Chapters 10
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1 The 4D Doodler 34:01
The Four Deed Doodler by Graf Waldayer. Do you believe, Professor Galt, that this four-dimensional plane contains life, intelligent life? At the question, Galt laughed shortly. You have been reading pseudoscience, Dr. Pilbott, he tweeted. I realize that as a psychiatrist you are interested in minds, in living beings, rather than in dimensional planes. But I fear you will find no minds to study in the fourth dimension. There aren't any there. Professor Gault paused, peered from beneath bushy white brows out over the laboratory. To his near-sighted eyes, the blurred figure of Harper, his young assistant, seemed busily at work over his mathematical charts. Galt hoped sourly that the young man was actually working, and not just drawing more of his absurd senseless designs amidst the mathematical computations.
Your proof, Dr. Pilbott broke into his thoughts insistently, is purely negative, Professor. How can you know there are no beings in the fourth dimension unless you actually enter this realm to see for yourself? Professor Galt stared at the fat, puffy face of his visitor, and snorted loudly. I am afraid, Pilbott, You do not comprehend the impossibility of such a passage. We cannot possibly break from the confines of our three-dimensional world. Here, let me explain by a simple illustration. Gault took up a book, held it so that a shadow fell on to the surface of the desk. That shadow, he said, is two-dimensional, has length and breadth, but no thickness. Now, in order to enter the third dimension, our plane, the shadow would have to bulge out in some way into the dimension of thickness.
An obvious impossibility. Similarly, we cannot enter the fourth dimension. Do you see? No, retorted Pilbott with some heat. In the first place, we are not two-dimensional shadows, and—why, what is the matter? Professor Galt's lanky form had stiffened, his near-sighted eyes glaring out over the laboratory to the rear of Pilbott. The psychiatrist wheeled around, following his host's gaze. It was Harper. That young man's antics drew an amazed grunt from Pilbott. He was describing peculiar motions in the air with his pencil. Circles, whirls, angles, abrupt jabs forward. He bent over the paper on the desk, made a few sweeps of the pencil. Then the pencil rose again into the air to describe more erratic motions.
Harper himself seemed in a trance. Suddenly, Pilbott gave a stifled gasp. It seemed to him, That Harper's arm vanished at the elbow as it stabbed forward, then reappeared. Once again the phenomena happened. Pilbot blinked rapidly, rubbed his eyes. It must have been an illusion, he decided. It was too unlikely. Harper! Galt's voice was like the snapping of a steel trap. Startled, Harper came to with a jerk. Seeing he was being watched, he flushed redly, then bent over his charts again. An apologetic murmur floated from his desk. What was he doing? Pilbot asked puzzledly. Doodling! Galt spat out the word disgustedly. Doodling? echoed the psychiatrist. Why, that is a slang term we use in psychiatry to describe the absent-minded scrawls and designs people make while their attention is elsewhere occupied.
An overflow of the conscious mind, we call it. Many famous people are doodlers. Their doodles often are a sign of a special ability. "'Exactly,' snapped Galt. "'It shows a special ability to waste time, and Harper has become worse since I hired him to do some of my mathematical work. Some influence in this laboratory, I blush to confess, seems to bring it on. Four-dimensional doodling, we call it, because, as you saw, he doesn't confine it to the surface of the paper.' Pilbott looked startled. "'By Jove!' he cried. I believe you've hit on something new to psychiatry. This young man may have some unknown faculty of mind, an instinctive perception of the fourth dimension. Just as some people have an unerring sense of direction, so perhaps Harper has a sense of—of a fourth direction, the fourth dimension.
I should like to examine some of his doodles. Harper looked up in alarm as his crusty-tempered employer appeared, followed by the stout figure of Pilbott. He rose and stood aside unassumingly, as Pilbot bent over the scrolls on his charts, clucking interestedly. Harper flickered a worried gaze over to the corner. He hoped they wouldn't notice his stress-analyzing clay model standing there. It looked like a futurist nightmare, with angles, curves, and knobs stuck out at all angles. Professor Gault might not understand. For one of his retiring temperament, Harper was aiming high. There was a standing award of fifty thousand dollars for the lucky mathematician who would solve the mystery of the stress barrier encountered by skyscrapers as they were built up toward the one hundred fifty-story mark.
At this height, they encountered stress and strains which mathematical computations and engineering designs had been unable to solve. Harper believed the stress barrier was due to an undetected space bending close to the Earth's surface, A bending of space greater than ever provided for in the prediction of Einstein. And, if he was right, he could win that award, and there might be wedding bills, and a little bungalow with Judith. Harper's greatest fear was that he would do something to annoy Galt into firing him, thus depriving him of the privilege of using the mathematical charts and computing machines available in the laboratory. Right now, he hoped Galt wouldn't notice that statue in the corner.
What's that? Harper's heart leaped. The professor was glaring at the statue, as though it were something the cat brought in. Pilbott looked up from examination of the doodles, and followed Galt over to the futuristic statuary. As Galt made strangled noises, Pilbott stared interestedly. Why, it's like some of the designs in his doodling, he exclaimed. And made with some of my best modelling clay for reproducing geometric solids, rasped Galt. He wheeled upon Harper. Get that thing out of here. I won't stand for such rot in this laboratory. Throw it into the hall for the janitor. Yes, sir, said Harper, gulping. He took hold of the statue, pulled at it. It won't budge, he exclaimed amazedly. Eh? Won't move.
It's not heavy, is it? demanded the professor. No, about thirty pounds, but it won't move. Galt took hold of one of the angles of the thing, jerked at it savagely. He gave up with an oath, returning to Harper's desk, muttering. Harper suddenly noticed the top portion of the statue. It didn't seem to be all there. He was positive there had been another section on top, shooting off at an angle, representing a problem in tangential stress. What had happened to that top section? He would figure that out later, when the occasion was more propitious. Right now, he realized that only the presence of Dr. Pilbott prevented Galt from firing him. He cast an apprehensive glance toward his employer. With trepidation, he saw Galt reaching for something projecting from behind a bench.
Galt pulled it out, held it dangling before him. A strangled exclamation of wrath came from him. His long nose pointed accusingly toward Harper, like a finger pointing to a criminal. "'I was afraid of that,' he grated. "'Cutting paper dolls!' Gault was holding up a large paper cut-out of a human figure—a long, rangy man. "'This is the last straw,' Gault went on, his voice rising. "'I have stood enough!' "'It wasn't me, sir!' Harper cried quickly. With visions of his job and fifty thousand dollars vanishing. It was your ten-year-old nephew, Rudolph. When he was here yesterday, he cut it out, said it looked like his uncle. Harper stopped as Galt seemed about to explode. Then the mathematician subsided.
A malicious expression crept over his face. Hmm, he said. Might be just what I need to explain things to Dr. Pilbot. I shall take this matter before the Psychiatric Society, Pobot was saying excitedly. Undoubtedly you have some strange faculty, an instinctive perception of four-dimensional laws. What was that, professor? I said, if you will step over to this desk, I will explain to you in elementary terms, very elementary and easy to understand, why you will never be able to study four-dimensional beings, if any exist. Gault's voice was tinged with sarcasm. Pilbott came over, followed by Harper, who was interested in any explanations about the fourth dimension, even elementary ones. Gault, with a glint in his eye, pressed the paper figure flatly on the surface of Harper's desk.
This paper man, we will say, represents a two-dimensional creature. We lay him flatly against the desk, which represents his world. Flatland, we mathematicians call it. Mr. Flatlander can't see into our world. He can only see along the flat plane of his own world. To see us, for instance, he would have to look up, which is the third dimension, a direction inconceivable to him. Now, doctor, are you beginning to understand why we can never see four-dimensional beings? Pilbot frowned thoughtfully, then looked up. And what about the viewpoint of the four-dimensioners themselves? What would prevent them from seeing us? Harper hardly heard the professor's snort of disgust. This two-dimensional cutout in Flatland fascinated him.
An idea occurred to him. Now, just supposing...
As Galt and Pilbott argued, Harper grasped the paper cutout and bent it, jackknifed it, creasing it firmly in the middle. Then he raised the upper half so that it rose vertically from the desk, while the lower half was still pressed flatly against the surface. Now, he murmured to himself, The flat-liner would have appeared to his fellows to have vanished from the waist up, because from the waist up he is bent into the third dimension, so far as they are concerned. E-e-e-e! At the wavering scream, Harper looked up quickly. Pilbott was staring frozenly in front of him toward the floor. Harper followed his glance and saw it. Professor Gault had vanished from the waist up. His lower body still stood before Pilbott, swaying slightly, But the upper body was unconditionally missing.
From the large feet planted solidly on the floor, long legs rose majestically, terminating in slim, angular hips, and from thence vanished abruptly into nothingness. It was as though the upper body had been sheared away, neatly and precisely at the waist. Pilbott stared from the visible portion of Galt to slack-jawed Harper, and back again, sweat splashing from his puffy face. Why, why, really, my dear fellow, he quavered, addressing the half-figure. This—this is a bit rude of you, vanishing in the midst of my sentence. I trust you will, uh, return at once. Then, as the full import of the phenomena penetrated to his understanding, his eyes became glazed, and he backed away. The portion of Professor Galt addressed failed to give any indication it had heard the remonstrance.
Slowly, the legs began to feel their way, like a blind man, about the floor. Harper stared wildly, white showing around his pale blue irises. No, he bleated. The professor didn't do it himself. I caused it to happen. I bent the paper cut out, and—and something saw me do it, and imitated me by bending the professor into the fourth dimension. Harper moaned faintly, wringing his hands. Pilbott, at the moment, got little satisfaction from this demonstration of his point about four-dimensional life. He glanced fearfully at the half-figure. "'You mean to say,' he quailed, "'that we are under scrutiny by some being of the fourth dimension?' "'That's it,' replied Harper, with a whinny. "'I know it. I can feel it.
It became aware of our three-dimensional life in some way, and its attention is now concentrated on the lab.' He wrung his hands. I just know something else terrible is going to happen. He backed away quickly as the occupied pair of pants moved toward him. His retreat was halted by his desk, upon which reposed two large California oranges, an inevitable accompaniment to Harper's lunch. To him, orange juice was a potent, revivifying drink. Now he automatically reached for one of the oranges, As a more hardy individual might reach for a whiskey and soda in a moment of mental shock. His eyes wide on the shuffling approach of Galt's underpinnings, Harper nervously dug sharp fingernails into the orange, tore off large chunks of skin.
A sudden blur seen from the corner of his eyes pulled his gaze back to the desk. The other orange had vanished. Phup! It dropped to the floor before Harper, and now it was a squashy mess. The inside standing out like petals, the juice running from it. The other orange slipped from Harper's nerveless fingers, rolled along the desktop. Harper pounced on the squashy thing on the floor, feverishly pulling back the projecting insides, closely examined it. He looked up wide-eyed at Pilbott. "'Turn inside out!' he gasped hoarsely, without breaking its skin. Pilbott's expression indicated that the scientific attitude was slowly replacing his former fright. He snapped his fingers. Imitation again, he said, half to himself.
He looked at Harper. When you bent the paper figure, this—this four-dimensional entity imitated your action by bending the professor. Now, as you started to peel the orange, your action was again imitated. In a four-dimensional manner, by this entity turning the other orange inside out. His voice dropped as he muttered, imitativeness, the mark of a mind of low evolutionary order, or of—his words faded off, his expression thoughtful. More white showed around Harper's eyes. You—you mean I'm being specially watched by this being? That he—it—imitates everything I do? That's it, clipped Pilbott. Because you possess this strange perception of its realm, the being has been especially attracted to you, imitates whatever you do, but in a four-dimensional manner.
A being of inexplicable powers and prerogatives, with weird power over matter, but with a mentality that is either very primitive or... Harper leaped into the air with a yell, as Professor Gault's abbreviated body sidled up to him from behind. As he leaped, the inside-out orange flew out of his grasp. I just know, he quavered, that Professor Gault wants me to do something, is probably barking orders at me from that other dimension. Oh, dear, I've dropped the orange on the professor's... where his stomach should be. The squashy orange had landed on the area of Gault that was the line of demarcation between his visible and invisible portions. That area that his stomach would occupy normally, It rested there in plain sight of the two startled men.
"'I—I'd better remove it,' said Harper weakly. He moved with a dreadful compulsion toward the swaying half-figure. One slender hand extended tremblingly toward the inverted orange. "'Abruptly!' the orange vanished. Harper halted like he'd run into a brick wall. Staring blankly ahead, he put his hands to his stomach, moaning faintly. "'Ambruptly!' "'What's the matter?' cried Pilbott. "'The orange—it's in my stomach!' "'See, what did I tell you?' exulted Pilbott. "'Another act of imitativeness. It saw you drop the orange on Galt's—where his stomach should be—and imitate it by putting the orange in your stomach. It proves I'm right about the being—'n'r'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' Harper looked quickly at the desktop.
"'The other orange—it's gone! Into my stomach!' groaned Pilbott. "'Be—be careful what you do! My God, don't do anything—don't even think! This—this four-dimensional creature will surely imitate whatever you do in some weird manner!' Rubbing his stomach, Pilbott glanced about at the various articles of furniture. He blanched. "'I wouldn't want any of that stuff inside of me!' He yammered. Harper flicked a despairing glance at the half-body, now gliding along in the vicinity of the paper cutout. We—we must do something to get the professor back, he said worriedly. He thought incongruously of a restaurant where he used to order lemon pie and invariably get apple. Finally, he found that he could get lemon by ordering peach.
Now the problem was, what did he have to order To get his employee extricated from being stuck between dimensions, like a pig under a fence. Anything he did would be imitated in a manner that might prove tragic. The upright portion of the cut-out was leaning over backward, the head drooping down like a wilted flower, as the tension at the crease slowly lessened. Gathering together what resolution he could, Harper determined to take the bull by the horns. He would get the professor returned, by pressing the upper portion of the cut-out flatly on to the desk's surface. With trembling hands, he pressed down on it, then sprang back with a muffled yell. Three feet above the half-body, the professor's head had flashed into visibility.
"'You only pressed the head on to the desk,' said Pilbot disgustedly. So the being only impressed Galt's head back into the laboratory. Now press down the rest of the body.' The professor's head, suspended above the body, glared about, A fixed Harper with a smouldering glance. The mouth moved rapidly, but no words came. "'Professor, I can't hear you,' whimpered Harper. "'Your lungs and vocal cords are in the other dimension. Here, I'll have you completely returned.' He reached a hand toward the cut-out, the torso of which still bulged upward from the desk. Galt's head waggled in vigorous negation of Harper's contemplated act. His mouth moved in what, if audible, would have been clipped, burning accents.
Harper drew back his hand as if he had touched a red-hot poker. The professor doesn't want me to touch the cut-out, he said helplessly. Galt's head hovered over the cut-out like a gaunt moon. It swooped down toward the paper figure, seeming to be studying its position on the desk closely. Pilbott watched him for a sign of his intentions or wishes. Harper wandered distractedly over toward the high-wall bench. He had it! He would distract the attention of the entity from Galt by making another cut-out. He would then experiment with that second one without endangering Galt. He'd be careful not to make this one tall and thin so as not to resemble the professor in outline. Perhaps with it, he could trick the entity into releasing the missing part of Galt's body.
He scraped in the bench door for the scissors, and started to shear through a large, stiff piece of paper. A moment later, he looked up as Pilbot walked over. Galt has some reason for not wanting his silhouette touched, he said. Can't quite make out his lip movements, but he seems afraid some permanent mark may be left on him by his return. He wants time to figure out—why, what are you doing? I've made another cut-out for experiment, exclaimed Harper. And this one doesn't look like the professor. It isn't tall and thin. See? He lifted the second cut-out from the flat surface of the bench, held it suspended before him. This one is short and fat. Harper halted abruptly, the breath whooshing from his lungs.
There was no use talking to thin air. Pilbott had been whisked into nothingness. Where the portly figure of the eminent psychiatrist had stood was now nothing, not even a half-man. Too late, Harper realized that when he had lifted the paper figure from the service of the bench, the entity had imitated him by lifting Pilbott into the fourth dimension. Belatedly, he knew that the cut-out which he held dangling resembled Pilbot in outline. Harper dashed back and forth in little rushes, carrying the paper figure. He dared not put it down, for fear of seeing some segment of Pilbot flash back. He did not know what to do with it. Finally, he compromised by suspending it to a low-hanging chandelier, where it dangled, swaying in the slight air currents.
Golt was watching his assistant's antics with a bleak expression that changed to sardonic satisfaction as he realized Pilbott was in a predicament like his, only more so. Abruptly he frowned, staring ahead, and Harper guessed that Pilbott had located Golt's torso in the other realm, was nudging him to indicate the fact. Suddenly, Harper knew that he himself must enter this fourth-dimensional realm, that strange instinct told him the solution to everything was there, somewhat as a woman's intuition impels her to act in a certain way without knowing why. How to get there? Another paper cut out? He glanced toward the professor, the occupied trousers and swimming above it the man's head. The head was watching him, the expression savage.
No, there must be no more cut-outs, Harper decided. While the four-dimensional entity distinguished between the outlines of a thin silhouette and a fat one, something in between, like Harper's form, would be testing it too far. He, Harper, would take the place of his own cut-out. Galt's head reared up, glared fixedly at his assistant as the young man swung his legs onto the desk, then lay down flat. A moment he lay there, in Flatland, then leaped to his feet. It was as though he had leaped into a different world. He was no longer in the laboratory. He wasn't on any floor at all, as far as he could make out. His feet rested on nothing, and yet there was some sort of tension under him. like the surface tension of water.
He was, he suddenly knew it, standing on a segment of warped space. There was a spatial strain here that acted as a solid beneath him. Harper looked up, that is, overhead. There was nothing there but vast stretches of emptiness, at first. Then he saw that this emptiness was lined and laced with filmy striations, like cellophane. They bore a strange resemblance to his doodlings, as though that strange faculty of his enabled him to somehow perceive this place of the fourth dimension. And instinctively Harper knew that these lacings were the boundaries of a vast enclosure, a four-dimensional enclosure, the walls of which consisted of joined and meshed space warps. Abruptly he became aware of movement.
He became aware of solidity there above him, and the solidity was in motion. Harper knew he was gazing upon a being of the fourth dimension, doubtless the entity that had caused the phenomena in the laboratory which had snatched him into the fourth dimension, and even now observing him with its four-dimensional sight. There was a shape above him that strained his eyes, gave hint of form just beyond his comprehension. Harper hardly noticed that Pilbott was beside him, shaking him. He had suddenly grasped a fundamental law of spatial stresses, and he whipped out a pad and pencil, began scribbling down the mathematical formula of these laws. He began to see now why skyscrapers encountered the stress barrier at a certain height.
He understood just as a person of innate musical ability, hearing music for the first time, would understand the laws of that music. Look out! It's moving! Descending! Pilbott was yelling in his ear. It is about to act! "'Became active the moment you got here. How did you induce it to bring you here?' "'Huh?' Harper looked up from his scribbling. "'Oh!' Harper explained quickly how he had induced the being to act on himself. "'That's it!' cried Pilbott hoarsely. "'You've switched the pattern of imitation on it, tricked it into bringing you here. That's what made it angry.' "'Angry?' Harper almost dropped his pad, clutched at Pilbott as there was a sudden upheaval of the invisible tension surface on which they stood.
A violent shake sprawled them on the ground, and now Harper saw the torso of Galt a few feet away, apparently hovering above the surface. "'Yes, angry!' Pilbott was pale. "'As long as you merely gave it something to imitate, it was pacified. But now it recognizes opposition, an effort to outwit it due to your switching the pattern of imitation. Its condition is dangerous. It's bound to react violently. We have to get out of here. You must know some way.' Harper again scribbled some figures on his pad. As soon as I've worked out this formula... Pilbott shook him frantically. Can't you understand? This creature is a mental patient of a violent type. We are in a fourth-dimensional insane asylum.
Pilbott gazed upward fearfully at a descending mass. The pattern of its action fits perfectly, he went on. Some violent type of insanity, combined with delusions of grandeur, any slightest opposition will cause a spasm of fury. It recognizes such opposition in the way you tricked it into bringing you here. At first I thought it was a primitive mentality, but now I know it is a highly evolved but insane creature, thinks it's Napoleon, wants to conquer the three-dimensional plane which its attention has been attracted to in some way. Harper looked up in surprise. Does it know about Napoleon? Of course not, you fool! screamed Pilbott. It has the Napoleonic complex, identifies itself with some great conqueror of its own realm.
And now it's on the rampage. We have to get out of here. He clutched at Harper as another upheaval of the surface threw them down. Rising, Harper put away his pad. His calculations were complete. He could now show engineers how to build high buildings, taking advantage of space stress, instead of trying to fight the stress. For the first time, the danger of their position seemed to penetrate to his consciousness. He looked about, And his eyes rested on a strange familiar projection, rising from the invisible floor a few feet away. It was the section of his clay statue that had vanished. Vanished because its peculiar shape had somehow caused it to be warped into the fourth dimension. Why hadn't he been able to move it?
Professor Galt moved around freely. He and Pilbott went over to it, tried to move it. A slight filming webwork around the projection caught Harper's eye. Now he knew! The being had somehow affixed it to the spot as a landmark so it could locate the laboratory. It must have been this projection that had first attracted the being's attention to the three-dimensional world, since, ordinarily, it would never have noticed the presence of three-dimensional life any more than humans would notice the presence of two-dimensional life, if such existed. Harper looked up at a bleat from Pilbott. Above them was a sudden, furious play of lights and shades. Vast masses seemed shifting in crazy juxtapositions, now descending rapidly toward them.
Quick! Harper, now fully aroused, gasped to Pilbott. Climb down this projection. Climb down it? Yes! There is a fluid condition of space where it penetrates between the two planes. By hugging its contours, you will emerge into the laboratory, I hope. Pilbott glanced overhead nervously, then experimentally slid a foot down the projection. The foot vanished. With a cry of relief, Pilbott lowered himself until only head and shoulders were visible. Then that, too, vanished. Harper looked up. Some monstrous suggestion of form was almost upon him. He grasped the projection, and just as his head sank out of sight, the form seemed to smash down on him. Pilbott helped Harper to his feet, from where he had sprawled at the base of the statue, on the laboratory floor.
Quick, he gasped. The creature will be infuriated now by our escape from its realm. A maniacal spasm is sure to follow. We must get Galt back in some way, then leave the laboratory. Even as they dashed over toward the abbreviated form of Galt, the laboratory shook. Invisible strains seemed to be bulging the walls inward. Harper rushed to the desk upon which still reposed the cutout, the section between neck and waist still arched off the surface. As Harper reached toward the cutout to press it flat, Galt's eyes widened, his mouth opened in a soundless shout of opposition. Harper hesitated. "'Never mind him,' yammered Pilbott. "'Press the figure flat.' Harper pressed it flat. For an instant the laboratory stopped its ominous vibration.
Then the figure of Gault flew through the air, came up against a wall, but it was his complete figure. "'More signs of violence,' cried Pilbott. "'But that action won't appease it. We must get out of here!' Even as he spoke, There was a thunderous crackling and roaring. Harper felt himself flying about, and for an instant of awful vertigo he did not know up from down. Forces seemed to be tearing at him. He felt as though he were a piece of iron being attracted simultaneously in several directions by powerful electromagnets. There was a flare of colored lights, a deafening detonation, and he felt himself knocked breathless against a wall. He picked himself up, looked around. On one side of him was the familiar south wall of the laboratory.
To the north, east, and west was open air. He was standing on a section of laboratory flooring that jutted out over empty space from the wall. His desk was a few feet away, right at the edge of the jutting floor. Galt and Pilbott were picking themselves up to one side of the desk. The pair looked over the edge of the floor, then recoiled, frenziedly hugging the flooring under them. Harper crawled over, looking over the edge, quickly backed away, Several hundred feet below, the traffic of the city roared. Galt went over to the door in one wall, opened it, then stepped back quickly, his face pale. "'The laboratory has been turned inside out!' he shouted. "'We are on the outside.' "'We must get away from here,' squalled Pilbot.
"'Another spasm of the creature will precipitate us into the street.' Galt forgot his apprehensions long enough to freeze Harper with a glance. "'This is all your doing,' he bawled. You, with your absurd doodling, which attracted the attention of some being of the fourth dimension. In his anger, he overlooked the fact that he was contradicting his formerly held opinion. The laboratory wrecked, he continued. And that isn't all. He stalked up to the cringing Harper, thrust his face toward him. Do you know, he yelled, why I didn't want to be returned hastily, why I didn't want you to bring me back by flattening out the paper cutout? You dolt! Did you ever try to get a crease out of a piece of paper?
I... I don't understand, muttered Harper. That paper doll was creased, wasn't it? shouted Galt. Once a piece of paper is creased, he resumed heatedly, it can't be perfectly flattened out again. At the crease, a thin cross-section continues to bulge, into the third dimension, in the case of that paper cutout, into the fourth dimension, in my case. I'm creased, too. at the line where I was bent into the fourth dimension. Surely you aren't blind. Harper staggered back as he saw it, a thin horizontal line of light shining through Galt's body, across his waistline, through clothes and all. I shall have to go through life this way, Galt snarled, due to your imbecilic doodling, and your meddling with what you don't understand.
Go about constantly with a slit of daylight showing through me. You're fired. Gentlemen, cried Pilbott. The Entity! We must get away! Another spasm will surely follow! Harper didn't think so. A few feet away he noticed something, his statue lying on its side. It was all there, including the portion that had been in the fourth dimension. The Entity's landmark was gone. Harper didn't believe it would locate this particular area of the third dimension again. The scream of a fire-siren rose up to them. As a ladder scraped over the projecting floor, Harper fondly felt the pad in his pocket with the formula on it. He wasn't worried now about having been fired. He was seeing visions of a small cottage with Judith.
Of course, he would have to be careful in the future with his doodling. He could not again risk attracting the attention of some four-dimensional being, not with Judith to think about.
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2 Bread Overhead 38:18
Bread Over Head by Fritz Leiber The staff of life suddenly and disconcertingly sprouted wings, and mankind had to eat crow.
As a blisteringly hot but guaranteed weather-controlled future summer day dawned on the Mississippi Valley, the walking mills of puffy products, spiked a loaf in one operation, began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas. The walking mills resembled fat metal serpents, rather larger than those Chinese paper dragons animated by files of men in procession. Sensory robot devices in their nose informed them that the waiting wheat had reached ripe perfection. As they advanced, their heads swung lazily from side to side, very much like snakes, gobbling the yellow grain. In their throats it was threshed, the chaff bundled and burped aside for pickup by the crawl trucks of a chemical corporation, the kernels quick-dried and blown along into the mighty chests of the machines.
There the tireless mills ground the kernels to flour, which was instantly sifted, the bran being packaged and dropped like the chaff for pickup. A cluster of tanks which gave the metal serpents a decidedly hump-backed appearance Added water, shortening, salt, and other ingredients, some named and some not. The dough was at the same time infused with gas from a tank conspicuously labeled carbon dioxide. No yeast creatures in your bread. Thus instantly risen, the dough was clipped into loaves and shot into radionic ovens, forming the midsections of the metal serpents. There the bread was baked in a matter of seconds. A fierce heat front browning the crusts, and the piping hot loaves sealed in transparent plastic bearing the proud puffy-loaf emblem two cherubs circling a floating loaf, and ejected on to the delivery platform at each serpent's rear end were a cluster of pick-up machines, like hungry piglets, snatched at the loaves with hygienic claws.
A few loaves would be hurried off for the day's consumption. The majority stored for winter in strategically located mammoth deep freezes. But now, behold a wonder! As loaves began to appear on the delivery platform of the first walking mill to get into action, they did not linger on the conveyor belt, but rose gently into the air, and slowly travelled off downwind across the hot, rippling fields.
The robot claws of the pickup machines clutched in vain, and, not noticing the difference, proceeded carefully to stack emptiness tier by tier. One errant loaf, rising more sluggishly than its fellows, was snagged by a thrusting claw. The machine paused, clumsily wiped off the injured loaf, set it aside, where it bobbed on one corner, unable to take off again, and went back to the work of storing nothingness.
A flock of crows rose from the trees of a nearby shelter belt as the flight of loaves approached. The crows swooped to investigate, and then suddenly scattered, screeching in panic. The helicopter of a hangoverish Sunday traveler bound for Wichita shied very similarly from the brown fliers, and did not return for a second look. A black-haired housewife spied them over her back fence, crossed herself, and grabbed her walkie-talkie from the laundry basket. Seconds later, the yawning correspondent of a regional newspaper was jotting down the lead of a humorous news story which, recalling the old flying saucer scares, stated that now apparently bread was to be included in the mad aerial tea-party.
The congregation of an open-walled country church, standing up to recite the most familiar of Christian prayers, had just reached the petition for daily sustenance when a sub-flight of the loaves, either forced down by a vagrant wind or lacking the natural buoyancy of the rest, came coasting silently as the sunbeams between the graceful pillars at the altar-end of the building. Meanwhile, the main flight, now augmented by other bred flocks from scores and hundreds of walking mills that had started work a little later, mounted slowly and majestically into the cirrus-flecked upper air, where a steady wind was blowing strongly toward the east. About one thousand miles farther on in that direction, where a cluster of stratosphere-tickling towers marked the location of the metropolis of New New York, A tender scene was being enacted in the pressurized penthouse managerial suite of Puffy Products.
McGarrow Winterly, secretary-in-chief to the managerial board, and referred to by her underlings as the Blonde Icicle, was dealing with the advances of Roger Racehorse Sneddon, assistant secretary to the board, and often indistinguishable from any passing office boy. Why don't you jump out the window, Roger, remembering to shut the airlock after you? The Golden Glacier said in tones not unkind. When are your high-strung, thoroughbred nerves going to accept the fact that I would never consider marriage with a business inferior? You have about as much chance as a starving Ukrainian Kulak now that Moscow's clapped on the interdict.
Roger's voice was calm, although his eyes were feverishly bright. as he replied, "'A lot of things are going to be different around here, Meg, as soon as the board is forced to admit that only my quick thinking made it possible to bring the name of Puffy Loaf in front of the whole world.' "'Puffy Loaf could do with a little of that,' the business girl observed judiciously. "'The way sales have been plummeting, it won't be long before the government deeds our desks to the managers of Fairy Bread and asks us to take the big jump. But just where does your quick thinking come into this, Mr. Sneddon? You can't be referring to the helium. That was Rose Thinker's brainwave. She studied him suspiciously.
You've birthed another promotional bumble, Roger. I can see it in your eyes. I only hope it's not as big a one as when you put the Martian ambassador on 3D and he thanked you profusely for the gross of puffy loaves. Assuring you that he'd never slept on a softer mattress in all his life on two planets. "'Listen to me, Meg. Today—yes, today—you're going to see the board eating out of my hand.' "'Ha! I guarantee you won't have any fingers left. You're bold enough now, but when Mr. Grice and those two big machines come through that door—' Now wait a minute, Meg. Hush! They're coming now!' Roger leaped three feet in the air, but managed to land without a sound, and edged toward his stool. Through the dilating iris of the door strode Phineas T.
Grice, flanked by Rose Thinker and Tin Philosopher. The man approached the conference table in the center of the room with measured pace and gravely expressionless face. The rose-tinted machine on his left did a couple of impulsive pirouettes on the way, and twittered a greeting to Meg and Roger. The other machine quietly took the third of the high seats and lifted a claw at Meg, who now occupied a stool twice the height of Rogers.
Miss Winterly, please, our theme. The blonde icicle's face thawed into a little girl's smile as she chanted bubblingly, Made up of tiny wheaten motes, and reinforced with sturdy oats, it rises through the air and floats, the bread on which all terra dotes. "'Thank you, Miss Winterly,' said the tin philosopher. "'Though a purely figurative statement, that bit about rising through the air always gets me—here.' He rapped his midsection, which gave off a high musical clang.
Ladies," he inclined his photocells toward Rose Thinker and Meg, and gentlemen, this is a historic occasion in old Puffy's long history, the inauguration of the helium-filled loaf, so light it almost floats away, in which that inert and heaven-aspiring gas replaces old-fashioned carbon dioxide. Later, there will be kudos for Rose Thinker, whose bright relays genius sparked the idea, and also for Roger Sneddon, who took care of the details. By the by, Racehorse, that was a brilliant piece of work, getting the Helium out of the government. You've been pretty stuffy lately about their monopoly. But first I want to throw wide the casement in your minds that opens on the long view of things. Rose Thinker spun twice on her chair and opened her photo cells wide.
Tin Philosopher coughed to limber up the diaphragm of his speaker and continued. Ever since the first cave wife boasted to her next-den neighbor about the superior paleness and fluffiness of her tortillas, mankind has sought lighter, whiter bread. Indeed, Thinkers wiser than myself have equated the whole upward course of culture with this poignant quest. Yeast was a wonderful discovery, for its primitive day. Sifting the bran and wheat germ from the flour was an even more important advance. Early bleaching and preserving chemicals played their humble parts. For a while, barbarous faddists, Blind to the deeply spiritual nature of bread, which is recognized by all great religions, held back our march toward perfection with their hair-splitting insistence on the vitamin content of the wheat germ.
But their case collapsed when tasteless colorless. Substitutes were triumphantly synthesized and introduced into the loaf, which for flawless purity, unequaled airiness, And sheer intangible goodness was rapidly becoming mankind's supreme gustatory experience. "'I wonder what the stuff tastes like,' Rose Thinker said out of a clear sky. "'I wonder what taste tastes like,' Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily. Recovering himself, he continued. "'Then, early in the twenty-first century,' came the epochal researches of Everett Whitehead, puffy-loaf chemist, culminating in his paper the structural bubble in cereal masses, and making possible the baking of air-tight bread twenty times stronger for its weight than steel, and of a lightness that would have been incredible, even to the advanced chemist-bakers of the twentieth century.
A lightness so great that, Besides forming the backbone of our own promotion, it has for ever since been capitalized on by our conscious-less competitors of Fairy Bread, with their enduring slogan, It Makes Ghost Toast. "'That's a beaut all right, that ecto dough blurb,' Rose Thinker admitted, bugging her photo-cells sadly. "'Wait a sec. How about—' "'There'll be bread overhead.' When you're dead, it is said. Phineas T. Grice wrinkled his nostrils at the pink machine as if he smelled her insulation smouldering. He said mildly, A somewhat unhappy jingle, Rose, referring as it does to the end of the customer as consumer. Moreover, we shouldn't overplay the figurative rises-through-the-air angle.
What inspired you? She shrugged. I don't know. Oh, yes, I do. I was remembering one of the worker's songs we machines used to chant during the big strike. Work and pray, live on hay, you'll get pie in the sky when you die. It's a lie. I don't know why we chanted it, she added. We didn't want pie, or hay, for that matter. And machines don't pray. "'Except Tibetan prayer-wheels.' Phineas T. Grice shook his head. "'Labor relations are another topic we should stay far away from. However, dear Rose, I'm glad you keep trying to out-jingle those dirty crooks at Fairy Bread.' He scowled, turning back his attention to Tin Philosopher. "'I get whopping mad, old machine, whenever I hear that other slogan of theirs.' The discriminatory one.
Untouched by robot claws. Just because they employ a few filthy androids in their factories. Tin Philosopher lifted one of his own sets of bright talons. Thanks, P. T. But to continue my historical resume, the next great advance in the baking art was the substitution of purified carbon dioxide recovered from coal smoke, For the gas generated by yeast organisms indwelling in the dough, and later killed by the heat of baking, their corpses remaining in situ. But even purified carbon dioxide is itself a rather repugnant gas, a product of metabolism whether fast or slow, and forever associated with those life processes which are obnoxious to the fastidious. Here the machine shuddered with delicate clinkings.
Therefore we of Puffy Loaf are taking to-day what may be the ultimate step toward purity. We are aerating our loaves with the noble gas helium, an element which remains virginal in the face of all chemical temptations, and whose slim molecules are eleven times lighter than obese carbon dioxide. Yes, Noble, uncontamable helium, which, if it be a kind of ash, is yet the ash only of radioactive burning, accomplished or initiated entirely on the sun, a safe ninety-three million miles from this planet. Let's have a cheer for the helium loaf." Without changing expression, Phineas T. Grice wrapped the table thrice in solemn applause. while the others bowed their heads. "'Thanks, T. B.' P. T. then said.
"'And now for the moment of truth. Miss Winterly, how is the helium loaf selling?' The business girl clapped on a pair of earphones and whispered into a lapel-mic. Her gaze grew abstracted as she mentally translated flurries of brief squawks into coherent messages. Suddenly, A single vertical furrow creased her matchlessly smooth brow. "'It isn't, Mr. Grice,' she gasped in horror. "'Fairy Bread is outselling puffy-loaves by an infinity factor. So far this morning there has not been one single delivery of puffy-loaves to any sales spot. Complaints about non-delivery are pouring in from both walking-stores and sessile shops.' "'Mr. Sneddon,' Grice barked. What bug in the new helium process might account for this delay?
Roger was on his feet, looking bewildered. "'I can't imagine, sir, unless—just possibly—there's been some unforeseeable difficulty involving the new metal-foil wrappers.' "'Metal-foil wrappers? Were you responsible for those?' "'Yes, sir.' Last-minute recalculation showed that the extra lightness of the new loaf might be great enough to cause drift during stackage. Draughts in stores might topple sales pyramids. Metal-foil wrappers, by their added weight, took care of the difficulty. "'And you ordered them without consulting the board?' "'Yes, sir. There was hardly time, and—' "'Why, you fool! I noticed that order for metal-foil wrappers.' Assumed it was some sub-secretary's mistake, and cancelled it last night.
Roger Sneddon turned pale. "'You cancelled it?' he quavered. "'And told them to go back to the lighter plastic wrappers?' "'Of course. Just what is behind all of this, Mr. Sneddon? What recalculations were you trusting?' When our physicist had demonstrated months ago that the helium loaf was safely stackable in light airs and gentle breezes, winds up to Beaufort scale three, why should a change from heavier to lighter wrappers result in complete non-delivery?
Roger Sneddon's paleness became tinged with an interesting green. He cleared his throat and made strange gulping noises. Tin Philosopher's photocells focused on him calmly, rose thinkers with unfeigned excitement. P. T. Grice's frown grew blacker by the moment, while Magara Winterly's Venus mask showed an odd dawning of dismay and awe. She was getting new squawks in her earphones. "'Er, um, er,' Roger said in winning tones, "'Well, you see, the fact is that I—' Hold it," Meg interrupted crisply. Triple urgent from Public Relations, Safety Division. Tulsa-Topeca Arrow Express makes emergency landing after being buffeted in a counter with vast flight of objects first described as brown birds, although no failures reported in Airway's electronic anti-bird fences.
After grounding safely near Emporia, no fatalities, Pilot's windshield found thinly plastered with soft white-and-brown material. Emblems on plastic wrappers embedded in material identified incontrovertibly as an undetermined number of puffy-loaves cruising at three thousand feet. Eyes and photocells turned inquisitorily upon Roger Sneddon. He went from green to puffy-loaf-white, and blurted, "'All right! I did it!' But it was the only way out. Yesterday morning, due to the Ukrainian crisis, the government stopped sales and deliveries of all strategic stockpiled materials, including helium gas. Puffy's new program of advertising and promotion, based on the lighter loaf, was already rolling. There was only one thing to do, there being only one other gas comparable in lightness to helium.
I diverted the necessary quantity of hydrogen gas from the hydrogenated oils section of our Magna Margarine division, and substituted it for the helium. You substituted hydrogen for the helium? Phineas T. Grice faltered in low mechanical tones, taking four steps backward. Hydrogen is twice as light as helium, Tin Philosopher remarked judiciously. "'And many times cheaper. Did you know that?' Roger countered feebly. "'Yes, I substituted hydrogen. The metal foil wrapping would have added just enough weight to counteract the greater buoyancy of the hydrogen loaf. But—' "'So, when this morning's loaves began to arrive on the delivery platforms of the walking mills,' Tin Philosopher left the remark unfinished.
"'Exactly,' Roger agreed dismally. Let me ask you, Mr. Steddon," Grice interjected still in low tones, if you expected people to jump to the kitchen ceiling for their puffy bread after taking off the metal wrapper, or reach for the sky if they happened to unwrap the stuff outdoors— Mr. Grice, Roger said reproachfully, you have often assured me that what people do with puffy bread after they buy it is no concern of ours. "'I seem to recall,' Rose Thinker chirped somewhat unkindly. "'That dictum was created to answer inquiries after Roger put the famous Sculptures in Miniature Artists on 3-D, and he testified that he always moulded his first attempts from puffy bread, one jumbo loaf squeezing down to approximately the size of a peanut.' Her photo-cells dimmed and brightened.
"'Oh, boy! Hydrogen!' The loaf's unwrapped. After a while, in spite of the crust seal, a little oxygen diffuses in. An explosive mixture. Housewife in curlers and kimono pops a couple slices in the toaster. Boom! The three human beings in the room winced. Tin philosopher kicked her under the table, while observing. So you see, Roger. That the non-delivery of the hydrogen loaf carries some consolations. And I must confess that one aspect of the affair gives me great satisfaction, not as a board member, but as a private machine. You have at last made a reality of the Rises Through the Air part of Puffy Bread's theme. They can't ever take that away from you. By now half the inhabitants of the Great Plains must have observed our flying loaves rising high.
Phineas T. Grice shot a frightened look at the west windows, and found his full voice. Stop the mills! he roared at Meg Winterly, who nodded and whispered urgently into her mike. A sensible suggestion, Tin Philosopher said. But it comes a trifle late in the day. If the mills are still walking and grinding, approximately seven billion puffy loaves are at this moment cruising eastward over Middle America. Remember that a six-month supply for deep freeze is involved, and that the current consumption of bread, due to its matchless airiness, is eight and one-half loaves per person per day. Phineas T. Grice carefully inserted both hands into his scanty hair, feeling for a good grip. He leaned menacingly toward Roger, who, chin resting on the table, regarded him apathetically.
"'Hold it,' Meg called sharply. "'Flock of multiple urgents coming in. News liaison. Information bureaus swamped with flying bread inquiries. Arrow express lines. Clear our airways or face lawsuit. U.S. Army. Why do loaves flame when hit by incendiary bullets?' U.S. Customs. If bread intended for export, get export license or face prosecution. Russian Consulate in Chicago. Advise on destination of bread lift. And some Kansas church is accusing us of a hoax inciting to blasphemy, of faking miracles. I don't know why." The business girl tore off her headphones. Rogers Snetton! she cried with a hysteria that would have dumbfounded her underlings. "'You've brought the name of Puffy Loaf in front of the whole world, all right.
Now do something about the situation!' Roger nodded obediently, but his pallor increased a shade. The pupils of his eyes disappeared under the upper lids, and his head burrowed beneath his forearms. "'Oh, boy!' Rose Thinker called gaily to Tin Philosopher. This looks like the start of a real crisis session. Did you remember to bring spare batteries?"
Meanwhile, the monstrous flight of puffy loaves, filling mid-western skies as no small fliers had since the days of the passenger pigeon, soared steadily onward. Private fliers approached the brown and glistening bread front in curiosity, and dipped back in awe. Aero Express lines organized sightseeing flights along the flanks. Planes of the government forestry and agricultural services and copters bearing the puffy-loaf emblem hovered stood on the fringes watching developments and waiting for orders. A squadron of supersonic fighters hung menacingly above. The behaviour of birds varied considerably. Most fled or gave the loaves a wide berth, but some bolder species, discovering the minimal nutritive nature of the translucent brown objects, attacked them furiously with beaks and claws.
Hydrogen diffusing slowly through the crusts had now distended most of the sealed plastic wrappers into little balloons, which ruptured when pierced with disconcerting pops. Below, neck-craning citizens crowded streets and backyards, cranks and cultists had a field day, while local and national governments raged indiscriminately at Puffy Loaf and at each other. Rumors that a fusion weapon would be exploded in the midst of the flying bread drew angry protests from conservationists, and a flood of Telefax pamphlets titled, H. Loaf or H. Bomb? Stockholme sent a mystifying note of praise to the United Nations Food Organization. Delhi issued nervous denials of a millet blight that no one had heard of until that moment, and reaffirmed India's ability to feed her population with no outside help except the usual.
Radio Moscow asserted that the Kremlin would brook no interference in its treatment of the Ukrainians, jokingly referred to the Flying Bread as a farce perpetrated by mad internationalists inhabiting Cloud Cuckoo Land, added contradictory references to airborne bread booby-trapped by capitalist gangsters, and then fell moodily silent on the whole topic. Radio Venus reported to its winged audience that Earth's inhabitants were establishing food depots in the upper air, preparatory to taking a permanent aerial residence such as we have always enjoyed on Venus.
New New York made feverish preparations for the passage of the Flying Bread. Tickets for sightseeing space in skyscrapers were sold at high prices. Cold meats and potted spreads were hawked to viewers with the assurance that they would be able to snag the bread out of the air and enjoy a historic sandwich. Phineas T. Grice, escaping from his own managerial suite, raged about the city, demanding general cooperation in the stretching of great nets between the skyscrapers to trap the errant loaves. He was captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped again, and was found posted with oxygen mask and submachine gun on the topmost spire of Puffy Loaf Tower, apparently determined to shoot down the loaves as they appeared, and before they involved his company in more trouble with Customs and the State Department.
Recaptured by Tin Philosopher, who suffered only minor bullet holes, he was given a series of mild electro-shocks and returned to the conference table, calm and clear-headed as ever. But the bread flight, swinging away from a hurricane moving up the Atlantic coast, crossed a clouded-end Boston by night, and disappeared into a high Atlantic overcast, also thereby evading a local storm generated by the weather department in a last-minute effort to bring down, or at least disperse, the H-loaves. Warnings and counter-warnings by Communist and capitalist governments seriously interfered with military trailing of the flight during this period, and it was actually lost in touch with for several days.
At scattered points, seagulls were observed fighting over individual loaves floating down from the gray roof. That was all. A mood of spirituality strongly tinged with humor seized the people of the world. Ministers sermonized about the bread, variously interpreting it as a call to charity, a warning against gluttony, a parable of the evanescence of all earthly things, and a divine joke. Husbands and wives, facing each other across their walls of breakfast toast, burst into laughter. The mere sight of a loaf of bread anywhere was enough to evoke guffaws. An obscure sect, Having as part of its creed the injunction, don't take yourself so damn seriously, won new adherence. The bread-flight, rising above an Atlantic storm widely reported to have destroyed it, passed unobserved across a foggy England, and rose out of the overcast only over middle Europa.
The lows had at last reached their maximum altitude. The sun's rays beat through the rarefied air on the distended plastic wrappers, increasing still further the pressure of the confined hydrogen. They burst by the millions, and tens of millions. A high-flying Bulgarian evangelist, who had happened to mistake the up-lever for the east-lever in the cockpit of his flyer, and who was the sole witness of the event, afterwards described it as, the foaming of a sea of diamonds, The Crackle of God's Knuckles.
By the millions and tens of millions, the loaves coasted down into the starving Ukraine. Shaken by a week of humor that threatened to invade even its own grim precincts, the Kremlin made a sudden about-face. A new policy was instituted of communal ownership of the produce of communal farms, and teams of hunger fighters and caravans of trucks loaded with pumpernickel were dispatched into the Ukraine. World distribution was given to a series of photographs showing peasants queuing up to trade scavenged puffy loaves for traditional black bread, recently aerated itself but still extra solid by comparison, the rate of exchange demanded by the Moscow teams being twenty puffy loaves to one of pumpernickel.
Another series of photographs Picturing chubby workers' children being blown to bits by booby-trapped bread, was quietly destroyed. Congratulatory notes were exchanged by various national governments and world organizations, including the Brotherhood of Free Business Machines. The great bread-flight was over, though for several weeks afterward scattered falls of loaves occurred, giving rise to a new folklore of manna among lonely Arabian tribesmen, and in one well-authenticated instance in Tibet, sustaining life in a party of mountaineers, cut off by a snow-slide. Back in New New York, the managerial board of Puffy Products slumped an utter collapse around the conference table. The long crisis session at last ended.
Empty coffee cartons were scattered around the chairs of the three humans, dead batteries around those of the two machines. For a while there was no movement whatsoever. Then Roger Sneddon reached out wearily for the earphones where Magera Winterly had hurled them down, adjusted them to his head, pushed a button, and listened apathetically.
After a bit his gaze brightened. He pushed more buttons and listened more eagerly. Soon he was sitting tensely upright on his stool, eyes bright and lower face all a smile, muttering terse comments and questions into the lapel-mic, torn from Meg's fair neck. The others, reviving, watched him, at first dully, then with quickening interest, especially when he jerked off the headphones with a happy shout and sprang to his feet. "'Listen to this!' he cried in a ringing voice. "'As a result of the world-wide publicity, Puffy Loaves are outselling fairy bread three to one. And that's just the old carbon dioxide stock from our freezers. It's almost exhausted, but the government, now that the Ukrainian crisis is over, has taken the ban off helium, and will also sell us stockpiled wheat if we need it.
We can have our walking mills burrowing into the wheat caves in a matter of hours. But that isn't all. The far greater demand everywhere is for puffy loaves that will actually float. Public Relations Child Liaison Division reports that the kiddies are making their mothers' lives miserable about it. If only we can figure out some way to make hydrogen non-explosive, or the Helium Loaf float just a little—I'm sure we can take care of that quite handily, Tin Philosopher interrupted briskly. Puffy Loaf has kept it a corporation's secret. Even you've never been told about it. But just before he went crazy, Everett Whitehead discovered a way to make bread using only half as much flour as we do in the present loaf.
Using this secret technique, which we've been saving for just such an emergency, it will be possible to bake a helium loaf as buoyant in every respect as the hydrogen loaf. "'Good!' Roger cried. "'We'll tether em on strings and sell em like balloons. No mother-child shopping team will leave the store without a cluster. Buying bread balloons will be the big event of the day for kiddies. It'll make the carry-home shopping load lighter, too. I'll issue orders at once.' He broke off, looking at Phineas T. Grice, said with quiet assurance, "'Excuse me, sir, if I seem to be taking too much upon myself.' "'Not at all, son. Go straight ahead,' the great manager said approvingly. "'Your,' he laughed in anticipation of getting off a memorable remark, "'Rising to the challenging situation like a genuine puffy-loaf.' Magera Winterly looked from the older man to the younger.
Then in a single leap she was upon Roger, her arms wrapped tightly around him. "'My sweet little ever-victorious self-propelled monkey-wrench!' she crooned in his ear. Roger looked fatuously over her soft shoulder at Tin Philosopher, who, as if moved by some similar feeling, reached over and touched Claus with Rose Thinker. This, however, was what he telegraphed silently to his fellow-machine across the circuit so completed. "'Good-o, Rosie!' That makes another victory for robot-engineered world unity. Though you almost gave us away at the start with that bread overhead jingle, we struck another blow against the next world war in which, as we know only too well, we machines would suffer the most.
Now if we can only arrange, say, a fur famine in Alaska, and a migration of long-haired Siberian lemmings across Bering Straits. We'd have to swing the Japanese current up there so it'd be warm enough for the little fellows. Anyhow, Rosie, with a spot of help from the Brotherhood, those humans will paint themselves into the Peace Corner yet." Meanwhile he and Rose Thinker quietly watched the blonde icicle melt.
And a story.
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3 Image of the Gods 36:07
Image of the Gods.
It was nearly winter when the ship arrived. Pete Farnham never knew if the timing had been planned that way or not. It might have been coincidence that it came just when the colony was predicting its first-rail bumper crop of all time. When it was all over, Pete and Mario and the rest tried to figure it out, but none of them ever knew for sure just what had happened back on Earth, or when it had actually happened. There was too little information to go on, and practically none that they could trust. All Pete Farnham really knew that day was that this was the wrong year for a ship from Earth to land on Baron Four. Pete was out on the plantation when it landed. As usual, his sprayer had gotten clogged.
Tarring should have been started earlier, before it got so cold that the stuff clung to the nozzle and hardened before the spray could settle into the dusty soil. The summer past had been the colony's finest in the fourteen years he'd been there. A warm, still summer, with plenty of rain to keep the dirt down and let the taro get well rooted and grow up tall and gray against the purple sky. But now the taro was harvested. It was waiting, compressed and crated, ready for shipment, and the heavy black clouds were scudding nervously across the sky, faster with every passing day. Two days ago, Pete had asked Mario to see about firing up the little furnaces the dusties had built to help them fight the winter.
All that remained now was tarring the fields, and then buckling down beneath the windshields before the first winter storm struck. Pete was trying to get the nozzle of the tar sprayer cleaned out when Mario's Jeep came roaring down the rutted road from the village in a cloud of dust. In the back seat, a couple of Dustys were bouncing up and down like happy five-year-olds. The brakes squealed, and Mario bellowed at him from the road. Pete, the ship's in. Better get hopping. Pete nodded and started to close up the sprayer. One of the Dustys tumbled out of the Jeep and scampered across the field to give him a hand. It was an inexpert hand, to say the least, but the Dustys seemed so proud of the little they were able to learn about mechanized farming that nobody had the heart to shoo them away.
Pete watched the fuzzy brown creature get its paws thoroughly gummed up with tar before he pulled him loose and sent him back to the Jeep with a whack on the backside. He finished the job himself, grabbed his coat from the back of the sprayer, and pulled himself into the front seat of the Jeep. Mario started the little car back down the road. The young colonist's face was coated with dust, emphasizing the lines of worry around his eyes. "'I don't like it, Pete. There isn't any ship due this year.' "'When did it land?' "'About twenty minutes ago. Won't be cool for a while yet.' Pete laughed. "'Maybe old Schooner is just getting lonesome to swap tall stories with us. Maybe he's even bringing us a locker of T-bones.
Who knows?' "'Maybe,' said Mario, without conviction. Pete looked at him and shrugged. Why complain if they're early? Maybe they've found some new way to keep our fields from blowing away on us every winter. He stared across at the heavy windbreaks between the fields, long, ragged structures built in hope of outwitting the vicious winds that howled across the land during the long winter. Pete picked bits of tar from his beard and wiped the dirt from his forehead with the back of his hand. This tarring is mean, he said wearily. Glad to take a break. Maybe Cap Schooner will know something about the rumors we've been hearing, Mario said gloomily. Pete looked at him sharply. About Earth? Mario nodded.
Schooner's a pretty good guy, I guess. I mean, he'd tell us if anything was really wrong back home, wouldn't he? Pete nodded and snapped his fingers. One of the dusties hopped over into his lap and began gawking happily at the broad fields as the Jeep jogged along. Pete stroked the creature's soft brown fur with his tar-caked fingers. "'Maybe someday these little guys will show us where they go for the winter,' he said. "'They must have it down to a science.' Somehow the idea was funny, and both men roared. If the Dustys had anything down to a science, nobody knew what. Mario grinned and tweaked the creature's tale. "'They sure do beat the winter, though,' he said. "'So do we. Only we have to do it the human way.' These fellows grew up in the climate.
Pete lapsed into silence as the village came into view. The ship had landed quite a way out, resting on its skids on the long, shallow groove the colonists had bulldozed out for it years before, the first year they had arrived on Baron Four. Slowly Pete turned Mario's words over in his mind, allowing himself to worry a little. There had been rumors of trouble back on Earth, persistent rumors he had taken care to soft-pedal as mayor of the colony. There were other things, too, like the old newspapers and magazines that had been brought in by the lad from Barin, too, and the rare radio message they could pick up through their atmospheric disturbance. Maybe something was going wrong back home, but somehow political upheavals on Earth seemed remote to these hardened colonists.
Captain Schooner's visits were always welcome, but they were few and far between. The colony was small, one ship every three years could supply it, And even then the taro crates wouldn't half fill up the storage holds. There were other colonies far closer to home that sent back more taro in one year than Baron Four could grow in ten. But when a ship did come down, it was a time of high excitement. It meant fresh food from earth, meat from the frozen lockers, maybe even a little candy and salt. And always for Pete, a landing meant a long evening of palaver with the captain about things back home and things on Baron Four. Pete smiled to himself as he thought of it. He could remember Earth, of course, with a kind of vague nostalgia, but Baron For was home to him now, and he knew he would never leave it.
He had too many hopes invested there, too many years of heartache and desperate hard work, too much deep satisfaction in having cut a niche for himself on this dusty, hostile world ever to think much about Earth any more. Mario stopped in front of the offices, and one of the dusties hopped out ahead of Pete. The creature strode across the rough gravel to the door, pulling tar off his fingers, just as he had seen Pete do. Pete followed him to the door, and then stopped, frowning. There should have been a babble of voices inside, with Captain Schooner's loud laugh roaring above the excitement, but Pete could hear nothing. A chill of uneasiness ran through him. He pushed open the door and walked inside.
A dozen of his friends looked up silently, avoiding the eyes of the uniformed stranger in the center of the room. When he saw the man, Pete Farnham knew something was wrong indeed. It wasn't Captain Schooner. It was a man he'd never seen before. The Dusty ran across the room in front of Pete and hopped up on the desk as though he owned it, throwing his hands on his hips and staring at the stranger curiously. Pete took off his cap and parka and dropped them on a chair. Well, he said, this is a surprise. We weren't expecting a ship so soon. The man inclined his head stiffly and glanced down at the paper he held in his hand. You're Peter Farnham, I suppose, mayor of this colony? That's right, and you?
Varga is the name, the captain said shortly. Earth Security and Supply. He nodded towards the small, frail-looking men in civilian clothes sitting beside him. This is Rupert Nathan of the Colonial Service. You'll be seeing a great deal of him. He held out a small wallet of papers. Our credentials, Farnham, be so good as to examine them. Pete glanced around the room. John Teagan and Hank Mario were watching him uneasily. Mary Turner was following the proceedings with her sharp little eyes, missing nothing. And Mel Dorfman stood like a rock, his heavy face curiously expressionless as he watched the visitors. Pete reached out for the papers, flipped through them, and handed them back with a long look at Captain Varga.
He was younger than Captain Schooner, with sandy hair and pale eyes that looked up at Pete from a soft baby face. Clean-shaven, his whole person seemed immaculate as he leaned back calmly in the chair. His civilian companion, however, had indecision written in every line of his pink face. His hands fluttered nervously, and he avoided the colonist's eyes. Pete turned to the captain. "'The papers say you're our official supply ship,' he said. "'You're early, but an earthship is always good news.' He clucked at the Dusty, who was about to go after one of the shiny buttons on the captain's blouse. The little brown creature hopped over and settled on Pete's knee. "'We've been used to seeing Captain Schooner.' The captain and Nathan exchanged glances.
Captain Schooner has retired from security service, the captain said shortly. You won't be seeing him again, but we have a cargo for your colony. You may send these people over to the ship to start unloading now, if you wish. His eyes swept the circle of wind-burned faces. While Nathan and I discuss certain matters with you here. Nobody moved for a moment. Then Pete nodded to Mario. Take the boys out to unload, Jack. We'll see you back here in an hour or so. Pete, are you sure? Don't worry. Take Mel and Hank along to lend a hand. Pete turned back to Captain Varga. Suppose we go inside to more comfortable quarters, he said. We're always glad to have word from Earth. They passed through a dark, smelly corridor into Pete's personal quarters.
For a colony house, it wasn't bad. Good plastic chairs, a handmade rug on the floor, even one of Mary Turner's paintings on the wall, and several of the weird, stylized carvings the Dustys had done for Pete. But the place smelled of tar and sweat, and Captain Varga's nose wrinkled in distaste. Nathan drew out a large silk handkerchief and wiped his pink hands, touching his nose daintily. The Dusty hopped into the room ahead of them, and settled into the biggest, most comfortable chair. Pete snapped his fingers sharply, and the brown creature jumped down again like a naughty child, and climbed up on Pete's knee. The captain glanced at the chair with disgust, and sat down in another. "'Do you actually let those horrid creatures have the run of your house?' he asked.
"'Why not?' Pete said. "'We have the run of their planet. They're quite harmless, really, and quite clean.' The captain sniffed. "'Nasty things. Might find a use for the furs, though. They look quite soft.' "'We don't kill dusties,' said Pete coolly. "'They're friendly and intelligent, too, in a childish sort of way.' He looked at the captain and Nathan, and decided not to put on the coffee-pot. Now what's the trouble? No trouble at all, the captain said. Except the trouble you choose to make. You have your year's taro ready for shipping? Of course. The captain took out a small pencil on a chain and began to twirl it. How much, to be exact? Twenty thousand, earth-weight? Tons? Pete shook his head.
Hundred-weight? The captain raised his eyebrows. I see, and there are... He consulted the papers in his hand. Roughly two hundred and twenty colonists here on Baron Four, is that right? That's right. Seventy-four men, eighty-one women, and fifty-nine children, to be exact. I'd have to look it up. Margaret Singman had twins the other night. "'Well, don't be ridiculous,' snapped the captain. "'On a planet the size of Baron Four with seventy-four men, you should be producing a dozen times the taro you stated. We'll consider that your quota for a starter at least. You have ample seed, according to my records. I should think, with the proper equipment—'Now, wait a minute,' Pete said softly. "'We're fighting a climate here, Captain.
You should know that.' We have only a two-planting season, and the proper equipment, as you call it, doesn't operate too well out here. It has a way of clogging up with dust in the summer and rusting in the winter. Really, said Captain Varga. As I was saying, with the proper equipment you could cultivate a great deal more land than you seem to be using. This would give you the necessary heavier yield, wouldn't you say so, Nathan? The little nervous man nodded. Certainly, Captain, with the proper organization of labor. That's nonsense, Pete said, suddenly angry. Nobody can get that kind of yield from this planet. The ground won't give it, and the men won't grow it. The captain gave him a long look.
Really, he said. I think you're wrong. I think the men will grow it. Pete stood up slowly. What are you trying to say? This business about quotas and organization of labor? You didn't read our credentials as we instructed you, Farnham. Mr. Nathan is the official governor of the colony on Baron For, as of now. You'll find him most cooperative, I'm sure, but he's answerable directly to me in all matters. My job is administration of the entire Baron system. Clear enough? Pete's eyes were dark. I think you'd better draw me a picture, he said tightly. A very clear picture. Very well. Baron For is not paying for its upkeep. Taro, after all, is not the most necessary of crops in the universe. It has value, but not very much value, all things considered.
If the production of taro here is not increased sharply, it may be necessary to close down the colony altogether." "'You're a liar,' said Pete shortly. "'The colonization board makes no production demands on the colonies, nor does it farm out systems for personal exploitation.' The captain smiled. The Colonization Board, as you call it, has undergone a slight reorganization, he said. Reorganization? It's a top-level board in the Earth Government. Nothing could reorganize it but a wholesale—he broke off, his jaw sagging as the implications sank in. You're rather out on a limb, you see, said the Captain coolly. Poor communications and all that. The fact is that the entire Earth government has undergone a slight reorganization also.
The Dusty knew that something had happened. Pete didn't know how he knew. The Dustys couldn't talk, couldn't make any noise as far as Pete knew. But they always seemed to know when something unusual was happening. It was wrong, really, to consider them unintelligent animals. There are other sorts of intelligence than human. and other sorts of communication, and other sorts of culture. The Baron Four colonists had never understood the queer perceptive sense that the Dustys seemed to possess, any more than they knew how many Dustys there were, or what they ate, or where on the planet they lived. All they knew was that when they landed on Baron Four, the Dustys were there. At first the creatures had been very timid.
For weeks the men and women, busy with their building, had paid little attention to the skittering brown forms that crept down from the rocky hills to watch them with big curious eyes. They were about half the size of men, and strangely humanoid in appearance, not in the sense that a monkey is humanoid, for they did not resemble monkeys, but in some way the colonists could not quite pin down. It may have been the way they walked around on their long, fragile hind legs, the way they stroked their pointed chins as they sat and watched and listened with their pointed ears lifted alertly, watching with soft gray eyes, or the way they handled objects with their little four-fingered hands. They were so remarkably human-like in their elfin way that the colonists couldn't help but be drawn to the creatures.
That whole first summer, when the colonists were building the village in the landing groove for the ships, the Dustys were among them, trying pathetically to help, so eager for friendship that even occasional rebuffs failed to drive them away. They liked the colony. They seemed somehow to savor the atmosphere, moving about like solemn, fuzzy overseers, as the work progressed through the summer. Pete Farnham thought that they had even tried to warn the people about the winter, But the colonists couldn't understand, of course. Not until later. The dusties became a standing joke, and were tolerated with considerable amusement. Until the winter struck.
It had come with almost unbelievable ferocity. The houses had not been completed when the first hurricanes came, and they were smashed into toothpicks. The winds came, vicious winds, full of dust and sleet and ice. Wild, erratic, twisting gales that ripped the village to shreds, tearing off the topsoil that had been broken and fertilized. Merciless, never-ending winds that wailed and screamed the planet's protest. The winds drove sand and dirt and ice into the heart of the generators, and the heating units corroded and jammed and went dead. The jeeps and tractors and bulldozers were scored and rusted. The people began dying by the dozens as they huddled down in the pitiful little pits they had dug to try to keep the winds away.
Few of them were still conscious when the dusties had come silently in the blizzard, eyes closed tight against the blast, to drag the people up into the hills, into caves and hollows that still showed the fresh marks of carving tools. They had brought food—what kind of food nobody knew, for the colony's food had been destroyed by the first blast of the hurricane— But whatever it was, it had kept them alive. And somehow the colonists had survived the winter, which seemed never to end. There were frozen legs and ruined eyes. There was pneumonia so swift and virulent that even the antibiotics they managed to salvage could not stop it. There was near starvation, but they were kept alive until the winds began to die, and they walked out of their holes in the ground to see the ruins of their first village.
From that winter on, Nobody considered the dusties funny any more. What had motivated them no one knew, but the colony owed them their lives. The dusties tried to help the people rebuild. They showed them how to build windshields that would keep houses intact and anchored to the ground when the winds came again. They built little furnaces out of dirt and rock, which defied the winds and gave great heat. They showed the colonists a dozen things they needed to know for life on the rugged planet. The colonists, in turn, Tried to teach the Dustys something about Earth, and how the colonists had lived, and why they had come. But there was a barrier of intelligence that could not be crossed. The Dustys learned simple things, but only slowly and imperfectly.
They seemed content to take on their mock overseer's role, moving in and about the village, approving or disapproving, but always trying to help. Some became personal pets, though pet was the wrong word, because it was more of a strange personal friendship limited by utter lack of communication than any animal and master relationship. The colonists made sure that the Dusties were granted the respect due them as rightful masters of Baron Four, and somehow the Dusties perceived this attitude, and were so grateful for the acceptance and friendship that there seemed nothing they wouldn't do for the colonists. There had been many discussions about them. You'd think they'd resent our moving in on them, Jack Mario had said one day.
After all, we are usurpers, and they treat us like kings. Have you noticed the way they mimic us? I saw one chewing tobacco the other day. He hated the stuff, but he chewed away and spat like a trooper. One of the Dustys had been sitting on Pete's knee when Captain Varga had been talking, and he had known that something terrible was wrong. Now he sat on the desk in the office, moving uneasily back and forth as Pete looked up at Mario's dark face, and then across at John Teigen and Mel Dorfman. John's face was dark with anger as he ran his fingers through the heavy gray beard that fell to his chest. Mel sat stunned, shaking his head helplessly. Mario was unable to restrain himself, His face was bitter as he stomped across the room, then returned to shake his fist under Pete's nose.
"'But did you see him?' he choked. "'Governor of the colony! What does he know about growing taro in this kind of soil? Did you see those hands? Soft, dainty, pink? How could a man with hands like that govern a colony?' Pete looked over at John Teagan. "'Well, John?' The big man looked up, his eyes hollow under craggy brows. "'It's below the belt, Pete.' But if the government's been overthrown, then the captain is right. It leaves us out on a limb. Pete shook his head. I can't give him an answer, he said. The answer has got to come from the colony. All I can do is speak for the colony. Teagan stared at the floor. We're an Earth colony, he said softly. I know that. I was born in New York. I lived there for many years.
But Earth isn't my home any more. This is. He looked at Pete. I built it, and so did you. All of us built it, even when things were getting stormy back home. Maybe that's why we came. Maybe somehow we saw the handwriting on the wall. But when did it happen? Mel burst out suddenly. How could anything so big happen so fast? Speed was the secret, Pete said gloomily. It was quick, it was well organized, and the government was unstable. We're just caught in the edge of it. Pity the ones living there now. But the new government considers the colonies as areas for exploitation instead of development. "'Well, they can't do it,' Mario cried. "'This is our land, our home. Nobody can tell us what to grow in our fields.' Pete's fist slammed down on the desk.
"'Well, how are you going to stop them? The law of the land is sitting out there in that ship.' "'Tomorrow morning he's coming back here to install his fat little friend as governor. He has guns and soldiers on that ship to back him up. What are you going to do about it?' "'Fight it,' Mario said. "'How?' Jack Mario looked around the room. "'There are only a dozen men on that ship,' he said softly. "'We've got seventy-four. When Varga comes back to the village tomorrow, we tell him to take his friend back to the ship and shove off.' We give him five minutes to get turned around, and if he doesn't we start shooting. Just one little thing, said Pete quietly. What about the supplies? Even if we fought them off in one, what about the food, the clothing, the replacement parts for the machines?
We don't need machinery to farm this land, said Mario eagerly. There's food here, food we can live on. The Dustys showed us that the first winter. And we can farm the land for our own use, and let the machinery rust. There's nothing they can bring us from Earth that we can't do without. We couldn't get away with it. Meldorfman shook his head bitterly. You're asking us to cut ourselves off from Earth completely, but they'd never let us. They'd send ships to bomb us out. We could hide and rebuild after they had finished. Pete Farnham sighed. They'd never leave us alone, Jack. Didn't you see that, Captain? His kind of mind can't stand opposition. We'd just be a thorn in the side of the New Earth government.
They don't want any free colonies. Well, let's give them one. Mario sat down tiredly, snapping his fingers at the Dusty. Furs! he snarled. He looked up, his dark eyes burning. It's no good, Pete. We can't let them get away with it. Produce for them, yes. Try to raise the yield for them, yes, but not a governor. If they insist on that, we can throw them out and keep them out. I don't think so. They'd kill every one of us first. John Teagan sat up and looked at Pete Farnham straight in the eye. In that case, Peter, it might just be better if they did. Pete stared at him for a moment and slowly stood up. All right. He said. "'Call a general colony meeting. We'll see what the women think. Then we'll make our plans.' The ship's jeep skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust.
Captain Varga peered through the windshield. Then he stood up, staring at the three men blocking the road at the edge of the village. The little pink-faced man at his side turned white when he saw their faces, and his fingers began to tremble. Each of the men had a gun. "'You'd better clear the road,' the captain snapped. "'We're driving through.' Pete Farnham stepped forward. He pointed to Nathan. "'Take your friend there back to the ship. Leave him there. We don't want him here.' Nathan turned to Varga. "'I told you,' he said viciously. "'Too big for their boots. Go on through.' The captain laughed and gunned the motor, started straight for the men blocking the road. Then Jack Mario shot a hole in his front tire.
The jeep lurched to a stop. Captain Vargas stood up, glaring at the men. Farnham, step out here, he said. You heard us, Pete said without moving. Crops, yes. We'll try to increase our yield, but no overseer. Leave him here, and we'll kill him. Once more, said the captain. Clear the way. This man is your new governor. He will be regarded as the official agent of the Earth Government until the final production capacity of this colony is determined. Now clear out. The men didn't move. Without another word, the captain threw the jeep into reverse, jerked back in a curve, and started the jeep, flat tire and all, back towards the ship in a billow of dust.
Abruptly, the village exploded into activity. Four men took up places behind the row of wind brakes beyond the first row of cabins. Pete turned and ran back into the village. He found John Teigen commandeering a squad of ten dirty-faced men. "'Are the women and children all out?' he shouted. "'All taken care of.' Teigen spat tobacco juice and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "'Where's Mel?' "'Left flank. He'll try to move in behind them. "'Gonna be tough, Pete. They've got good weapons. "'What about the boys last night?' John was checking the bolt on his ancient rifle. "'Hank and Ringo? "'Chist got back an hour ago. If Vargo wants to get his surface plans into action, he's going to have to dismantle them and rebuild them outside.
The boys jammed up the launching ports for good," he spat again. Don't worry, Pete. This is going to be a ground fight. Okay," Pete held out his hand to the old man. This may be it, and if we turn them back, there's bound to be more later. There's a lot of planet to hide on, said Teagan. They may come back, but after a while they'll go again. Pete nodded. I just hope we'll still be here when they do. They waited. It seemed like hours. Pete moved from post to post among the men. Heavy-faced men he had known all his life, it seemed. They waited, with whatever weapons they had available—pistols, homemade revolvers, ortho guns, an occasional rifle, even knives and clubs. Pete's hearts sank. They were bitter men.
But they were a mob with no organization, no training for fighting. They would be facing a dozen of security's best-disciplined shock troops, armed with the latest weapons from Earth's electronics laboratories. The colonists didn't stand a chance. Pete got his rifle, and made his way up the rise of ground overlooking the right flank of the village. Squinting, he could spot the cloud of dust rising up near the glistening ship, moving toward the village. And then, for the first time, He realized that he hadn't seen any dusties all day. It puzzled him. They had been in the village in abundance an hour before dawn while the plans were being laid out. He glanced around, hoping to see one of the fuzzy brown forms at his elbow, but he saw nothing, and then as he stared at the cloud of dust coming across the valley, he thought he saw the ground moving.
He blinked and rubbed his eyes. With a gasp, He dragged out his binoculars and peered down at the valley floor. There were thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, their brown bodies moving slowly out from the hills, surrounding the village, converging into a broad, liquid column between the village and the ship. Even as he watched, the column grew thicker, like a heavy blanket being drawn across the road, a multitude of dusties lining up. Pete's hair prickled on the back of his neck. They knew so little about the creatures, so very little. As he watched the brown carpet rolling out, he tried to think. Could there be a weapon in their hands? Could they somehow have perceived the evil that came from the ship, somehow sensed the desperation in the men's voices as they had laid their plans?
Pete stared, a sinking feeling, in the pit of his stomach. They were there in the road, thousands upon thousands of them, standing there, waiting. For what? Three columns of dust were coming from the road now. Through the glasses Pete could see the jeeps, filled with men in their gleaming gray uniforms, crash helmets tight about their heads, blasters glistening in the pale light. They moved in deadly convoy along the rutted road, closer and closer to the crowd of dusties overflowing the road. The dusties just stood there. They didn't move. They didn't shift or turn. They just waited. The captain's car was first in line. He pulled up before the line with a screech of brakes and stared at the sea of creatures before him.
"'Get out of there!' he shouted. The dusties didn't move. The captain turned to his men. "'Fire into them!' he snapped. "'Clear a path!' There was a blaze of fire, and a half-dozen dusties slid to the ground, convulsing. Pete felt a chill pass through him, staring in disbelief. The dusties had a weapon, he kept telling himself. They must have a weapon, something the colonists had never dreamed of. The guns came up again, and another volley echoed across the valley, and a dozen more dusties fell to the ground. For every one that fell, another moved stolidly into its place. With a curse, the captain sat down in the seat, gunned the motor, and started forward. The jeeps struck the fallen bodies, rolled over them, and plunged straight into the wall of dusties.
Still they didn't move. The car slowed and stopped, mired down. The other cars picked up momentum and plunged into the brown river of creatures. They, too, ground to a stop. The captain started roaring at his men. Cut them down! We're going to get through here! Blasters began roaring into the faces of the dusties. And as they fell, the jeeps moved forward a few feet, until more of the creatures blocked their path. Pete heard a cry below him, and saw Jack Mario standing in the road, gun on the ground, hands out in front of him, staring in horror as the dusties kept moving into the fire. "'Do you see what they're doing?' he screamed. "'They'll be slaughtered, every one of them!' And then he was running down the road, shouting at them to stop.
And so were Pete and Tegan and the rest of the men. Something hit Pete in the shoulder as he ran. He spun around and fell into the dusty road. A dozen Dustys closed in around him, lifted him up bodily, and started back through the village with him. He tried to struggle, but vaguely he saw that the other men were being carried back also, while the river of brown creatures held the jeeps at bay. The Dustys were hurrying, half-carrying and half-dragging him back through the village and up a long ravine into the hills beyond. At last they set Pete on his feet again, plucking urgently at his shirt sleeve as they hurried him along. He followed them willingly then, with the rest of the colonists at his heels.
He didn't know what the Dustys were doing, but he knew they were trying to save him. Finally they reached a cave, a great cleft in the rock that Pete knew for certain had not been there when he had led exploring parties through these hills years before. It was a huge opening, and already a dozen of the men were there, waiting, dazed by what they had witnessed down in the valley, while more were stumbling up the rocky incline, tugged along by the fuzzy brown creatures. Inside the cavern, steps led down the side of the rock, deep into the dark coolness of the earth. Down and down they went, until they suddenly found themselves in a mammoth room lit by blazing torches. Pete stopped and stared at his friends who had already arrived.
Jack Mario was sitting on the floor, his face in his hands, sobbing. Tegan was sitting, too, blinking at Pete as if he were a stranger, and Dorfman was trembling like a leaf. Pete stared about him through the dim light, and then looked where Tegan was pointing at the end of the room. He couldn't see it clearly at first. Finally, he made out a raised platform with four steps leading up. A torch lighted either side of a dais at the top, and between the torches rising high into the gloom stood a statue. It was a beautifully carved thing, hewn from the heavy granite that made up the core of this planet, with the same curious styling as other carving the Dustys had done. The design was intricate, the lines carefully turned and polished.
At first Pete thought it was a statue of a Dusty, But when he moved forward and squinted in the dim light, he suddenly realized that it was something else indeed, and in that moment he realized why they were there, and why the Dustys had done this incredible thing to protect them. The statue was weirdly beautiful, the work of a dedicated master sculptor. It was a figure standing with five-fingered hands on hips, head raised high. Not a portrait, but an image seen through other eyes than human, Standing high in the room, with the lights burning reverently at its feet. Unmistakably, it was the statue of a man.
They heard the bombs much later. The granite roof and floor of the cavern trembled, and the men and women stared at each other, helpless and sick, as they huddled in that great hall. But presently the bombing stopped. Later, when they stumbled out of that grotto into the late afternoon light, the ship was gone. They knew it would be back. Possibly it would bring back search parties to hunt down the rebels in the hills. Perhaps it would just wait and again bomb out the new village when it rose. But searching parties would never find their quarry, and the village would rise again and again if necessary. And in the end, somehow, Pete knew that the colonists would find a way to survive here and live free as they had always lived.
It might be a bitter struggle, but no matter how hard the fight, There would be one strange and wonderful thing they could count on. No matter what they had to do, he knew the Dustys would help them.
End of Image of the Gods by Alan Edward Norse. Recorded by Jodi Krangel.
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4 Martian V. F. W. 13:44
Martian. V.
F. W.
There's nothing like a parade, I always say. Of course, I'm a Martian. Mr. Crothers was a busy man. Co-ordinating, the biggest parade in New York's history is not easy. He was maneuvering his two hundred pounds around Washington Square with the agility of a quarter-back. He had his hands full organizing marchers, locating floats, placing the many brass bands in their proper order, and barking commands to his assistants. But Mr. Crothers approached the job with all the zeal of an evangelist at a revival meeting. As he approached the southwest corner of the square, he saw something that jarred his already frayed nerves. He stopped abruptly. The mass of clipboards and papers he was carrying fell to the street.
There before him were one hundred and fifty ants, each of them at least six feet tall. His first impulse was to turn and run for the nearest doctor. He was certain that the strain of his job was proving too much for him. But one of the ants approached him. It seemed friendly enough, so Mr. Crothers stood his ground. My group is waiting for their assignment. The ants' voices seemed to come from the very core of its thorax, which was a violent red. Good Lord! Mr. Crothers' mouth opened up as wide as an oven door. Mr. Crothers, I believe the parade is about to start, and my group—Mr. Crothers managed to blurt out, What the devil are you, anyway? This is the parade marking the International Geophysical Year, is it not?
The ants had a pleasant, friendly voice. Well, yes, but— And you are Mr. Crothers, the manager of the parade. Is that not correct? Mr. Crothers rubbed his eyes and took another look at the strange creature.
Its head was a brilliant yellow. It had two large, goggle eyes which rolled like itinerant marbles when it spoke. The low-slung abdomen was a burnt brown. It was bad enough, Mr. Crothers thought, that these ants were six feet tall, but it was nightmarish to see them in three colors. Mr. Crothers, the ant continued, haven't you been instructed by the National Academy of Sciences that the Martian V. F. W. is to participate in this parade? The Martian. Mr. Crothers' mouth was open again. Then he realized that when the ant spoke, its mouth didn't move. He picked up his clipboard and papers from the street. His voice was hostile now. "'What the hell is this? Some kind of gag? What are you trying to do, scare a man half to death?' "'Oh, we're not joking, Mr.
Crothers. The National Academy—' They didn't say anything to me about a bunch of clowns dressed up like ants. Mr. Crothers' indignation became intensified. He was loath to admit that he'd been taken in by such obviously animated costumes. Now look here. I'm a very busy man. The arrangements have been made, Mr. Crothers. If my group has refused a place in this parade, we shall file suit immediately. As manager, you'll be named co-defendant. The ant was gentle, but firm. The thought of being sued softened Mr. Crothers' attitude. "'Well, I'm very sorry, pal, but every contingent in this parade is listed on my clipboard, and you're not. I know this list by heart. What did you say the name of your group was?' "'The Martian V.
F. W.' Mr. Crothers was amused. "'Those sure are the craziest outfits I'd ever seen,' he chuckled. "'Where did you get them? Walt Disney make them for you?' He followed his own little joke with a long, throaty laugh. The aunt was impatient. About the parade, Mr. Crothers, there isn't much time. Oh, yes, the parade. Well, let me see. He thumbed through the clipboard. I guess there's always room for a few laughs. How many in your group? One hundred and fifty. And we also have a float with us, not a very large one. It measures twenty by twenty. Tell you what. You move your group to the corner of Thompson Street and Third Street. Get behind the Tiffany float and follow them. Okay? The ant paused a moment to record the instructions in his mind.
Then he turned to leave. Oh, wait a minute. Mr. Crothers cried before the aunt could rejoin his group. Just who did you speak to at the National Academy of Sciences? I believe it was a Mr. Canfield. Mr. Crothers's face lit up. Why didn't you say so in the first place? I'd have placed you right away. That's perfectly all right, Mr. Crothers. Listen, I don't know what you guys do, but those costumes should certainly bring the house down. There's going to be four million people watching the parade. I bet that's the biggest audience you've ever seen. It certainly is. With that, the aunt strode away. "'Good luck!' Mr. Carruthers shouted after him. "'Daddy, daddy, look! Look at the big rocket!' The boy jumped up and down gleefully.
"'It must be a whole mile long, Daddy. What kind is it?' "'That's the Vanguard, son.' An autumn breeze from the East River chilled their vantage point at 61st Street and 5th Avenue. "'The Vanguard?' The name meant nothing to the boy. "'Gee, I bet it can fly all the way to the stars.' It's the rocket that carried the first artificial satellite into space. The parade, now three hours old, continued past the reviewing stand. "'I want to get a better look at the vanguard!' the boy shouted. The father lifted the boy on to his shoulders. The little fellow laughed and whooped it up, firing several shots from his Captain Video Ray Gun at the passing missile. The rocket moved on, and the noise of the crowd diminished slightly.
A one-hundred-piece band was passing in front of them. They were playing the Stars and Stripes forever. They were followed by the Saks Fifth Avenue display, nine small floats, each depicting life on another planet. The National Academy of Sciences had a success on its hands. "'Wow, Daddy! I want to ride on it! I want to ride on that float and visit all those planets! Can I, Daddy?' The boy became all limbs, trying to squirm down from his father's shoulders. You stay right where you are, young man. The father struggled to hold his balance. But I want to go to the stars. I want to watch the rest of the parade from Venus or Mercury. Please, Daddy! The father grinned. Not just yet some, but it won't be long before man will go to the stars.
Who lives up there, Daddy? Oh, there isn't any life up there yet. If no one's living up there, why does anyone want to go there? Well, maybe there'll be too many people on Earth some day, and then we'll have to find other planets with more room. Another monstrous band was going by. The boy became restless. He began to toy with his ray gun, half interested in seeing if there were any sparks left in it. Why can't there be something besides so many bands in a parade? I want to see another float. The father tried to interest the boy by pointing out all the famous people who were also there—a variety of statesmen, the world's leading scientists and religious and cultural leaders, and the President of the United States.
The boy was interested, but not in what his elder was saying to him. He was looking downtown, his eyes squinting, trying to make out figures as far away as Fifty-Sixth Street. Then his mouth opened, not uttering a sound yet, just waiting to burst with joy at what was coming toward them. His father looked up at him. I wish you'd tell me what you're looking at. I'm all the way down here on street level, remember? Daddy, they look like ants. What? Ants, Daddy, ants! A whole army of them! Isn't it exciting? What on earth are you talking about? They're doing somersaults and backflips and everything. They're coming right this way. Gee, there's hundreds of them, and they got a float behind them, Daddy, a great big float with something burning on it.
The child, sitting on his shoulders, made mobility impossible for the father, and he couldn't see around the spectators. He resigned himself to stand and wait for this new spectacle to overtake them. The reaction to this new sight had already begun to work its way uptown. In the distance, but getting closer every second, he could hear unrestrained laughter and rejoicing. "'Hey, take it easy!' The boy was beginning to ride the shoulders like a bronco-buster. "'By the time they get here, I won't have any shoulders left. Where are they now?' "'They're almost here, Daddy, and they aren't ants at all. They're just a bunch of clowns dressed up like it!' He began to giggle hysterically. Golly, they're funny.
Can you see them yet, Daddy? Before the father could produce an answer, the ants were in view. They were a sight that couldn't fail to stimulate the funny bone. By comparison with real ants, Everything about them had been grossly exaggerated to achieve the proper effect. They walked on their two back legs, but the four front apertures were far from idle. Some of them turned somersaults, some did complicated flips consisting of two or three spins in mid-air. Still others, doing a kind of animated catwalk, carried toy ray guns, which they fired at random into the crowd. The guns were something like the little boy's Captain Video ray gun, only larger. They emitted little streaks of blue sparks, which shone brightly but disappeared when contact was made with air.
They were easily the hit of the parade, a three-ring circus all by themselves, as they pranced and clowned their way up Fifth Avenue, giving the spectators a wail of a show that was completely new. The guests on the reviewing stand refrained from any hilarity until they saw the float that four of the ants were pulling behind them. It was in keeping with the rest of the nonsense they were perpetrating. The float boasted eight larger-ray guns, three on either side and two in the rear, that fired the same fascinating blue sparks. Behind each gun an ant stood on its head, wildly waving six legs in the breeze, begging to be noticed and laughed at. Above the guns, emblazoned in fiery orange letters, were the words, MARTIAN V.
F. W., This was interpreted by one and all as a punch line, and was treated accordingly. It was heartwarming to be able to see the president and so many other dignitaries abandon composure in favour of a good old-fashioned belly laugh. Daddy, I can't laugh any more. The boy had to pause between every other word. My stomach hurts. Aren't they the funniest things you ever saw? The father was too convulsed to be able to answer him. Daddy, one of them is coming this way. He's firing his Captain Video Ray Gun at us. The boy squeezed his father and held on tight. The father took a deep breath in order to be able to speak. Take your gun and fire back at him, son. Fire away. Go on. He's just being playful.
He broke forth with another gust of laughter. I won't see anything as funny as this again if I live to be a hundred. The ants pranced over to where they were standing, firing its gun in every direction. The boy fired back. The ant took one look at the lad's gun and let out a long, cackling laugh, which built to a crescendo and then stopped, as though it had been turned off. The ant rejoined the group, and they continued on their merry way. The boy fired several shots into the float as it passed. He wanted to see if he could knock out those blazing orange letters, Martian V. F. W. The letters continued to burn, but in the boy's mind, he was certain he had made several direct hits. The boy and his father watched the float until it was out of sight.
They knew there wouldn't be another attraction like those ants. They must have been real professionals, the father thought. Such team work, such precision, each one of them having a specific job to do, and each doing it to perfection. After them, everything was bound to be anticlimactic. More marchers, more bands, a few more floats. The boy was beginning to tire. It had been a long day. Now everything was dull. Daddy, I don't want to see any more. Let's go home. We'll stay another five minutes. The parade somehow seemed to be slowing down. The father yawned and let his son down from his shoulders. He looked across the street at the president and the other dignitaries on the reviewing stand. All were slowly raising their hands in salute as another color guard drowsily made its way by.
Soon the last group in the parade was passing the reviewing stand, another brass band. They were moving with the speed of a glacier. A full five seconds elapsed between each note of music. Everything was happening in slow motion. On the reviewing stand, the dignified hands went up. Agonizingly slow, to a final salute, and they stayed there. The greatest mind in the world stood motionless, unalterably still. Just as each wave of pandemonium had unfurled itself up Fifth Avenue during the parade, so now did silence take command. The little boy tugged at his father's coat. Daddy, Daddy, he pleaded. Why has the parade stopped? I wanna go home. His words came out more slowly, with each passing second like a high-speed phonograph playing at thirty-three and a third RPM.
Daddy, why don't you answer me? Daddy, why don't... His father never heard him. Fifty miles above the Atlantic, the fleet of spaceships hung suspended like lanterns. In the lead ship, the ant in charge of communications reported to the commander. We've just received the first communique from the advancing guards, sir. Read it to me. The communications chief read from a large perforated paper. Time? O 600. Mission accomplished. Manhattan Island cut down the middle. Immediate result of superisonic rays. Four million dead. Rays spreading east and west. Estimated time of rays full effect? O 800. Island will then be neutralized, awaiting further orders. The ant folded the paper and looked up at the commander.
Shall I relay further orders, sir? No. The commander of the ants paused and stroked his chin. We're moving in. The End of Martian, by G. L. Vandenberg.
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5 One Shot 33:08
One shot by James Benjamin Blish.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Raynard.
One shot. By James Benjamin Blish.
You can do a great deal if you have enough data and enough time to compute on it by logical methods. But given the situation that neither data nor time is adequate, and an answer must be produced, what do you do?
On the day that the Polish freighter Ludmilla Laid an egg in New York Harbor. Abner Longman's, one shot, Braun, was in the city going about his normal business, which was making another million dollars.
As we found out later, almost nothing else was normal about that particular week for Braun. For one thing, he had brought his family with him, a complete departure from routine. Reflecting the unprecedentedly legitimate nature of the deals he was trying to make. From every point of view, it was a bad weekend for the CIA to mix into his affairs. But nobody had explained that to the master of the Ludmilla.
I had better add here that we knew nothing about this until afterward. From the point of view of the storyteller, an organization like the Civilian Intelligence Associates gets to all its facts backwards. Entering the tale, At the payoff. Working back to the hook. And winding up with a sheaf of background facts to feed into the computer for next time.
It's rough on the various people who've tried to fictionalise what we do, particularly for the lazy examples of the breed who come to us expecting that their plotting has already been done for them. But it's inherent in the way we operate, and there it is.
Certainly nobody at CIA so much as thought of Braun when the news first came through. Harry Anderton, the harbor defense chief, called us at O eight thirty Friday to take on the job of identifying the egg. This was when our records show us officially entering the affair. But of course, Anderton had been keeping the wires to Washington streaming for an hour before that, getting authorization to spend some of his money on us. Our clearance status was then, and is now, C.R. Clean and routine.
I was in the central office when the call came through, and had some difficulty in making out precisely what Anderton wanted of us.
Slow down, Colonel Anderton, please, I begged him. Two or three seconds won't make that much difference. How did you find out about this egg in the first place? The automatic compartment bulkheads on the Ludmilla were defective, he said. It seems that this egg was buried among a lot of other crates in the dump cell of the hold.
What's a dump cell? It's a sea lock for getting rid of dangerous cargo. The bottom of it opens right to Davy Jones. Standard fitting for ships carrying explosives, radioactives, anything that might act up unexpectedly. All right, I said. Go ahead.
Well, there was a timer on the dump cell floor, set to drop the egg when the ship came up the river. That worked fine, but the automatic bulkheads that are supposed to keep the rest of the ship from being flooded while the cells open didn't. At least, they didn't do a thorough job. The Ludmilla began to list, and the captain yelled for help. When the harbor patrol found the dump cell open, they called us in.
I see. I thought about it a moment. In other words, you don't know whether the Ludmilla really laid an egg or not.
That's what I keep trying to explain to you, Dr. Harris. We don't know what she dropped, and we haven't any way of finding out. It could be a bomb. It could be anything. We're sweating everybody on board the ship now, but it's my guess that none of them know anything. The whole procedure was designed to be automatic.
"'All right. We'll take it,' I said. "'You've got divers down?' "'Sure, but—' "'We'll worry about the butts from here on. Get us a direct line from your barge to the big board here so we can direct the work. Better get on over there yourself.' "'Right,' he sounded relieved. "'Official people have a lot of confidence in CIA.' "'Too much, in my estimation.' Some day the job will come along that we can't handle, and then Washington will be kicking itself, or more likely some scapegoat, for having failed to develop a comparable government department.
Not that there was much prospect of Washington doing that. Official thinking had been running in the other direction for years. The precedent was Associated Universities Organization, which ran Brookhaven. CIA had been started the same way. By a loose corporation of universities and industries, all of which had wanted it to own an ultimac, and no one of which had the money to buy one for itself. The Eisenhower administration, with its emphasis on private enterprise and concomitant reluctance to sink federal funds into projects of such size, had turned the two examples into a nice, fat trend, which ultimac herself said wasn't going to be reversed within the practicable lifetime of CIA.
I buzzed two staffers, and in five minutes got Clark Chaney and Joan Hadamard, CIA's business manager and social science division chief respectively. The titles were almost solely for the benefit of the TO, that is, Clark and Joan do serve in those capacities, but said service Takes about two per cent of their capacities and their time. I shot them a couple of sentences of explanation, trusting them to pick up whatever else they needed from the tape, and check the line to the diver's barge.
It was already open. Anderton had gone to work quickly, and with decision, once he was sure we were taking on the major question. The television screen lit, but nothing showed on it but murky light, striped with streamers of darkness, Slowly rising and falling. The audio went clonk, oing, oing, bonk, oing.
Underwater noises, shapeless and characterless.
Hello out there in the harbour. This is CIA. Harris calling. Come in, please.
Monag here, the audio said. Boink! Oing! Oing!
Got anything yet?
Not a thing, Dr. Harris, Monnick said. You can't see three inches in front of your face down here. It's too silty. We've bumped into a couple of crates, but so far, no egg.
Keep trying.
Chaney, looking even more like a bulldog than usual, was setting his stopwatch by one of the eight clocks on Ultimax's face. "'Want me to take the divers?' he said.
"'No, Clark. Not yet. I'd rather have Joan do it for the moment.' I passed the mic to her. "'You'd better run a probability series first.' "'Check.' He began feeding tape into the integrator's mouth. "'What's your angle, Peter?' The ship. I want to see how heavily shielded that dump cell is.
It isn't shielded at all, Anderton's voice said behind me. I hadn't heard him come in. But that doesn't prove anything. The egg might have carried sufficient shielding in itself. Or maybe the commies didn't care whether the crew was exposed or not. Or maybe there isn't any egg.
All that's possible, I admitted. But I want to see it anyhow.
Have you taken blood tests? Joan asked Anderton. Yes. Get the reports through to me, then. I want white cell counts, differentials, platelet counts, hematocrit, and sed rates on every man.
Anderton picked up the phone, and I took a firm hold on the doorknob. Hey, Anderton said. Putting the phone down again. Are you going to duck out just like that? Remember, Dr. Harris, we've got to evacuate the city, first of all. No matter whether it's a real egg or not, we can't take the chance on its not being an egg.
Don't move a man until you get a go-ahead from CIA, I said. For all we know now, evacuating the city may be just what the enemy wants us to do, so they can grab it unharmed. Or they may want to start a panic for some other reason. Any one of fifty possible reasons.
You can't take such a gamble, he said grimly. There are eight and a half million lives riding on it. I can't let you do it.
You passed your authority to us when you hired us, I pointed out. If you want to evacuate without our OK, you'll have to fire us first. It'll take another hour to get that cleared from Washington. "'So you might as well give us the hour.' He stared at me for a moment. His lips thinned. Then he picked up the phone again to order Joan's blood count, and I got out the door, fast.
A reasonable man would have said that I found nothing useful on the Ludmilla except negative information. But the fact is that anything I found would have been a surprise to me. I went down looking for surprises. I found nothing but a faint trail to Abner Longman's Brawn, most of which was fifteen years old.
There had been a time when I'd known Brawn, briefly, and to no profit to either of us, as an undergraduate majoring in social sciences. I'd taken on a term paper on the old International Longshoremen's Association, A racket-ridden union, now formerly extinct, although anyone who knew the signs could still pick up some traces on the docks.
In those days, Braun had been the business manager of an insurance firm, the sole visible function of which had been to write policies for the ILA and its individual dock-wallopers. For some reason, he had been amused by the brash youngster who had barged in on him and demanded the low-down. And had shown me considerable lengths of ropes, not normally in view of the public. Nothing incriminating, but enough to give me a better insight into how the Union operated than I had any right to expect, or even suspect.
Hence, I was surprised to hear somebody on the docks remark that Braun was in the city over the week-end. It would never have occurred to me that he still interested himself in the water-front. For he'd gone respectable with a vengeance. He was still a professional gambler, and according to what he had told the Congressional Investigation Committee last year, took a $30,000 to $50,000 a year at it. But his gambles were no longer concentrated on horses, the numbers, or shady insurance deals. Nowadays, what he did was called investment, mostly in real estate. Rialtos knew him well as the man who had almost brought the Empire State Building. The almost in the equation stands for the moment when the shoe-string broke.
Joan had been following his career too, not because she had ever met him, but because for her he was a type study in the evolution of what she called the extra-legal ego. With personalities like that, Respectability is a disease, she told me. There's always an almost open conflict between the desire to be powerful and the desire to be accepted. Your ordinary criminal is a moral imbecile, but people like Brown are damned with a conscience, and sooner or later they crack trying to appease it.
I'd sooner try to crap a Timkin bearing, I said. Brown's ten-point steel all the way through. Don't you believe it? The symptoms are showing all over him. Now he's backing Broadway plays, sponsoring beginning actresses, joining playwrights groups. He's the only member of Buskin and Brush who's never written a play, acted in one, or so much as pulled the rope to raise the curtain.
That's investment, I said. That's his business. Peter, you're only looking at the surface. His real investments almost never fail. But the plays he backs always do. They have to. He's sinking money in them to appease his conscience, and if they were to succeed, it would double his guilt instead of salving it. It's the same way with the young actresses. He's not sexually interested in them. His type never is, because living a rigidly orthodox family life is part of the effort towards respectability. He's backing them to Pay his debt to society. In other words, they're talismans to keep him out of jail.
It doesn't seem like a very satisfactory substitute. Of course it isn't, Joan had said. The next thing he'll do is go in for direct public service. Giving money to hospitals or something like that. You watch.
She had been right. Within the year. Braun had announced the founding of an association for clearing the Detroit slum area where he had been born, the plainest kind of symbolic suicide. Let's not have any more Abner Longman's Brawns down here. It depressed me to see it happen, for next on Jones and Grant gender for Braun was an entry into politics as a fighting liberal. A new dealer, twenty years too late. Since I'm mildly liberal myself when I'm off duty, I hated to think what Brown's career might tell me about my own motives if I let it.
All of which had nothing to do with why I was prowling around the Ludmilla. Or did it? I kept remembering Anderton's challenge. You can't take such a gamble. There are eight and a half million lives riding on it. That put it up into Brown's normal operating area all right. The connection was still hazy. But on the grounds that any link might be useful, I phoned him.
He remembered me instantly. Like most uneducated, power-driven men, he had a memory as good as any machine's. "'You never did send me that paper you was going to write,' he said. His voice seemed absolutely unchanged, although he was in his seventies now. "'You promised you would.' Kids don't keep their promises as well as they should, I said. But I've still got copies, and I'll see to it that you get one this time. Right now, I need another favour. Something right up your alley. CIA business? Yes. I didn't know you knew I was with CIA.
Braun chuckled. I still know a thing or two, he said. What's the angle?
That I can't tell you over the phone. But it's the biggest gamble there ever was, and I think we need an expert. Can you come down to CIA's central headquarters right away? Yeah, if it's that big. If it ain't, I got lots of business here, Andy, and I ain't going to be in town long. You sure it's top stuff? My word on it.
He was silent a moment. Then he said, Andy? Send me your paper. The paper? Sure, but—then I got it. I'd given him my word. You'll get it, I said. Thanks, Mr. Brown.
I called headquarters, and sent a messenger to my apartment to look for one of those long, dusty blue folders with the legal-length sheets inside them, with orders to scorch it over to Brown without stopping to breathe more than once. Then I went back myself.
The atmosphere had changed. Anderton was sitting by the big desk, clenching his fists and sweating. His whole posture telegraphed his controlled helplessness. Chaney was bent over a seismograph, echo sounding for the egg through the river bottom. If that even had a prayer of working, I knew he'd have had the trains of the Hudson and Manhattan stopped. Their rumbling course through the tubes would have blanked out any possible echo pit from the egg.
Wild Goose Chase, Joan said, scanning my face.
Not quite. I've got something, if I can just figure out what it is. Remember One Shot Braun? Yes. What's he got to do with it? Nothing, I said. But I want to bring him in. I don't think we'll lick this project before deadline without him.
What good is a professional gambler on a job like this? He'll just get in the way.
I looked toward the television screen, which now shone an amorphous black mass jutting up from a foundation of even deeper black.
Is that operation getting you anywhere?
Nothing's got us anywhere, Anderson interjected harshly. We don't even know if that's the egg. The whole area is littered with crates. Harris, you've got to let me get that alert out.
Clark, how's the time going? Cheney consulted the stopwatch. Deadline in twenty minutes, he said. All right. Let's use those minutes. I'm beginning to see this thing a little clearer. Joan, what we've got here is a one-shot gamble, right? "'In effect,' she said cautiously. "'And it's my guess that we're never going to get the answer by diving for it. Not in time, anyhow. Remember when the Navy lost a barge-load of shells in the harbor, back in 52?' They scrabbled for them for a year, and never pulled up at one. They finally had to warn the public that if it found anything funny-looking along the shore, it shouldn't bang said object, or shake it either. We're better equipped than the Navy was then.' But we're working against a deadline.
If you'd admitted that earlier, Henderson said hoarsely, we'd have half a million people out of the city by now. Maybe even a million.
We haven't given up yet, Colonel. The point is this, Joan. What we need is an inspired guess. Get anything from the prob series, Clark? I thought not. On a one-shot gamble of this kind, the laws of chance are no good at all. For that matter, the so-called ESP experiments showed us long ago that even the way we construct random tables is full of holes, and that a man with a feeling for the essence of a gamble can make a monkey out of a chance almost at will. And if there ever was such a man, Braun is it. That's why I asked him to come down here. I want him to look at that lump on the streen and play a hunch. You're out of your mind, Anderton said.
A decorous knock spared me the trouble of having to deny, affirm or ignore the judgment. It was Braun. The messenger had been fast, and the gambler hadn't bothered to read what a college student had thought of him fifteen years ago. He came forward and held out his hand, while the others looked over him frankly. He was impressive, all right. It would have been hard for a stranger to believe that he was aiming at respectability. To the eye, he was already there. He was tall and spare, and walked perfectly erect, not without spring despite his age. His clothing was as far from that of a gambler as he could have taken it by design. A black, double-breasted suit with a thin vertical stripe, a grey silk tie with a pearl, stick-pin, just barely large enough to be visible at all, a black Homburg, All perfectly fitted, all worn with proper casualness.
One might almost say a formal casualness. It was only when he opened his mouth that One-Shot Braun was in the suit with him.
"'I came over as soon as your runner got to me,' he said. "'What's the pitch, Andy?' "'Mr. Braun, this is Joan Hadamard. "'Clerk Chaney. Colonel Anderton. "'I'll be quick, because we need speed now.' A Polish ship has dropped something out in the harbor. We don't know what it is. It may be a hell bomb, or it may just be somebody's old laundry. Obviously, we've got to find out which, and we want you to tell us.
Braun's aristocratic eyebrows went up. Me? Hell, Andy, I don't know nothing about things like that. I'm surprised with you. I thought CIA had all the brains it needed. Ain't you got machines to tell you answers like that?"
I pointed silently to Joan, who had gone back to work the moment the introductions were over. She was still on the mic to the divers. She was saying, "'What does it look like?' "'It's just a lump of something, Dr. Hadamard. Can't even tell its shape. It's buried too deeply in the mud. Clunk! Oing! Oing!' "'Try the Geiger!' We did. Nothing but background. Scintillation counter? Nothing, Dr. Hadamard. Could be shielded.
Let us do the guessing, Monig. All right. Maybe it's got a clockwork fuse that didn't break with the impact, or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a stethoscope on it, and see if you pick up a ticking or anything that sounds like a motor running.
There was a lag, and I turned back to Braun. As you can see, we're stymied. This is a long shot, Mr. Brown. One throw of the dice. One show-down hand. We've got to have an expert call it for us. Somebody with a record of hits on long shots. That's why I call you.
It's no good, he said. He took off the Homburg, took his handkerchief from his breast pocket, and wiped the hat-band. I can't do it.
Why not? "'It ain't my kind of thing,' he said. "'Look, I never in my life run odds on anything that make any difference. But this makes a difference. If I guess wrong—' "'Then we're all dead ducks.' "'But why should you guess wrong? Your hunches have been working for sixty years now.' "'Braun wiped his face. "'No, you don't get it. I wish you'd listened to me. Look, my wife and my kids are in the city.' It ain't only my life, it's theirs, too. That's what I care about. That's why it's no good. On things that matter to me, my hunches don't work.
I was stunned, and so I could see with Joan and Chaney. I suppose I should have guessed it, but it had never occurred to me. Ten minutes, Chaney said. I looked up at Braun. He was frightened. And again I was surprised, without having any right to be. I tried to keep at least my voice calm.
Please try it anyhow, Mr. Brown. As a favour. It's already too late to do it any other way, and if you guess wrong, the outcome won't be any worse than if you don't try at all.
My kids, he whispered. I don't think he knew that he was speaking aloud. I waited.
Then his eyes seemed to come back to the present. "'All right,' he said. "'I told you the truth, Andy. Remember that.' "'So—' "'Is it a bomb, or ain't it? That's what's up for grabs, right?' I nodded. He closed his eyes. An unexpected stab of pure fright went down my back. Without the eyes, Braun's face was a death-mask.
The water sounds and the irregular ticking of a guide counter seemed to spring out from the audio speaker, four times as loud as before. I could even hear the pen of the stenograph scribbling away, until I looked at the instrument and saw that Clark had stopped it, probably long ago.
Droplets of sweat began to form along Braun's forehead and his upper lip. The handkerchief remained crushed in his hand.
Anderton said, "'Of all the fool!' "'Hush!' Joan said quietly.
Slowly, Brown opened his eyes. "'All right,' he said. "'You guys wanted it this way. I say it's a bomb.' He stared at us for a moment more, and then, all at once, the timkin bearing burst. Words poured out of it. Now, you guys do something. Do your job like I did mine. Get my wife and kids out of there. Empty the city. Do something. Do something!"
Anderton was already grabbing for the phone. You're right, Mr. Brown. If it isn't already too late... Chaney shot out a hand and caught Anderton's telephone arm by the wrist. "'Wait a minute,' he said. "'What do you mean, wait a minute?' Haven't you already shot enough time? Chaney did not let go. Instead, he looked inquiringly at Joan and said, One minute, Joan. You might as well go ahead. She nodded and spoke into the mic. Monig, unscrew the cap.
Unscrew the cap? The audio squawked. But, Dr. Hadamard, if that sets it off...
It won't go off. That's the one thing you can be sure it won't do.
What is this? Anderton demanded. What's this deadline stuff, anyhow?
The cap's off, Monig reported. We're getting plenty of radiation now. Just a minute. Yeah, Dr. Hadamard, it's a bomb all right, but it hasn't got a fuse. Now, how could they have made a full mistake like that?
In other words, it's a dud," Joan said. That's right, a dud.
Now, at last, Braun wiped his face, which was quite grey.
I told you the truth, he said grimly. My hunches don't work on stuff like this.
But they do, I said. I am sorry we put you through the wringer, and you too, Colonel, but we couldn't let an opportunity like this slip. It was too good a chance for us to test how our facilities would stand up in a real bomb drop.
A real drop? Anderton said. Are you trying to say that CIA staged this? You ought to be shot, the whole pack of you!
No, not exactly, I said. The enemy's responsible for the drop all right. We got word last month from our man in Gideena that they were going to do it. And that bomb would be on board the Ludmilla. As I say, it was too good an opportunity to miss. We wanted to find out just how long it would take us to figure out the nature of the bomb, which we didn't know in detail after it was dropped here. So we had our people and Gdynia defuse the thing after it was put on board the ship, but otherwise leave it entirely alone.
Actually, you see, your hunch was right on the button as far as it went. We didn't ask you whether or not the object was a live bomb. We asked whether it was a bomb or not. You said it was, and you were right.
The expression on Braun's face was exactly like the one he had worn while he had been searching for his decision, except that since his eyes were open, I could see that it was directed at me. If this was the old days, he said in an ice-cold voice, I might have made the colonel's idea come true. "'I don't go in for tricks like this, Andy.' "'It was more than a trick,' Clark put in. "'You'll remember we had a deadline on the test, Mr. Braun. Obviously, in a real drop, we wouldn't have all the time in the world to figure out what kind of thing had been dropped. If we had still failed to establish that when the deadline ran out, we would have had to allow evacuation of the city, with all the attendant risk that that was exactly what the enemy wanted us to do.' So?
So, we failed the test, I said. At one minute short of the deadline, Joan had the divers unscrew the cap. In a real drop, that would have resulted in a detonation, if the bomb was real. We'd never risk it. That we did do it in the test was a concession of failure, an admission that our usual methods didn't come through for us in time.
And that means that you were the only person who did come through, Mr. Brown. If a real bomb drop ever comes, we're going to have to have you here as an active part of our investigation. Your intuition for the one-shot gamble was the one thing that bailed us out this time. Next time, it may save eight million lives."
There was quite a long silence. All of us, Anderson included, watched Brown intently. But his impassive face failed to show any trace of how his thoughts were running. When he did speak at last, what he said must have seemed insanely irrelevant to Anderton, and maybe to Cheney too. And perhaps it meant nothing more to Joan than the final clinical note in the case history. "'It's funny,' he said. "'I was thinking of running for Congress next year from my district. But maybe this is more important.' It was, I believe, the sigh of a man at peace with himself.
End of One Shot by James Benjamin Blish
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6 Out Around Rigel 43:28
Out around Rigel.
Out around Rigel by Robert H. Wilson. The sun had dropped behind the Grimaldi plateau, although for a day twilight would linger over the Oceanus pro The sky was a hazy blue, and out over the deeper-tinted waves the full earth swung. All the long half-month it had hung there above the horizon, its light dimmed by the sunshine, growing from a thin crescent to its full disk three times as broad as that of the sun at setting. Now in the dusk it was a great silver lamp hanging over Nardos the Beautiful, the city built on the water. The light glimmered over the tall white towers, over the white, ten-mile-long adamantine bridge running from Nardos to the shore, and lit up the beach where we were standing, with a brightness that seemed almost that of day.
Once more, Garth, I said, I'll get that trick yet. The skin of my bare chest still smarted from the blow of his wooden fencing sword. If it had been the real two-handed Lunarian dueling sword, with its terrible mass behind a curved razor edge, the blow would have produced a cut deep into the bone. It was always the same, ever since Garth and I had fenced as boys with crooked laths. Back to back, we could beat the whole school, but I never had a chance against him. Perhaps one time in ten. On guard. The silvered swords whirled in the earthlight. I nicked him on one wrist, and had to duck to escape his wild swing at my head. The wooden blades were now locked by the hilts above our heads. When he stepped back to get free, I lunged and twisted his weapon.
In a beautiful parabola, Garth's sword sailed into the water, and he dropped to the sand to nurse his right wrist. Confound your wrestling, Donal! If you've broken my arm on the eve of my flight—it's not even a sprain. Your wrists are weak. And I suppose you've always been considerate of me, three broken ribs, for half a cent. He was on his feet, and then Kelvar came up and laid her hand on his shoulder, until a few minutes before she had been swimming in the surf, watching us. The earth-light shimmered over her white skin, still faintly moist, and blazed out in blue sparkles from the jewels of the breastplates and trunks she had put on. When she touched Garth, and he smiled, I wanted to smash in his dark face, and then take the beating I would deserve.
Yet, if she preferred him, and the two of us had been friends since before she was born, I put out my hand. Whatever happens, Garth, we'll still be friends? Whatever happens. We clasped hands. Garth, Kevlar said, it's getting dark. Show us your ship before you go. All right. He had always been like that. One minute in a black rage, the next perfectly agreeable. Now he led the way up to a cliff hanging over the sea. "'There,' said Garth, "'is the comet, our greatest step in conquering distance. After I've tried it out, we can go in a year to the end of the universe. But, for a starter, how about a thousand light-years around Rigel in six months?' His eyes were afire. Then he calmed down. "'Anything I can show you?' Editor's Note The manuscript, of which a translation is here presented, was discovered by the rocket-ship expedition to the moon three years ago.
It was found in its box by the last crumbling ruins of the great bridge mentioned in the narrative. Its final translation is a tribute at once to the philological skill of the earth, and to the marvelous dictionary provided by Donal, the Lunarian. Stars and lunar localities will be given their traditional Earth names, and measures of time, weight, and distance have been reduced, in round numbers, to terrestrial equivalents. Of the spaceship described, the comet, no trace has been found. It must be buried under the rim of one of the hundreds of nearby lunar craters. The result, as some astronomers have long suspected, and as the NAL story verifies, of a great swarm of meteors striking the unprotected, airless moon.
I had seen the comet before, but never so close. With a hull of shining helioberyllium, the new light, inactive alloy of a metal and a gas, the ship was a cylinder about twenty feet long by fifteen in diameter, while a pointed nose stretched five feet farther at each end. Fixed at each point was a telescopic lens, while there were windows along the sides and at the top. All made, Garth informed us, of another form of the alloy almost as strong as the opaque variety. Running halfway around each end were four fins, which served to apply the power driving the craft. A light inside showed the cylinder to be a single room, ten feet high at the centre of its cylindrical ceiling, with a level floor.
"'How do you know this will be the bottom?' I asked, giving the vessel a shove to roll it over. But it would not budge. Garth laughed. Five hundred pounds of mercury and the disintegrators are under that floor. While out in space, I have an auxiliary gravity engine to keep my feet there. You see, since your mathematical friends derived their identical formulas for gravity and electromagnetism, my job was pretty easy. As you know, a falling body follows the line of least resistance in a field of distortion of space caused by mass. I bend space into another such field by electromagnetic means, and the comet flies down the track. Working the Mercury disintegrators at full power, I can get an acceleration of 200 miles per second, which will build up the speed at the midpoint of my trip to almost 4,000 times that of light.
Then I'll have to start slowing down, but at the average speed the journey will take only six months or so." But can anyone stand that acceleration? Kelvar asked. I've had it on and felt nothing. With the rocket exhaust shoving the ship, it couldn't be done, but my gravitational field attracts the occupant of the comet just as much as the vessel itself. You're sure, I interrupted, that you have enough power to keep up the acceleration? Easily. There's a two-thirds margin of safety. And you haven't considered that it may get harder to push? You know, the increase of mass with velocity. You can't take one half of the relativity theory without the other. And they've actually measured the increase of weight in an electron.
The electron never knew it. It's all a matter of reference points. I can't follow the math, but I know that from the electron standards, it stayed exactly the same weight. Anything else is nonsense. Well, there may be a flaw in the reasoning, but as they've worked it out, nothing can go faster than light. As you approach that velocity, the mass keeps increasing, and with it the amount of energy required for a new increase in speed. At the speed of light, the mass would be infinite, and hence no finite energy could get you any further. Maybe so. It won't take long to find out. A few of the brightest stars had begun to appear. We could just see the parallelogram of Orion, with red Betelgeuse at one corner, and across from it Rigel, scintillant like a blue diamond.
"'See,' Garth said, pointing at it, "'three months from now. That's where I'll be, the first man who dared to sail among the stars.' Only because you won't let anyone else share the glory and the danger. Why should I? But you wouldn't go, anyway. Will you let me? I had him there. On your head be it. The comet could hold three or four in a pinch, and I have plenty of provisions, if you really want to take the chance. It wouldn't be the first we've taken together. All right. We'll start in ten minutes." He went inside the ship. Don't go, Kalvar whispered, coming into the comet's shadow. Tell him anything. "'But don't go.' "'I have to. I can't go back on my word. He'd think I was afraid.' "'Haven't you a right to be?' "'Garth is my friend, and I'm going with him.' "'All right.
But I wish you wouldn't.' From inside came the throb of engines. "'Kelver,' I said, "'you didn't worry when only Garth was going.' "'No.' "'And there's less danger with two of us to keep watch.' "'I know. But still.' "'You were afraid for me?' "'I am afraid for you.' My arm slipped around her, there in the shadow. "'And when I come back, Kalvar, will we be married?' In answer she kissed me. Then Garth was standing in the doorway of the Comet. "'Danal, where are you?' We separated and came out of the shadow. I went up the plank to the door, kicking it out behind me. Kalvar waved, and I called something or other to her. Then the door clanged shut. Seated before the control board at the front of the room, Garth held the switch for the two projectors.
Both turned up, he yelled over the roar of the generators. His hand swung over, and the noise died down. But nothing else seemed to have happened. I turned back again to look out the little window fixed in the door. Down far below, I could see for a moment the city of Nardos, with its great white bridge, and a spot that might be Kalvar. Then there was only the ocean, sparkling in the earth-light, growing smaller, smaller. And then we had shot out of the atmosphere into the glare of the sun and a thousand stars. On and up we went until the moon was a crescent with stars around it. Then Garth threw the power forward. Might as well turn in, he told me. There'll be nothing interesting until we get out of the solar system and I can put on real speed.
I'll take the first trick. How long watches shall we stand? Eighteen hours ought to match the way we have been living. If you have another preference... No, that will be all right, and I suppose I might as well get in some sleep now. I was not really sleepy, but only dazed a little by the adventure. I fixed some things on the floor by one of the windows, and lay down, switching out the light. Through a top window, the sunlight slanted down to fall around Garth, at his instrument board, in a bright glory. From my window I could see the earth and the gleaming stars. The earth was smaller than I had ever seen it before. It seemed to be moving backward a little, and even more to be changing phase.
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, sleepily, the bright area was perceptibly smaller. If I could stay awake long enough, there would only be a crescent again, if I could stay awake, but I could not.
Only the rattling of dishes as Garth prepared breakfast brought me back to consciousness. I got to my feet sheepishly. How long have I slept? Twenty hours straight. You looked as if you might have gone on forever. It's a lack of disturbance to indicate time. I got in a little myself once we were out of the solar system. A sandwich in one hand, I wandered over the vessel. It was reassuringly solid and concrete, and yet there was something lacking. Garth, I asked, what's become of the sun? I thought you'd want to know that. He led me to the rear telescope. But I don't see anything. You haven't caught on yet. See that bright yellowish star on the edge of the constellation Scorpio? That's it. Involuntarily, I gasped.
Then— How far away are we? I put on full acceleration fifteen hours ago, when we passed Neptune, and we have covered thirty billion miles, three hundred times as far as from the moon to the sun, but only one half of one per cent of a light year. I was speechless. And Garth led me back to the control board. He pointed out the acceleration control, now turned up to its last notch forward. He also showed me the dials which were used to change our direction. Just keep that star on the cross-hairs. That's Pi Orionis, a little out of our course, but a good target since it is only twenty-five light-years away. Half the light is deflected on this screen, with a delicate photo-electric cell at its center.
The instant the light of the star slips off it, a relay is started, which lights a red lamp here, and in a minute sounds a warning bell. That indicator over there shows our approach to any body. It works by the interaction of the object's gravitational field with that of my projector, and we can spot anything sizable an hour away. Sure you've got everything?" It all seemed clear. Then I noticed at the top three clock-like dials, one to read days, another to record the speeds of light, and the third to mark the light years travelled. These can't really work, I said. We have no way to check our speed with outer space. Not directly. This is geared with clockwork to represent an estimate based on the acceleration.
If your theory is right, then the dials are all wrong. And how long do you expect to go ahead without knowing the truth? Until we ought to be at Pi Orionis, at two weeks and twenty-five light-years by the dials, if we aren't there, we'll start back. By your figuring, we shouldn't be yet one light-year on the way. Anything more? No, I think I can manage it. Wake me if anything's wrong, and look out for dark stars. Then he had left me there at the controls. In five minutes he was asleep, and the whole ship was in my hands. For hours nothing happened. Without any control of mine the ship went straight ahead. I could get up and walk about, with the weather eye on the board, and never was there the flash of a danger light.
But I was unable to feel confident, and went back to look out through the glass. The stars were incredibly bright and clear, Right ahead were Betelgeuse and Rigel, and the great nebulae of Orion still beyond. There was no twinkling, but each star a bright, steady point of light, and if Garth's indicators were correct, we were moving toward them at a speed now seventy-five times that of light itself, if they were correct. How could one know before the two long weeks were over? But before I could begin to think of any plan, my eye was caught by the red lamp flashing on the panel. I pressed the attention button before the alarm could ring, then started looking for the body we were in danger of striking.
The position indicators pointed straight ahead, but I could see nothing. For ten minutes I peered through the telescope, and still no sign. The dials put the thing off a degree or so to the right now, but that was too close. In five more minutes I would swing straight up and give whatever it was a wide berth. I looked out again. In the angle between the crosshairs, wasn't there a slight haze? In a moment it was clear. A comet, apparently the two of us racing toward each other. Bigger it grew, and bigger, hurtling forward. Would we hit it? The dials put it up a little, and far off to the right. But it was still frightening. The other light had come on too, and I saw that we had been pulled off our course by the comet's attraction.
I threw the nose over, passed on the other side for leeway, then straightened up as the side-distance dial gave a big jump away. Though the gaseous globe, tailless of course away from the sun, showed as big as the full earth, the danger was past. As I watched, the comet vanished from the field of the telescope, five minutes, perhaps, with the red danger-light flickering all the time. Then, with a ghastly flare through the right-hand windows, it had passed us. Garth sat up. What happened, he yelled. Just a comet. I got by all right. He settled back, having been scarcely awake. And I turned to the board again. The danger light had gone out, but the direction indicator was burning. The near approach of the comet had thrown us off our course by several degrees.
I straightened the ship up easily, and then had only a little more difficulty in stopping a rocking motion. Then again the empty hours of watching, gazing into the stars. Precisely at the end of eighteen hours, Garth awakened, as if the consummation of a certain number of internal processes had set off a little alarm clock in his brain. We were forty-one hours out, with a speed, according to the indicator, of one hundred and twenty-eight times that of light, and a total distance covered of slightly over one quarter of a light year. A rather small stretch compared to the four hundred and sixty-six light-years we had to go, but when I went back for a look out of the rear telescope, the familiar stars seemed to have moved the least bit closer together, and the sun was no brighter than a great number of them.
I slept like a log, but awakened a little before my trick was due. Exactly on schedule, Fourteen days and some hours after we had started off, we passed Pi Orionis. For long there had been no doubt in my mind that, whatever the explanation, our acceleration was holding steady. In the last few hours the star swept up the brilliance of the Sun, then faded again until it was no brighter than Venus. Venus, our Sun itself, had been a mere dot in the rear telescope until the change in our course threw it out of the field of vision. At sixty-five light-years, Twenty-three days out, Beta-Erendeni was almost directly in our path for Rigel, slightly less than a third of the distance to the midpoint in over half the time, but our speed was still increasing two hundred miles per second every second, almost four times the speed of light in an hour.
Our watches went on with a not altogether disagreeable monotony. There was no star to mark the middle of our journey. Only, toward the close of one of my watches, a blue light which I had never noticed came on beside the indicator dials, and I saw that we had covered two hundred and thirty-three light-years, half the estimated distance, to Rigel. The speed marker indicated three thousand nine hundred and seventy-five times the speed of light. I wakened Garth. You could have done it yourself, he complained sleepily, but I suppose it's just as well. He went over through the board and started warming up the rear gravity projector. We'll turn one off as the other one goes on. Each take one control, and go a notch at a time.
He began counting. One, two, three. On the twentieth count, my dial was down to zero. His up to a maximum deceleration, and I pulled out my switch. Garth snapped sideways a lever on the indicators. Though nothing seemed to happen, I knew that the speed dial would creep backward. And the distance dial progressed at a slower and slower rate. While I was trying to see the motion, Garth had gone back to bed. I turned again to the glass, and looked out at Rigel, on the crosshairs, and Cappa Orionis over to the left, and the great nebula reaching over a quarter of the view with its faint, gaseous streamers. And so we swept on through space, with Rigel, A great blue glory ahead, and new stars, invisible at greater distance, flaring up in front of us, and then fading into the background as we passed.
For a long time we had been able to see that Rigel, as inferred from spectroscopic evidence, was a double star, a fainter, greener-blue companion revolving with it around their common center of gravity. Beyond Kappa Orionis, three hundred light-years from the sun, the space between the two was quite evident. Beyond four hundred light-years, the brilliance of the vast star was so great that it dimmed all the other stars by comparison, and made the nebula seem a mere faint gauze. And yet, even with this gradual change, our arrival was a surprise. When he relieved me at my watch, Garth seemed dissatisfied with our progress. It must be further than they figured. I'll stick at twenty-five times light speed, and slow down after we get there by taking an orbit.
I'd have said it was nearer than that estimate, I tried to argue, but was too sleepy to remember my reasons. Propped up on one elbow, I looked around and out at the stars. There was a bright splash of light, I noticed, where the telescope concentrated the radiation of Rigel at one spot on the screen. I slept, and then Garth was shouting in my ear. We're there! I opened my eyes, blinked, and shut them again in the glare. I've gone around three or four times trying to slow down. We're there, and there's a planet to land on. At last I could see. Out the window opposite me, Rigel was a blue-white disk half the size of the sun, but brighter, with the companion star a sort of faint reflection, five or ten degrees, to one side, and still beyond, as I shaded my eyes, I could see swimming in the black a speck with the unmistakable glow of reflected light.
With both gravity projectors in readiness, we pulled out of our orbit and straight across toward the planet. Letting the attraction of Rigel fight against our still tremendous speed. For a while the pull of the big star was almost overpowering. Then we got past, and into the gravitational field of the planet. We spiraled down into it, looking for a landing place and trying to match our speed with its rotational velocity. From rather unreliable observations, the planet seemed a good deal smaller than the moon, and yet so dense as to have a greater gravitational attraction. The atmosphere was cloudless, and the surface a forbidding expanse of sand. The globe whirled at a rate that must give it a day of approximately five hours.
We angled down, picking a spot just within the lighted area. A landing was quite feasible. As we broke through the atmosphere, we could see that the sand, although blotched with dark patches here and there, was comparatively smooth. At one place there was a level outcropping of rock, and over this we hung, It was hard work watching through the single small port in the floor as we settled down. Finally the view was too small to be of any use. I ran to the side window, only to find my eyes blinded by Rigel's blaze. Then we had landed, and almost at the same moment Rigel set. Half overlapped by the greater star, the faint companion had been hidden in its glare. Now, in the dusk, a corner of it hung, ghostlike, on the horizon, and then, too, had disappeared.
I flashed on our lights, while Garth cut out the projector and the floor-gravity machine. The increase in weight was apparent, but not particularly unpleasant. After a few minutes of walking up and down, I got used to it. Through a stop-cock in the wall, Garth had drawn in a tube of gas from the atmosphere outside, and was analysing it with a spectroscope. "'We can go out,' he said. "'It's unbreathable, but we'll be able to use the space-suits. Mostly fluorine. It would eat your lungs out like that. And the suits?' Fortunately, they've been covered with helioberyllium paint, and the helmet glass is the same stuff. Not even that atmosphere can touch it. I suppose there can be no life on the place.
With all this sand, it would have to be based on silicon instead of carbon, and it would have to breathe fluorine. He got out the suits, rather like a diver's, with the body of metal-painted cloth, and the helmet of the metal itself. On the shoulders was an air-supply cylinder, The helmets were fixed with radio, so we could have talked to each other even in airless space. We said almost anything to try it out. Glad you brought two, and we don't have to explore in shifts. Yes, I was prepared for emergencies. Shall we wait for daylight to go out? I can't see why, and these outfits will probably feel better in the cool. Let's see. We shot a searchlight beam out the window. There was a slight drop down from the rock where we rested.
Then the sandy plains stretching out. Only far off were those dark patches that looked like old seaweed on a dried-up ocean bed, and might prove dangerous footing. The rest seemed hard packed. My heart was pounding as we went into the airlock and fastened the inner door behind us. "'We go straight out now,' Garth explained. "'Coming back, it will be necessary to press this button and let the pump get rid of the poisonous air before going in.' I opened the outer door and started to step out, then realized that there was a five-foot drop to the ground. "'Go ahead and jump,' Garth said. "'There's a ladder inside I should have brought, but it will be too much trouble to go back through the lock for it.
Either of us can jump eight feet at home, and we'll get back up somehow.' I jumped, failing to allow for the slightly greater gravity, and fell sprawling. Garth got down more successfully, in spite of a long package of some sort he carried in his hand. Scrambling down from the cliff and walking out on the sand, I tried to get used to the combination of greater weight and the awkward suit. If I stepped very deliberately it was all right, but an attempt to run sank my feet in the sand and brought me up staggering. There was no trouble seeing through the glass of my helmet over wide angles. Standing on the elevation by the comet, his space suit shining in the light from the windows, Garth looked like a metallic monster, Some creature of this strange world, and I must have presented to him much the same appearance, silhouetted, dark and forbidding against the stars.
The stars! I looked up and beheld the most marvelous sight of the whole trip. The great nebula of Orion seemed, from a distance, of less than one hundred and fifty light-years its own width. A great luminous curtain, fifty degrees across. I could just take it all in with my eye. The central brilliancy, as big as the sun, A smaller one above it, and then the whole mass of gas stretching over the sky, the whole thing aglow with the green light of nebulum and blazing with the stars behind it. It was stupendous, beyond words. I started to call Garth, then saw that he was looking up as well. For almost half an hour I watched, as the edge of the nebula sank below the horizon. Then its light began to dim.
Turning, I saw that the sky opposite was already grey. The dawn! Why, the sun had just set. Then I realized. It was over an hour since we were landed, and a full night would be scarcely two hours and a half. If we were in a summer latitude, the shorter period of darkness was natural enough, yet it was still hard to believe as, within ten minutes, it was as bright as earth-light on the moon. Still clearer and clearer grew the light. The stars were almost gone, the center of the nebula only a faint wisp. There were no clouds that give the colors of sunrise, but a bluish-white radiance seemed to be trembling on the eastern horizon. And then, like a shot, Rigel came up into the sky. The light and heat struck me like something solid, and I turned away.
Even with my suit reflecting most of the light away, I felt noticeably warm. The comet shone like a blinding mirror. so that it was almost impossible to see Garth on the plain below it. Stumbling and shielding my eyes with my hand, I made my way toward him. He was standing erect. In his hands, two old Lunarian-duelling swords. There was hate in his voice, as the radio brought it to my ears. "'Donal, only one of us is going back to the moon.' I stared. Was the heat getting him? Hadn't we better go inside, I said. quietly and somewhat soothingly. He made no reply, but only held out one of the hilts. I took it, dumbly. In that instant he could have struck my head from my body, if he wished. But Garth, old friend!
No friend to you. You shall win Calvar now, or I. I am giving you a sporting chance. One of your light cuts letting the fluorine inside will be as deadly as anything I can do. The one who does go back will tell of an accident. Making repairs out in space. Damn you, if you don't want me to kill you where you stand, come on and fight. Garth, you've gone mad. I've been waiting ever since I got you here to leave the moon. On guard. With a rush of anger I was upon him. He tried to step back, stumbled, had one knee to the ground, then hurled himself forward with a thrust at my waist that I dodged only by an inch. I had to cover, and in spite of myself, with the cool work of parrying, my animosity began to disappear.
And so began one of the strangest battles that the universe has ever seen. Lumbering with our suits and the extra gravity, we circled each other under the blazing sky. The blue-white of Rigel shimmered off our suits, and the arcs of our blades as well as we cut and guarded, each wary now, realizing that a touch meant death. As that terrible sun climbed upward in the sky, Its heat was almost overpowering. The sweat poured off every inch of my body, and I gasped for breath. And still we fought on, two glittering metal monsters under the big blue star sweeping up to its noon. I knew now that I could never kill Garth. I could not go back to Kelvar with his blood. Yet, if I simply defended, sooner or later he would wear me down.
There was just one chance. If I could disarm him, I could rustle him into submission. Then he might be reasonable, or I could take him home bound. I began leading for the opening I wanted, but with no result. He seemed resolved to tire me out. Either I must carry the fight to him, or I would be beaten down. I made a wide opening, counting on dodging his slow stroke. I did, but he recovered too soon. Again on the other side, with no better result. Still again, just getting in for a light tap on Garth's helmet. Then I stepped back, with guard low, and this time he came on, The sword rose in a gleaming arc and hung high for a moment. I had him. There were sparks of clashing, locked steel. Damn you, Donal!
He took a great step back, narrowly keeping his balance on the sand. On another chance I would trip him. My ears were almost deafened by his roar. Come on and fight! I took a step in and to the side, and had him in the sun. He swung blindly, trying to cover himself with his whirling point, but I had half a dozen openings to rip his suit. When he moved to try to see, I would lock with him again. I watched his feet, and as I watched, I saw an incredible thing. Near one of Garth's feet, the sand was moving. It was not a slide caused by his weight. Rather, why, it was being pushed up from below. There was a little hump, and suddenly it had burst open, and a stringy mass like seaweed was crawling toward his leg.
"'Look out, Garth!' I yelled. How he could see through that terrible sun I do not know, but Garth swung through my forgotten guard with a blow square across my helmet glass. The force threw me to the ground, and I looked up, dazed. The beryllium glass had not broken to let in the fluorine-filled air, but Garth was standing over me. That's your last trick, Donal. His blade rose for the kill. I was unable even to get up, but with one hand I pointed to the ground. Look! I shouted again, and on the instant the thing wound itself around Garth's foot. He swung down, hacking it loose. I had got to my feet. Run for the ship, I cried, and started off. Not that way. I looked back, and saw that I had run in the wrong direction.
But it made no difference. Over a whole circle around us, the sand was rising, and directly between us and the comet there was a great green-brown mass. We were surrounded. We stood, staring at the creatures. Spread out to full dimensions, each one made a sphere about four feet in diameter, in the center a solid mass whose outlines were difficult to discern, and spreading out from this a hundred long, thin, many-jointed arms, or legs, or branches, or whatever one would call them. The things were not yet definitely hostile, only their circle, of perhaps fifty yards radius, grew continually thicker and more impenetrable. Within the enclosed area, the only ripples we could see in the sand were heading outward.
There was to be no surprise attack, from below at least, only one in mass. What, I wondered, might be the sign of friendship, to persuade them to let us go. And then the circle began to close in. The things rolled over and over and over on themselves, like gigantic tumbleweeds. At one point, to the right of the direct route to the comet, the line seemed thinner. I pointed the place out to Garth. Break through there, and make a run for it. We charged into the midst of them with swinging blades. The very suddenness of our rush carried us halfway through their midst. Then something had my legs from behind. I almost fell, but succeeded in turning and cutting myself free. The creatures from the other side of the circle must have made the hundred yards in four or five seconds, and the rest had now covered the breach in front.
It was hopeless. And so we stood back to back, hewing out a circle of protection against our enemies. They seemed to have no fear, and in spite of the destruction our blades worked among them, they almost overcame us by sheer numbers and weight. It was a case of whirling our swords back and forth, interminably, in the midst of their tentacles. Against the light, the long arms were a half-transparent brown. Our swords broke them in bright slivers. Formed from the predominant silicon of the planet, the creatures were living glass. For perhaps a quarter of an hour we were in the thick of them, hewing until I thought my arms must fall, slashing and tearing at the ones that had got underfoot and were clamping their tentacles around our legs.
Only for the spacesuits we should have by this time been overpowered and torn into bits, and yet these garments could not be expected to hold on indefinitely. But at last there was a breathing space. The crippled front ranks dragged themselves away, and there was left around us a brief area of sand, covered with coruscating splinters of glass. Garth got the breath to say something rather encouraging. It was like the old days at school. Only this time the odds were all against us. We were still a good hundred yards from the comet, and in our path stood a solid wall of the creatures. Even if we got free, they could outrace us to the goal. And with our limited strength we could not hope to kill them all.
In a minute or two they would attack us again. Somehow we must fight our way as long as we lasted. Perhaps they might be frightened. We threw ourselves at the side next our goal. The line gave, perhaps, a yard, then stiffened, and we found ourselves swallowed up in a thick cloud of brown smoke. Poisoned gas. It must be shot out of their bodies, at a cost so great that it was kept as a last resort. Through the rolling vapour it was just possible to see our opponents, but they made no forward move. They were waiting for us to be overcome. Suppose their compound could eat through even our helioberyllium? But it did not. We were safe. "'Stand still, Garth,' I whispered, counting on the radio to carry my voice.
Let them think we're dead, and then give them a surprise. All right. Long, long minutes. If only they did not know that it was the customary thing for a dead man to fall.' Slowly they began to move in. Then Garth and I were upon them. They halted as if stupefied. We had hacked our way through half their masts. The rest fled, and we began running toward the comet, praying that we might reach the ship before they could get organized again. How we floundered through the sand in wild and desperate haste. Before we had covered half the distance, the pursuit began. There was no attempt to drag us down directly, but the two wings raced past to cut us off in front. At the base of the little cliff where the comet lay, the circle closed.
Jump! I called, and threw myself up over them toward the stone. Garth would have fallen back, but I cut his hand and pulled him to safety. We had won. But had we? Joined by reinforcements from somewhere, the creatures were packed all around the base of the cliff, and had begun to climb its walls. To cut us off from the ship, We rushed separately toward the two sides, and they backed away, but those in front were now established on the top. We stepped backward, and the whole line came on, but now we turned and ran for the comet. We were just able to turn again and clear them away with our swords. In a moment others would be climbing up from behind over the ship, and the door to safety was on a level with our heads.
There was just one chance. Stamping Threatening We cleared the things out for ten feet in front of us, but once we turned our backs for a running start, they were at us again. "'Boost you up, Donal,' said Garth pantingly. "'No, you first.' But in the midst of my words he almost threw me into the doorway. I turned to pull him up after me. They were around his legs, and one had jumped down on his helmet. He must have known it would happen. "'Go back to her,' he cried, and slammed shut the door. There was no time to help him. to interfere with the way of expiation he had chosen. I tried to look away, but a sort of fascination kept me watching him through the glass. He had been dragged to his knees.
Then he was up again, willing to keep them away on all sides in a mad, gallant fight. But the creatures knew it was the kill. Now they were around his knees, now up to his waist in their overpowering mass. It was only a matter of minutes. Garth took a staggering step backwards, dragging them all with him. He was facing me. and swung up his sword in the old lunar salute. Good luck, Donal. The words, coming clearly over the radio, had a note of exultation. Then, flashing his blade over his head, he turned it into the midst of the accursed things. With a tremendous effort, Garth tore the protecting helmet from his head and plunged backward over the cliff. There was nothing to do but get in out of the lock and start for home, and little on the trip is worthy of recounting.
Without unsurpassable difficulty, I was able to operate the machinery and steer, first for Betelgeuse, then for the sun. Counting on the warning bells to arouse me, I managed to get in snatches of sleep at odd intervals. At times, the strain of the long watches was almost maddening. By the time the midpoint had passed, I was living in a sort of waking dream, or rather a state of somnambulism. I ate, my hands moved the controls, and yet all the while my mind was wandering elsewhere. Out to Garth's body under the blazing light of Rigel, back to the moon and Kalvar, or else in an unreal, shadowy world of dreams and vague memories. With perfect mechanical accuracy, I entered the solar system and adjusted the projectors for the sun's attraction.
Running slower and slower, I watched Venus glide by, and then gradually everything faded, and I was walking along the great Nardo's Bridge with Kalvar. The ocean was so still that we could see, mirrored in it the reflection of each white column, and our own faces peering down, and beyond that the stars. "'I shall bring you a handful for your hair,' I told her, and leaned over, farther, farther, reaching out. Then I was falling, with Kalvar's face growing fainter, and in my ears a horrible ringing like the world coming to an end. Just before I could strike the water, I wakened to find the alarm bell jangling, and the object indicator light flashing away. Through the telescope, the moon was large in the sky.
It was an hour, perhaps two, before I approached the sunlit surface and hovered over the shore by Nardos. Try as I would, my sleep-drugged body could not handle the controls delicately enough to get the comet quite in step with the moon's rotation, always a little too fast or a little too slow. I slid down until I was only ten or fifteen feet off the ground that seemed to be moving out from under me. In another minute I should be above the water, I let everything go, and the comet fell. There was a thud, a sound of scraping over the sand, a list to one side. I thought for an instant that the vessel was going to turn over, but with the weight of the reserve mercury in the fuel tanks, it managed to right itself on a slope of ten or fifteen degrees.
From the angle I could barely see out the windows, and everything looked strange. The water under the bridge seemed too low. The half-full earth had greenish-black spots on it. And the sky? So dead with sleep that I could scarcely move, I managed to crane my neck around to see better. There was no sky, only a faint gray haze through which the stars shone, and yet the sun must be shining. I stretched still further. There the sun burned, and around it was an unmistakable corona. It was like airless space. Was I dreaming again? With a jerk I got to my feet, climbed up the sloping floor to the atmosphere tester. My fingers slipped off the stop-cock, then turned it, and the air pressure needle scarcely moved.
It was true. Somehow, as the scientists had always told this would be the case, eventually the air of the moon, with so little gravity to hold it back, had evaporated into space. But in six months? It was unthinkable. Surely someone had survived the catastrophe. Some people must have been able to keep themselves alive in caves where the last of the atmosphere would linger. Kalvar must still be alive. I could find her and bring her to the comet. We would go to some other world. Frantically, I pulled on my space suit and clambered through the airlock. I ran until the cumbersome suit slowed me down to a staggering walk through the sand beside the Oceanus Procellarum. Leaden and dull, the great sea lay undisturbed by the thin atmosphere still remaining.
It had shrunk by evaporation far away from its banks, and where the water once had been there was a dark incrustation of impurities. On the land side, all was a great white plain of glittering alkali without a sign of vegetation. I went on toward Nardos, the beautiful. Even from far off, I could see that it was desolate. Visible now that the water had gone down. The pillars supporting it rose gaunt and skeletal. Towers had fallen in, and the gleaming white was dimmed. It was a city of the dead, under an earth leprous-looking with black spots where the clouds apparently had parted. I came nearer to Nardos and the bridge, nearer to the spot where I had last seen Kalvar. Below the old water-level the columns showed a greenish stain, and halfway out the whole structure had fallen in a great gap.
I reached the land terminus of the span, still glorious and almost beautiful in its ruins. Whole blocks of stone had fallen to the sand, and the adamantine pillars were cracked and crumbling with the erosion of ages. Then I knew. In our argument as to the possible speed of the comet, Garth and I had both been right. In our reference frame, the vessel had put on an incredible velocity, and covered the nine hundred odd light-years around Rigel in six months. But from the viewpoint of the moon, it had been unable to attain a velocity greater than that of light. As the accelerating energy pressed the vessel's speed closer and closer toward that limiting velocity, the mass of the ship and its contents had increased toward infinity, In trying to move laboriously with such a vast mass, our clocks and bodies had been slowed down until, to our leaden minds, a year of moon-time became equivalent to several hours.
The comet had attained an average velocity of perhaps one hundred and seventy-five thousand miles per second, and the voyage that seemed to me six months had taken a thousand years. A thousand years! The words went ringing through my brain. Calver had been dead for a thousand years. I was alone in a world. Uninhabited for centuries. I threw myself down and battered my head in the sand. More to achieve, somehow, my own peace of mind, than in any hope of its being discovered, I have written this narrative. There are two copies, this to be placed in a helioberyllium box at the terminus of the bridge, the other within the comet. One, at least, should thus be able to escape the meteors which, unimpeded by the thin atmosphere, have begun to strike everywhere, tearing up great craters in the explosion that follows as a result of the impact.
My time is nearly up. Air is still plentiful in the comet, but my provisions will soon run short. It is now slightly over a month since I collapsed on the sands into merciful sleep, and I possess food and water for perhaps another. But why go on in my terrible loneliness? Sometimes I waken from a dream in which they are all so near, Kalvar, Garth, all my old companions, and for a moment I cannot realize how far away they are. Beyond years and years. And I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I—I— Trampling back and forth over the dust of our old life, staring across the waste, waiting—for what? No, I shall wait only until dark.
When the sun drops over the Grimaldi plateau, I shall put my manuscripts in their safe places, then tear off my helmet and join the other two. An hour ago, the bottom edge of the sun touched the horizon.
-
7 Pygmalion's Spectacles 44:42
Pygmalion Spectacles by Stanley Grumman Weinbaum. What is reality? asked the gnome-like man. He gestured at the tall banks of buildings that loomed around Central Park. with their countless windows glowing like the cave-fires of a city of Cro-Magnon people. All is dream. All is illusion. I am your vision as you are mine. Dan Burke, struggling for clarity of thought through the fumes of liquor, stared without comprehension at the tiny figure of his companion. He began to regret the impulse that had driven him to leave the party to seek fresh air in the park, and to fall by chance to the company of this diminutive old madman. But he needed escape. This was one party too many, and not even the presence of Clare with her trim ankles could hold him there.
He felt an angry desire to go home, not to his hotel, but home to Chicago and to the comparative piece of the Board of Trade. But he was leaving tomorrow anyway. "'You drink,' said the elfin-bearded face. "'To make real a dream, is it not so? Either to dream that what you seek is yours, or else to dream that what you hate is conquered. You drink to escape reality.' And the irony is that even reality is a dream. Cracked, thought Dan again. Or so, concluded the other, says the philosopher Berkeley. Berkeley? Echoed Dan. His head was clearing. Memories of a sophomore course in elementary philosophy drifted back. Bishop Berkeley, eh? You know him, then? The philosopher of idealism, no? The one who argues that we do not see, feel, hear, taste the object?
But that we have only the sensation of seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting. I... sort of recall it. Ha! But sensations are mental phenomena. They exist in our minds. How, then, do we know that the objects themselves do not exist only in our minds? He waved again at the light-flecked buildings. You do not see that wall of masonry. You perceive only a sensation of feeling sight. The rest you interpret. "'You see the same thing,' retorted Dan. "'How do you know I do? Even if you knew that what I call red would not be green, could you see through my eyes? Even if you knew that, how do you know that I, too, am not a dream of yours?' Dan laughed. "'Of course nobody knows anything. You just get what information you can through the windows of your five senses, and then you make your guesses.' When they're wrong, you pay the penalty.
His mind was clear now, save for a mild headache. Listen, he said suddenly. You can argue a reality away to an illusion. That's easy. But if your friend Berkley is right, why can't you take a dream and make it real? If it works one way, it must work the other. The beard waggled. Elf's bright eyes glittered queerly at him. All artists do that, said the old man softly. Dan felt that something more quivered on the verge of utterance. "'That's an evasion,' he grunted. "'Anybody can tell the difference between a picture and the real thing, or between a movie and life.' "'But,' whispered the other, "'the realer the better, no. And if one could make a—a movie—very real indeed—what would you say then?
Nobody can, though.' The eyes glittered strangely again. "'I can,' he whispered. I did. Did what? Made a real a dream. The voice turned angry. Fools, I bring it here to sell to Westman, the camera people, and what do they say? It isn't clear. Only one person can use it at a time. It's too expensive. Fools! Fools! Huh? Listen, I'm Albert Ludwig, Professor Ludwig. As Dan was silent, he continued. It means nothing to you, huh? But listen, a movie that gives one sight and sound. Suppose now I add taste, smell, even touch, if your interest is taken by the story. Suppose I make it so that you are in the story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you and you are in it.
Would that be to make real a dream? How the devil could you do that? How? How? But simply! First, my liquid positive, then my magic spectacles. I photograph the story in a liquid with light-sensitive chromates. I build up a complex solution, do you see? I attaste chemically and sound electronically. And when the story is recorded, then I put the solution in my spectacle, my movie projector. I electrolyze the solution, break it down. The older crow-mates go first, and out comes the story, sight, sound, smell, taste, all. Touch? If your interest is taken, your mind supplies that. Eagerness crept into his voice. You will look at it, Mr. Burke, said Dan. A swindle, he thought. Then a spark of recklessness glowed out of the vanishing fumes of alcohol.
Why not? he grunted. He rose, Ludwig standing, came scarcely to his shoulder. A queer, gnome-like old man, Dan thought, as he followed him across the park and into one of the scores of apartment hotels in the vicinity. In his room, Ludwig fumbled in a bag, producing a device vaguely reminiscent of a gas mask. There were goggles and a rubber mouthpiece. Dan examined it curiously, while the little bearded professor brandished a bottle of watery liquid. Here it is, he gloated. My liquid positive, the story. Our photography, infernally hard, therefore the simplest story. A utopia. Just two characters and you, the audience. Now put the spectacles on. Put them on and tell me what the fools the Westman people are.
He decanted some of the liquid into the mask and trailed a twist wire to a device on the table. A rectifier, he explained, for the electrolysis. Must you use all the liquid? asked Dan. If you use part, do you see only part of the story? And which part? Each drop has all of it. But you must fill the eye-pieces. Then as Dan slipped the device gingerly on, So? Now what do you see? Not a damn thing, just the windows and the lights across the street. Of course, but now I start the electrolysis. Now! There was a moment of chaos, liquid before Dan's eyes clouded suddenly white, and formless sounds buzzed. He moved to tear the device from his head, but emerging forms in the mistiness caught his interest.
Giant things were writhing there. The scene steadied. The whiteness was dissipating like mist in summer. Unbelieving, still gripping the arms of that unseen chair, he was staring at a forest. But what a forest! Incredible, unearthly, beautiful! Smooth bulls ascended inconveniently toward a brightening sky, trees bizarre as the forests of the Carboniferous Age. Infinitely overhead swayed misty fronds. And the verdure showed brown and green in the heights. And there were birds. At least curiously lovely pipings and twiddings were all about him, though he saw no creatures. Thin elfin whistlings like fairy bugles sounded softly. He sat frozen and tranced. A loud fragment of melody drifted down to him, mounting in exquisite, ecstatic bursts, now clear as sounding metal, now soft as remembered music.
For a moment he forgot the chair whose arms he gripped, the miserable hotel room invisibly about him. Oh, Ludwig, his aching head. He imagined himself alone in the midst of that lovely glade. Eden, he muttered, and the swelling music of unseen voices answered. Some measure of reason returned. Illusion, he told himself. Clever optic devices, not reality. He groped for the chair's arm, found it, and clung to it. He scraped his feet and found again an inconsistency. To his eyes the ground was mossy verdure. To his touch it was merely a thin hotel carpet. The Elf embugling sounded gently. A faint, deliciously sweet perfume breathed against him. He glanced up to watch the opening of a great crimson blossom on the nearest tree, and a tiny reddish sun edged into a circle of sky above him.
The fairy orchestra swelled louder in its light, and the notes sent a thrill of wistfulness through him. Illusion? If it were, it made reality almost unbearable. He wanted to believe that somewhere, somewhere this side of dreams, there actually existed this region of loveliness. An outpost of paradise. Perhaps. And then, far through the softening mists, He caught a movement that was not the swaying of verdure, a shimmer of silver more solid than mist. Something approached. He watched the figure as it moved, now visible, now hidden by trees. Very soon he perceived that it was human. But it was almost upon him before he realized that it was a girl. She wore a robe of silvery, half-translucent stuff, luminous as star-beams, a thin band of silver-bound glowing black hair about her forehead.
And other garment or ornament she had none. Her tiny white feet were bare to the mossy forest floor as she stood no more than apace from him, staring dark-eyed. The thin music sounded again. She smiled. Dan summoned stumbling thoughts. Was this being also illusion? Had she no more reality than the loveliness of the forest? He opened his lips to speak. But a strained, excited voice sounded in his ears. "'Who are you?' "'Have you spoken?' The voice had come as if from another, like the sound of one's words in fever. The girl smiled again. "'English!' she said in queer, soft tones. "'I can speak a little English.' She spoke slowly, carefully. "'I learned it from—' she hesitated. "'My mother's father, whom they call the Grey Weaver.' Again came the voice in Dan's ears.
"'Who are you?' "'I am called Galatea,' she said. "'I came to find you.' "'To find me?' echoed the voice that was Dan's. "'Lukan, who is called the Gray Weaver, told me,' she explained, smiling. "'He said you will stay with us until the second noon from this.' She cast a quick, slanting glance at the pale sun. Now full above the clearing, then stepped closer. "'What are you called?' "'Dan,' he muttered. His voice sounded oddly different. "'What a strange name,' said the girl. She stretched out her bare arm. "'Come,' she smiled. Dan touched her extended hand, feeling without any surprise the living warmth of her fingers. He had forgotten the paradoxes of illusion. This was no longer illusion to him, but reality itself.
It seemed to him that he followed her, walking over the shadowed turf that gave with springy crunch beneath his tread, though Galatea left hardly an imprint. He glanced down, noting that he himself wore a silver garment, and that his feet were bare. With the glance he felt a feathery breeze on his body and a sense of mossy earth on his feet. Galatea, said his voice. Galatea, what place is this? What language do you speak? She glanced back, laughing. Why, this is pericosma, of course. And this is our language. Pericosma, muttered Dan. Pericosma? A fragment of Greek that had survived somehow from a sophomore chorus a decade in the past came strangely back to him. Pericosma, land beyond the world.
Galatea cast a smiling glance at him. Does the real world seem strange, she queried, after that Shadowland of yours? Shadowland, echoed Dan, bewildered. This is Shadow, not my world. The girl's smile turned quizzical. Poof! she retorted with an impudently lovely pout. And I suppose, then, that I am the phantom instead of you, she laughed. Do I seem ghostlike? Dan made no reply. He was puzzling over unanswerable questions as he trod behind the lithe figure of his guide. The aisle between the unearthly trees widened, and the giants were fewer. It seemed a mile, perhaps, before a sound of tinkling water obscured that other strange music. They emerged on the bank of a little river, swift and crystalline, that rippled and gurgled its way from glowing pool to flashing rapids, sparkling under the pale sun.
Galatea bent over the brink and cupped her hands. Raising a few mouthfuls of water to her lips, Dan followed her example, finding the liquid stinging cold. "'How do we cross?' he asked. "'You can wade up there,' the dryad who led him gestured to sunlit shallows above a tiny falls. "'But I always cross here.' She poised herself for a moment on the green bank, then dove like a silver arrow into the pool. Dan followed. The water stung his body like champagne. But a stroke or two carried him across to where Galatea had already emerged with a glistening of creamy bare limbs. Her garment clung tight as a metal sheath to her wet body. He felt a breathtaking thrill at the sight of her. And then, miraculously, the silver cloth was dry, the droplets rolled off as if from oiled silk, and they moved briskly on.
The incredible forest had ended with the river. They walked over a meadow studded with little, many-hued star-shaped flowers, whose fronds underfoot were soft as a lawn. Yet still the sweet piping followed them, now loud, now whisper soft, in a tenuous web of melody. Galatea, said Dan Fennelly. Where is the music coming from? She looked back, amazed. You silly one, she laughed. From the flowers, of course. See? She plucked a purple star and held it to his ear. True enough, a faint and plaintive melody hummed out of the blossom. She tossed it in his startled face and skipped on. A little copse appeared ahead, not of the gigantic forest trees, but of lesser gross, bearing flowers and fruits of iridescent colors, and a tiny brook bubbled through, and there stood the objective of their journey.
A building of white marble-like stone, single-storied and vine-covered, with broad glassless windows. They trod up a path of bright pebbles to the arched entrance, and here, on an intricate stone bench, sat a gray-bearded patriarchal individual. Galatea addressed him in a liquid language that reminded Dan of the flower-pipings. Then she turned. "'This is Lukan,' she said, as the ancient rose from his seat and spoke in English. "'We are happy, Galatea and I.' To welcome you, since visitors are a rare pleasure here, and those from your shadowy country most rare. Dan uttered puzzled words of thanks, and the old man nodded, reseating himself on the carven bench. Galateus skipped through the arched entrance, and Dan, after an irresolute moment, dropped to the remaining bench.
Once more his thoughts were whirling in perplexed turbulence. Was all this indeed but illusion? Was he sitting in actuality, and a— Prosaic hotel room, peering through magical spectacles that pictured this world about him? Or was he, transported by some miracle, really sitting here in this land of loveliness? He touched the bench, stone, hard, and unyielding, met his fingers. Liu Khan, said his voice. How did you know I was coming? I was told, said the other. By whom? By no one. Why, Someone must have told you. The gray weaver shook his solemn head. I was just told. Dan ceased his questioning, content for the moment to drink the beauty about him, and then Galatea returned, bearing a crystal bowl of the strange fruits.
They were piled in colorful disorder—red, purple, orange, and yellow, pear-shaped, egg-shaped, and clustered spheroids. Fantastic, unearthly. He selected a pale, transparent ovid, bit into it, and was deluged by a flood of sweet liquid, to the amusement of the girl. She laughed and chose a similar morsel. Biting a tiny puncture in the end, she squeezed the contents into her mouth. Dan took a different sort, purple and tart as Rhinish wine, and then another, filled with edible almond-like seeds. Galatea laughed delightedly at his surprises, And even Lukan smiled a gray smile. Finally Dan tossed the last husk into the brook beside him, where it danced briskly toward the river. Galatea, he said.
Do you ever go to a city? What cities are in Paracosma? Cities? What are cities? Places where many people live close together? Oh, said the girl, frowning. No, there are no cities here. Then where are the people of Paracosma? You must have neighbors. The girl looked puzzled. A man and a woman live off there, she said, gesturing toward a distant blue range of hills dim on the horizon. Far away over there. I went there once, but Lukan and I prefer the valley. But Galatea, protested Dan, are you and Lukan alone in this valley? Where—what happened to your parents? Your father and mother? They went away. That way, towards the sunrise. They'll return some day. And if they don't—why, foolish one, what could hinder them?
Wild beasts, said Dan. Poisonous insects, disease, flood, storm, lawless people, death. I never heard those words, said Galatea. There are no such things here, she sniffed contemptuously. Lawless people. Not— Death? What is death? It's—Dan paused helplessly—it's like falling asleep and never waking. It's what happens to everyone at the end of life. I have never heard of such a thing as the end of life, said the girl decidedly. There isn't such a thing. What happens then, queried Dan desperately, when one grows old? Nothing, silly. No one grows old unless one wants to. Like Lukan. A person grows to the age he likes best and then stops. It's a law. Dan gathered his chaotic thoughts. He stared into Galatea's dark, lovely eyes.
Have you stopped yet? The dark eyes dropped. He was amazed to see a deep, embarrassed flush spread over her cheeks. She looked at Lukan nodding reflectively on his bench, then back to Dan, meeting his gaze. Not yet, he said. And when will you, Galatea? When I have had the one child permitted me. You see, she stared down on her dainty toes, one cannot bear children afterwards. Permitted? Permitted by whom? By a law. Laws? Is everything here governed by laws? What of chance and accidents? What are those? Chance and accidents? Things unexpected, things unforeseen. "'Nothing is unforeseen,' said Galateus still soberly. She repeated slowly, "'Nothing is unforeseen.' He fancied her voice was wistful.
Lukan looked up. "'Enough of this,' he said abruptly. He turned to Dan. "'I know these words of yours—chance, disease, death. They are not for paracosma. Keep them in your unreal country.' "'Where did you hear them, then?' "'From Galatea's mother,' said the grey weaver. "'Who had them from your predecessor, a phantom who visited here before Galatea was born?' Dan had a vision of Ludwig's face. "'What was he like?' "'Much like you. But his name.' The old man's mouth was suddenly grim. "'We do not speak of him,' he said and rose entering the dwelling in a cold silence. "'He goes to weave.' said Galatea after a moment. Her lovely, piquant face was still troubled. What does he weave? This, she fingered the silver cloth of her gown.
He weaves it out of metal bars on a very clever machine. I do not know the method. Who made the machine? It was here. But—Galatea! Who built the house? Who planted these fruit trees? They were here. The house and the trees were always here. She lifted her eyes. I told you everything had been foreseen, from the beginning until eternity, everything. The house and the trees and machine were ready for Lukan and my parents and me. There's a place for my child, who will be a girl, and a place for her child, and so on forever. Dan thought a moment. Were you born here? I don't know. He noted in sudden concern, that her eyes were glistening with tears. "'Galatea, dear, why are you unhappy? What's wrong?' "'Why, nothing!' she shook her black curls, smiled suddenly at him.
"'What could be wrong? How can one be unhappy in paracosma?' She sprang erect and seized his hand. "'Come, let's gather fruit for tomorrow.' She darted off in a whirl of flashing silver, and Dan followed her around the wing of the edifice. Graceful as a dancer, she leaped from a branch above her head, caught it laughingly, and tossed a great golden globe to him. She loaded his arms with the pri—prizes, and—sent him back to the bench, and when he returned she piled it so full of fruit that a deluge of colorful spears dropped around him. She laughed again and sent them spinning into the brook with thrust of her rosy toes, while Dan watched her with an aching wistfulness. Then suddenly she was facing him.
For a long, tense instant they stood motionless, eyes upon eyes, and then she turned away and walked slowly around the arched portal. He followed her with his burden of fruit, his mind once more in a turmoil of doubt and perplexity. The little sun was losing itself behind the trees of that colossal forest to the west, and a coolness stirred among the long shadows. The brook was purple-hued in the dusk. But its cherry notes mingled still with the flower music. Then the sun was hidden, the shadow fingers darkened the meadow. Of a sudden the flowers were still, and the brook gurgled alone in the world of silence. In silence, too, Dan entered the doorway. The chamber within was a spacious one. Floored with the large black and white squares, exquisite benches of carved marble were here and there.
Old Loucon in a far corner, bent over an intricate glistening mechanism. And as Dan entered, he drew a shining length of silver cloth from it, folded it, and placed it carefully aside. There was a curious, unearthly fact that Dan noted. Despite windows open to the evening, no night insects circled the globes that glowed at intervals from niches on the walls. Galatea stood in a doorway to his left, leaning half-warily against the frame. He placed the bowl of fruit on a bench at the entrance and moved to her side. This is yours, she said, indicating the room beyond. He looked in upon a pleasant smaller chamber, a window framed a starry square, and a thin, swift, nearly silent stream of water gushed from the mouth of a carved human head on the left wall, curving into a six-foot basin sunk in the floor.
Another of the graceful benches, covered with silver cloth, completed the furnishings. A single glowing sphere, pendant by a chain from the ceiling, illuminated the room. Dan turned to the girl, whose eyes were still unwontedly serious. "'This is ideal,' he said. "'But, Galatea, how am I to turn out the light?' "'Turn it out,' she said. "'You must cap it so.' A faint smile showed again on her lips as she dropped a metal covering over the shining sphere. They stood tense in the darkness. Dan sensed her nearness achingly. And then the light was on once more. She moved towards the door, and there paused taking his hand. Dear Shadow, she said softly, I hope your dreams are music. She was gone. Dan stood irresolute in his chamber.
He glanced into the large room where Lukan still bent over his work, and the gray reaver raised a hand in solemn salutation, but said nothing. He felt no urge for the old man's silent company. and turned back into his room to prepare for slumber. Almost instantly, it seemed, the dawn was upon him, and bright elfin pipings were all about him, while the odd ruddy sun sent a broad, slanting pane of light across the room. He rose, as fully aware of his surroundings, as if he had not slept at all. The pool tempted him, and he bathed in stinging water. Thereafter he emerged into the central chamber. Noting curiously that the globe still glowed in dim rivalry to the daylight, he touched one casually, it was cool as metal to his fingers, and lifted freely from its standard.
For a moment he held the cold flaming thing in his hands, then replaced it and wandered to the dawn. Galatea was dancing upon the path, eating a strange fruit as rosy as her lips. She was merry again, once more the happy nymph who had greeted him. And she gave him a bright smile as he chose a sweet green ovid for his breakfast. "'Come on,' she called. "'To the river!' She skipped away toward the unbelievable forest. Dan followed, marvelling that her lithe speed was so easy a match for his stronger muscles. Then they were laughing in the pool, splashing about until Galatea drew herself to the bank, glowing and panting. He followed her as she lay relaxed. Strangely, he was neither tired nor breathless, with no sense of exertion.
A question recurred to him, as yet unasked. Galatea, said his voice. Whom will you take as a mate? Her eyes went serious. "'I don't know,' she said. "'At the proper time you will come. That is law.' "'And will you be happy?' "'Of course,' she seemed troubled. "'Isn't everyone happy?' "'Not where I live, Galatea.' "'Then that must be a strange place, that ghostly world of yours.' A rather terrible place. It is often enough, Dan agreed. I wish—he paused. What did he wish? Was he not talking to an illusion, a dream, an apparition? He looked at the girl, at her glistening black hair, her eyes, her soft white skin, and then, for a tragic moment, he tried to feel the arms of that drab hotel chair beneath his hands.
And failed. He smiled. He reached out his fingers to touch her bare arm, and for an instant she looked back at him with startled sober eyes and sprang to her feet. "'Come on. I want to show you my country.' She set off down the stream, and Dan rose reluctantly to follow. What a day that was! They traced the little river from still pool to stinging rapids, and ever about them were strange twitterings and pipings that were the voices of the flowers. Every turn brought a new vista of beauty, every moment brought a new sense of delight. They talked or were silent when they were thirsty. The cool river was at hand. When they were hungry, fruit offered itself. When they were tired, there was always a deep pool in a mossy bank, and when they were rested, a new beauty beckoned.
The incredible trees towered in numberless forms of fantasy, but on their own side of the river was still the flower-starred meadow. Galatea twisted him in a bright, blossomed garland for his head, And thereafter he moved always with the sweet singing about him. But little by little the red sun slanted toward the forest, and the hours dripped away. It was Dan who pointed it out, and reluctantly they turned homeward. As they returned, Galateus sang a strange song, plaintive and sweet as the melody of the river and flower music, and again her eyes were sad. "'What song is that?' he asked. "'It is a song sung by another Galateus,' she answered. Who is my mother? She laid her hand in his arm. I will make it into English for you, she sang.
The river lies in flower and fern. In flower and fern it breathes a song. It breathes a song of your return, of your return in years too long. In years too long it murmurs bring, it murmurs bring, their vain replies. Their vain replies, the flowers sing, the flowers sing, the river lies. Her voice quavered on the final notes. They were silent save for the tinkle of the water and the flower-bugles. Dan said, Galatea, and paused. The girl was again sombre-eyed, tearful. He said huskily, "'That's a sad song, Galatea. Why was your mother sad? You said every woman is happy in paracosma.' She broke a law," replied the girl tonelessly. "'It is the inevitable way to sorrow,' she faced him. She fell in love with the phantom, Galatea said.
One of your shadowy race you came to stay in, then had to go back. So when her appointed lover came, it was too late. Do you understand? But she yielded finally to the law, and is forever unhappy, and goes wandering from place to place about the world. She paused. I shall never break a law, she said defiantly. Dan took her hand. I would not have you unhappy, Galatea. I want you always happy. She shook her head. I am happy, she said, and smiled a tender, wistful smile. They were silent a long time as they trudged the way homeward. The shadows of the forest giants reached out across the river as the sun slipped behind them. For a distance they walked hand in hand, but as they reached the path of pebbly brightness to the house, Galatea drew away and sped swiftly before him.
Dan followed as quickly as he might. When he arrived, Lukan sat on his bench by the portal, and Galatea had paused on the threshold. She watched his approach with eyes, in which he again fancied the glint of tears. "'I am very tired,' she said, and slipped within. Dan moved to follow, but the old man raised his staying hand. "'Ren from the shadows,' he said. "'Will you hear me a moment?' Dan paused, acquiesced, and dropped to the opposite bench. He felt a sense of foreboding. Nothing pleasant awaited him. "'There is something to be said,' lukon continued. And I say it without desire to pain you if phantoms feel pain. It is this. Galatea loves you, though I think she has not yet realized it. I love her, too," said Dan.
The gray weaver stared at him. I do not understand. Substance, indeed, may love shadow. But how can shadow love substance? I love her, insisted Dan. Then woe to both of you, for this is impossible in paracosma. It is a confliction with the laws. Galatea's mate is appointed, perhaps even now approaching. "'Laws! Laws!' muttered Dan. Whose laws are they? Not Galatea's nor mine." "'But they are,' said the grey weaver. "'It is not for you nor for me to criticize them, though I yet wonder what power could annul them to permit your presence here.' "'I had no voice in your laws.' The old man peered at him in the dusk. "'Has anyone anywhere a voice in the laws?' he queried. "'And my country would have,' retorted Dan.
Madness, growled Lukan. Man-made laws? Of what use are man-made laws with only man-made penalties, or not at all? If you shadows make a law that the wind shall blow only from the east, does the west wind obey it? We do not pass such laws, acknowledged Anne bitterly. They may be stupid, but they're no more unjust than yours. Our, said the grey weaver, are the unalterable laws of the world, the laws of nature. Violation is always unhappiness. I have seen it. I have known it in another, and Galatea's mother. Though Galatea is stronger than she, he paused. Now, he continued, I ask only for mercy. Your stay is short, and I ask that you do no more harm than is already done. Be merciful. Give her no more to regret.
He rose and moved through the archway. When Dan followed a moment later, he was already removing a square of silver from his device in the corner. Dan turned silent and happy to his own chamber. where the jet of water tinkled faintly as the distant bell. Again he rose at the glow of dawn, and again Galatea was before him, meeting him at the door with her bowl of fruit. She deposited her burn in giving him a wane little smile of greeting, and stood facing him as if waiting. "'Come with me, Galatea,' he said. "'Where?' "'To the river-bank. To talk.' They trudged in silence to the brink of Galatea's pool. Dan noted a subtle difference in the world around him. Outlines were vague, the thin flower-pipings less audible, and the very landscape was queerly unstable, shifting like smoke when he wasn't looking at it directly.
And strangely, though he had brought the girl here to talk to her, he had now nothing to say, but sat in aching silence with his eyes on the loveliness of her face. Galatea pointed at the red-descending sun. "'So short a time,' she said, "'before you go back to your phantom world. I shall be sorry, very sorry.' She touched his cheek with her fingers. "'Dear Shadow,' suppose," said Ann Huskily, "'that I won't go. What if I won't leave here?' His voice grew fiercer. "'I'll not go. I'm going to stay.' The calm, mournfulness of the girl's face checked him. He felt the irony of struggling against the inevitable progress of a dream. She spoke. "'Had I the making of the laws, you should stay. But you can't, dear one, you can't.' Forgotten now were the words of the gray weaver.
"'I love you, Galatea,' he said. "'And I you,' she whispered. "'See, dear Shadow, how I break the same law my mother broke, and am glad to face a sorrow overing.' She placed her hand tenderly over his. "'Lukan is very wise, and I am bound to obey him. But this is beyond his wisdom, because he let himself grow old.' She paused. "'He let himself grow old,' she repeated slowly. A strange light gleamed in her dark eyes as she turned suddenly to Dan. "'Dear one,' she said tensely, "'that thing that happens to the old—that death of yours—what follows it?' "'What follows death?' he echoed. "'Who knows?' "'But,' her voice was quivering, "'but one can't simply vanish. There must be an awakening.' "'Who knows?' said Dan again.
"'They're those who believe we wake to a happier world.' But—he shook his head hopelessly. "'It must be true, it must be,' Galatea cried. "'There must be more for you than the mad world you speak of.' She leaned very close. "'Suppose, dear,' she said, "'that when my appointed lover arrives, I send him away. Suppose I bear no children but let myself grow old, older than Lukan, old until death. Would I join you in your happier world?' "'Galatea!' cried distractedly. Oh, my dears, what a terrible thought! More terrible than you know, she whispered, still very close to him. It is more than violation of a law. It is rebellion. Everything is planned, everything was foreseen, except this. And if I bear no child, her place will be left unfulfilled, and the place is of her children, and of their children.
And so, until some day the whole great plan of Per Cosmo fails, of whatever his destiny was to be, her whisper grew very faint and fearful. It is destruction. But I love you more than I feared. Death! Dan's arms were about her. No, Galatea, no. Promise me. She murmured. I can promise, and then break my promise. He drew his head down, their lips touched, and he felt fragrance and a taste like honey in her kiss. At least, she breathed, I can give you a name by which to love you. Philometros, measure of my love. A name? muttered Dan. A fantastic idea shot through his mind, a way of proving to himself that all this was reality, and not just a page that anyone could read who wore old Ludwig's magic spectacles.
If Galatea would speak his name, perhaps he thought daringly, perhaps then he could stay. He thrust her away. Galatea, he cried. Do you remember my name? She nodded silently, her unhappy eyes on his. Then say it, say it, dear. She stared at him dumbly, miserably, but made no sound. Say it, Galatea, he pleaded desperately. My name, dear, just my name. Her mouth moved. She grew pale with effort, and Dan could have sworn that his name trembled on her quivering lips, though no sound. At last she spoke. I can't, dearest one. Oh, I can't. Allah forbids it. She stood suddenly, erect, re-carving. Lukan call, she said, and darted away. Dan followed along the pebbled path, but her speed was beyond his powers.
At the portal he found only a grave weaver standing cold and stern. He raised his hand as Dan appeared. Your time, said. Go, thinking of the havoc you have done. Where is Galatea? I've sent her away. The old man blocked the entrance. For a moment Dan would have struck him aside, but something withheld him. He stared wildly about the meadow. There! A flash of silver beyond the river at the edge of the floor. He turned and raced towards it, while motionless and cold the grave weaver watched him go. Galatea! He was over the river now on the forest bank, running through column vistas that whirled around him like mist. The world had gone cloudy, fine flakes danced like snow before his eyes. Per Cosma was dissolving around him.
Through the chaos he fancied a glimpse of the girl, but closer approach left him still voicing his hopeless cry of Galatea. After an endless time he paused. Something familiar about the spot struck him, and just as the red sun edged above him he recognized the place—the very point at which he had entered Per Cosma. A sense of futility overwhelmed him, as for a moment he gazed at an unbelievable apparition. A dark window hung in midair before him, through which glowed rows of electric lights. Ludwig's window. It vanished, but the trees rised and the sky darkened, and he swayed dizzily in turmoil. He realized suddenly that he was no longer standing, but sitting in the midst of the crazy glade, and his hands clutched something smooth and hard, the arms of that miserable hotel chair.
Then at last he saw her close before him. Galatea was sorrow-stricken features, her tear-filled eyes on his. He made a terrific effort to rise, stood erect, and fell sprawling in a blaze of Koro skating lights. He straggled to his knees. Walls, Ludwig's room, encompassed him. He must have slipped from the chair. The magic spectacles lay before him, one lens splintered and spilling a fluid no longer water clear but white as milk. "'God!' he muttered. He felt shaken, sick, exhausted. With a bitter sense of bereavement, and his head ached fiercely. The room was drab, disgusting. He wanted to get out of it. He glanced automatically at his watch. Four o'clock. He must have sat here nearly five hours.
For the first time he noticed Leopold's absence. He was glad of it, and walked out of the door to an automatic elevator. There was no response to his ring. Someone was using the thing. He walked three flights to the street and back to his own room. In love with the vision! Worse, and led with a girl who had never lived in a fantastic utopia that was literally nowhere, he threw himself on his bed with a groan that was half a sob. He saw finally the implication of the name Galatea, Galatea, Pygmalion statue, given life by Venus in the ancient Grecian myth. But his Galatea, warm and lovely and vital, must remain forever without the gift of life, since he was neither Pygmalion nor God. He woke late in the morning, staring uncomprehensibly about for the fountain and pool of Per Cosmo.
Slow comprehension dawned. How much—how much—of last night's experience had been real? How much was the product of alcohol? Or had old Lugwin been right? And was there no difference between reality and dream? He changed his rumpled attire and wandered despondently to the street. He found Lugwin's hotel at last. Inquiry revealed that the diminutive professor had checked out. Leaving no forwarding address. What of it? Even Ludwig couldn't give what he sought a living Galatea. Dan was glad that he had disappeared. He hated a little professor. Professor? Hypnotists called themselves professors. He dragged through a weary day and then a sleepless night back to Chicago. It was midwinter when he saw a suggestively tiny figure ahead of him in the loop.
Ludwig! Yet what use to hail him? His cry was automatic. Professor Ludwig! The elephant figure turned, recognized him, smiled. They stepped into the shelter of the building. "'I'm sorry about your machine, Professor. I'll be glad to pay for the damage.' "'Ah! That was nothing. A cracked glass. But you—have you been ill? You look much the worse.' "'It's nothing,' said Dan. "'Your show is marvelous, Professor, marvelous. I'd have told you so, but you were gone when I ended.' Ludwig shrugged. "'I went to the lobby for a cigar. Five hours with a wax dummy, you know.' It was marvelous, repeated Dan. So real, smiled the other. Only because you cooperated, then. It takes self-hypnosis. It was real, all right, agreed Dan glumly.
I don't understand it, that strange beautiful country. The trees were club-mosses enlarged by a lens, said Leeuwig. All was trick photography, but stereoscope, as I told you, three-dimensional. The fruits were rubber, the house was a summer building on our campus, Northern University. And the voice was mine. You didn't speak at all except your name at the first, and I left a blank for that. I played your part, you see. I went around with the photographic apparatus dropped on my head, to keep the viewpoints always out of the observer. See? He grinned wryly. Luckily, I'm rather short, or you'd have seemed a giant. Wait a minute, said Dan, his mind whirling. You say you played my part? Then Galatea?
Is she real, too? He's real enough, said the professor. My niece, a senior at Northern, and likes dramatics. She helped me out with a thing. Why, I want to meet her? Dan answered vaguely happily. A nake had vanished. A pain was ceased. Paracosma was attainable at last.
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8 The Repairman 28:41
The Repairman. The Repairman by Harry Harrison. Being an interstellar troubleshooter wouldn't be so bad if I could shoot the trouble.
The old man had that look of intense glee on his face that meant someone was in for a very rough time. Since we were alone, it took no great feat of intelligence to figure it would be me. I talked first, bold attack being the best offense, and so forth. I quit. Don't bother telling me what dirty job you have cooked up, because I have already quit, and you do not want to reveal company secrets to me. The grin was even wider now, and he actually chortled as he thumbed a button on his console. A thick, legal document slid out of the delivery slot onto his desk. "'This is your contract,' he said. "'It tells you how and when you will work. It's a steel and vanadium-bound contract that you couldn't crack with a molecular disruptor.' I leaned out quickly, grabbed it, and threw it into the air with a single motion.
Before it could fall, I had my solar out and, with a wide-angle shot, burned the contract to ashes. The old man pressed the button again, and another contract slid out on his desk. If possible, the smile was still wider now. I should have said a duplicate of your contract, like this one here. He made a quick note on his secretary plate. I have deducted thirteen credits from your salary for the cost of the duplicate, as well as that one-hundred-credit fine for firing a solar inside a building. I slumped, defeated, waiting for the blow to land. The old man fondled my contract. According to this document, you can't quit. Ever. Therefore, I have a little job I know you'll enjoy. Repair job. The Centauri beacon has shut down.
It's a Mark III beacon. What kind of beacon? I asked him. I have repaired hyperspace beacons from one arm of the galaxy to the other, and I was sure I had worked on every type or model made, but I had never heard of this thing. Mark III, the old man reported. Practically chortling. I have never heard of it either, until records dug up the specs. They found them buried in the back of their oldest warehouse. This was the earliest type of beacon ever built, by Earth no less. Considering its location on one of the Proxima Centauri planets, it might very well be the first beacon. I looked at the blue prints he handed me, and felt my eyes glaze with horror. It's a monstrosity. It looks more like a distillery than a beacon.
Must be at least a few hundred meters high. I'm a repairman, not an archeologist. This pile of junk is over two thousand years old. Forget about it and build a new one. The old man leaned over his desk, breathing into my face. It would take a year to install a new beacon, besides being too expensive, and this relic is on one of the main routes. We have ships making fifteen light-year detours now. He leaned back. Wiped his hands on his handkerchief, and gave me Lecture 44 on Company Duty and My Troubles. This department is officially called Maintenance and Repair, when it really should be called Troubleshooting. Hyperspace beacons are made to last forever, or damn close to it. When one of them breaks down, it is never an accident, and repairing the thing is never a matter of just plugging in a new part.
He was telling me, the guy who did the job, while he sat back on his fat paycheck in an air-conditioned office. He rambled on. How I wish that were all it took. I would have a fleet of parts ships and junior mechanics to install them, but it's not like that at all. I've a fleet of expensive ships that are equipped to do almost anything, manned by a bunch of irresponsibles like you. I nodded moodily at his pointing finger. How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space jockeys, mechanics, engineers, soldiers, conmen, and anything else it takes to do the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail, and bulldoze you thugs into doing a simple job. If you think you're fed up, just think how I feel.
But the ships must go through. The beacons must operate. I recognized his deathless line as the curtain speech, and crawled to my feet. He threw the Mark III file at me, and went back to scratching in his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on his finger again. And don't get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract. We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol Toon long before you can draw the money out. I smiled, a little weakly, I'm afraid, as if I had never meant to keep that account a secret. His spies were getting more efficient every day. Walking down the hall, I tried to figure a way to transfer the money without his catching on, and knew at the same time he was figuring a way to out-figure me.
It was all very depressing, so I stopped for a drink, then went on to the spaceport. By the time the ship was serviced, I had a course charted. The nearest beacon to the broken-down Proxima Centauri beacon was on one of the planets of Beta Cersinus, and I headed there first, a short trip of only about nine days in hyperspace. To understand the importance of the beacons, you have to understand hyperspace. Not that many people do, but it is easy enough to understand that in this non-space the regular rules don't apply. Speed and measurements are a matter of relationship, not constant facts like the fixed universe. The first ships to enter hyperspace had no place to go, and no way to even tell if they had moved.
The beacons solved that problem and opened the entire universe. They are built on planets and generate tremendous amounts of power. This power is turned into radiation that is punched through into hyperspace. Every beacon has a code signal as part of its radiation and represents a measurable point in hyperspace. Triangulation and quadrature of the beacons works for navigation, only it follows its own rules. The rules are complex and variable, but there are still rules that a navigator can follow. For a hyperspace jump, You need at least four beacons for an accurate fix. For long jumps, navigators use as many as seven or eight, so every beacon is important, and everyone has to keep operating. That is where I and the other troubleshooters came in.
We travel in well-stocked ships that carry a little bit of everything, only one man to a ship, because that is all it takes to operate the overly efficient repair machinery. Due to the very nature of our job, we spend most of our time just rocketing through normal space. After all, when a beacon breaks down, how do you find it? Not through hyperspace. All you can do is approach as close as you can by using other beacons, then finish the trip in normal space. This can take months, and often does. This job didn't turn out to be quite that bad. I zeroed on the Beta Sarsinius beacon and ran a complicated eight-point problem through the navigator. Using every beacon I could get an accurate fix on.
The computer gave me a course with an estimated point of arrival as well as a built-in safety factor I could never eliminate from the machine. I would much rather take a chance of breaking through near some star than spend time just barreling through normal space, but apparently tech knows this too. They had a safety factor built into the computer so you couldn't end up inside a star no matter how hard you tried. I'm sure there was no humaneness in this decision. They just didn't want to lose the ship. It was a 20-hour jump, ship's time, and I came through in the middle of nowhere. The robot analyzer chuckled to itself and scanned all the stars, comparing them to the spectra of Proxima Centauri.
It finally rang a bell and blinked a light. I peeped through the eyepiece. A fast reading with the photocell gave me the apparent magnitude, and a comparison with its absolute magnitude showed its distance. Not as bad as I had thought. A six-week run, give or take a few days. After feeding a coarse tape into the robot pilot, I strapped into the acceleration tank and went to sleep. The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time, and just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the company grades your pay by the number of specialties you can handle. All this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed the time.
I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary distance. Planet Two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts, was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of the ancient directions, and finally located the right area. Staying outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey. The old boys had enough brains to choose a traceable site for the beacon. Equidistant on a line between two of the most prominent mountain peaks, I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye out from the first peak and kept it on course directly toward the second.
There was a nose and a tail radar in the eye, and I fed their signals into the scope as an amplitude curve. When the two peaks coincided, I spun the eye controls and dived the thing down. I cut out the radar and cut in the noise orthicon and sat back to watch the beacon appear on the screen. The image blinked, focused, and a great dam pyramid swam into view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles, scanning the surrounding country. It was flat, marshy-bottomed land without a bump. The only thing in a ten-mile circle was this pyramid, and that definitely wasn't my beacon. Or was it? I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of undressed stone. Without carvings or decorations.
There was a shimmer of light from the top, and I took a close look at it. On the peak of the pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something clicked in my mind. Locking the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III plans, and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a basin on top of it for water. This was used to cool the reactor that powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was still there. Inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course, weren't even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing, had built a nice, heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon. I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid.
The summit of the local stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the local life form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalests, and were trying to shoot down the eye. A cloud of arrows and rocks flying in every direction. I pulled the eye straight up and away, and threw in the control circuit that would return it automatically to the ship. Then I went to the gallery for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to irritate the things who had built the pyramid, a great beginning for a job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the bottle. Normally a repairman stays away from the natives' cultures.
They are poison. Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon has to go on to a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some inaccessible place. Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local cloths I had yet to find out, but that would come in time. The first thing to do was make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language. And for that, I had long before worked out a system that was foolproof. I had a pry-eye of my own construction. It looked like a piece of rock about a foot long. Once on the ground, it would never be noticed, though it was a little disconcerting to see it float by.
I located a lizard town about a thousand kilometres from the pyramid and dropped the eye. It swished down and landed at night in the bank of the local mud wallow. This was a favourite spot that drew a good crowd during the day. In the morning, when the first wallowers arrived, I flipped on the recorder. After about five of the local days, I had a sea of native conversation in the memory bank of the machinery translator, and I tagged a few expressions. This is fairly easy to do when you have a machine memory to work with. One of the lizards gargled at another one, and the second one turned around. I tagged this expression with the phrase, Hey, George, and waited my chance to use it. Later the same day, I caught one of them alone, and shouted, "'Hey, George!' at them.
It gurgled out through the speaker in the local tongue, and he turned around. When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the M.T. brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as the M.T. could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I figured it was time to make contact. I found him easily enough. He was the Centurion version of a goat-boy. He herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in an outcropping of rock and wait for him. When he passed next day, I whispered into the mic, "'Welcome, O goat-boy grandson. This is your grandfather's spirit speaking from Paradise.' This fitted in with what I could make out of the local religion.
Goat-boy stopped as if he'd been shot. Before he could move, I pushed a switch, and a handful of the local currency wampum-type shells rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet. Here is some money from Paradise, because you have been a good boy. Not really from Paradise. I had lifted it from the Treasury the night before. Come back tomorrow, and we will talk some more, I called back after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to notice that he took the cash before taking off. After that, Grandpa and Paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa had been out of touch with things since his death, and Goat Boy happily filled him in.
I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it wasn't nice. In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice little religious war going on around the pyramid. It all began with the land bridge. Apparently the local lizards had been living in the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders didn't think much of them. They were a low type and confined to a distant continent. The idea that the race would develop and might reach this continent never occurred to the beacon mechanics, which is, of course, what happened. A little geological turnover, a swampy land bridge formed in the right spot, and the lizards began to wander up Beacon Valley, and found religion.
A shiny metal temple out of which poured a constant stream of magic water. The reactor cooling water pumped down from the atmosphere condenser on the roof. The radioactivity in the water didn't hurt the natives. It caused mutations that bred true. A city was built around the temple, and, through the centuries, the pyramid was built up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife, murder, and destruction since then, but still the holy waters would not flow. Now our mobs fought around the temple each day, and a new band of priests guarded the sacred fount.
And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing. It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon, and taken off. Only native life forms were quite well protected. There were spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn't found, that would cheerfully rat on me when I got back. Diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the PlastiFlesh equipment. Working from 3D snaps of grandson, I modeled a passable reptile head over my own features. It was a little short in the jaw, me not having one of their toothy mandibles, but that was all right. I didn't have to look exactly like them. Just something close to soothe the native mind.
It's logical. If I were an ignorant aborigine of earth, and I ran into a spiken who looks like a two-foot gob of dried shellac, I would immediately leave the scene. However, if the spiken were wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked remotely humanoid, I would at least stay and let him talk. This was what I was aiming to do with the centurions. When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive suit of green plastic, Complete with tail. I was really glad that they had tails. The lizards didn't wear clothes, and I wanted to take a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment I would need, and began to wire the suit.
When it was done, I tried it out in front of the full-length mirror. It was horrible, but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear, and gave me a duck waddle. That only helped the resemblance. That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A little before dawn, the eye hooked on to my shoulders, and we sailed straight up. We hovered above the temple at about two thousand meters, until it was light, then dropped straight down. It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slow, flapping wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight, but it was impressive enough for the natives.
The first one that spotted me screamed and dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived. I folded my arms in a regal stance. "'Greetings, O noble servers of the great God,' I said. Of course, I didn't say it out loud. Just whispered loud enough for the throat-mic to catch. This was radioed back to the M.T., and the translation shot back to a speaker in my jaws. The natives chomped and rattled, and the translation rolled out almost instantly. I had the volume turned up, and the whole square echoed. Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves, and others fled, screaming.
One of the doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that after the pterodactyl eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp. The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren't buying any lizards in a poke. They just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive again. Begone, O faithful seed, I said to the eye, and pressed the control in my palm at the same time. It took off straight up, a bit faster than I wanted. Little pieces of wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I walked through the temple doors. I would talk with you, O noble priests, I said. Before they could think up a good answer, I was inside. The temple was a small one, built against the base of the pyramid.
I hoped it wasn't breaking too many taboos by going in. I wasn't stopped, so it looked all right. The temple was a single room with a murky-looking pool at one end. Sloshing the pool was an ancient reptile who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him, and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then growled something. The empty whispered into my ear, Just what in the name of the thirteenth sin are you, and what are you doing here? I drew up my scaly figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the ceiling. I come from your ancestors to help you. I am here to restore the holy waters. This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing.
I could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead. Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me. "'You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We will—stop!' I thundered before he got so far in that he couldn't back out. I said your ancestors sent me as an emissary. I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me, or the wrath of those who have passed on will turn against you. When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke. The first lizard knew I was talking since then, and immediately called a meeting of the shamans.
It, of course, took place in the public bathtub, and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and settled all the major points. I found out that they were new priests. The previous ones had all been boiled for letting the holy water cease. They found out I was there only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this, tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the first lizard turned to me. Undoubtedly you know of the rule, he said. Because the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the blind could enter the Holy of Holies.
I'd swear he was smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an old suitcase can be called smiling. He was also signalling to him an under-priest, who carried a brassiere of charcoal, complete with red-hot irons. All he could do was stand and watch as he stirred up the coals. pulled out the ruddiest iron, and turned toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain got back in gear. Of course, I said, blinding is only right. But in my case you will have to blind me before I leave the Holy of Holies, not now. I need my eyes to see and mend the fount of holy waters. Once the waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning iron. He took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me.
The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through. Then it banged to behind me and I was alone in the dark. But not for long. There was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led the way without a word. A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal doorway labeled in archaic script, Mark III Beacon, authorized personnel only. The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the whole job, for there wasn't a trace of a lock on the door. One lizard merely turned the handle, and we were inside the beacon.
I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the blueprints. With the faithful priest stumbling after me, I located the control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and indicators looked to be in good shape, if anything unexpectedly bright from constant polishing. I checked the readings carefully and found just what I had suspected. One of the eager lizards had managed to open a circuit box and had polished the switches inside. While doing this, he had thrown one of the switches, and that had caused the trouble. Rather, that had started the trouble. It wasn't going to be ended by just reversing the water valve switch.
This valve was supposed to be used only for repairs, after the pile was damped. When the water was cut off with the pile in operation, it had started to overheat, and the automatic safeties had dumped the charge down the pit. I could start the water again, easy enough, but there was no fuel left in the reactor. I wasn't going to play with the fuel problem at all. It would be far easier to install a new power plant. I had one in the ship that was about a tenth the size of the ancient bucket of bolts, and produced at least four times the power. Before I sent for it, I checked over the rest of the beacon. In two thousand years there should be some sign of wear. The old boys had built well. I'll give them credit for that.
Ninety per cent of the machinery had no moving parts, and had suffered no wear whatever. Other parts they had beefed up, figuring they would wear, but slowly. The water-feed pipe from the roof, for example. The pipe walls were at least three meters thick, and the pipe opening itself no bigger than my head. There were some things I could do, though, and I made a list of parts. The parts, the new power plant, and a few other odds and ends were shooted into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before they were loaded into a metal crate. In the darkest hour before the dawn, the heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away without being seen. I watched the priests through the pry-eye while they tried to open it.
When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the narrow temple stairs, and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside the beacon door when I woke up. The repairs didn't take long, though there was plenty of groaning from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe. so their holy waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job they were waiting for. I threw the switch that started the water flowing again. There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through the dry pipe.
Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down for the eye-burning ceremony. The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door, and looked even happier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why. It was bolted and barred from the other side. It has been decided, a lizard said, that you shall remain here forever, and tend the holy waters. We will stay with you, and serve your every need. A delightful prospect, eternity spent, in a locked beacon with three blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn't accept. What, you dare interfere with the messenger of your ancestors? I had the speaker on full volume, and the vibration almost shook my head off.
The lizards cringed, and I set my solar for a narrow beam and ran it around the door-jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open. Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it. The rest of their clan showed up at the front of the stairs and made a great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the crowd, I faced up to the first lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath the surface. What lack of courtesy! I shouted. He made little bubbles in the water. The ancestors are annoyed, and have decided to forbid entrance to the inner temple forever, though out of kindness they will let the waters flow.
Now I must return. On with the ceremony. The torture master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped the steel plate over my eyes, under the plastic skin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony eye-sockets, and the plastic gave off an authentic odor. A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well. Before they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch, and my plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn't see it, of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws latched onto the steel plates in my shoulders. I had got turned around after the eye-burning, and my flying beast hooked onto me backward.
I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing into the sunset. Instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made the most of a bad situation, and threw them a snappy military salute. Then it was out in the fresh air and away. When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base, and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I counted off my talons to see if I had forgotten anything. One. The beacon was repaired. Two. The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage, accidental or deliberate. Three. The priest should be satisfied. The water was running again, my eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business, which added up to, for, the fact that they would probably let another repairman in under the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again.
At least I had done nothing like butchering a few of them. That would make them antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers. I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the repair ship, very glad that it would be some other repairman who would get the job. End of The Repairman by Harry Harrison
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9 Toy Shop 12:04
Toy Shop.
Because there were few adults in the crowd, and Colonel Biff Horton stood over six feet tall, He could see every detail of the demonstration. The children, and most of the parents, gaped in wide-eyed wonder. Biff Horton was too sophisticated to be awed. He stayed on because he wanted to find out what the trick was that made the gadget work. "'It's all explained right here in your instruction book,' the demonstrator said, holding up a garishly printed booklet, opened to a four-color diagram. You all know how magnets pick up things, and I bet you even know that the Earth itself is one great big magnet. That's why compasses always point north. Well, the Atomic Wonder space-wave tapper hangs on to those space waves.
Invisibly, all about us, and even going right through us, are the magnetic waves of the Earth. The Atomic Wonder rides these waves just the way a ship rides the waves in the ocean, Now watch.
Every eye was on him as he put the gaudy model rocket-ship on top of the table and stepped back. It was made of stamped metal, and seemed as incapable of flying as a can of ham, which it very much resembled. Neither wings, propellers, nor jets broke through the painted surface. It rested on three rubber wheels, and coming out through the bottom was a double strand of thin, insulated wire. This white wire ran across the top of the black table, and terminated in a control box in the demonstrator's hand. An indicator light, a switch, and a knob appeared to be the only controls. "'I turn on the power switch, sending a surge of current to the wave receptors,' he said. The switch clicked, and the light blinked on and off with a steady pulse.
Then the man began to slowly turn the knob. A careful touch on the wave generator is necessary, as we are dealing with the powers of the whole world here. A concerted, ah, swept through the crowd as the space wave tapper shivered a bit, then rose slowly into the air. The demonstrator stepped back, and the toy rose higher and higher, bobbing gently on the invisible waves of magnetic force that supported it. Ever so slowly, the power was reduced, And it settled back to the table.
Only $17.95, the young man said, putting a large price sign on the table. For the complete set of the Atomic Wonder, the Space Tapper Control Box, Battery and Instruction Book.
At the appearance of the price card, the crowd broke up noisily, and the children rushed away towards the operating model trains. The demonstrators' words were lost in their noisy passage. and after a moment he sank into a gloomy silence. He put the control box down, yawned, and sat on the edge of the table. Colonel Horton was the only one left after the crowd had moved on. "'Could you tell me how this thing works?' the colonel asked, coming forward. The demonstrator brightened up, and picked up one of the toys. "'Well, if you will look here, sir,' He opened the hinged top. You will see the space-wave coils at each end of the ship. With a pencil, he pointed out the odd-shaped plastic forms, about an inch in diameter that had been wound, apparently at random, with a few turns of copper wire.
Except for these coils, the interior of the model was empty. The coils were wired together, and other wires ran out through the hole in the bottom of the control box. Biff Horton turned a very quizzical eye on the gadget, and upon the demonstrator, who completely ignored this sign of disbelief. "'Inside the control box is the battery,' the young man said, snapping it open, and pointing to an ordinary flashlight battery. "'The current goes through the power switch and power light to the wave generator.' "'What do you mean to say?' Biff broke in. It's that the juice from this fifteen-cent battery goes through this cheap rheostat to those meaningless coils in a model, and absolutely nothing happens.
Now tell me what really flies the thing. If I'm going to drop eighteen bucks for six bits'worth of tin, I want to know what I'm getting.
The demonstrator flushed. "'I'm sorry, sir,' he stammered. "'I wasn't trying to hide anything. Like any magic trick, this one can't really be demonstrated until it's been purchased.' He leaned forward, and whispered confidentially. "'I'll tell you what I'll do, though. This thing is way overpriced, and hasn't been moving at all. The manager said I could let them go at three dollars, if I could find any takers. If you want to buy it for that price—' "'Sold, my boy,' the colonel said, slamming three bills down on the table. "'I'll give that much for it, no matter how it works. The boys in the shop will get a kick out of it.' He tapped the winged rocket on his chest. Now, really, what holds it up?
The demonstrator looked round carefully, then pointed. Strings, he said. Or rather, a black thread. It runs from the top of the model through a tiny loop in the ceiling and back down to my hand, tied to this ring on my finger. When I back up, the model rises. It's as simple as that.
"'All good illusions are simple,' the colonel grunted, tracing the black thread with his eye. "'As long as there is plenty of flim-flam to distract the viewer.' "'If you don't have a black table, a black cloth will do,' the young man said. "'And the arch of a doorway is a good sight. Just see that the room in back is dark.' "'Wrap it up, my boy. I wasn't born yesterday. I'm an old hand at this kind of thing.' Biff Horton sprang it at the next Thursday night poker party. The gang were all missile men, and they cheered and jeered as he hammed up the introduction. "'Let me copy the diagram, Biff. I could use some of those magnetic waves in the new Bird. Those flashlight batteries are cheaper than locks.
This is the thing of the future.' Only Teddy Caner caught Wise as the flight began. He was an amateur magician, and spotted the gimmick at once. He kept silent with professional courtesy. and smiled ironically as the rest of the bunch grew silent one by one. The Colonel was a good showman, and he had set the scene well. He almost had them believing in the space-wave tapper before he was through. When the model had landed, and he had switched it off, he couldn't stop them from crowding around the table. "'A thread!' one of the engineers shouted, almost with relief, and they all laughed along with him. "'Too bad!' The head project physicist said. I was hoping that a little space-wave tapping could help us out.
Let me try a flight with it. Teddy Kaner first, Biff announced. He spotted it while you were all watching the flashing lights, only he didn't say anything. Kaner slipped the ring with the black thread over his finger, and started to step back. You have to turn the switch on first, Biff said. I know, Kaner smiled, but that's part of illusion. The spiel and the misdirection. I'm going to try this cold first, so I can get it moving up and down smoothly, then go through it with the whole works. He moved his hand back smoothly, in a professional manner that drew no attention to it. The model lifted from the table, then crashed back down. "'The thread broke,' Kena said. "'You jerked it instead of pulling smoothly,' Biff said, and knotted the broken thread.
Here, Let me show you how to do it. The thread broke again when Biff tried it, which got a good laugh that made his collar a little warm. Someone mentioned the poker game.
This was the only time that poker was mentioned, or even remembered that night, because very soon after this they found that the thread would lift the model only when the switch was on, and two and a half volts flowing through the joke coils. With the current turned off, The model was too heavy to lift. The thread broke every time. "'I still think it's a screwy idea,' the young man said. "'One week getting fallen arches, demonstrating those toy-ships for every brat within a thousand miles, then selling the things for three bucks when they must have cost at least a hundred dollars apiece to make.' "'But you did sell the ten of them to people who would be interested?' the older man asked. "'I think so.' I caught a few Air Force officers and a colonel in missiles one day.
Then there was one official I remembered from the Bureau of Standards. Luckily he didn't recognize me. Then those two professors you spotted from the University. Then the problem is out of our hands and into theirs. All we have to do now is sit back and wait for results. What results? These people weren't interested when we were hammering on their doors with the proof. We've patented the coils, and can prove to anyone that there is a reduction in weight around them when they are operating. But a small reduction, and we don't know what is causing it. No one can be interested in a thing like that, a fractional weight decrease in a clumsy model, certainly not enough to lift the weight of the generator.
No one wrapped up in massive fuel consumption, tons of lift and such, is going to have time to worry about a crackpot, who thinks he has found a minor slip in Newton's laws. "'You think they will now?' the young man asked, cracking his knuckles impatiently. "'I know they will. The tensile strength of that thread is correctly adjusted to the weight of the model. The thread will break if you try to lift the model with it. Yet you can lift the model, after a small increment of its weight has been removed by the coils. This is going to bug these men.' Nobody is going to ask them to solve the problem, or concern themselves with it. But it will nag at them, because they know this effect can't possibly exist.
They'll see at once that the magnetic wave theory is nonsense. Or perhaps true. We don't know. But they will all be thinking about it, and worrying about it. Someone is going to experiment in his basement, just as a hobby, of course, to find the cause of the error. And he... or someone else, is going to find out what makes those coils work, or maybe a way to improve them. And we have the patents. Correct. They will be doing the research that will take them out of the massive lift propulsion business and into the field of pure spaceflight. And in doing so they will be making us rich, whenever the time comes to manufacture," the young man said, cynically. We'll all be rich, son. the older man said, patting him on the shoulder.
Believe me, you're not going to recognize this old world ten years from now.
End of Toy Shop by Harry Harrison
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10 Warning From The Stars 41:55
Warning from the Stars.
Reading by Rowdy Delaney, Idaho, U.S.A.
Warning from the Stars by Ron Kocking It was a beautifully machined container, shaped like a two-pound chocolate candy box, the color and texture of lead. The cover fitted so accurately that it was difficult to see where it met the lip on the base. Yet when Forrester lifted the container from the desk in the security guard's office, he almost hit himself in the face with it. So light was it. He read the words clumsily etched by hand into the top surface with some sharp instrument. To be opened only by Dr. Richard Forster, Assistant Director, Air Force Special Research Center, Petersport, Maryland. Caution. Open not later than twenty-four hours after receipt. Do not open in atmosphere less than equivalent of sixty-five thousand feet above MSL.
He turned the container over and over. It bore no other markings, no express label or stamps, no file or reference number, no return address. It was superbly machined, he saw. Tentatively, he pulled at the container cover. It was as firm as if it had been welded on. But then, if the cover had been closed in the thin atmosphere of sixty-five thousand feet, it would be held on by the terrific pressure of a column of air twelve miles high. Forrester looked up at the burly guard. "'Who left this here?' "'Your guess is as good as mine, sir.' The man's voice was as close to insolence as the difference in status would allow, and Forrester bristled. "'I just clocked in an hour ago. There was a thick fog came on all of a sudden, and there was a bit of confusion when we were changing over.
They didn't say anything about the box when I relieved.' "'Fog?' Forrester queried. "'How could fog form on a warm morning like this?' "'You're the scientist, sir. You tell me.' Went as fast as it came. Well, it looks like very sloppy security. The contents of this thing must almost certainly be classified. Give me the book, and I'll sign for it. I'll phone you the file number when I find the covering instructions. Forster was a nervous, over-conscientious little man, and his day was already ruined, because any departure from strict administrative routine worried and upset him. Only in his field of aviation medicine did he feel competent, secure. He knew that around the center they contemptuously called him Lilliput.
The younger researchers were constantly trying to think up new ways to play jokes on him and annoy him. Crowley Preston, the research center's director, and his chief had been summoned to Washington the night before. Forrester wished fervently that he was around to deal with this matter. Now that relations between East and West had reached the snapping point, the slightest deviation from security regulations usually meant a full-scale inquiry. He signed for the container, and carried it out to the car, still seething impotently over the guard's insolence. He placed it beside him on the front seat of his car, and drove up to the building which housed part of the labs and also his office. He climbed out.
Then, as he slammed the door, he happened to glance into the car again. The seat covers were made of plastic, in a maroon and blue plaid pattern. But where the box had rested, there was a dirty gray rectangular patch that hadn't been there before. Forrester stared, then opened the door again. He rubbed his fingers over the discolored spot. It felt no different from the rest of the fabric. He placed the box over the area. It fitted perfectly. He flopped down on the seat, his legs dangling out of the car, fighting down a sudden, irrational wave of panic. He pushed the container to the other end of the seat. After all, he rationalized, plastics are notoriously unstable under certain conditions. This is probably a new alloy Washington once tested for behavior under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure.
What's gotten into you? He took a deep breath, picked up the box again. Where it had rested, there was another discolored patch on the car seat covers. Holding it away from him, Forster hurried into the office, then dumped the box into a metal wastebasket. Then he went to a cabinet and pulled out a Geiger counter, carried it over to the wastebasket. As he pointed the probe at the box, the familiar's slow clicking reassured him, and feeling a little foolish, he put the instrument back on its shelf. Hurriedly, he went through his mail. There was nothing in it referring to the package. Then he called the classified filing section. Nobody there knew anything about it either. For some reason he couldn't explain to himself.
He wasn't even surprised. He stared into the wastebasket. The clumsily etched instructions glinted up at him, to be opened as soon as possible. He picked up the phone and called the decompression chamber building. There was no valid reason why he should have been self-conscious as he talked to the lab attendant in charge of the decompression tank. He used it a dozen times a month for tests and experiments. Yet when he gave his instructions his voice was labored and strained. Some genius in Washington sent this thing down without any covering instructions, but it has to be opened in a hurry in a thin atmosphere, er, I'd like to stay on the intercom for a while, in case it blows up in my face or something.
He tried to laugh, but all that came out was a croak. The attendant nodded indifferently, then helped Forster into the helmet of his pressure suit. He climbed up the steps into the chamber, pulling the air-tight door shut behind him. He placed the box on the desk in front of the instrument panel, then turned back to push the door clamps into place. For the first time in the hundreds of hours he had spent in this tank, he knew the meaning of claustrophobia. Mechanically, he plugged in his intercom and air lines, went through the other routine checks before ascent, tested communications with the lab attendant, then flicked the exhaust motor switch. Now there was nothing to do except wait. He stared at the box.
In artificial light, it seemed full of hidden menace. A knowing aliveness of its own. Forrester shrugged his shoulders impatiently, as though to throw off the vague blanket of uneasiness that was settling around him. Somebody had forgotten to send a cover letter with the container, or it had been mislaid. That could happen, although with security routine as strict as it was, the possibility was remote. All the same, it could happen. After all, what other explanation was there? What was it he was afraid of? There was something about it. He glanced at the altimeter. The needle showed only ten thousand feet, and seemed to be crawling around the dial. He resolved not to look at it for three minutes by the clock on the panel.
When he checked the altimeter again, it registered just over thirty thousand feet, not even halfway yet. As the pressure in the tank decreased, he began to be conscious of the need for reverse breathing, and he concentrated on using his tongue to check the flow of air into his lungs, then using the thoracic muscles to exhale against the higher pressure inside the suit. Time seemed to be passing in microseconds. Twenty-five thousand feet, thirty thousand, forty thousand, fifty thousand, At 62,000, 500 feet, he gently tested the cover of the container again. It lifted. As the altimeter needle flickered on the 65,000-foot mark, he cut the exhaust motor and picked up the box. The cover slipped off easily.
His feeling of anticlimax was almost ludicrous. As he looked in, all the box contained was a flattened roll of some grayish material. He took it out. Despite its comparative bulk, it was feather-light. It had the appearance of metal, but was as porous and pliable as a good grade of bond paper. He could not feel its texture through his heavy gloves. He took a good look. It was new all right. No doubt Washington wanted some tests run on it, although without covering instructions and data this trip was wasted. But some heads would roll when he reported back on the way the container had been shipped in. He started to unroll the material to get a better look at it. Then he saw that it was covered with cramped, closely-spaced handwriting in a purplish ink, handwriting that was elusively familiar.
Then he read the words written in neat capitals at the top, the name of the man with the familiar handwriting. And fear came back, clamped cold fingers around his throat. James Rawdon Bentley. Dear Dick, the writing went on, take a large economy-sized grip on yourself. I know this is going to sound like a voice from the dead, but I'm very much alive and kicking, in the best of health, in fact. The writing blurred, and instinctively Forrester put his fist up to rub his eyes, only to meet the hard plastic of his helmet visor, James Rodden Bentley. It was January 18, 1951, three years ago, and the jagged line of the Australian coast stretched like a small-scale map to the black curve of the horizon.
From the converted bomber that was his flying lab, Forrester could see the other American observation plane cruising on a parallel course about a half-mile away, and beyond it, downwind, the fringe of the billowing cloud dome of the supersecret British thermonuclear shot. Then suddenly Bentley's voice from the other plane was crackling over the earphones, sharp and urgent. Our geigers and scintillometers are going crazy. We're getting out of here. There's something coming inside. A light! Silence! Forrester had watched, in helpless horror, as the other ship dipped a silver wing, then nosed down ever so slowly, it seemed. Down! Down! In a dive that seemed to take hours as Forrester's plane tracked it.
Ending in a tiny splash, like a pebble being thrown into a pond. Then, the grimly beautiful iridescence of oil and gasoline spreading across the glassy waters of the Timur Sea. No parachutes had opened on the long journey down. An Australian air-sea rescue launch and helicopter were at the scene of the crash in minutes, but neither bodies nor survivors had been found, then or later. Everything okay, Dr. Forrester? Yes, he said hoarsely. Yes, everything's okay. Just routine. Forrester focused his eyes on the writing again. There was no doubt at all that it was Bentley's. They had roomed and studied together for four years at MIT, and then there had been a couple of years post-graduate work after that.
During all that time, they used each other's notes constantly. But Bentley was dead. Forster read on, stunned. First, you'll want to know what happened over the Timor Sea after the shot. Put very simply, I, the rest of the technicians, and the crew of the B-29 were trans-ship to another vehicle, without any damage to ourselves. How? I'm not allowed to explain at this stage. Actually, they only wanted me, but it wasn't feasible to collect me and leave the rest behind, so they're all here, safe and well. Who are they, and where am I? The second question I can't answer, not allowed to. They, roughly translated, are the shiny ones, which doesn't tell you anything, of course. Briefly, there are a couple of light-years ahead of Earth in evolution, mentally, morally, and physically, although I use the last word loosely.
Too bad that English is a commercial language. It's so hard to discuss really abstract ideas. Why am I here? The whole reason for this message is wrapped up in the answer to that. As you probably know, Project Longfall, which I was heading up, was delayed about a year due to my removal. That was the sole purpose, although I and the rest of us are getting special instruction to keep us occupied. At about the same time, they also took several other key people from Britain, Russia, and the United States. Others were already here. The idea then was delay. To delay more test shots of atomic weapons, in the hope that East and West would come to some agreement. Now, because of the growing volume of tests and the critical tension which prevails, delay will no longer suffice, and far more drastic steps are to be taken.
I wish you could be here for only a few minutes to see what happens after a multi-megaton thermonuclear test shot is set off on Earth. I can't describe it in any terms which would have any relation to your present knowledge of physics. All I can say is that life here is intimately bound up with the higher laws of electromagnetism, which at present are only being guessed at on your level. It's not the radioactivity, which you know as such, which causes the trouble. There are neutralizing devices throughout the planetary system to take care of that. The damage is caused by an ultra-ultra short-wave radiation, which not even the most sensitive scintillometer you have can pick up, a very subtle by-product of every chain reaction.
It doesn't have too much immediate effect on the lower forms of life, including human beings, if you'll pardon the expression, but here it causes a ghastly carnage, so ghastly it sickens me even to think about it for a second. The incredible thing is that the people here could stop Earth from firing another shot if they wished to, and at twenty-four hours notice. But their philosophy is totally opposed to force, even when it means their own destruction. That will give you an idea of the kind of people they are. Here they say that Einstein was on the fringe of discovering the theory involved when he died, but was having trouble with the mathematics. Remember how Einstein always complained that he was a really poor mathematician?
But with atomic warfare threatening to break out on Earth at any minute, they've got to do something. This is what they plan to do. This is what they are going to do. Starting within a few hours after you receive this message, a mass removal of key scientists will begin. They will take 20, 30, or 40, roughly equal numbers from both sides, every few hours as technical conditions allow. That will go on until East and West agree to drop this whole mad weapons race. It will be done quietly, peacefully. Nobody will be hurt except by a fluke. But if needs be, they will lift every major scientific brain off the face of Earth to stop the present drift to disaster for everybody. There are no weapons, no devices that you have at present which can stop this plan going into effect.
There it is. It's as simple as that. If you knew... What you were really headed for, it would need no steps from here to make both sides on Earth stop this horrible foolishness in a moment. The lesson of Mars is part of the orientation course here. I'm not on Mars. I'm using up space, so I'll go into note form for a bit. Martians had an atomic war. Forgot they had to breathe. Destroyed 60% of their atmosphere. Canals on Mars aren't. They're closely spaced lines of shafts leading to underground cities. View from Earth telescopes, shaft mouths appear as dots which run together into lines due to eye fatigue. British Royal Astronomical Society figured that out thirty years ago at least. See papers on their proceedings.
Photographs here show monsters created by wholesale mutations. Lasted about four generations before reproduction failed. Now only vegetation on Mars. Saw pictures of last survivors. Horrible. I was ill for days after. Imagine having to take 40 separate breaths after making a single step. Getting back to the others. A regular U.N. Remember O'Connor and Walters in our class? They're here. Check. You'll find that O'Connor is detached from Oak Ridge and Walters from Aikens for special duty. That's Central Intelligence's story for their disappearance. Remember those top German boys the Russians were supposed to have gotten to before the Allies could reach them after the Nazi collapse? They're here, too.
And Komolnikov and Pritchkin of the Russian Academy. Believe me, The style and the writing was a little less urgent again now. I've had all the intellectual stuffing knocked out of me here. We all have had, for that matter, were supposed to be the cream of the crop, but imagine sitting down to instruction from people whose IQs start where yours leaves off. But what has really made most of us here feel pretty humble is the way they have demolished Earth's so-called scientific method. And use the method itself to prove that it doesn't stand up. You know how we've always been taught to observe, collect data, then erect a theory to fit the data, a theory which has to be modified when other data come along which don't fit into it.
Here they work the opposite way. They say, know the fundamental principles governing the operation of the universe, and then all the pieces fit together inside this final truth. I understand now why so many of the Oak Ridge boys turned to religion after they had been exposed to the electron microscope for a while. They realized they had gone as far as their scientific training would ever take them. Time and space are running out. I know all this must sound confused and incredible, Dick. I'm still confused myself. But I want you to think about what I've written, then take the action you think best. I know it won't be easy for you. If you think this is some maniac's idea of a joke, you'll have proof very soon that it isn't, because one of the people at your center is due to leave for here any time now.
You're wondering why I use this weird and wonderful means of communication. The problem was to find a writing material which would stand up in Earth's atmosphere. Oddly enough, it's not the oxygen which causes the trouble, but the so-called inert nitrogen. This container will probably not disintegrate for a couple of days at sea-level atmospheric pressure, but this material I'm writing on would not last more than a few seconds. That's one reason they picked you. Most people just don't have a spare decompression chamber up in the attic. The other reason was that with your photographic memory you'll know this is my handwriting, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I hope. I'm sure you've sat in that pressure suit long enough, but remember, if you want to take another look at this, you'll have to put it back in the container before you go down, wishing you all you would wish for yourself.
Forster examined the signature. That was the way Bentley made the capital J. It looked almost like a T, with just a faint hook at the bottom of the downstroke. Then, the way it joined the—hey, Doc, are you going to tie up the tank all day? I've got work to do. Forster recognized the voice on the intercom as Tom Somerford's. Somerford was one of the crop of recent graduates to join the center, brash, noisy, irresponsible like the rest of them. He knew Forrester hated being called Doc, so he never lost an opportunity to use the word. True, he was gifted and well trained, but he was the ringleader in playing the practical jokes on Forrester which might have been funny in college, but which only wasted a research team's time in these critical days.
Practical joke. Anger flooded over him. Yes, this was all a macabre game, cooked up by Somerford, with the help of some of his pals. Probably they were all out there now, snickering among themselves, waiting to see his face when he came out of the decompression chamber, waiting to gloat. "'Hey, Doc, you still with us?' "'I'll be out very shortly,' Forster said grimly. "'Just wait right there.' He spun the air inlet controls. Impatiently, he watched the altimeter needle begin its anti-clockwise movement. He'd call a staff meeting right away, find the culprits, and suspend them from duty. Preston would have to back him up. If Somerford proved to be the ringleader, he would insist on his dismissal, Forster decided, and he would see to it that the young punk had trouble getting another post.
The fantastic waste of time involved in such an elaborate forgery, Forster trembled with indignation. And using the name of a dead man, Above all, a scientist who had died in the interest of research, leaving behind him a mystery which still troubled the Atomic Energy Commission, because nobody had ever been able to explain that sudden dive in a plane which was apparently functioning perfectly, and flown by a veteran crew. He glanced down at the roll. Was it his imagination, or had the purplish ink begun to fade? He ran a length of it through his fingers, and then he saw that in places there were gaps where the writing had disappeared altogether. He glanced up at the altimeter needle, which was sliding by the twenty-four thousand foot mark.
He looked back at his hands again, just in time to see the roll part in two places, leaving only the narrow strip he held between his gloved fingers. He put the strip on the desk and bent clumsily in his suit to retrieve the other pieces from the floor. But wherever he grabbed it, it fell apart. Now it seemed to be melting before his eyes. In a few seconds there was nothing. He straightened up. The strip he had left on the desk had disappeared too. No ash, no residue, nothing. His thought processes seemed to freeze. He glanced mechanically at the altimeter. It read twenty-five hundred feet. He grabbed at the two pieces of the container. They still felt as rigid as ever. He fitted them together carefully, gaining a crumb of security from the act.
He realized vaguely that the altimeter needle was resting on zero, but he had no idea how long he had been sitting there, trying to find a thread of logic in the confused welter of thoughts, when he heard the scrape of metal on metal as somebody wrestled with the door clamps from the outside. He was certain of only one thing. His memory told him that the signature that was no longer a signature had been written by Jim Rawdon, who, Couldn't possibly have survived that crash into the Timor Sea. From behind, somebody was fumbling with his helmet connections. Then fresh air and familiar sounds rushed in on him as the helmet was taken away. Summerfield's thin, intelligent face was opposite his. "'Doc, are you all right?' he was asking sharply.
For once there was no superciliousness in his voice. "'I'm fine,' Forster said heavily. I—I've got a headache. Stayed in here too long, I suppose. What's in the box? Summerfield asked. The way he asked told Forrester at once that the youngster knew nothing about it. Uh—just some half-baked idea out of the Pentagon. Some colonel trying to justify his existence. He clutched the box to him, as though Summerford might try and take it away. The tank's all yours. He turned and clambered out of the chamber. He put the box down on the concrete floor, and climbed out of the pressure suit, watching the box all the time. It seemed to gleam up at him, as though it had eyes full of silent menace. He realized vaguely that Somerford was standing in front of him again, looking anxious.
"'Are you quite sure you're OK?' "'I'm fine,' Forrester said, hardly recognizing his own voice. He picked up the box and stumbled out, heading for his office. When he walked in, his secretary was answering the line fitted with a scrambler, which connected directly with the Pentagon. "'General Morgensen,' she said, handing him the receiver. Forster took the receiver, sat down at his desk and took a deep breath, fighting hard to regain his self-control. "'Forster,' he said into the mouthpiece, when the office door closed behind the girl. "'Forster!' What in the dickens happened to Preston? My driver met the train here this morning, but there was no sign of him. But the Pullman Porter checked him in last night, and we found all his gear and papers in his compartment.
He left here in plenty of time to catch the train, General, Forster heard himself say. He took the train to get a night's rest. He realized how irrelevant the last statement was only after he made it. The general was talking again. Important meeting with the Joint Chiefs. Whole briefing team was being held up. He reported it to the CIA as a precautionary measure. Forrester could see the words on the roll, the roll that wasn't, as though they were engraved on his eye retinas. As a beginning, and to prove this isn't just a bit of hocus-pocus, one of the people at your center is due to leave for here any time now. General, Forrester broke in hoarsely. "'I've got some very important information which you must have.
I'll leave by heliplane right away.' He replaced the phone receiver in its cradle, wondering how convincing he would be able to make his story. At least, even if he didn't have Bentley's letter, he had the container. That should help. But when he looked across the desk, he saw that that, too, had disappeared without a trace. General Morgensen was the newest product of the atomic age, half-soldier, half-scientist, shrewd and perceptive, an intellectual giant. He listened carefully, without comment or change of expression, as Forster doggedly went through his story in chronological order. Halfway through, he held up his hand and started pushing buttons on the console built into his desk. Within a few moments, men began filing into the room, and sat down around Forster.
Then the general motioned to the clerk seated in the corner by the tape recorder. Gentlemen, listen to this playback, and then I'll have Dr. Forster go on from there. What was left of Forster's confidence leaked away as he heard his own diffident voice filling the room again. It was like being awake in the middle of a weird dream. But when the tape recorder hissed into silence, he went on, staring straight ahead of him in quiet desperation. When he ended his story, there was silence for a moment. Everyone sat motionless. Then Morganson looked up and around. "'Well, gentlemen, Mr. Bates, C.I.A.' First, this was no longer a story told by one man. It had become a problem, a situation to be evaluated objectively.
Well, sir, the only part of the thing I can comment on at this point is the stuff about O'Connor and Walters, that checks. They both disappeared without a trace. It was treated as a maximum security situation, and we did give out the story that they had been assigned to special duty. He glanced briefly at Forster. Up until now, we assumed that only the directors at Aiken and Oak Ridge knew the real situation, outside the Atomic Energy Commission and the CIA, of course. This represents a very serious leak, or... His voice trailed away. Colonel Barfield, Intelligence. The young Colonel tried to sound flippant, unsuccessfully. General, acting on the assumption that the story is true, it would answer about two hundred question marks in our files, maybe more, with further study.
The CIA man cleared his throat and raised a finger. For everybody's information, he said, a preliminary field check shows that Dr. Preston's train was stopped for ten minutes by fog last night. The train's radar installation failed simultaneously. There wouldn't be anything odd about that, except the temperature at the time was about sixty-five degrees, and the humidity was only fifty-five per cent. Consider that, gentlemen. Theoretically, fog can't form under such conditions. Similar fog occurred on the occasions when O'Connor and Walters were reported missing. The Met people couldn't explain that either. That's all. Morgensen sat straight up, as though he had suddenly made a decision. I don't think there's any value in further discussion at this point.
You will all have transcripts of Dr. Forrester's statement within a few minutes. According to that statement, we're due to lose a number of key men in the next few hours. I'll have Code One Emergency Precautions instituted at all research establishments, and I think the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should hear from me right away. Colonel Barfield, I'd like you to ask Colonel Malinowski the Russian military attache, to see me here not later than one hour from now. We'll have a full-dress conference here at eight o'clock tomorrow morning, with written evaluation reports in detail from all branches. Dr. Forster, consider yourself assigned to Pentagon duty as of now and until further notice. Forster sat, dazed, until he realized that the others had left, and the general was standing in front of him.
"'Go get some rest, Forrester,' the other man said with surprising gentleness. "'You've had a tough day.' As Forrester slept that early summer night, weathermen across the world were marking their weather maps with thousands of observations, feathery wind arrows, temperatures, barometric pressures, and relative humidities. Then, as they drew their isobars, the patterns for the northern hemisphere emerged. A giant high-pressure system with its center in northern Oklahoma promised warm weather across America. Another, centered east of the Ural Mountains, forecast clear weather for most of Europe and northern Asia. A low-pressure trough between was dropping light, warm rain on the green fields of England, but from Seattle to Washington, D.C., from Stettin to Vladivostok, the sun was rising or setting in clear skies.
Then, about 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, a thickening mist descended over warm and drowsy Southwest South Carolina. It was a fog that was not a fog, observers said afterwards, because there was no damp, no coldness, just a steady loss of visibility, until a man couldn't see his hand in front of his face, even though a bright moon was shining. Most of the reporting night shift at Aiken Hydrogen bomb plant never reached the tightly guarded gates. Those who did were not allowed in. At the same hour, across the world at the newly built underground heavy-water factory of Rosalovsky Grosk, west of the southern tip of Lake Bekel, The late morning sun cast deep shadows into the gaping holes in the hillside which marked the plant entrances and exits.
Deep below, miles of filtration chambers hissed quietly as they prepared their deadly concentrate. Then, without warning, the sun grew watery and pale, and within a few minutes a haze began to form at ground level. It grew thicker and thicker. The sun became a dim orange sphere, then was blotted out. Total darkness enveloped the area. And at the same hour, the watchers manning the lonely circle of probing radar domes, facing each other across the frozen wastes of the Arctic, cursed softly in Russian and English as their scopes sweeping the upper air first went blank, then dark. They were shaken men at the meeting in General Morgensen's office the next morning. Over 30 key men are gone from Aiken, Morgensen was saying.
In terms of goals, it means that our 1960 program now cannot possibly be fulfilled until 1965. If the situation develops as forecast by Dr. Forster's statement, our entire nuclear weapons program will grind to a halt within two weeks. If we drain men from civilian research, it will cause a total breakdown in the civilian atomic power production program. As you all know, the nation's entire economic expansion program is based on the availability of that power. Without it, industry will be forced into a deep freeze. That, in turn, means we might as well run up a white flag on the White House lawn. He smiled thinly. I would be a lot more worried than I am, except we have the first indications that the other side is in the same boat.
I broke every regulation in the book last night, when I talked to Melinowski. I took the liberty of warning him on the basis that there was nothing to lose. His reaction was that it was all a Wall Street capitalist plot, psychological warfare he called it. He phoned me an hour ago. Sounded as though he'd just seen a ghost. He said the Russian ambassador had asked for an appointment with the Secretary of State this morning. Forster, bewildered and out of his depth in these global problems, let the flood of words pour over him. Then he realized Morganson was staring at him over the telephone receiver at his ear, and that the room was very quiet. Then Morgensen said respectfully, "'Very well, Mr.
President. We'll have Dr. Forster there.' Forster was relegated to the side-lines after his interview with the gray-faced man in the White House. Events were moving swiftly, events which Forster could read behind the blurred black headlines of the newspapers. The Russian ambassador was closeted with the Secretary of State for a record six-hour talk. Then the Soviet Foreign Minister took off for Washington at thirty minutes' notice, and another record was made when he spent all day with the President. The Washington columnists began to hint of lessening tensions in the Cold War, and the wire services carried reports of Russian radio broadcasts talking of a new era of cooperation between East and West.
Only fragments of the broadcasts could be monitored. Because radio reception had suddenly deteriorated right across the world. The reports could not be confirmed, because Russia cut all phone communications with the outside world. There was no possible mode of contact. Meanwhile, in the United States, television reception was blacking out for hours at a time, with no explanation available. The Civil Aeronautics Administration and the Air Force banned all plane movements under instrument flight conditions because radar navigational equipment had become so unreliable as to be useless. Newspapers across the nation were reporting sudden fogs of short duration, which baffled local weathermen. The U.S.
Weather Bureau in Washington refused to comment. For the first time in the history of an East-West Conference, there was no haggling, no propaganda speeches. Hour after hour, even as the talks went on, the cream of the world's scientific brains quietly continued to disappear, it was revealed later. In three days, the major powers accomplished what they had failed to do in the previous fifteen years. Just four days and twenty-one hours after Forrester had first talked to General Morgensen at the Pentagon, a treaty was signed ending the World Atomic Weapons Race. And it had all happened, was over and done, before the people of the globe could realize what was happening, before they could rise in mass panic in the face of the incredible unknown.
Almost immediately after the announcement, radio and radar communications suddenly returned to normal, and reports of the mysterious fogs ceased. Back at the center, as he walked down the floodlit ramp of the heliport towards his car, Forster found himself thinking of the experimental work on the dream state which he had performed as a graduate student. He knew that a dream which might take half an hour to recount took only a fraction of a second to occur in the subconscious of the sleeper as he awoke. It was the same way with the events of the last five days. Already details were becoming fuzzy and blurred, as though they had happened five years ago. He opened the car door, and the soft glow of the dome light filled the interior.
Then he saw again the rectangular discoloration on the seat covers, and the jolt back to reality was almost a physical thing. Relief, overwhelming, flooded over him. He looked up into the indigo-velvet sky. Above him was the enormous triangle formed by Deneb, Vega, and Altair. From within it were a thousand other dimmer stars, but all, he knew, far, far bigger, than the speck of solidified gases called Earth. Somewhere out there, living, thinking, breathing, was Bentley. Good night, Forrester said out loud, and somehow he was sure he wasn't talking into thin air.
End of Warning from the Stars by Ron Cocking