The Einstein See-Saw

A desk disappears from Tony Costello's laboratory and is replaced by a stranger's cluttered worktable. The papers on it concern relativity, matter and tensors, and Tony quickly grasps their practical possibilities. An engineer whose profitable connections with a gang have collapsed, he sees a chance to recover his fortunes. Soon, heavy safes begin vanishing from locked offices, leaving the police with a puzzle that ordinary transport cannot explain.

Miles J. Breuer builds this science fiction story around the meeting of mathematical speculation and a crime investigation. Reporter Phil and Ione Bloomsbury trace a missing safe to Tony's building, where their discovery puts them at the engineer's mercy. Laboratory machinery, concealed rooms and the prospect of hyperspace give the pursuit its unusual shape. Readers interested in early magazine science fiction will find a plot that turns abstract ideas about space into physical dangers and impossible thefts.