Matthew Revsof has made some important advances in developing fusion energy—but he himself is in a mental institution and his notes locked in his safe. He gave his wife the combination, but it doesn’t work—until Henry intervenes.
This story turns on the fact that on certain older typewriters, the numeral “1” and the lower-case letter “L” look identical. (Modern computers users often have the same problem with O’s and 0’s, or l’s and I’s.) In a way, that makes it a tad on the obsolete side, since a large percentage of the readers of this story will never even have seen a typewriter—but, as I say, the problem has not gone away with advancing technology, and so the story still makes sense, even if this particular instance of the problem doesn’t.
The set-up here is decidedly artificial, however, and that tends to detract from the story overall.
