was saturated with its aroma.Dad and I looked at each other in amazement.I picked it up gingerly in a pair of tongs.It was black and charred on the outside, but the burnt scales crumbled away at a touch, carrying the skin with it.Under the char was white, firm flesh that resembled chicken.I couldn't resist tasting it, and it resembled chicken about the way Jupiter resembles an asteroid.Believe me or not, with our scientific work reduced to rubble about us, we sat there in seventh heaven and devoured dinosaur.Parts were burnt, parts were nearly raw.It hadn't been dressed.But we didn't stop until we had picked the bones clean.Finally I said, “Dad, we've got to raise them gloriously and systematically for food purposes.”Dad had to agree.We were completely broke.I got a loan from the bank by inviting the president to dinner and feeding him dinosaur.It has never failed to work.No one who has once tasted what we now call “dinachicken” can rest content with ordinary fare.A meal without dinachicken is a meal we choke down to keep body and soul together.Only dinachicken is food.Our family still owns the only herd of dinachickens in existence and we are the only suppliers for the worldwide chain of restaurants-this is the first and oldest-which has grown up about it.Poor Dad! He was never happy, except for those unique moments when he was actually eating dinachicken.He continued working on the Chrono-funnels and so did twenty other research teams which, as he had predicted would happen, jumped in.Nothing ever came of any of it, though, to this day.Nothing except dinachicken.Ah, Pierre, thank you.A superlative job/ Now, sir, if you will allow me to carve.No salt, now, and just a trace of the sauce.That’s right.Ah, that is precisely the expression I always see on the face of a man who experiences his first taste of the delight.A grateful humanity contributed fifty thousand dollars to have the statue on the hillside put up, but even that tribute failed to make Dad happy.All he could see was the inscription: The Man Who Gave Dinachicken to the World.You see, to his dying day, he wanted only one thing, to find the secret of time travel.For all that he was a benefactor of humanity, he died with his curiosity unsatisfied.=====My original title had been Benefactor of Humanity, which I thought carried a fine flavor of irony, and I chafed when Leo Margulies of Satellite changed that title.When The Saturday Evening Post asked permission to reprint the story (and it appeared in the March-April 1973 issue of that magazine) I made it a condition that they restore the original title.But then, when I saw my own title in print, I thought about it and decided that Leo's title was better.So it appears here as A STATUE FOR FATHER again.Bob Mills, by the way, whom I mentioned in connection with BUY JUPITER, was a very close friend of mine when he was working with F & SF and with Venture.He is not one of those with whom I have lost contact, either [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]