FINE FANTASY STORIES
WITH THE MARK OF
DISTINCTION!
Here
is an exciting new collection of science-fiction and fantasy taken from the
pages of America's famous weekly. The Saturday Evening Post. The best writing and the most spine-tingling storytelling talent went
into these selected tales. You will enjoy
NOTE ON DANGER B by Gerald Kersh
What was the incredible menace that lay in
wait for the super-jet fliers of the upper stratosphere?
DOOMSDAY DEFERRED by Will F. Jenkins
Is this the way the world will end? With a tiny creeping horror escaping from the jungle to overwhelm
the world?
THE
TERRIBLE ANSWER by
Paul Galileo
He
had built the most powerful mechanical brain in existence—and dared ask it the
one question he would ask of no man.
THE
ENEMY PLANET by
Rear-Admiral D. V. Gallery Over the world's radios came
the ultimatum from Mars—we are coming . . . surrender or perish!
Plus
other stories of super science, ghostly visitations, time-journeys and similar
marvels make this book a special event for fantasy readers.
******
WILLIAM
RANDALL'S COVER ILLUSTRATION shows some of the miraculous bubbles from the
fabled past being blown by the magician in Grace Amundson's
"The Child Who Believed."
THE SATURDAY
EVENING
POST FANTASY STORIES
Compiled by BARTHOLD
FLES
Stories by
GRACE AMUNDSON NOEL LANGLEY
WILL F. JENKINS GERALD KERSH
WILLARD
TEMPLE CONRAD RICHTER WILBUR
SCHRAMM PAUL GALLICO REAR-ADMIRAL D.
V. GALLERY
AVON PUBLISHING CO., INC. 575 Madison Avenue, New York 22,
N.
CONTENTS
THE
ENEMY PLANET
Rear Admiral D. V. Gallery, USN................................... 3
THE CHILD WHO BELIEVED
Grace Amundson.............................................................
20
SCENE FOR SATAN
Noel Langley....................................................................
35
DOOMSDAY DEFERRED
Will F. Jenkins...................................................................
54
THE
ETERNAL DUFFER
Willard Temple................................................................
71
NOTE ON DANGER B
Gerald Kersh.....................................................................
83
THE TERRIBLE ANSWER
Paul Gallico......................................................................
91
THE VOICE IN THE EARPHONES
Wilbur Schramm.............................................................. 104
DOCTOR HANRAY'S SECOND CHANCE
Conrad Richter................................................................. 114
EACH STORY COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED
Copyright,
1946, 1947, 1949, 1950, by The Curtis Publishing Company.
The Eternal Duffer by Willard H. Temple, The Terrible Answer by Paul Gallico, reprinted by permission of
Harold Ober Associates. Doctor Hanray's Second Chance by Conrad Richter, permission to reprint
granted by Paul R. Reynolds & Son. The Voice in the Earphones by
Wilbur Schramm, reprinted from Wilbur Schramm's "Windwagon Smith And Other Yarns" by permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
Avon Reprint Edition,
copyright, 1951, by Avon Publishing Co., Inc. Primed in U.S.A.
THE ENEMY PLANET
by Rear Admiral D. V. Gallery, USN
Panic spread over the whole world. The UN met in extraordinary session, to hear
the ultimatum of THE ENEMY PLANET.
Interplanetary
Defense H.Q.
World Government
Lake Success,
N. Y. May
20, 2050 A.D.
PUBLICATION
of this story may shock the world by ex-posing what a gullible creature man is.
For the past 100 years we have been preparing to defend this
earth from invasion by monsters from outer space. It is now revealed that
these monsters exist only in our minds, and that for the last century mankind
has been jousting with celestial windmills. World Government is making this
disclosure because the unbroken era of peace which the world has enjoyed since
1950 insures that war between peoples of the earth is now impossible. The
brotherhood of man is so firmly established that nothing can now undermine it;
not even this revelation that its foundation rests on a gigantic hoax
perpetrated in the evil days of 1950 when an atomic war seemed inevitable.
The
man who worked this benevolent fraud was Doctor Danson,
of Iceland, the first President of World Government, and one of the great men
of the twentieth century. The doctor ranked second only to Einstein as a
physicist, was an authority
3
on international law and was one ot the foremost amateur astronomers of his time. It now
appears that he was also the greatest sidereal prestidigitator who ever lived.
Until
1950 4ie secluded himself with his few assistants at his observatory in
Iceland, high on the rugged and inaccessible northern slope of Mt. Hekla.
Isolated there, three difficult days' journey from Reykjavik, he wrote his
great books on world government and studied the stars in peace, while the
civilized world fought the War of the Four Freedoms to its unconditional
surrender.
When United Nations was formed at the end of
World War II, incorporating in its charter many noble ideas originated by Danson, the doctor confidendy
looked for the banishment of war from the earth and the dawn of a new era.
By 1949 even Doctor Danson
could see that this hope was futile. The pious hypocrisy of the nations, the
constant wrangling and vetoes in the Assembly and the ominous cold war between
Russia and the West made it obvious that UN was doomed to follow in the
footsteps of the hapless League of Nations.
Doctor
Danson determined to prevent this at any cost and by
any means. During the winter of 1949 he framed a plan to bring about the changes
in human nature necessary to salvage the world's last hope for escape from the
gathering atomic-holocaust.
Early in 1950
the doctor called his small
staff around him in his observatory for a conference. "Fear," the
doctor told his colleagues, "is the dominant emotion in the world today,
fear of one man for another. But I am convinced'now
that fear of what man himself can do to his fellow man
will never persuade nations to give up their fundamental and historic right to
impose their will by force upon weaker nations. Not until man fears for his
mastery over this tiny dunghill on which we live will he bow to the will of his
Creator and live in peace with his brothers.
"But," the doctor declared, "the UN is not yet a lost cause. I have a plan for saving it; a plan in which
success depends upon absolute secrecy. The men who establish peace on earth
must do it anonymously, and their roles cannot be known to the world until long
after thev are dead . . . perhaps never."
4
Doctor Danson
offered his colleagues the option of withdrawing then and there or dedicating
their lives to his project under a most solemn oath of secrecy. So great was
their faith in Doctor Danson that all six took the
vow, labored the rest of their lives on the isolated slope of the volcano and
carried the secret to their graves. When all had pledged themselves, the doctor
outlined his scheme for a hoax upon mankind which would make the deceptions of
Hider, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt seem like
parlor pranks.
He
began by reminding his disciples of several recent widely publicized events.
Shortly after the end of World War II, the Signal Corps of the United States
Army bounced radar signals off the moon and detected the return echo. The
flying-saucer hysteria had seized the United States in the summer of 1947 and was still in progress. Rcsponsibile
military men predicted that push-button warfare was just around the corner,
interplanetary-space travel was seriously discussed, and scientific societies
were formed to promote it, Man's imagination boggled at the Pandora's box which
he had opened at Hiroshima. The atomic age had just begun, nothing was
impossible any more, and the world was ready to believe anything.
In
this atmosphere of world-wide apprehension the British Interplanetary Space
Society began its series of monthly broadcasts to Mars. At their meetings in
London they probed the silences of outer space with high-powered radio
transmitters in the hope that the Martians might hear and answer them.
They theorized that if rational beings
existed on Mars with mental development approximating that of man, then the
Martians should be able to decipher any messages which they received. Earth's
scholars had solved the riddle of dead and completely forgotten languages of
the ancient Egyptians and Persians, and our military cryptologists had broken
seemingly unintelligible ciphers. If the Martians could detect radio signals,
they would probably be smart enough to understand them.
Doctor Danson
proposed to give the British society its eagerly awaited answer from Mars. At
the observatory on Mt. Hekla he could receive the Interplanetary Space
Society's powerful broadcasts without difficulty, so it would be a simple
matter to phrase and time his replies plausibly. He planned to send
5 his answers using the technique of the United States Army Signal Corps and bounce his answers off the moon when Mars and the moon were on the same side of the earth.
Using the moon as a reflector, it would be
easy to make radar signals arrive in London from interstellar space at such
times and in such manner that they would seem to be Martian replies to the
British signals.
The
biggest problem was to break the interplanetary ice plausibly and establish a common language between Mars and Earth. How could two perhaps totally
dissimilar kinds of beings, living in different planetary environments,
communicate ideas to each other? But unless some common bond could be
established, the hopes of the British Interplanetary Space Society for a reply could never be fulfilled.
Doctor
Danson and his staff sat up long into the night discussing
this difficulty. They finally concluded that if rational beings inhabited two
adjacent tiny planets in a remote corner of the universe, this should be bond
enough. So, taking the bull by the horns, they credited the Martians with
ability to speak English or at least to receive and transmit English by Morse Code.
That night they also planned the use of a new atomic ray which they had developed on Mt. Hekla. Only a few months after Hiroshima, while experimenting with rays for probing
the Heaviside layer of ionized particles in the upper atmosphere, they had
made a discovery from which they recoiled in horror. They learned how to
combine radar technique with atomic fission and thus project powerful
concentrated beams of energy to great distances. Using these beams, they melted
rocks twenty miles away on Mt. Hekla's desolate northern slope.
Since
they were all men of peace and since this ray would obviously be used for mass
destruction if the rest of the world ever found out about it, they confined all
knowledge of it within the walls of their mountain retreat. After a few spectacular
experiments, they locked the secret away, never to be used again unless
Iceland's safety demanded it. They now agreed that the safety of the human race
demanded it, and laid their plans for using it at the proper time.
On
the night of March 29,
1950, the British society
in London broadcast to Mars in ancient Hebrew. Eleven minutes
6
after the end of their message the operator on the
microwave scope muttered, "I'm getting something."
The
society members crowded around and watched the dancing trace on the scope. At
first the curious audience thought the trace was being disturbed by static, but
soon one alert member noted the similarity of the pulsations to Morse Code, and
began spelling aloud, "... r-s. M-a-r-s—Mars." "They are
answering us!" he shouted.
After
the oscilloscope spelled out "Mars" about a dozen times, the message
from outer space stopped, and the be-bewildered members of the society gaped at
one another in amazement.
Then, after some minutes, the society answered
the Martian message by broadcasting: "Earth to Mars: we are receiving
you."
In the observatory on Mt. Hekla, another
group was gathered around a radio receiver. When the London radio began to
crackle again, Doctor Danson said, "It has
begun. Repeat back their Hebrew message and we will
quit for the night."
In
London eleven minutes later, the trace on the oscilloscope danced again, and
the Hebrew message which they had sent to Mars a few moments before came back
word for word from the sky. After this message was repeated twice, transmissions
from outer space stopped and all further attempts to continue communication
that night were fruidess.
When
it became apparent that Mars had signed off, the society faced a problem.
Obviously it was necessary to get a report to the prime minister, and,
fortunately, Sir John Watts, chief scientist of the Ministry of Supply, was a
guest at the historic meeting. Sir John had come as a skeptic prepared to
scoff, and though he could not deny that transmissions from somewhere were
actually received on the radar scope, he was by no means prepared to certify
that they came from Mars.
However,
the society realized that Sir John's testimony, even if reluctandy
given, would carry great weight. They insisted that he
take the matter up with the prime minister. Sir John finally persuaded them to
conduct another test the following night in strict secrecy, and promised that
if similar results were obtained, he would make a factual report of these
results to the prime minister.
An hour after Mars rose over London's horizon the next night, a message
went out asking the station in the sky, "Do you understand English?"
Doctor Danson and his staff in Iceland were waiting
for it. The moon was in good position, and the reply bounced back to London:
"Yes,
we understand English. Greetings from Mars to Earth.
We first detected weak magnetic signals coming from Earth twenty-four Martian
years ago—1902
your date—and have been
trying to communicate with you ever since. Our recorded history goes back for 15,000 Martian years—30,000 Earth years —and we have been using magnetic
waves throughout this period. Have you ever received previous messages from
us?"
The
message was jubilantly received in London. A society member excitedly called
attention to the fact that Marconi sent his first wireless message across the Adantic in 1902.
London
replied: "First message from Mars received last night. Greetings
from Earth to Mars."
This seemed a rather inadequate salutation to
initiate interplanetary communication, but, after all, what does one planet
say to another when they meet for the first time?
A
few minutes later the oscilloscope in London became active again. The dancing
trace spelled out: "This is Mars. We will transmit to you for one half
hour each day when Earth presents same face to Mars as it presents now. We will
use your time units and dates. We have learned much about English by reading
signals coming from Earth in past forty-eight years, but we have many
questions: What is air? What is Money? What is communism? What is bettygrable? What is the mystery tune? Can you receive
transmissions by atomic pulses or gamma rays?"
Sir John, obviously impressed, didn't intend
to be stampeded into jumping to conclusions. He said, "Ask the Martians
how many moons their planet has."
The answer prompdy
came back: "Four."
"H'm'm,"
Sir John said. "Actually they have only two."
"But"
someone objected, "maybe they have some small
ones which we can't see."
Then Sir John said, "Ask them to
describe the next planet in the solar system outside their own orbit."
The answer came back: "There are many
small ones be-
8
tween us and Jupiter, the next big one, which is
twenty times the diameter of Mars and has eleven moons. There is also a small
planet between us and Earth. It lies 1,000,000 miles
inside the orbit of Mars and is one one-thousandth the size of your
planet."
This reply was an important building block in
Doctor Danson's whole scheme. Any amateur astronomer
could have supplied the information on Jupiter and on the asteroids between
Mars and Jupiter. But only the doctor and his staff knew about the tiny planet
between Mars and Earth which they had discovered several months previously.
This asteroid, barely visible from Earth if you knew where to look for it,
would be quite conspicuous at times from Mars. Doctor Danson
planned to let Earth's astronomers spend some weeks searching for this needle
in the heavenly haystack before telling them where to look for it.
After this second demonstration, Sir John
went to the prime minister and stated his belief that the whole business was a
hoax, but gave a factual description of everything which occurred. The prime
minister listened, sent for the air minister and the chief of Scodand Yard, and instructed them to give Sir John whatever
assistance he required in exposing this fraud. Sir John prompdy
conferred with the radar and intelligence experts, and they drew up plans for
tracking down the prankster.
Meantime,
the British Interplanetary Space Society continued its nighdy
conversations with Mars, these sessions being now jammed with spectators of all
degrees of credulity and skepticism. The newspapers wrote sensational articles
which threw England into a state. Lurid dispatches from London went all over
the world, and the United States Federal Communications Commission set up a
receiver to see if they could intercept these broadcasts. To the skeptics'
amazement, this receiver near Washington got the broadcast just as well as
London did.
This
put the story on front pages wherever newspapers were published. Receivers were
tuned in everywhere, and soon Doctor Danson and his
conspirators on Mt. Hekla had a worldwide audience for their broadcasts
describing life on Mars.
The Martian broadcasts told of a civilization
much older and happier than ours on Earth. They had one government
9
for the whole planet and seemed to live
according to precepts whkh we had always professed
but seldom practiced. We had difficulty explaining the meaning of the words
"war" and "crime" to them, because apparendy
such things did not exist on their planet.
They
informed us that the universe in which we live had been created by a Supreme
Being, with Whom they were able to communicate, and that He had promised them
everlasting life in the hereafter, if they lived good lives during the short
span of three or four hundred years while they were on Mars. They therefore
lived in peace and harmony with one another, because obviously only fools would
do otherwise under the circumstances.
The Martians spoke of many things which
amazed our scientists, indicating they knew more about atomic fission than we
did. When they asked us why we were developing the hydrogen bomb, we sent them
an evasive answer. It was found impossible to frame a direct reply which didn't
malign the intelligence of the human race.
The
common people of the world listened to the broadcasts and looked to the wise
men for guidance at this time. But the wise men began to have an uneasy feeling
that perhaps there was a greater wisdom than theirs out in the starry sky.
There were great doubts in the world at this
time.
Pravda
denounced the broadcasts as a capitalist plot to overthrow communism and
enslave the working classes. But the Politburo installed radar receivers in the
Kremlin to listen in directly on the interplanetary conversations, and the rest
of the Russians got them secondhand by tuning in on The Voice of America and
other radio stations west of the Iron Curtain.
After a week of exciting communication, Mars
advised they would be unable to answer for the next three weeks on account of
impending magnetic storms. Although the British Interplanetary Space Society
continued the broadcasts, there was no reply.
Doctor Danson took
this precaution because during only one week of the lunar month was the moon in
proper position to act as his sounding board. Although some alert observer
might note the coincidence of the lunar cycle and the transmitting periods,
Earth would soon receive proof that the
10
Martians
were real—proof so spectacular and convincing that even the most hardened
skeptics would believe.
During
the three-week radio silence, the Air Ministry and Scotland Yard completed
preparations to expose the "fraudulent messages from Mars" ... if they were fraudulent.
On the night of April twenty-sixth, when Mars
started broadcasting again, the Air Ministry tuned direction finders in
England, Ireland and Scodand to the frequency of the
Martian broadcasts and set up high-speed cameras in front of oscilloscopes to
provide an accurate time record of all that occurred.
RAF planes cruised at extreme altitudes all
over the British Isles, scanning the ground with search receivers and direction
finders. Wartime restrictions on private flying were revived and Fighter
Command Headquarters put its radar warning net on a red-alert basis to spot any
high-flying aircraft impersonating Mars. Similar steps were taken in the
United States.
That night Air Ministry experts took over the
broadcast from London and sent out the following message:
"After this message, we will transmit a
long dash. At the
end of this dash we request that you close your transmitter
key and hold it down for one minute. Stand by for the dash,
which is coming now.---------------------------------------------- ."
At
this particular hour and day, the distance to Mars was 67,890,000 miles, so the transmission time there and back should have been
twelve minutes and ten seconds. Doctor Danson,
anticipating a time check, had prepared graphs for the entire year showing the
distance from Earth to Mars at any hour of the day and the precise interval of
time necessary for radar waves, traveling at the speed of light, to make the
round trip. Another handy chart gave him the correction to allow for the actual
transmitting time to the moon and back, so he was not caught napping by this
test. As his return signal came back from Mars, timers in London caught it at
twelve minutes and eleven seconds.
A
hasty check of direction-finder stations apparendy
indicated that the signals did not originate on Earth. The direction-finder
stations were set up to search out a station located on our own planet. These
stations got the same strength signal
11 no
matter where they turned, as they
would if a signal came in from above. The aerial
spotters, whose attention had been directed earthward, missed the Martian
messages completely. Fighter Command reported that no unidentified aircraft had
been over England. Washington flashed word of similar results.
The Martians then continued: "Mars . . .
Mars. Replying to your previous inquiry about location of
unknown small planet between Mars and Earth. Look in the plane of the
ecliptic forty degrees and thirty minutes from Mars' present location."
London immediately phoned this information to
the observatory at Greenwich, which had searched the sky unsuccessfully for
three weeks. By midnight the existence of a tiny new planet had been confirmed.
Events of the evening persuaded most of the
scientific world that the messages were indeed coming from Mars. The perfect
time check, direction-finder indications and discovery of a new planet in the
exact place predicted convinced everybody.
Pravda
promptly switched the party line and proclaimed that Russian scientists had
been the first to talk with Mars; had been doing it for ten years.
The
British Government announced that it was taking over the broadcasts until the
source of these signals was definitely determined, hinting darkly that Winston
Churchill might know more about them than he was admitting.
Mars
became the most important subject on Earth. Bookstores sold out astronomical
treatises which had gathered dust for years. Newspapers ran daily features
explaining the elementary facts about the solar system. Even the international
tension relaxed as man lifted his eyes to the heavens and began
to think.
People who had never heard of Mars before
learned that it is the next planet outside Earth's orbit, that its diameter is
little over half that of the earth, and that it has two moons visible from the
Earth, which behave in an extraordinary manner. They learned that Mars takes
almost twice as long to circle the sun as Earth does; that
once every 15 to 17 years Earth and Mars miss colliding by a mere 35,000,000 miles, but when at opposite sides of their orbits
they are separated by 248,000,-000 miles. The old controversy about the canals
on Mars raged
12
again, reople found tnat equally eminent authorities have affirmed and denied
the existence of these canals.
In
learning these things about Mars, men learned things about the universe which
most of them had never known before. They learned of galaxies and nebulae; of
great stars whose diameter exceeded that of the Earth's path around the sun;
and of distances which surpass trie mind's ability to
comprehend them. They learned that the stars in our sky are more numerous than
all the souls which have departed this earth since the time of Adam; that the
ponderous masses of the stars, their orbits and velocities through the heavens
faithfully obey a great code of law; and that Earth's scientists can quote and
explain this code in great detail . . . until you ask them, "Whence came
these laws?"
Man
learned that this planet, which he calls his own, is so puny that if Earth were
suddenly atomized and scattered from here to Polaris like dust before a cosmic
wind, even our nearest neighbors in the solar system would placidly continue in
the rotations and revolutions of their appointed orbits undisturbed. Man's
mental horizon expanded by several light years.
The next sensation on the interplanetary
program was the announcement by the Martians that they had been traveling
through space in atomic-powered ships since our year of 1940,
and that in the summer of 1947
numerous expeditions from
Mars circled and explored the earth.
Before
the excitement from that announcement subsided an even
more starding one followed. Mars announced that another
exploration of Earth would occur in exactly two weeks and several hundred space
ships would circle the earth on May tenth, approaching much closer than the 1947
expedition.
While
the world prepared itself for this visitation, Doctor Danson
briefed his assistants on the next phase of his plan. He said, "We shall
now use the new ray which we discovered right after Hiroshima. This ray,"
the doctor continued, "when pointed up at the sky, will pass through the
atmosphere as an invisible beam of energy until it encounters the F-two
Heaviside layer some 100 to 200 miles above the earth. When it hits the
ionized particles at the bottom of the laver, it will
13
energize these particles sufficiently to make them
visible, forming small illuminated disks in the sky."
The
doctor continued, "If we shoot high-frequency pulses of energy up the
beam, we can knock the disks loose from the beam in about the same manner that
neutrons can be knocked loose from the atom. The disks will circle the earth,
once in the Heaviside layer, and then, as they fade and become invisible
again, will seem to disappear into outer space. The path which the disks follow
on their way around the earth is a matter of chance, but if we knock loose
enough disks they will be seen all over the earth."
The
doctor concluded, "We have already developed a pretty good case of
hysteria in the world; the appearance of our saucers will aggravate the
panic."
The
"Martians" had predicted that the great saucer shower would start at
midnight Greenwich Time, May tenth. That night Doctor Danson
and his assistants gave the world the most remarkable pyrotechnic display ever
seen. They sent 200 disks about one tenth the angular size of the
sun shooting around the world in various directions, and millions of people
watched in open-mouthed wonder wherever the sky was clear.
Primitive
peoples believed the end of the world was at hand, and many civilized people
agreed. Unskilled observers outdid one another in their lurid accounts of what
they had seen. Descriptions by radio commentators made Orson Welles's Invasion
from Mars broadcast in 1938
seem factual by comparison.
Some United States newspapers declared the lights in the sky were exhaust
flames from huge, dimly visible rocket ships, and described these ships in
great detail. An Air Force B-36 pilot
claimed that one of these rockets had whizzed past him at 40,000 feet as if he had been standing still. When
his story was checked, however, it was discovered that the object in question
was a Navy fighter plane on a routine flight.
Reports from astronomers proved more
reliable. Even with their largest telescopes the astronomers could not observe
any details of the strange celestial visitors. They determined that the
luminous disks definitely were not meteors, and certainly were different from
any phenomena ever seen before. The things cruised at an altitude of about 150 miles, seemed to
14
come from the polar regions, and to travel at
about 20,000 miles per hour.
The
next night a British Government spokesman officially informed Mars that we now
believed them. The message said: "His Majesty's Government prepared to
concede actual existence of beings on Mars."
This
called for a sharp retort from the Martians: "Your strange message is
first indication we have had since communication was established that you
doubted our existence. We have never questioned yours. You must be very untrustworthy
people to be so suspicious."
This
was the first unfriendly note in the interplanetary conversations. It was by
no means the last.
Concern in all the world capitals over the
space ships immediately revitalized interest in the United Nations. Rancor
disappeared from UN debates, and the only matters seriously discussed were the
startling new developments on our neighboring planet.
The
Security Council decided unanimously that UN was the agency to deal with Mars,
rather than any individual gov« ernment, and the British
Government quickly agreed.
Shortly
after UN took over, the next dramatic development occurred. Mars announced that
the latest reconnaissance showed they could land on Earth, so they intended to
send over a delegation of Martians the next time the two planets were favorably
located in their orbits, in 1954.
This
delegation would bring with them large supplies of radioactive isotopes, which
they believed were in great demand on Earth to cure disease. They would also
bring several atomic engines, which could supply the whole Earth with power. In
return, they wished to take back some samples of our air.
UN was about to accede to this request when Vishinsky pointed out that in all messages which had been
exchanged with the Martians nothing whatever had been said about what sort of
"people" they were, what they looked like or what their size was.
So
UN dispatched a message describing a human being in some detail for the
Martians' benefit, and inquiring discreedy as to what
they looked like.
The reply said: "We have no eyes or ears
such as you have.
15
We
speak, see and hear by means of electromagnetic waves and have organs to create
and detect such waves. We have arms and legs like yours, and although we have
no heads, we think as you do, except more clearly, and have been doing it much
longer. Our bodies are spherical and are 150 to 200 feet in diameter."
The Security Council sat in stunned silence
after this information boomed out of the loud-speaker from the radio room.
Finally
the head of the United States delegation turned to Vishinsky
and said, "We can't let those sons of brotherhood come down and tramp
around the earth I"
For
the first time in the history of the UN, the Russian delegate failed to
exercise his veto and breathed a fervent "Da!"
of agreement.
The
Security Council quickly agreed on a message to the Martians informing them
politely but firmly that we objected to the proposed visit and could not permit
it.
By this time Doctor Danson
and his associates could see their way clearly to their objective. The whole
world was in a dither of fright. All they had to do was to hoist their hobgoblin
a few more times and say, "Boo!" to frighten mankind into saving
itself.
Mars
replied to the rejection of their proposed visit with an abrupt ultimatum,
"Delegation will visit Earth as proposed, whether you agree or not, as
soon as planets are close enough for heavy-transport space ships to make the
flight. Our Supreme Being says He has been displeased for twenty centuries at
your disregard of His wishes, and that we may use force." »
Upon
receipt of this message, all previous international differences were
forgotten, just as a family fight stops when strangers try to butt in. Earthly
problems were no longer of much importance compared to the impending invasion
of monsters. Whether we lived until 1954 under
the communist system or capialist system paled into
insignificance compared to the question of remaining masters of our native
planet.
An
emergency session of the Security Council recommended that the long-neglected
military establishment of UN, merely a paper organization ever since UN's
conception, be implemented immediately. All nations of the world readily
agreed to pool their armed forces under the Security Council.
16
Navies were scrapped as being useless in an
interplanetary war. United States Navy admirals indignantly protested this move
and published articles making a convincing case for super-carriers as the best
weapon for repelling Martians. But the hysteria was too great and no one paid
much attention to them. The Air Force claimed they would blast the invaders
into oblivion in forty-eight hours by using hydrogen bombs and the B-36. But the Security Council ruled this out because the Martian giants would
be very mobile targets, and atomizing seventy of them might involve wiping out
many of the world's major cities.
They
decided that if we couldn't prevent the invaders from landing, mobile artillery
and huge tanks might at least slay the gigantic monsters after they got on the
ground. The Security Council decided to pin their faith on the artilleryman and
tank while we reoriented our weapons to point toward space instead of toward
ourselves.
Meantime
production of conventional weapons stopped. The world plunged into intensive
development of guided missiles, rockets, satellite vehicles and space ships.
Push-button warfare advanced by leaps and bounds, and by 1952 rocket-launching emplacements were installed all over the world. From
these emplacements we could shoot rockets into outer space guided by radar and
traveling at a speed of Mach 10. The world's entire production capacity for hydrogen bombs was pooled and
devoted to turning out warheads for these rockets.
While these far-reaching changes occurred in
armaments, even more profound changes took place in human relations. Under the
threat of attack from another world, labor and capital joined hands, civil
rights were universally extended, and man became acquainted with and liked his
fellow man. Protestant and Catholic; Bolshevik, Laborite and Republican,
Chinese, Negro and Dixiecrat, all found a common
cause in which they buried their differences. Except for the grievous burden of
supporting the rocketeers and their thousands of
missile stations scattered all over the globe, the world became a fine place to
live in and an unparalleled era of peace, prosperity and good will began.
In 1954 the
final episode in the unification of the world
17
occurred. A fiery projectile from outer space roared
across Europe from west to east on the night of August ninth, and destroyed the
great Russian city of Sverdlovsk, just east of the
Urals. We know now that this catastrophe was caused by one of the large meteors
which have left their scars on the earth periodically; fortunately, many
centuries apart. But at the time, the world was in such a state of hysteria
that everyone jumped to the obvious conclusion that this was a missile from
Mars. Doctor Danson and his associates, of course,
seized the opportunity to confirm that assumption with taunting broadcasts
from Mt. Hekla.
After this disaster the assembly unanimously
voted to form a World Government in which all nations
surrendered the last vestiges of individual sovereignty. This was really just a
formality, because by this time it was impossible for nations to exercise the
prime attribute of sovereignty—namely, the right to wage war and slaughter one
another. War was out of the question, because the only weapons in the world
were designed to shoot out and away from the world to drive off intruders.
As soon as the nations ratified the World
Government— and they did so with remarkable speed—Doctor Danson
turned over his laboratory to his principal assistant and came to Lake Success
as Iceland's delegate to the assembly. His arrival was joyfully welcomed by the
other delegates because by then UN had assumed the shape which he had tried to
give it in the first place, and they all recognized the profound influence
which he had wielded over UN's development. At least they thought they did.
Doctor Danson was
elected first' President of the World Government and re-elected five successive
times, serving in all for twenty years.
While the doctor presided over the assembly,
his staff on Mt. Hekla continued to awe the world with periodic broadcasts and
saucer showers. The predicted invasion never occurred, but their judicious
propaganda kept people on edge and expecting it for fifty years.
Under
Doctor Danson's leadership the world made great
strides toward the millennium. Primitive peoples who had no need or desire for
civilization were left to live their lives as
18
fhey chose. Other peoples were assisted in every
way to improve their standards of Living and culture. The life span of man
increased to an average of 101 years;
concurrendy, production of all kinds increased, so
that, despite the growing population, everyone lived a more abundant and useful
life. Prisons were converted to museums and it took many years to fill all this
additional space with suitable exhibits.
Doctor
Danson returned to his Mt. Hekla retreat in 1975, continuing to guide his colleagues and to write great books until his
death in 1999.
The remote observatory
carried on its' celestial propaganda for ten more years, until it was wiped out
by the great eruption of Mt. Hekla in 2008.
When
Doctor Danson retired from World Government he left a
strongbox in custody of the Security Council, with instructions to open it
fifty years after his death. The box contained the documents on which this
narrative is based.
For the forty-two years since the eruption,
nothing has been heard from Mars. However, the mark left on the world's memory by the preceding fifty years has held
the human race together in peace, and a firm base has been established for
justice, prosperity and mutual trust.
World
Government confidendy predicts that we shall all live happily ever after.
THE CHILD WHO BELIEVED
by Grace Amundson
Once he had been famous, but now only this
little girl trusted him. For her he would perform one last illusion—if it filled him.
T_TE WAS a magician of the upper brackets though
reasonable in price. He had told them that, but they seemed to have the notion
that because he came rather cheap they must tutor him a bit. He had explained
that his fee was always more moderate out of season. He had further assured
them that he was invariably booked solid from September to late spring. Had
this been the holiday season, for example, they would simply have to make do
with someone third rate.
He
didn't mind a benefit or two in the heat of summer. In fact, he rather enjoyed
lending his personality now and again to a genial gathering of parvenu
entrepreneurs in garden finery. But when he arrived, one of them met him at the
gate and, if he did say so, herded him rather rudely into the dining tent, as
though he were some old hack to be pushed into the arena at the last moment.
Almost, to be brutally incisive, as though he were one of those tawdry
characters who would show up in any condition for a performance.
His
escort, a buoyant, curried fellow in tan sharkskin, offered him a cigarette
from a crocodile case. "My name's Camden. We thought the children better
not see you until we're ready for you."
Armitage laid his battered black case on a bench and
stripped off bis shrunken and yellowed gloves.
"I think you'll find chil-
20
dren accept the wondrous quite sensibly," he
said, running a deprecating glance over the inside of the
tent and setting finally on Camden.
'1 suppose you understand what this is all about,"
said Camden. He spoke with an almost offensive maturity, but there was an
eager, angelic waxiness about bis nostrils. It gave the edge to Armitage's
haggard boredom.
Armitage tossed his gloves on the top of his case.
His cutaway smelled slighdy of naphthalene. A mossy
ripple had captured his lapel in some forgotten storage. "I never concern
myself with the motives of these affairs," he said wearily.
"It's the annual summer carnival for the
building fund of Ascension Academy," Camden persisted. "We fathers
manage the whole thing. Side show, the works. Ellerman's handling the barker's job this year. He's got a
girl in Ascension. He should be along any moment now to cue you. They'll bring
you supper here first."
The air was streaked with the odor of hot
grease and chicken. Armitage sniffed fastidiously.
His frail stature altered according to his passing moods of hauteur. "I
don't customarily eat before a performance. But if this is a late show, I shall feel faint unless I have nourishment. I'll have a bite. Something
light, mind you."
"Are you sure you don't want to brush up
a bit first?"
Armitage stared uncomprehendingly at Camden, the
greenish balls of his eyes like skinless white grapes. "I beg your
pardon?"
Camden sensed the trespass. He fumbled wtih his cuff links. Outside, the lanterns bobbed on,
broiling the dusk in hot festoons. "I'll see if I can locate Ellerman," Camden said. At the tent flap he paused.
"You might want to know about the audience. All children.
It may be tough going. Last year they —Oh, hell, you don't want to be bored
with that. Only they're not so easily amused as they
were in my day. Damned if I know
why—too much of a good thing, I suppose."
Armitage rendered a faint and patronizing smile.
"Really, I wouldn't worry if I were you."
Camden darted out. Armitage
sat down, flicked open his case and lightly rearranged a few items. He
pressed his finger tips to his eyes, sighed and wriggled the veined arch of his
21
nose in lieu of scratching it. He flexed his
fingers, sighed again and affixed a cigarette to a holder delicately traced with gold; the great Pignon
had given that to him when he had mastered the trick of breaking out of a
concrete sarcophagus.
Outside,
Ellerman roamed the languid assemblage, haranguing
them with a vivacity more suitable for auctioning off
a marble quarry. Armitagc smiled. No inspired
hedonism, no reckless hearts out there. He drummed rhythmically on the table.
He had been able to break his way out of six padlocks in his day, but he had
never been able to produce a quick dram out of a hat when he needed it most.
Not the vintage stuff anyway. He'd known a mediocre Norwegian conjurer who'd
been able to squeeze a green aqua vitae out of a dry sponge
on occasion. But stricdy bathtub stuff. Ellerman's voice pressed closer. "Right this way
folks! Here you are, folks! Hit the man in the eye!" It was a bit
pathetic, Armitage decided. Everything was a bit
pathetic, for that matter. The tragedy was not that people died, but that they
lived so meagerly—on so much. Not a lavish spirit among them. No wonder the
profession had sunk so low.
Suddenly a treble tantrum broke outside the
tent. It struck his quivering nerves like a snapped wire. He sank his thumbs in
the pits of his eyes and cursed sofdy.
"Stop
it right now! Stop it!" screamed the child's voice. "Get dressed
right, so they won't laugh! You're not supposed to look like this! Stop it
right now!"
Immediately
the tent flap was torn open and a rigid, leggy child thrust inside, propelled
by a firm man in a paper derby, a false nose, tight coat and short trousers.
"Now
what's come over you so suddenly, young lady?" he demanded, and swung the
false nose on its elastic to the middle of his forehead, leaving a pale fungus
patch in a ludicrous crust of pigment.
The child stared at this
new outrage with bitter fury.
"We've
had just enough of this," the man said sternly. "This morning you
were all excited because I was going to do this job."
"They're laughing The kids are all laughing at you!"
"All right, so they're laughing. That's what
they're supposed to do. I'm funny, see?" He adopted a stance and a widess grin.
Like an enraged goat, the child hurled herself
at him head-
22
first, fists hammering his chest. A button soared
off his coat. "No, Zhey can't laugh at you!
You're my father! You stop it... right
now!"
1 He
pried her off, limb by limb. She was a vital,
tenacious lichen. "Now look here. You'll stay right here until the magician's
show. If there's any more of this nonsense, you'll be sent home without seeing
the magician. Understand?"
He
glanced at his watch, clapped the incredible nose in position again and turned
to go. Suddenly he caught sight of Armitage.
"Oh, there you are," he said. "Camden saw to you, did he? I'll
send him in to tell you when it's time to tee off. Quite a
crowd out there. Excuse me." He dashed forth and resumed his
braying.
The
child, a peaked blonde with lank, stranded hair, swiveled and stared at Armitage out of the lavender pastures of her eyes. She had
a neck like a young ostrich. The puckered indention of her upper lip gave her
an expression of brooding, inner resource. With her teeth she tore a fragment
of cuticle from her finger, spat it thoughtfully to one side and moved in a
conical pattern of white linen and blue ribbon to the bench beside Armitage, trailing her hand over the magic kit as she
passed. She flopped on the bench a few places away from Armitage
and stared at him, to discover whether the deliberate vibration had jarred him
to wrath. Armitage stared blandly back and cast forth
two magnificent rings of smoke which wreathed her like cloudy quoits. With
superb poise she shrugged them to fit. There being nothing to communicate for
the moment, she occupied herself with a recent injury to her calloused knee.
A
slope-shouldered woman with an unmanageable halo of hair brought in a plate
with half a broiled chicken and some French fries on it. She laid the plate
before Armitage on the tresde
table, then glanced down at the child with a measured
proportion of hypothetical fondness.
"Well," she said,
"and what are you doing?"
"I'm picking off my scab."
With
a sharp sucked-in breath, the woman appealed to Armitage.
He continued to dissect his chicken with zoological precision. He ignored her
looks. "My dear woman, may I have a wedge
of lemon with this chicken?"
23
"We don't serve it with lemon."
"I am not inquiring into your culinary
ignorance, madam. But either I have a wedge of lemon to cut this boiled oil or
there will be no performance this evening."
The
woman cast an exasperated look over his head and turned back to the kitchen.
"I want some chicken, too,"
announced the child.
"I'm only supposed to serve the
performers," snapped the woman, salvaging a lingerie strap beneath her
apron.
"The young lady is my assistant,"
said Armitage loftily.
The
woman snorted^and trudged off across the sawdust.
There was silence between the two on the bench.
Finally the child said, "People are
afraid of my father too."
Armitage ate in a kind of abstraction. "Respect
is the thing," he said. "It's about the only commodity you can't buy
with money these days."
"My father's very poor," she
assured him nervously.
There
was another recuperative silence. "Would you care to divulge your
name?" Armitage inquired eventually.
"Constance. Constance Ellerman."
"Constance, eh? That's the kind of people we need more
of."
The
waitress dragged toward them with the lemon and another half chicken. Constance
looked at the pliant half corpse of fowl laid out on the plate and recoiled
from the contours of such recent life. "I don't want it," she said
hastily, feverish abhorrence in her eyes:
The
woman bent over and shook her shoulder playfully, but there was a venomous
energy behind the gesture. "Why don't you want it? It's perfecdy good chicken."
Armitage interposed himself hastily, "What sort
of cannibals do you think we are, madam — to eat our recognizable
brethren?" Defdy, he sliced the nude chicken to
less recognizable lineaments and incarcerated the meat between two slices of
bread. 'There you are, my dear. A bit of witch meat. Every third bite a charm."
The
woman deposited their coffee and quivering lemon pie and slumped off, glancing
back scornfully midway across the tent.
Armitage put down his knife and fork, laid his hands
on the table and stared speculatively at them for a moment. The
24 dim right in the tent flickered. Constance
took two bites from her sandwich and tilted her head to study Armitage. A sleek tiger cat wandered in and curled round
her legs. She gave h a lap of her lemon pie. On her third bite of sandwich she
extracted a pellet from her mouth and deposited it carefully on the table.
She nudged Armitage. "What's that?"
He
broke sharply from his reverie. "What? Oh, that! Aha, that's your third
bite." He stuck his finger in a glass
of water and leveled a drop on the pellet. It sprang into a tiny paper palm.
"That's easy," said Constance, "if you're a magician."
"There
you go," he sighed. "Always underrating us.
We traffic with the supernatural, make fools of the sorcerers, defy the
alchemists, and what thanks do we get?. Skepticism! I
tell you, Constance, we're the sad harp of lost mankind, we magicians. Poor,
maligned vessels of what we know not what. Between two worlds, the conscious
and the unconscious, we perform deeds half divine. No one can explain them.
And even we are afraid ef them. In us are vested all
the vestigial senses, telepathic and empathic. And what meager tools! The remnant hunch, the inspired guess, the fugitive hint.
Pity the poor magician, Constance."
Constance,
charmed by the mellifluous chain of his expression, stirred the cup of her ear
with her finger. "Show me," she demanded. "Show me what you're
talking about."
"And
traffic with my very soul? I should say not. You can only perform especial
tricks a certain number of times, you know."
"How many times?"
Armitage speculated, lips pursed,
a cast to his eye. "Oh, I should say I'm good for about two more
performances of my magic specialty. It's a very personal piece of magic, of
course."
"Show me."
"If I gave you an honorary performance,
I'd have only one performance left, wouldn't I? No, I
can't risk that, Constance." "Why not?"
"Well, it takes a great deal out of a person,
for one thing. And suppose I really needed that trick someday in a tight spot,
with a hardhearted audience. Why, then I'd have wasted a whole performance on you."
Outside, the gathering drifted to the far end
of the school lawn, Ellerman's voice whooping them
on. Constance's head whirled to the sound, her pale hair tasseling
out. Filial shame colored her cheeks. She turned on Armitage.
"I
bet it's a silly trick anyway," she flashed. "I bet I'd laugh at
you."
Against the echo of Ellerman's
buffoonery, Armitage winced, blinked and pressed bis thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. A host
of gnats shadowed the feeble bulb hanging from the center of the tent. When Armitage looked up again, a sprightly expression was lashed
to his face.
"Constance," he said with zest,
"you have indeed humiliated me. I shall concede you a command
performance."
"I
don't care very much," she said airily, and parted the tiger cat's fur
between yellow and black.
"But
I do. How would I feel ten years from now when Constance Ellerman
is a very important person, if I were uncharitable now?"
"I won't be silly when I grow up,
anyway."
Armitage drew back on the bench, his fingers barely
touching the tresde table. "Behold,
Constance," he said huskily. "I, Armitage,
magician prince, successor to the great Pignon, can
reproduce history in condensed and animate miniature. Watch closely. I shall
recreate for you the pageantry of Genghis Khan in Turkestan, all of eight
centuries ago."
Armitage drew in his breath. His shallow chest did
not expand very much, but his cheeks dipped in alarmingly. His eyes bulged a trifle, and the saffron hue of his skin drained to
a waxy white. The atmosphere about them contracted until Armitage,
Constance and the tent were a spherical density wheeling free in imperishable
space, remote from the temporal fluff of the carnival. Constance yawned hard as
her eardrums tightened. And then Armitage began to
blow—only gcnde, phosphorescent bubbles at first,
gradually enlarging until finally, with infinite precision, he was producing
luminous pastel globes of considerable size. And within each one a small figure
or a group of figures, true in every dimension, obliviously pursued their
violent affairs. First there was Genghis Khan—only a malevolent Chinese to
Constance—riding the Great Wall with his warriors. There were palanquins with
princesses;
26
swarming, minute battles; exotic, alien faces.
Constance made no attempt to grasp the globules as they passed overhead, but
watched them with cold appraisal until they burst and disappeared. She was
evaluating a piece of technical bravura in which Armitage
was proving himself a magacian above suspicion.
There were no suitable expletives, only the drudging exclamations reserved for
the calculated surprises of adults.
Gradually,
as he reduced his effort, the strain left Armitage's
face. His breathing lengthened, the pastel globules became smaller and deeper
in color; the spectacular life encased by them diminished until the figures
were hardly larger than sugar crystal, but still rigorously faithful to
life. And eventually there was nothing on the air but a sparkling froth. The
pulsing mortality of the carnival flooded into the tent again. Armitage sat like an unstrung instrument, a fine
perspiration on his long nose.
"That was good," conceded
Constance, and edged closer to observe his debilitated expression. "Are
you all right?"
Armitage shook himself free of his misty hearing.
"Perfecdy,
perfecdy, Constance. If one overdoes a thing like
this, how-
ever, one is quite apt to—well-------------- "
"Die?"
"That's a rather cruel word, isn't it,
Constance?"
"I wish I could do a trick like that.
Could I learn it, do
you think?"
Armitage pulled down his cuffs and sprucely fitted a
fresh cigarette into his holder. "Virtuosity is not controlled or acquired,
Constance. It is bequeathed and handed on. I could only make you an outright
gift of my precocity."
"How?"
"Well, it would have to happen in a dire
moment—perhaps as I was about to leave this terrestrial pain!"
"You
mean die?" said Constance, then hastily clapped both hands over her errant
mouth.
Armitage smiled. "If you
insist. For example, if you were holding my hand at that tragic moment,
the magnetic flow of genius, an imperishable thing, would undoubtedly escape to
you."
Constance gave a windy sigh. At the same
moment, Camden poked his head inside the tent. "Armitage,
if you're ready
27
for this pack of doubting young brutes, 111 show
you the way."
Armitage rose, tamped out
his cigarette and picked up his black case.
Constance scrambled to her feet. "Mr. Armitage," she whispered horrendously, "I almost
forgot. You can't do that trick again tonight, can you? You've only got one
performance left. You'd better not forget."
"That's all right, Constance. I'll
manage."
"You
might need it," she said, her brow knit with concern. "I'm sorry I
used it up, Mr. Armitage. Maybe it won't count."
Armitage looked down, a dapper glitter in his eye.
"Thank you, Constance. I shall treasure your concern." He marched off
with inscrutable nonchalance, one shoulder weighted low by the case.
Constance
tore across the tent after him, but Camden put out a firm arm. "Your
father says you're to join the children in the audience, Constance."
She
struggled against the blockade. "Let me go!" Distressed, she called
after Armitage, "I'm sorry I used it up, Mr. Armitage! But it won't count, I'm sure!" With maddened
impatience, she bit Camden's hand.
"Constance, you litde " Pinning her hands behind
her,
he
pushed her through the audience entrance and released her like a winged thing. Rcluctandy, she mounted a chair at the rear and stood
thoughtfully on one leg, awaiting the performance. Her cousin, from the suburb
across the river, blew a feathered paper snake against her leg. With the
subconscious cunning of irritation, she lowered her raised foot and ripped it.
At
that moment the hired spodight came on and the burgundy-velvet
curtains were drawn, revealing Mr. Armitage behind
his portable table. He did not look up immediately, but continued his fleeting,
oblivious gestures over equipment, as through his audience were a secondary
consideration. Constance clapped. Her fellow men were sullen. Armitage displayed no apprehension, rather a touch of
contempt. Rapidly, in suave pantomine, he produced
four blooming geraniums from his left pocket and lined up the pots on the
table.
"That's nothing,"
scoffed the boy in front of Constance.
"It is, too," said Constance with a
kick.
28
Armitage took a substantial wooden block and whirled
it rapidly between two fingers. The contours blurred, and he tossed a large rubber ball into the audience. With a somewhat fixed smile, he
paused at the pinnacle of his toss for applause. A bit shaken at the lack of
it, he turned quickly and dropped seven lighted cigars in succession from his
sleeve.
"Faker," said
Constance's cousin languidly.
The
hour wore on humidly. All delicacies of legerdemain were laid at the skeptical
altar of youth. Flushed, perspiring and rigidly proud, Armitage
dug into obscure corners of his repertoire, but everything was too subdy perfect and nothing sufBciendy
spectacular. He flung minor miracles at their leaden feet, flawless illusions
at their surfeited eyes. Apparendy only the broad
stroke could rouse them. Constance, meanwhile, pounded her chair in a one-man
claque.
With
reckless desperation, Armitage brought forth a
handful of ancient coins and flung them upward. They disappeared in mid-air,
only to be discovered at his direction in the pockets of lads at various points
in the audience.
"Aw, he's a phony!" scoffed a lad in the front row.
"He
is not!" yelled Constance. . . . "Show them, Mr. Armitage!
Make them some history! That'll show them!"
Armitage appeared to hcstitate,
then resolve himself in hopeless pity for his
benighted audience. He held himself to his fullest height. Constance went into
a frenzy of clapping.
"I shall re-create for you a spectacle which
you do not deserve," he said. "In accurate and animated miniature, I
shall produce out of the archives of time the Battle of Bunker Hill."
A sheepish silence fell. Armitage
reared back slighdy. The very atmosphere fled before
his drawn breath and sickly pallor. He began to blow—short, carbonated breaths
which were gradually lengthened and sustained. And with them, the preliminary
fizz of his effort grew to translucent bubbles of substantial diameter,
floating just beyond reach and popping into oblivion at the far end of the
tent. Obscurely at first, activity wakened in them. Small figures clarified,
regiments marched, uniforms flashed. The lads roused from their lethargy and
fought for vantage points of view.
Constance was more concerned with the effect
than the phenomenon. It was only as the largest bubble, containing the
29
ascent of the British up the hill, passed over,
that she glanced triumphantly toward Armitage and saw
him totter and grasp the backdrop weakly. Climbing ruthlessly over her contemporaries,
she reached the grassy aisle and ran toward the stage.
"Don't do any more,
Mr. Armitage! Stop it!" she shrilled.
In
the wings, Camden, with his first intuitive reaction in years, quickly tumbled
the curtain, but not before Constance had wriggled across the foodights on her stomach and flung herself
beneath the curtain, on the weather side of death.
When she reached the side of Armitage, he was crumpled with his head on his knees. She
slipped her hand into his. He felt the warmth and tightened his convulsive
grip. She peered with fearless candor into his contorted face. He managed a
shred of a smile laced with agony.
"Good
. . . Constance," he gasped. "You made it. It's all . . . yours now.
Oh, ancient masters"—his voice was no more than a dry leaf in a fitful
wind—"I commend to your grace, Constance .. . first
woman in the royal line ... of
custodians."
Ellerman and Camden arrived simultaneously, one with
a bottle of lemon pop, the other with a bulky first-aid kit. Armitage waved them off disdainfully and toppled over. It
was fully twenty minutes before Ellerman, still
rumbling with the rudiments of resuscitation, discovered his daughter, trapped to the elbow beneath the weight of Armitage's body, her hand in his clasp.
He
attempted to divert her with small talk as he extricated her. "There now,
young lady, we'll send you home with Martin. And we'll certainly tease Mr. Armitage about this when he gets better, won't we?"
She
wiped her stained face on the sleeve of her free arm and heard him with dull
tolerance. "Anyway, I got it all before he died."
Ellerman cast a bleak glance at Camden and laid the
back of his hand quickly to her forehead.
Camden
drove Ellerman home afterward. Camden's wife was
waiting at the Ellermans'. They had planned a late
foursome and recuperative drink the day before. The women were waiting it out
in the game room over the garage.
"Hail
the erstwhile ringmaster," said Ellerman's wife
as he entered. "How did it go?"
30
"Never again," said Ellerman.
"You
forget," said his wife, torturing an old abrasion, "we must keep our
child in a school of standards at any price."
"That
moth-eaten magician died on us," said Ellerman,
wiping the make-up from his face with a monogrammed paper towel. Ellerman's wife glanced at Camden's wife with sudden
comprehension. Behind the knotty-pine bar, Camden plunked stick pineapple into
old-fashioned glasses. "Ugly business. No address
on him. Not a cent in his pockets. A dinner roll in his case.
Out of nowhere, into whatever."
"What on earth did you do with
him?" inquired his wife.
"Sent him to the morgue. Or should we have brought him with us?"
"One old body more or less," sighed
his wife.
"Martin bring
Constance home all right?" Ellerman asked.
"What was left of her."
"She
was pretty worked up, I guess. Bed was the place for that young lady."
"Well, she didn't make it," said
his wife flatly.
Ellerman looked up, the hollows of his eyes still
laden with grease paint; it gave him a wild look. "Where the devil is
she?"
"She's
in the garden. Yes, my darling, the gates are locked. She ran out there when
Martin brought her home, and she won't come in. I tried to catch her, but even
though you have never acknowledged it, I do have a point of exhaustion, you
know."
"It
was a pretty gruesome experience for her," Ellerman
reflected. "Is she crying?"
"Crying?
My dear, she's in a rage against all society. She's gnashing her teeth. She
wants none of us. We're silly. People laugh at us. We don't have to support her
any longer. Shell earn her own livelihood, if you
please, with a most remarkable piece of magic she's inherited from this Mr. Armitage. Did you know our daughter can revive history
inside colored bubbles, my darling? Do you think we ought to take her up on
it?"
Ellerman appealed to Camden, "I tell you,
there's no percentage in it. You spend a good half of your life slogging away
in some hotbox to give your kids the things you never had. You make a damned
fool of yourself to prove you can
31 be
a pal. And what happens? Some mangy fraud comes along with a bag of tricks,
pulls a bit of hocus-pocus for cakes and coffee, and they turn against
you."
Camden
foraged in his pocket for his lighter and brought forth, in a pause of
puzzlement, a slip of paper which he studied as he lounged across the bar.
"See what you make of this, Ellerman. Damned if
I can figure it out," he mused.
Ellerman came round. "Looks like one of those
genealogical trees."
"But no mothers. Just fathers," observed Camden. "And not all the same nationality, at that.
"International
gametes," quipped Ellerman.
"Sounds like a bunch of gyp artists, frankly. Where'd you get it?"
"Out of Armitage's
magic kit. I
thought it might give us some cue on his relatives."
"He probably gets a better break this
way," said Ellerman. "What's that up there
in the corner?"
Camden
bent to the almost imperceptible script. " 'Descent
of inheritance,' it says. Descent of inheritance to what, for
the love of Pete? Listen to them. Hippolytus, Gerbert, Androletti,
Baptista Porta, Kircher, Comus, Philipstal, Maskelyne, de Kolta, Pignon, Armitage . . . and after Armitage
a question mark."
"I recognize the
question mark."
Camden
lolled back on one arm. "That was still a honey of a trick, and you know
it." He turned to his wife. "This guy, Dolores, actually reproduced
the Battle of Bunker Hill inside bubbles. Every detail as
clear as life. The figures moved just like a motion picture, only they
had dimensión. . . . How do you explain it, Ellerman?"
"The
optical illusion owes a great debt to the magic lantern," Ellerman replied without conviction. He picked up his drink
and examined it critically, as though expecting to see some minute form of
marine life in it.
"Before
you knock off," said his wife, "it might be a wise idea to bring
young Constance Phantasmagoria in out of the foggy dew."
Ellerman
snapped his fingers recollectively and put down his
drink. Briskly, he descended the stairs leading to the garden.
"Constance!" he called sharply. "It's time to cut out this
32
nonsense and get to bed now! Constance! Where are
you?" He walked rapidly through the arbor and past the benches along the
gravel path. "Constance, answer me."
"You
don't have to bother about me any more," came the wan reply.
"That
may be," said her father, tracking down her voice, "but the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Daughters might post an objection. Are you
cold?"
"No," came
the annoyed monosyllable.
"Oh,
there you are," said Ellerman, stooping.
"How in the dickens did you get there and -what are you doing
anyway?"
Betrayed
by her white dress, Constance sat crouched against the fence, encaged by the
thorny trunks of climbing roses. "I'm practicing."
"Practicing what?"
"The bubble trick. Mr. Armitage gave
it to me."
"Well, suppose you come inside and we'll
talk about that."
"I don't have to come inside. I'm going
to live out here now."
Ellerman evaluated his chances of dragging her out
un-scratched, to say nothing of his own hide. He could not even see how she had
got there. But there she sat, a sorry litde oracle
pitted against her world. It was shock, Ellerman
decided. The child had held the hand of death. It was a traumatic experience
even for an adult. He must remember that.
"Constance,"
he said gently, "Mr. Armitage died this evening.
It was a shock to all of us."
"It wasn't to Mr. Armitage," she insisted.
"Well,
perhaps not. But things are different for Mr. Armitage
now. He's living a different kind of life—a more pleasant life, an easier life.
That's what death is, you know."
"You're silly."
"Yes,
I've often considered that possibility. But the important thing for us to
remember is that though Mr. Armitage is dead, we are
no different. We go on in the same way. We get up in the morning, we eat our
cereal, we go to bed at night—"
She
drew back tensely against the wall and let out a jagged, objecting wail.
"I am too different! Mr. Armitage left me his trkk! I can do Mr. Armitage's
trick! I can draw history, like he said!"
Ellerman stood up. His knee joints snapped. "You
don't
33
know any history to speak of yet," he said
coldly. "You have got to learn there is a point at which we stop playing
and become serious. I am going into the house now. When I reach the steps I
shall give you one more chance. If you don't come then, the door will be locked
until you apologize for this conduct. Your mother and I love you dearly, but
you are a very ordinary litde
girl with no special privileges or outstanding talents. Harsh as it may sound, you must learn to live with what you are."
Ellerman walked toward the house. From the game room
came the recording of that damned Alsatian polka which Camden played to death
every visit. It struck him occasionally that the record was as silly as Camden.
He was engulfed by a familar wave of distrust for the
unreality of his utterly normal life.
With
all his heart he wanted to stay out here in the garden and comfort his
daughter. He had always tried to do a decent job of this business of being a parent. But what if his parents hadn't borne down hard on the wild
illusions of his youth? Where would he be now? There were times when he was
more terrified of having a too remarkable child than a stupid one. Somewhere
between two poles there was a nice, healthy average, if you controlled all the
environmental forces. Better they grew up to believe less than something too
lurid. Besides, what in the name of common sense would one do with a prodigy
anyway?
At the steps, he turned adamantly and faced
the dark end of the garden. He couldn't expect to erase Armitage
in an evening, but barring something out of the ordinary, there was nothing
indelible about these charlatans. "Are you coming, Constance?"
From
her thorny ambush, she raged like a savage, cornered pygmy, "Wait! I'll
show you—I'll show you!"
Ellerman waited, then suddenly took a backward step
and flung his arm protectively across his eyes. For sailing toward him from the
end of the garden and floating cheerfully overhead was a barrage of insouciant
pastel globules, rather raggedly blown as yet, but containing in precise
miniature the nice, healthy sequence of his personal history.
34
SCENE FOR
SATAN
by Noel Lan^ley
The
man who played the ghost had died. "Then who—or what—was this apparition
that walked the battlements of Elsinore and frightened Hamlet into the most
realistic performance of his entire
career?
TN THE '8o's,
the last of the Fothergays had bonded together ■*•
to form the Grand Family of the Theater, and they blazed in the kind of Gothic
glory that went out with the Mauve Decade. Fin de siècle, the period was called; the long-drawn-out
deathbed of the Golden Age.
When
old Walmsbury Fothergay
died at seventy-six in an asylum outside Paris, nobody knew who he was, or
cared; he was laid in a potter's field. His last appearance on the stage had
been in 1909, in England, and even then his name had meant
little to his audience, who had been discomfited by his halting delivery and
old-fashioned gestures, and his presence in the cast had gone unnoticed by the
press. The part had been Adam in a provincial touring company's production of
As You Like It, and he had been given it on
sufferance. Hodson, the manager of the company, had
once been his dresser, twenty years earlier. Hodson'had seen him as
Hamlet and Macbeth when he had been the pampered and idolized infant genius of
the Fothergays. On the first night of his Hamlet, the
audience had risen to its feet and given him an ovation that they now reserved
for Cup Tie Finals and prize fights. The Fothergays
35
had been in their own box—all except Phillida, who had played the Queen, thus to add luster to
her nephew's debut. They stood, too, with their eyes full of easy tears> and
the audience included them in the ovation, and Phillida
embraced Walmsbury with massive grandeur, and held
his hand as he bowed, for all the world like a doting
nurse teaching a child to paddle. There had been a tribal banquet afterward in
the Fothergay mansion in Belgrave
Square, and the whole family had been present, down -to obscure second and
third cousins who wafted timidly in the background and bobbed or curtsied
obsequiously if addressed by the great ones.
The
entire clan spoke in automatic meter, like so much bad parody of Shakespeare,
and their sentences sagged and bulged with flowered phrases and archaic usages.
Their royalty was more real to them than any kinship with Victoria could have
been; their world of Yorick's skulls and fortressed
battlements at midnight clung about them wheresoever
they went, like a somber curtain shielding them from the rude daylight of
reality. They saw all incident, no matter how trivial
and mundane, from behind a row of imaginary foodights.
They asked for the salt at table in the same tones in which they demanded their
scabbards of their pages on the stage. Their dignity and self-sufficiency were
impregnable. They knew no peer and called no man "master," and their
passions were as undisciplined, illogical and violent as those of spoiled
children. They quarreled savagely, were prey to insane torments of jealousy and
equally insane paroxysms of demonstrative affection for the most casual of
causes, and then could remain unmoved in the face of public calamities and
disaster. To the world, they presented a front so united that to scratch a Fothergay was to beard a wolf pack. Illegitimacy ran
rampant in their antecedents; profligacy and debauchery—of a restrained and
haughty nature—were a part of their heritage. They did not sow wild oats so
much as dragon's teeth, but every tooth was sown far from the eyes of the
prying world, for they feared the censure of their public far more than that of
God Himself.
Old
Porter Fothergay was suspected of being a bastard son
of Byron, nor did his looks belie it; and certainly the wild, tormented
disarray of his moods was as Byronic as it was tiresome to his family.
Sardou, Porter's elder
brother, was the skeleton in the Fothergay closet. At
twenty he had been the subject of a scandal that forced him to leave England,
and he lived in Bavaria, his life shrouded in mystery. The scandal had been
long forgotten by the public; but upon his infrequent visits to England he was
barred from the house; the family was forbidden all intercourse with him. He
went by an obscure continental tide, never answering to the name of Fothergay, and he dressed in funereal black. None of the Fothergay men showed their age, but in his case that
quality was abnormally pronounced; at sixty-four, he looked a young forty. His
most remarkable feature was his teeth, which were perfect; and his eyes were as
clear and white as a youth's. Phillida was adamant
and vehement in her conviction that he had sold himself to the devil and
practiced the black art.
Phillida was statuesque and massive, with a deep,
musical voice and dark eyes that had been compared to Mrs. Siddons'. Her Lady
Macbeth was the greatest in living memory, and she was a secret drinker. She
was deeply superstitious, and the only Fothergay who
went religiously to church. As a young girl she had had an affair with Lord
Melbourne, and the Fothergay streak of cruelty took
the form, in her, of demoniac persecution of her maids and dressers.
Walmsbury, not yet nineteen, had inherited the
effulgent brouhaha of his strain in full measure. His vitality, like an erratic
clock spring, was perpetually either overwound or rundown.
He gave full rein to his emotions, and, lacking the sublime snobbishness that
insured the rest of the family against crises with the middle classes, was
invariably in need of extrication by his clan from the sordid aftermaths of Shelleyesque encounters with foolish young women of no
account. He, too, had inherited the Byronic stamp; the retrousse
nose, the auburn locks that hung carelessly upon his brow. He had even gone so
far as to cultivate a slight limp, which the women in his audiences found
devastating. His mind was smothered by the gorgeous humbug of the Fothergays; not one of them ever progressed mentally beyond
the exuberance of adolescence; the transition from first childhood to second
was bridged only by the flimsy tinsel of the naive self-adulation and utter
self-content that followed in the wake of their acclaim.
37
Lamorna, his mother, was the least electric of the
family. She,had never been a
great actress, and had submitted with gratitude to the uncertain delights of
marrying Porter and bearing his children. She was fat and resigned now, and
philosophically indifferent to the alarums and excursions of her husband and
son. Her two youngest daughters, Minerva and Cordelia,
were still at finishing school, and had so far shown no signs of inheriting the
family's buskin gusto. Two of Porter's illegitimate children were members of
the theater company; they were quiet and reserved, and were never permitted to
forget their minor status. They had inherited little of Porter's dynamic ego,
and were permitted to walk upon the boards with him solely as a magnanimous
concession on the part of the concerted Fothergays.
If the fortunes of the family were as
prenatally damned as their Byronic antecedents might well imply, it was Sardou
who elected to himself the role of Nemesis; for, later in the same season that
had brought recognition and glory to Walms-bury, he
arrived in London and, contrary to all regulations, called in person upon Walmsbury in his dressing room to compliment him upon his
performance. It was their first meeting, and Walmsbury,
being headstrong and contrary, at once struck up a defiant friendship with his
wicked uncle. They dined regularly at the Garrick Club and in Sardou's rooms in
the Albany, finding much in common and enjoying the mutual bond of cordial
admiration.
Phillida was the first to ferret out and disclose the
illicit friendship to the family, and despite her alarm and vehemence, the news
was received at first with incredulity; She had spared no pains to gather
proofs and testimonies of it, however; and at last, after much violent uproar
and patriarchal denunciations of Sardou, it was agreed that Walmsbury must not be openly taxed with his perfidy, but
excused on the grounds of his youth and hotheadedness. Porter would interview
his brother and forbid further commerce between the two.
The interview took place accordingly in the
library of the house; a gloomy room that smelled of mildew and rotting leather
bindings, for the sun never reached it, and it was used only on grave and
painful occasions. It was lined with blotchy plaster statues of Roman emperors
that towered into the permanent twilight of the ceiling, and the velvet curtains over the windows
had gone black with tarnish. None of this was due to negligence, for the rest
of the house was spodess. It had been left so to add
to its theatrical effect.
Sardou arrived in a private carriage,
immaculately dressed, and the family hid upstairs while the buder
showed him through to the library. Porter awaited him imposingly, one foot upon
the fender, his hand casually fingering his two gold watch fobs.
The brothers greeted each other with courtesy
and restraint, and seated themselves. The difference in their looks was marked
enough to be disconcerting; Porter could have passed for Sar-dou's
father.
"My dear Porter," said Sardou
without preamble, "I believe L know the purpose of your invitation. You are concerned
for your son's well-being, and fear that I may influence his habits adversely.
Your fears are justified, your concern well-founded. I am an execrable
influence upon your son. In your place, I would not have the slightest
hesitation in offering me sixty thousand pounds to quit England, never to
return. Believe me, his career, his prospects and his peace of mind are well
worth every penny."
Porter, confounded, digressed into vague
threats and blustered his way through irrelevant verbiage. He aired again, and
in unguarded terms, his feeling for his brother, pounding occasionally upon
the table and reddening about the neck.
"It is quite useless to froth at me,
Porter," Sardou replied eventually. "I am in England because I need
money. Frankly, I am ruined. Had the family not neglected me in my youth,
denied me normal affection and left me to grapple with the world while yet too
young to comprehend its subder hazards, I might now
express myself quite otherwise. As it is, I ask only for what would be legally
mine had justice been done me."
"Damn you, not a penny! Not a fig!"
returned his brother fiercely.
Sardou,
never moving, let his eyes slant away casually, and then said, "Porter,
you are my brother; for no other reason I warn you as I do now. I have powers
that are not usual. Often their impact is of greater force than I might have
intended. \ My
laws are not yours. Don't cross me, Porter. I most earnesdy
39
advise you not to cross me. We have flesh in
common; I warn you in all brotherliness and compassion not to cross me or I may
blast your world asunder."
"I
am not awed," said Porter aggressively. "Unless all communication
between you and my son cease, I will be forced to take steps. I am not without
power or influence."
"Then
must we match wits?" asked Sardou. "You force my hand?"
"The
words are yours, not mine," said Porter, rising with finality and striking
an indomitable attitude.
Sardou,
rising also, with an ex-pression of regret, bowed
civilly, and the issue was closed. He drove away in his private carriage, and
the family at once forgathered in the drawing room to hear the outcome.
"The blackguard is trying to rob
me," Porter informed them with righteous animation, "but I flatter
myself in all humility that he has met, if not his match, at least an adversary
of no negligible ability!"
Phillida, her eyes jet with anguish, wrung her hands.
"He is in league with evil forces!" she insisted. "It is a
matter for exorcism! Only the full power of the Church can confound him!"
"You are overwrought," said Porter.
"It is understandable."
"Would
I were!" returned Phillida dramatically.
"But I know why he has returned to England! It is true he is in need of
money. What is worse—far worse—is that he dare not return to Europe! Pay him
his money, Porter, and release your son from fealty to him! Walmsbury
is in deadly, unholy danger from his influence. It is not flesh and blood with
which you have to deal. It is with the forces of darkness, the minions of the
Antichrist!"
"Damnation, Phillida!"
returned Porter testily. "The issue is ugly enough without draping it in
mumbo jumbo! Let us confine ourselves to hard facts!"
For answer, Phillida
wrenched a letter from her reticule and in ringing declamatory tones began to
read from it, " ' . . . in answer to your inquiries . . . our authority is
that Sardou di Ardinablo
has been forced to flee the country on pain of arrest for the prosecution of
witchcraft against the
person of a youth of nineteen, Arnol
Horst--------------- '"
40
Here Phillida broke
off-to repeat in trembling accents, "a youth of nineteen—the age of Walmsbury!"
"From
whom is the letter?" asked Porter, concealing his impatience with a poor
grace.
"From
the Bishop of Tizezzlar," returned Phillida with fire, "written in confidence to my own
priest. Will you query its sincerity? Hardly! It continues: "... a youth of nineteen, Arnol Horst, a choir leader in the Cathedral of Tizeealar, of exemplary character and undisputed morality,
the sole means of support of his widowed mother. Horst struck
up a friendship with di Ardinablo,
the outcome of which be»g di
Ardi-nablo's persistent appearance at choir practice
in the guise of tut** and patron. Remonstrances
and disapproval had no effect upon the relationship between Horst and di Ardinablo. His influence upon
the youth being almost hypnotic in its intensity, attempts were made to
prevent meetings. Upon di Ardinablo
being refused admission to the rooms in which the choir was assembled, a series
of misfortunes began to befall the cathedral, clearly prompted by mischievous
impiety. Defacing of relics, damage to furnishings, and sacrilegious writings
occurred. This was not done in the presence of witnesses, but evidence pointed
directly to the machinations of di Ardinablo, whose excursions in the terrain of black magic
are common knowledge in Tizezzlar.
" 'The youth Horst, furthermore, fell into an
apathy, his face taking on a pallor and his spirits remaining dejected. He
refused all food and asked constandy for di Ardinablo. Convinced that the
youth was the victim of sorcery, the rites of exorcism were twice practiced, on
both occasions to no avail. On the night of December the third, the magistrate
was approached by the curé on
my own express instruction. Together they visited di Ardinablo in his chambers, and the following is an exact
account of the happenings, as testified both by the curé and the magistrate on holy oath..
" 'Di Ardinablo was
requested to cease all association with Horst. This he declared he had already
done, adding that it was "so much the worse for meddlers," and that
the results would prove disastrous to the youth and his mentors.
" 'When taxed with the question: did he admit to
employing sorcery in his efforts to regain the youth's company, he
41
laughed aloud. Upon being pressed for an admission, he stated, "You have flung the full weight
of the Church against me. May I not
retaliate with a secular pebble or tw6?" Asked if the youth was in danger
of dying, he replied, yes, unless given freedom of thought and action.
"'
The cure now made the sign of the cross, saying "Do you deny God?" Di
Ardinablo answered, "There are many. Some I deny, others I serve." "Heresy!" declared the magistrate, whereupon di Ardinablo laughed aloud, in
the act of which, spitde from his lips fell upon the
magistrate's face.
"
'The magistrate was made aware of a burning sensation upon his upper lip, where
the spittle had struck him, the pain being "acute and fiery," and on
raising his hand to his face, found himself to be bleeding from the lip in
violent profusion. All efforts to stem the flow proving unavailing, loss of
blood and extreme terror caused the magistrate to fall insensible to the floor.
A gash or wound was now perceptible on his lip,
severing it to the nostril and disclosing the teeth behind, the blood
continuing to flow at an alarming speed. The cure, aware that he was in the
presence of evil powers exceeding in strength his own, called upon di Ardinablo to save the life of
the magistrate, fast ebbing from the loss of blood. Di Ardinablo,
in no way disconcerted by the result of his infernal powers, at once demanded
the freedom of the youth Horst in return. The cure, seeing no alternative,
acceded to his request. Instandy the blood ceased to
flow from the lip of the magistrate and he slowly regained consciousness. The
cure assisted him from the chambers and took him immediately to a doctor. On
the way, which was no more than a four-minute walk, the magistrate kept his
handkerchief over his lip. Upon entering the doctor's house and removing the
handkerchief in the presence of the doctor, no trace whatsoever remained of the
wound, the skin was not only whole but showed neither
scar nor abrasion. Where blood had fallen upon his clothing and hands, however,
the stains remained, not yet dry. The magistrate, displaying outstanding
fortitude, at once recoursed to his headquarters,
issued a warrant against the person of di Ardinablo, and personally led a party of police to di Ardinablo's chambers,
accompanied this time by myself and the Archbishop of Tanka-Higin.
" 'Di Ardinablo was
found to have fled, however. Of the youth Horst, the worst was yet to be
learned. Upon our return to the cathedral, we were led to the room which he had
used as an office, and to which no human agency could have gained access. He
was lying dead upon the floor, his lips bared like those of animal, in a pool
of his own blood. Upon his upper lip was a disfigurement identical to that of
the magistrate. Your brother, Sardou di Ardinablo, is a daemon, a creature of hell; his powers are
those of the eternally damned.'"
A
silence fell upon the room at the close of these words, and Phillida,
her breast heaving from the exertion of her reading, stood with the letter in
her hand and gazed at Porter as if defying him to disregard its import.
Porter,
obviously affected by the theatrical power of the account, hesitated before he
spoke. When he finally did so, he spoke guardedly. "Let us not discount
any reports or information that could or might affect the fortunes of Walmsbury," he said. "Let us also earnesdy pray that no such supernatural phenomena present
themselves in our dealings with Sardou. If it is the feeling of the family
that I should submit to his request for money, I am prepared to bow in the face
of the wish of the majority."
"Give
him all he wants!" cried Phillida. "But
only be certain that he quits England instandy upon
receiving it!"
The rest of the family, torn between
embarrassment at having to admit their credulity of such a tale, and alarm for
the safety of Walmsbury, nodded or muttered assent,
keeping their glances assiduously averted.
"One thing shall be understood,
then," said Porter. "Unnecessary as it is for me to say it, still, I
do. No word of this must ever reach the ears of Walmsbury."
The family assented again, and Porter retired,
profoundly disturbed, to arrange the transfer of the money to his brother.
On
the face of it, it would appear that this transaction would write finis to the
influence of Sardou upon his immediate family. Worshiper of Satan though he
might be, he was still a gendeman whose word should
be his bond, yet the same day that the bank draft was placed in his hands,
Porter fell from the top to the bottom of the ornate marble staircase that
adorned the hall of the Belgrave Square mansion. He
landed
43
on the side of his head, snapping his neck like
a drumstick, and his teeth met through his tongue, which protruded at least
three inches out of his mouth. Though rigor mortis had not set in when he was
picked up by the footmen and carried to his bedroom, his jaws were set like a
clamp upon his tongue, and his eyes bulged open in a
blank, glazed stare of ludicrous incredulity. A silk pocket handkerchief was
laid over his face, embroidered with gold and monogrammed "V.R."
The
death was a public bereavement; the papers carried lengthier obituaries than
those accorded prime ministers; the theater closed for two weeks, and the
motion to bury him in the Abbey was defeated by the narrowest of margins. Phillida had retired from the world into her suite, where
she wept unceasingly and was visited almost hourly by members of the clergy.
The house of Fothergay had been dealt a mortal blow;
its disintegration was almost visible. Overnight, the luster of the mansion in Belgrave Square had grown musty and old. The library now
looked as tawdry as it was in actuality. No one could mount the marble
staircase without a shudder at its macabre associations. The brocade curtains
in the main hall stood out in all their decay.
Walmsbury wandered aimlessly from room to room, his
mind offended and disarrayed by the blunt vulgarity of coping with death that
did not vanish upon the fall of a curtain and the first roar of applause, but
which remained uncouthly permanent, hanging in the air like the smell of bad
drains. The golden dream boat of his way of life had struck shoals, and the
gilt was being painfully scraped away from its flimsy hull.
He
was now the head of the family, appealed to for decisions, persistendy
badgered for consents and signatures and opinions of approval or otherwise.
Matters
were made no easier when, upon the day of the funeral, Phillida
appeared for the first time and began sobbing Latin prayers and beseeching him
to guard himself against vague terrors; and later, at the very graveside,
having perceived Sardou in the huge crowd of mourners, collapsed into
hysterics of such serious proportions that she had to be forcibly escorted back
to her carriage. That night she ran a fever and
44
shrieked aloud like a wild thing, alternately praying
and crying for protection from Sardou.
Sardou
himself, meanwhile, had displayed the most correct demeanor. His wreath was the
largest of the many thousands that towered
above the grave in a precarious pile. He sent notes of condolence couched in the most restrained and sensitive terms, and made no attempt to thrust his presence even upon Walmsbury
until the day of the reading of the will. The family were
assembled in the inner office of their solicitor, a benign octogenarian, in
whose care the will, doubly sealed, had lain.
The women sat as far from Sardou as possible, eying him like hens eying a fox. Phillida wore a black veil, and she ostentatiously held a
gold crucifix tighdy in her hands.
The
solicitor broke the seals, one by one, and slowly drew the will from its
wrappings. As he
did so, a faint wreath of thin, pale smoke untwined itself from the will and floated delicately toward the chandelier.' So small was it that its incongruity might well have
gone unnoticed among the preoccupied gathering had the old man not put down the will and rubbed his hands with his
handkerchief as if they were smarting, while an expression of uneasy
bewilderment crept over his features. Phillida choked
back an involuntary exclamation and sank back in her chair, and Sardou raised
his eyebrows in innocent interest.
The
solicitor looked about the group, and then lifted the will and unfolded it charily. As he did so, a wind began to blow against the windows with a mournful low sighing. The curtains swelled away from the
wall in slow, stately motion, and the chandelier began an imperceptible
rocking. A chill slithered round the room, though the weather was mild, and
lingered about the ankles and necks of the family.
The solicitor began to read the will aloud, and then slowly his voice began to fade to a murmur,
then to a whisper, and finally to a soundless
mouthing.
"This
will," he said at last, removing his glasses and
struggling to keep emotion from his voice,
"was sealed by the late Mr. Porter Fothergay in my
presence. I was aware of the contents ...
or so I thought. The seals, as you may observe, are untouched; the will has never been moved from
45 its place in my strongbox. There is, however, a codicil." He
paused and licked his lips. "A codicil of which I have
no recollection whatsoever. It is in the hand of the late Mr. Porter Fothergay. It bequeaths the sum of two hundred thousand
pounds—two thirds of the complete estate—to his brother, Sardou Thackeray Tournelay Fothergay, and the
guardianship of his nephew, Walmsbury Porter Tournelay Fothergay, until his
coming of age."
A
gusset of wind at this point slid beneath the will and lifted it gently an inch
or so from the table and dropped it again. A stunned, horrified silence fell
upon the family, and Sardou had the grace to bow his head in discreet
self-effacement; then the silence was split asunder by a shriek from Phillida. Holding the crucifix rigidly before her she rose
and pointed a condemning finger at Sardou.
"Fiend!"
she cried. "Child of damnation! Get thee hence! Begone; Begone, ere the wrath of
heaven annihilate you!"
Sardou
rose also, and, in a placating voice, replied without due concern, "Your
attitude is forgivable in the extreme, Phillida.
Believe me, I offer you my profoundest sympathies. My good fortune means litde to me -in the face of your distress. I shall
withdraw as you request, sister, and bear you no hard feelings for the
epithets."
As
good as his word, he quit the inner office, closing the door sofdy behind him, and with his departure the chill wind
died down, the curtains sagged lifelessly back against the wall, and the
pent-up feelings of the gathering were suddenly given full voice. In the
ensuing uproar, only Walmsbury remained collected. In
the violent and prolonged examinations and comparisons to which the signature
on the will was subject, he sat quiedy, listening and
observing, while within him an unbefitting jubilation began to radiate at the
thought of his new freedom.
There
was no possible chance that the codkil was a forgery.
For weeks it passed through the hand of every expert in London and all of them
prescribed it as genuine.
Walmsbury, after a fitting period of mourning, left
the Belgrave Square mansion and moved into rooms near
his uncle. His mother and Phillida in indifferent health, left England for the Continent upon doctors' orders,
and the lesser
46
figures of the family were left to close and dispose
of the house. So complete and lethal was the rift brought about by Walms-bury's departure that the dan
can be said to have disintegrated forever as a power in the land at the moment
when he climbed from the pavement to his coach and slammed the door behind him.
His career, however, proceeded
to fresh heights; his popularity doubled and quadrupled, and he now stood
alone as the greatest Shakespearean of his time. Sardou, moreover, began to
make his appearance as an actor in his nephew's plays. Cir-cumspecdy,
he started in minor roles, displayed always a nice tact while actually upon the boards; and finally, a year after the
death of his brother, when the season reopened with Hamlet, he was cast as the
Ghost at his own express request. His make-up was impressive and horrific in
the extreme. When he stepped onto the darkened stage on the night of the first
dress rehearsal, an unholy pale green glow seemed to emanate from him, and an eerie
shudder ran through the watchers when he spoke his first lines in tones of such
sepulchral ill omen as to be almost in actuality from beyond the grave.
The
first night was the event of the season. Long before the rise of the curtain
the auditorium hummed with tense anticipation. Royalty was represented, and
romantic foreign costumes intershot the diamonds and
starch of the English gentry in the orchestra stalls.
In Walmsbury's dressing room, however, an incident of disconcerting
moment occurred, an incident that betokened the presence of some occult force
that was foreign to the powers of Sardou, and inexorably hostile to him.
Walmsbury had come to the theater early, and while he
was attiring himself in his costume, became slowly aware of an indefinable
disturbance in the atmosphere. The dressing room had been his father's, and
there was a lithograph of old Porter on the wall still,
dressed as Hamlet, and gazing with brooding eyes upon the room. Tonight the
portrait had taken on an almost magnetic quality, and Walmsbury
found his eyes returning to it constantly, as if by taking it by surprise, he
would discover some uncanny movement upon its face or read some secret message
in its expression. A sickly undercurrent of fear began to possess him; it was
not stage fright,
47 for, if anything, he was over-confident of himself and too vain ever to
fear that his performance might not be his best. The fear was indefinable; it was as if he
were the spectator of some grisly portent that boded ill for someone else, not
himself; and that vague but ominous forces were at work.
When
he rubbed the make-up across his face, his upper lip smarted as if from a netde sting. Anxiously he cleaned his face with a towel and
called to his dresser petulantly to help him. Together they examined his lip in
the miror. The smarting continued, increasing in
irritation, and Walmsbury began to verge upon a state
of hysteria. Moreover, there was no sign upon his lip to indicate a hurt of any
kind. The dresser was sent running for a doctor, and Walmsbury
flung himself violently upon his sofa, his hands over his eyes. There was a
tap upon his door which he ignored, and then it opened, and Sardou, already
dressed in his ghoulish rig, entered with alarm upon his face.
"Walmsbury!"
he said in an agitated voice. "What is this
your dresser told me of pain in your lip?" v
"It burns me!" said Walmsbury tearfully.
"I
cannot understand it,"
said Sardou nervously, sitting
swifdy beside him and running his fingers along his
face. "It
cannot be! It would be impossible! Even accident could not re-
direct it back against me---------- "
He broke off, and leaving the
tips of his fingers upon Walmsbury's
temples, commenced to breathe deeply and slowly, his eyes took on a strange,
icy intensity, and the pupils contracted as if he were facing a bright light.
A
warm sensation spread throughout Walmsbury's forehead
and then began to move down his face. He began to relax and closed his eyes
with a sense of relief; when suddenly the warm flow reached his lip and he gave
a scream so piercing that Sardou leaped to his feet.
"My
God!" said Sardou unsteadily, his face transformed by pane. "Who is
doing it? Something has gone wrong! Walmsbury, grit
your teeth! Defy it! Listen to me! It is impossible for you to feel that pain!
Do you hear! You cannot feel it! I harness the powers of the earth to deny it;
I confound the influence that confronts me!" and he spoke several
sentences in a rapid undertone, moving his fingers in the air as he did
48 so, in obscure cabalistic patterns. Walmsbury was
aware of intense heat in the room, and pulled at his collar, coughing for
breath; the pain in his lip writhed like a live nerve, then suddenly abated and vanished. He lay back upon the
sofa, and Sardou stood watching him intendy, beads of
sweat oozing through the green of his make-up.
"Has it gone?" Sardou said at last
in a low, dry voice, and Walmsbury
nodded weakly. "Have no more fears. What you have suffered was not meant
for you. It was meant for me, but I have vanquished it. It will not
return," said Sardou with undue forcefulness. "You need no doctor. In
a moment your strength will return, and you can finish your make-up."
"What was it?" asked Walmsbury
unsteadily.
"Never mind," returned Sardou curdy. "Forget it. Think of your performance. I shall
stay with you until curtain rise." He himself was disconcerted, though he
concealed it, and in his mind uncertainties and misgivings began clustering,
for it was the first time in his life that he had found himself pitting his
sorcery against an invisible adversary that was stronger than himself.
On the other side of the proscenium, Phillida, pale and ill, had entered and taken her place in
the Fothergay box. She had arrived in London from
Dover not an hour earlier, and her journey had exhausted her. She carried in
her reticule a small pearl-handled pistol; it lay upon her
lap and she could feel the weight of it pressing against her knee. It was her
intention, solemnly conceived and unshakable, to kill her brother upon his
line: "My hour is almost come." Her hands were perfecdy
still and her heart beat dully and slowly. Her mind, exhausted and weary, lay
in a passive atrophy. She looked neither to the
left nor to the right, and was unaware of the bows of courtesy and greeting
that were directed at her from the other boxes.
The orchestra assembled and the overture
began. The house lights were dimmed slowly and imperceptibly. The mighty
audience quietened by degrees, like the subsiding of a Gargantuan hornets' nest. At last only the foodights, low and green, flung an eerie half-light up the
gigantic velvet curtain; the music lulled away uneasily till only a muted French horn
49
lingered forlornly, like a ghosdy
breath, upon the hushed, expectant gloom.
The curtain rose silently; the play began.
Slowly paced, the scenes moved forward, one by one. Walmsbury's
entrance met with a worshipful ovation; yet he seemed preoccupied and lacking
in his usual power; his voice sometimes fell to an inaudible murmur. There was
an indefinable unrest on the stage that insidiously crept like a silent mist
from actor to actor, and then out toward the mute audience, tensing the air
with a bleak forsakenness. Phillida sat like a pallid
wax figure, never moving her eyes from her nephew on the stage, breathing so faindy that she appeared not to be breathing at all.
Horatio's
"Look, my lord, it comes!" made taut the atmosphere. In the grim
pause that followed, the audience held its breath; then shuddered as Sardou
appeared to dissolve out of pure shadow; at first only a gray blur that
flickered like a marsh glow and steadily strengthened until two fiery eyes
glared out from its midst, and the Ghost stood high upon a batdement,
dear in every detail, a creature of the grave and afterworld in very truth.
" 'Angds and ministers of grace defend us!' " said Walms-bury, in a voice
so shaken with feeling that the audience shuddered again. As the scene
proceeded, tension mounted. When the Ghost retreated, beckoning to Hamlet to
follow, a namdess dread took hold of the audience,
and a woman in the gallery whimpered. The curtain fdl silendy, leaving the theater
in pitch blackness. Behind it, the sceneshifters hurried the next
backdrop into place without guide lights, and the curtain had barely touched
the boards before it began to rise again.
In the utter dark of the wings, Walmsbury, direcdy behind Sardou,
was suddenly aware that his unde had begun to writhe
and struggle in horrible pantomine, as if he were
grappling with an unseen enemy whose fingers were at his throat. The next
moment he sagged limply against his nephew, made a weird scratching noise in
his throat, and slid to the floor. Horrified, Walmsbury
tried to save him, then knelt beside him and shook him ineffectually. There
were no actors near them; the collapse was hidden by the darkness.
A
hot, sticky liquid had made its way onto Walmsbury's
50
hands. His befuddled mind labored stupidly before
he realized it was Sardou's blood, and his throat closed against the shriek
that sprang toward his mouth, trapping it. He crouched where he was, in a nightmare of suspended time, paralyzed and helpless. Then a faint, icy
stirring of the air behind him made his hackles rise, and without turning his
head he was aware of yet further horrors. Then his heart began to thump and
hammer in animal terror, for a figure was moving slowly past him and onto the
stage, dressed -in the same awful trappings of the Ghost; and as it proceeded
toward the center, a spodight fell murkily down upon it from above, and Walms-bury could see each
crack and crevice of the boards through its slowly wafting draperies. It paused
for a moment, then slowly, horribly slowly, it turned until it was facing him,
its face still in shadow, and then its arm began to rise and it beckoned to
him. It beckoned, then beckoned again, and the
stillness in the theater was as painful
as the inner wrenchings of his despair. Walmsbury felt himself slowly rising to his feet, propelled
not by his own will, but by something vast and supernatural.
The
Ghost beckoned a third time, and now he walked fearfully toward it, like a man in a trance. It lowered its arm and stood observing him
motionlessly.
" "Where wilt thou lead me?' "
said Walmsbury in a forced, low voice. "
'Speak. I'll go no farther.'"
The
stillness of the grave hung upon them as the Ghost slowly lifted its head until
its face gazed direcdy into the eyes of Walmsbury.
There was a brief, muffled clatter from the Fothergay box as the
unused pistol fell harmlessly from Phillida's
nerveless fingers to the floor.
A sigh escaped from Walmsbury's
mouth and he swayed on his feet as a drunken numbness gripped his flagging
senses. Old Porter Fothergay's face was surveying him from the shoulders of the Ghost—old Porter Fothergay, who was dead and rotten in his grave, stood five
feet away from him, and Walmsbury
could see the wings behind him as if he was staring through a fine-mesh screen.
The
lips of the Ghost parted now, and the theater was sud-
51
dcnly filled by the sound of its voice, deep and
true and clear, with a hallow echo underlying it. "
'Mark me,' " it said.
With
agonized effort, Walmsbury answered, " 'I will.' "
" 'My hour is almost come, when I to sulphurous and tormenting flames must render up
myself.'"
" 'Alas, poor ghost!' " said
Walmsbury unsteadily.
Someone in the wings had come upon the body
of Sardou.
Walmsbury could hear the suffocated, panic-stricken
whispers,
and then a dry, paperlike scuffing as the body was
dragged
away. .
The Ghost's voice continued, unhurriedly and
with dignity,
through the lines, "'. . . If thou didst ever thy dear father
love ------
" 'O God!' "
" 'Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.'" " 'Murder?'"
" 'Murder most foul, as in the best it is; but this
most foul,
strange, and unnatural ---------
Phillida sat forward in her box, painfully, clasping
her hands, her breast filled with wonder and awe, and tears welled and fell
from her eyes. One moment the tiny figures on the stage seemed a thousand miles
away; the next, they were so close that she felt she could touch her nephew
with her hand from where she sat.
The Ghost's voice spoke on, nobler and deep
than it had .been in life, holding the theater in thralldom, " '. . . but
know, thou noble youth, the serpent that did sting thy father's life now wears
his crown.'"
" 'O my prophetic soul! my
uncle?' " replied Walmsbury,
his voice sick with horror.
" 'Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
with witchcraft
of his wit, with traitorous gifts -----------
The
pallid green light of the spotiight pulsated before Walmsbury's eyes like the sluggish, foggy water of a surly
tide; the eyes of the Ghost remained motionless, transfixing him. There was no
recognition, no kinship in them; they were as blank as the glass jewelry on his
costume. The face was his father's, but its expression confounded and belied
it.
"'. . . Thus was I,
sleeping, by a brother's hand, of life, of
52
crown, of queen at once despoiled . . . sent to my
account with all my imperfections on my head. O horrible! O horrible! most horrible!'" Inexorably the mouth moved, the
unblinking eyes commanded, the words fell like the deep, impartial tolling of a
mournful bell; the scene slowly drew toward its close. . . .
" 'Fare thee well at once! The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, and 'gins to pale his uneffectual
fire. Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.'"
The Ghost moved silently toward a patch of
shadow, glided into it, and then showed itself again
for a dim second as it neared the wings, and then was gone.
Walmsbury stood motionless, then stirred and moved his
hand heavily across his forehead. " 'O, all you
host of heaven! O earth! What else?'" he said at last, in a broken voice.
The words followed upon themselves mechanically, while fear and bewilderment
dashed themselves like murderous waves against his brain. He moved backward and
toward the other wings, as if pathetically in search of human company.
Horatio
and Marcellus stood awaiting their entrance, their faces drained and silly with
shock and terror. The lights were brighter now, and one of the guide lights was
burning beyond the wings.
As Walmsbury spoke
the line, " 'O villain, villain, smiling damned villain!'"
Horatio moved slightly, and for a fleeting, sickening second, Walmsbury saw past him to where his uncle lay, surrounded
by a silent group. At his moment of death, his lips had bared and locked
themselves into a silent, ghasdy, bloody grin.
"'. . . So uncle, there you are. Now to
my word; it is, "Adieu, adieu! remember me."
I have sworn V"
Then suddenly he clapped his hands over his
face and sagged down onto his knees.
"The curtain!" he shrieked. "For the love of heaven, ring down! Ring down!"
And as
the stunned audience rusded into movement and the
ropes of the curtain gave up their slack, he toppled forward on his face,
sobbing weakly, and thudded ineffectually with his clenched fists upon the
hollow boards.
DOOMSDAY DEFERRED
by Will F. Jenkins
Is
this the way the world ends? With a tiny creeping horror
escaping the jungle to overwhelm the world with madness?
TF I
were sensible, I'd say that somebody else told me this ■*■ story,
and then cast doubts on his veracity. But I saw it all. I was part of it. I
have an invoice of a shipment I made from Brazil, with a notation on it. "José Ribiera's stuff." The shipment went through. The
invoice, I noticed only today, has a mashed soldado ant sticking to the page. There is nothing unusual about it as a
specimen. On the face of things, every element is irritatingly commonplace.
But if I were sensible, I wouldn't tell it this way.
It
began in Milhao, where José Ribiera came to me. Milhao
is in Brazil, but from it the Andes can be seen against the sky at sunset. It
is a town the jungle unfortunately did not finish burying when the rubber boom
collapsed. It is so far up the Amazon basin that its principal contacts with
the outer world are smugglers and fugitives from Peruvian justice who come
across the mountains, and nobody at all goes there except for his sins. I don't
know what took José Ribiera there. I went because one of the three
known specimens of Morpho andiensis was captured nearby by Bohlcr in 1911, and a lunatic millionaire in Chicago was willing to pay for a try at a
fourth for his collection.
I got there after a river steamer refused to
go any farther,
54
and after four days more in a canoe with
paddlers who had lived on or near river water all their lives without once
taking a bath in it. When I got to Milhao, I wished
myself back in the canoe. It's that sort of place.
But
that's where José
Ribiera was, and in back-country Brazil there is a
remarkable superstition that os Senhores Norteamericanos are honest men. I do not explain it. I simply
record it. And just as I was getting settled in a particularly noisome inn, José knocked on my door and came in. He was a
small brown man, and he was scared all the way down deep inside. He tried to
hide that. The thing I noticed first was that he was clean. He was barefoot,
but his tattered duck garments were immaculate, and the rest of him had been
washed, and recendy. In a town like Milhao, that was starding.
"Senhor," said José
in a sort of apologetic
desperation "you are a Senhor Norteamericano. I —
I beg your aid."
I
grunted. Being an American is embarrassing, sometimes and in some places. José closed the door behind him and fumbled
inside his garments. His eyes anxious, he pulled out a small cloth bundle. He
opened it with shaking fingers. And I blinked. The lamplight glittered and
glinted on the most amazing mass of tiny gold nuggets I'd ever seen. I hadn't
doubt it was gold, but even at first glance I wondered how on earth it had been
gathered. There was no flour gold at all—that fine powder which is the largest
part of any placer yield. Most of it was gravelly particles of pinhead size.
There was no nugget larger than a half pea. There must have been five pounds of
it altogether, though, and it was a rather remarkable spectacle.
"Senhor," said José
tensely, '1 beg that you will help me turn this into cattle!
It is a matter of life or death."
I
hardened my expression. Of course, in thick jungle like that around Milhao, a cow or a bull would be as much out of place as an
Eskimo, but that wasn't the point. I had business of my own in Milhao. If I started gold buying or cattle dealing out of
amiability, my own affairs would suffer. So I said in polite regret, "I am
not a businessman, senhor, do not deal in gold or cattle either. To buy
cattle, you should go down to Sao Pedro" —that was four days' paddle
downstream, or considering the current perhaps three—"and take this gold
to a banker. He will
55
give you money for it if you can prove that it is
yours. You can then buy cattle if you wish."
José looked at me desperately. Certainly half the population of Milhao—and positively the Peruvian-refugee half— would have
cut his throat for a fraction of his hoard. He almost panted: "But, senhor! This would be enough to buy catde in Sâo Pedro and send them here, would it not?"
I agreed that at a guess it should buy all
the cattle in Sâo Pedro, twice over, and hire the town's wheezy steam launch to tow them
upriver besides. José looked sick with relief. But, I said, one
should buy his livestock himself, so he ought to go to Sâo Pedro in person. And I could not see what good catde
would be in the jungle anyhow.
"Yet—it
would buy catde 1" said José,
gulping. "That is what
I told—my friends. But I cannot go farther than Milhao,
senhor. I cannot go to Sâo
Pedro. Yet I must—I need to buy catde
for—my friends! It is life and death! How can I do this, senhor?"
Naturally, I considered that he exaggerated
the emergency.
"I
am not a businessman," I repeated. "I would not be able to help
you." Then at the terrified look in his eyes I explained, "I am here
after butterflies."
He couldn't understand that. He began to
stammer, pleading. So I explained.
"There
is a rich man," I said wryly, "who wishes to possess a certain
butterfly. I have pictures of it. I am sent to find it. I can pay one thousand milreis for one butterfly of a certain sort. But I have no
authority to do other business, such as the purchase of gold or catde."
José looked extraordinarily despairing. He looked
numbed by the loss of hope. So, merely to say or do something, I showed him a
color photograph of the specimen of Morpho andiensis which is in the Goriot collection in Paris. Bug collectors were in despair about it during the
war. They were sure the Nazis would manage to seize it. Then José's eyes lighted hopefully.
"Senhor!" he said urgendy. "Perhaps my—friends can
find you such a butterfly! WUl you pay for such a
butterfly in catde sent here from Sâo Pedro, senhor?"
I said rather blankly that I would, but----------- Then
I was talk-
ing to myself. José had bolted out of my room, leaving maybe
56
five pounds of gravelly gold nuggets in my hands.
That was not usual.
I went after him, but he'd disappeared. So I
hid his small fortune in the bottom of my collection kit. A few drops of
formaldehyde, spiHed before closing up a kit of
collection botdes and insects, is
very effective in chasing away pilferers. I make use of it regularly.
Next
morning I asked about José. My queries were greeted with shrugs. He was a very
low person. He did not live in Milhao, but had a
clearing, a homestead, some miles upstream, where he lived with bis wife. They had one child. He
was suspected of much evil. He had bought pigs, and taken them to his clearing
and behold he had no pigs there! His wife was very pretty, and a Peruvian had
gone swaggering to pay court to her, and he had never come back. It is notable,
as I think of it, that up to this time no ant of any sort has come into my
story. Butterflies, but no ants. Especially
not soldados—army
ants. It is queer.
I
learned nothing useful about José, but I had come to Milhao
on business, so I stated it publicly. I wished a certain butterfly, I said. I
would pay one thousands milreis for a perfect specimen.
I would show a picture of what I wanted to any interested person, and I would
show how to make a butterfly net and how to use it, and how to handle
butterflies without injuring them. But I wanted only one kind, and it must not
be squashed.
The
inhabitants of Milhao became happily convinced that I
was insane, and that it might be profitable insanity for them. Each person
leaped to die nearest butterfly and blandly brought it to me. I«pent a whole day explaining to bright-eyed people that
matching the picture of Morpho andtensis required more than that <he number of legs
and wings should be the same. But, I repeated, I would pay one thousand milreis for a butterfly exactly 'like the picture. I had
.plenty of margin for profit and lóss, at that. The
last time a Morpho andtensis was sold, it brought $25,000 at auction. I'd a lot rather have the money,
myself.
José Ribiera came back. His expression was
tense beyond belief. He plucked at my arm and said, "Senhor," and I grabbed him and dragged him to my inn.
57
I hauled out his treasure, "Here!"
I said angrily. "This is not mine! Take it!"
He
paid no attention. He trembled. "Senhor," he said, and swallowed. "My friends—my
friends do not think they can
catch the butterfly you seek. But if you will tell
them------------ "
He
wrinkled his
brows. "Senhor, before a butterfly is born, is it a litde soft nut with a worm in it?"
That
could pass for a description of a cocoon. Jose s friends— he
was said not to have any—were close observers. I said so. )o$& seemed to grasp at hope as at a straw.
"My—friends
will find you the nut which produces the butterfly," he said urgendy, "if you tell them
which kind it is and what it looks like."
I blinked. Just three specimens of Morpho andiensis had ever been captured, so far as was known.
All were adult insects. Of course nobody knew what the cocoon was like. For
that matter, any naturalist can name a hundred species—and in the Amazon valley
alone—of which only the adult forms have been named. But who would hunt for
cocoons in jungle like that outside of Milhao?
"My
friend," I said skeptically, "there are thousands of different such
things. I will buy five of each different kind you can discover, and I will pay
one milreis apiece. But only five of each kind,
remember!"
I
didn't think he'd even try, of course. I meant to insist that he take back his
gold nuggets. But again he was gone before I could stop him. I had an
uncomfortable impression that when I made my offer, his face lighted as if he'd
been given a reprieve from a death sentence. In the light of later events, I
think he had.
I
angrily made up my mind to take his gold back to him next day. It was a
responsibility. Besides, one gets interested in a man—especially of the
half-breed class—who can unfeignedly ignore five
pounds of gold. I arranged to be paddled up to his clearing next morning.
It
was on the river, of course. There are no footpaths in Amazon-basin jungle. The
river flowing past Milhaos is a broad deep stream perhaps two hundred yards wide. Its width seems less
because of the jungle walls on either side. And the jungle is daunting. It is
trees and vines and lianas as seen from the
58
stream, but it is more than that. Smells come out,
and you can't identify tnem. Sounds come out, and you
can't interpret them. You cut your way into its mass, and you see nothing. You
come out, and you have learned nothing. You cannot affect it. It ignores you.
It made me feel insignificant.
My
paddlers would have taken me right on past Jose's clear ing
without, seeing it, if he hadn't been on the river bank. He shouted. He'd been
fishing, and "now that I think, there were no fish near Rim, but there
were some picked-clean fish skeletons. And I think the ground was very dark
about him when we first saw him, and quite normal when we approached. I know he
was sweating, but he looked terribly hopeful at the sight of me.
I left my two paddlers to smoke and slumber
in the canoe. I followed }osi into
the jungle. It was like walking in a tunnel of lucent green light. Everywhere
there were tree trunks and vines and leaves, but green light overlay
everything. I saw a purple butterfly with crimson wing tips, floating
abstractedly in the jungle as if in an undersea grotto.
Then
the path widened, and there was Jose's dwelling. It was a perfect proof that
man does not need civilization to live in comfort. Save for cotton garments, an
iron pot and a machete, there was literally nothing in the clearing or the
house which was not of and from the jungle, to be replaced merely by stretching
out one's hand. To a man who lives like this, gold has no value. While he keeps
his wants at this level, he can have no temptations. My thoughts at the moment
were almost sentimental.
I beamed politely at Jose's wife. She was a
pretty young girl with beautiful regular features. But, disturbingly, her eyes
were as panic-filled as Jose's. She spoke, but she seemed tremblingly absorbed
in the contemplation of some crawling horror. The two of them seemed to live
with terror. It was too odd to be quite believable. But their child—a
brown-skinned three-year-old quite innocent of clothing—was unaffected. He
stared at me, wide-eyed.
"Senhor," said Jose in a trembling voice, "here are the things you desire, the
small nuts with worms in them."
His
wife had woven a basket of flat green strands. He put it before me. And I
looked into it tolerandy, expecting nothing.
59
But
I saw the sort of thing that simply does not happen. I saw a half bushel of
cocoons!
Jose had acquired them somehow in less than
twenty-four
hours. Some were miniature capsules of silk which would yield
little butterflies of wing spread no greater than a mosquito's.
Some were sturdy fat cocoons of stout brown silk. There were
cocoons which cunningly mimicked the look of bird droppings,
and cocoons cleverly concealed in twisted leaves. Some were
green—I swear it—and would pass for buds upon some un-
named vine. And---------
It
was simply, starkly impossible. I was stupefied. The Amazon basin has been collected,
after a fashion, but the pupa and cocoon of any reasonably rare species is at
least twenty times more rare than the adult insect.
And these cocoons were fresh! They were alive! I could not believe it, but I
could not doubt it. My hands shook as I turned them over.
I
said, "This is excellent, José!
I will pay for all of them
at the rate agreed on—one milreis each. I will send
them to Sâo Pedro today, and their price w.ill be spent for cattle and the bringing
of the cattle here. I promise it!"
José did not relax. I saw him wipe sweat off his
face.
"I—beg you to command
haste, Senhor,"
he said thinly.
I
almost did not hear. I carried that basket of cocoons back to the river-bank. I
practically crooned over it all the way back to Milhao.
I forgot altogether about returning the gold pellets. And I began to work
frenziedly at the inn.
I
made sure, of course, that the men who would cart the parcel would know that it
contained only valueless objects like cocoons. Then I slipped in the parcel of José's gold. I wrote a letter to the one man in Sâo Pedro who, if God was good, might have sense enough to attend to the
affair for me. And I was almost idiotically elated.
While
I was making out the invoice that would carry my shipment by refrigerated air
express from the nearest airport it could be got to, a large ant walked across
my paper. One takes insects very casually in back-country Brazil. I mashed him,
without noticing what he was. I went blissfully to start the parcel off. I had
a shipment that would make history among bug collectors. It was something that
simply could not be done!
The fact of the impossibility hit me after
the canoe with the
60
parcel started downstream. How the devil those
cocoons had
been gathered--------
The problem loomed larger as I thought. In
less than one day, José had collected a half bushel of cocoons, of at least one hundred different
species of moths and butterflies. It could not be done! The information to make
it possible did not exist! Yet it had happened. How?
The
question would not down. I had to find out. I bought a pig for a present and
had myself ferried up to the clearing again. My paddlers pulled me upstream
with languid strokes. The pig made irritated noises in the bottom of the canoe.
Now I am sorry about that pig. I would apologize to its ghost if opportunity
offered. But I didn't know.
I
landed on the narrow beach and shouted. Presently José came through the tunnel of foliage that led to his house. He thanked me,
dry-throated, for the pig. I told him I had ordered cattle sent up from Sao
Pedro. I told him humorously that every ounce of meat on the hoof the town
contained would soon be on the way behind a wheezing steam launch. José swallowed and nodded numbly. He still looked like someone who
contemplated pure horror.
We
got the pig to the house. Jose's wife sat and rocked her child, her eyes sick
with fear. I probably should have felt embarrassed in the presence of such
tragedy even if I could not guess at its cause. But instead, I thought about
the questions I wanted to ask. José sat down dully beside me.
I was oblivious of the atmosphere of doom. I
said blandly, "Your friends are capable naturalists, José. I am much pleased. Many of the 'little nuts' they have gathered are
quite new to me. I would like to meet such students of the ways of
nature."
José's teeth clicked. His wife caught her breath. She
looked at me with an oddly despairing irony. It puzzled me. I looked at José, sharply. And then the hair stood up on my head. My heart tried to stop.
Because a large ant walked on José's shoulder, and I saw what kind of ant it was.
"My God!" I said shrilly. "Soldadosl
Army ants!"
I acted through pure instinct. I snatched up
the baby from its mother's arms and raced for the river. One does not think at
such times. The soldado ant, the army ant, the driver ant, is the
absolute and undisputed monarch of all jungles everywhere.
61
He
travels by millions of millions, and nothing can stand against him. He is
ravening ferocity and inexhaustible number. Even man abandons his setdements when the army ant marches in, and returns only
after he has left—to find every bit of flesh devoured to the last morsel, from
the earwigs in the thatch to a horse that may have been tethered too firmly tq break away. The army ant on the march can and does kill
anything alive, by tearing the flesh from it in tiny bites, regardless of
defense. So—I grabbed the child and ran.
José Ribiera screamed at me, "No! Senhorl No!"
He
sat still and he screamed. I'd never heard such undiluted horror in any man's
voice.
I
stopped. I don't know why. I was stunned to see José and his wife sitting frozen where I'd left them. I was more stunned, I
think, to see the tiny clearing and the house unchanged. The army ant moves
usually on a solid front. The ground is covered with a glistening, shifting
horde. The air is filled with tiny clickings of limbs
and mandibles. Ants swarm up every tree and shrub. Caterpillars, worms, bird nesdings, snakes, monkeys unable to flee—anything living
becomes buried under a mass of ferociously rending small forms which tear off
the living flesh in shreds until only white bones are left.
But José sat still, his throat working convulsively. I had seen soldados on him. But there were no soldados. After a moment José got to his feet and came stumbling toward me.
He looked like a dead man. He could not speak.
"But
look!" I cried. My voice was high-pitched. "I saw sol-dado ants! I saw them!"
José gulped by pure effort of will. I put down the
child. He ran back to his mother.
"S-st. Yes," said José, as if his lips were very stiff and his throat
without moisture. "But they are—special soldados. They are—pets. Yes. They are tame. They are my—friends. They— do tricks,
senhor. I will show you!"
He
held out his hand and made sucking noises with his mouth. What followed is not
to be believed. An ant—a large ant, an inch or more long—walked calmly out of
his sleeve and onto his outstretched hand. It perched there passively while the
hand quivered like an aspen leaf.
62
"But
yes!" said José hysterically. "He does tricks, senhorl Observe! He will stand on his head!"
Now, this I saw, but I do not believe it. The
ant did something so that it seemed to stand on its head. Then it turned and
crawled tranquilly over his hand and wrist and up his sleeve again.
There
was silence, or as much silence as the jungle ever holds. My own throat went
dry. And what I have said is insanity, but this is much worse. I felt Something waiting to see what I would do. It was,
unquestionably, the most horrible sensation I had ever felt. I do not know how
to describe it. What I felt was—not a personality, but a mind. I had a ghasdy feeling that Something was
looking at me from thousands of pairs of eyes, that it was all around me.
I
shared, for an instant, what that Something saw and
thought. I was surrounded by a mind which waited to see what I would do. It
would act upon my action. But it was not a sophisticated mind. It was
murderous, but innocent. It was merciless, but naïve.
That is what I felt. The feeling doubdess has a natural explanation which reduces it to
nonsense, but at the moment I believed it, I acted on my belief. I am glad I
did.
"Ah,
I see!" I said in apparent amazement. "That is clever, José! It is remarkable to train an ant! I was absurd to be alarmed. But—your
cattle will be on the way, José!
They should get here very
soon! There will be many of them!"
Then I felt that the mind would let me go.
And I went.
My
canoe was a quarter mile downstream when one of the paddlers lifted his blade
from the water and held it there, listening. The other stopped and listened
too. There was a noise in the jungle. It was mercifully far away, but it
sounded like a pig. I have heard the squealing of pigs at slaughtering time,
when instinct tells them of the deadly intent of men and they try punily to fight. This was not that sort of noise. It was
worse; much worse.
I made a hopeless spectacle of myself in the
canoe. Now, of course, I can see that, from this time on, my actions were not
those of a reasoning human being. I did not think with proper scientific
skepticism. It suddenly seemed to me that Norton's theory of mass consciousness
among social insects was very
63
plausible. Bees, says Norton, are not only units in an
organization. They are units of an organism. The hive or the swarm is a creature—one
creature—says Norton. Each insect is a body cell only, just as the corpuscles
in our blood stream are individuals and yet only parts of us. We can destroy a
part of our body if the welfare of the whole organism requires it, though we
destroy many cells. The swarm or the hive can sacrifice its members for the
hive's defense. Each bee is a mobile body cell. Its consciousness is a part of
the whole intelligence, which is that of the group. The group is the actual
creature. And ants, says Norton, show the fact more clearly still; the ability
of the creature which is an ant colony to sacrifice a part of itself for the
whole. . . . He gives illustrations of what he means. His book is not accepted
by naturalists generally, but there in the canoe, going down-river from Jose's
clearing, I believed it utterly.
I
believed that an army-ant army was as much a single creature as a sponge. I
believed that the Something in Jose's jungle
clearing—its body cells were soldado ants—had discovered that other creatures perceived and thought as it
did. Nothing more was needed to explain everything. An army-ant creature, without
physical linkages, could know what its own members saw and knew and felt. It
should need only to open its mind to perceive what other creatures saw and knew
and felt.
The
frightening thing was that when it could interpret such unantish
sensations, it could find its prey with a terible infalla-bility. It could flow through the jungle in a
streaming, crawling tide of billions of tiny stridulating bodies. It could
know the whereabouts and thoughts of every living thing around it. Nothing
could avoid it, as nothing could withstand it. And if it came upon a man, it
could know his thoughts too. It could perceive in his mind vast horizons beyond
its former ken. It could know of food—animal food—in quantities never before
imagined. It could, intelligently, try to arrange to secure that food.
It had.
But if so much was true, there was something
else it could do. The thought made the blood seem to cake in my veins. I began
frantically to thrust away the idea. The Something in Jose's clearing hadn't
discovered it yet. But pure terror of the
64
discovery had me drenched
in sweat when I got back to Milhao.
All
this, of course, was plainly delusion. It was at least a most unscientific
attitude. But I'd stopped being scientific. I even stopped using good sense.
Believing what I did, I should have got away from there as if all hell were
after me. But the Something in Josh's clearing may already have been practicing
its next logical step without knowing it. Maybe that's why I stayed.
Because I did stay in Milhao. I didn't leave the town again, even for
Jose's clearing. I stayed about the inn, half-heartedly dealing with gentry who
tried every known device, except seeking the Morpho andiensls, to extract a thousand milreis
from me. Mosdy they offered mangled corpses which
would have been useless for my purpose even if they'd been the butterfly I was
after. No argument would change their idea that I was insane, nor dash their
happy hope of making money out of my hallucination that butterflies were worth
money. But I was only half-hearted in these dealings, at best. I waited
feverishly for the cattle from Sao Pedro. I was obsessed.
I
couldn't sleep. By day I fought the thought that tried to come into my head. At
night I lay in the abominable inn—in a hammock, because there are no beds in
back-country Brazilian inns, and a man would be a fool to sleep in them if there were— and listened to the small, muted,
unidentifiable noises from the jungle. And fought away the thought that kept trying to come into my mind. It was very bad.
I
don't remember much about the time I spent waiting. It was purest nightmare.
But several centuries after the shipment of the cocoons, the launch from Sao
Pedro came puffing asth-matically up the reaches of
the river. It was twitching all over, by that time, from the strain of not
thinking about what the Something might discover next.
I didn't let the launch tie up to shore. I
went out to meet it in a canoe, and I carried my collection kit with me, and an
automatic pistol and an extra box of cartridges. I had a machete too. It was
not normal commercial equipment for consummating a business deal, but I
feverishly kept my mind on what I was going to do. The Something in Jose's
clearing wouldn't be made suspicious by that. It was blessedly naive.
The
launch puffed loudly and wheezed horribly, going past
65
Miihao between tall
banks of joagfe. It wed a flatboat on which
were twenty head of cattle—poor,
<Ih|wibtiI, tick-infested creatures. I had them
tethered fast. My teeth
chattered as I stepped on
the flatboat. If the Sum thing, tolaed what it could
do ------ But my hands
obeyed me. I shot a
doll-eyed cow
through the
head. I assassinated an emaciated stter. I systematically murdered every one. I was probably wid-eyed and certainly fever-thin and
positively lunatic in the eyes of the Brazilian launch crew. But to them os Senkores Norteamericanos are notoriously mad.
I
was especially close to justifying their belief because of the thought that
kept trying to invade my mind. It was, baldly, that if without physical linkage
the Something knew what its separate body cells saw,
then without physical linkage it also controlled what they did. And if it
could know what deer and monkeys saw and knew, then by the same process it
could control what they
did. It held within itself,
in its terrifying innocence, the power to cause animals to march docilely and
blindly to it and into the tiny maws of its millions of millions of parts. As
soon as it realized the perfectly inescapable fact, it could increase in number
almost without limit by this fact alone. More, in the increase its intelligence
should increase too. It should grow stronger, and be able to draw its prey from
greater distances. The time should come when it could incorporate men into its
organism by a mere act of will They would report to it and be controlled by it. And of course they would march to it and
drive their livestock to it so it could increase still more and grow wiser and
more powerful still.
I
grew hysterical, on the flatboat. The thought I'd fought so long wouldn't stay
out of my mind any longer. I slashed the slain animals with the machete until
the flatboat was more gruesome than any knacker's
yard. I sprinkled everywhere a fine white powder from my collection kit—which
did not stay white where it fell, but turned red—and pictured the Amazon basin
taken over and filled with endlessly marching armies of soldado ants. I saw the cities emptied of humanity, and the jungle of all other
life. And then, making whimpering noises to myself, I pictured all the people
of all the world loading their ships with their cattle and then themselves—because
that was what the Something would desire—and all the ships coming to
66
l>ring
food to the organism for which all earth would labor and die.
fosé Ribiera screamed from the edge of the jungle. The
launch and the fiatboat were about to pass his clearing.
The reek of spilled blood had surrounded the flatboat with a haze of
metallic-bodied insects. And José,
so weakened by long terror and
despair that he barely tottered, screamed at me from the shore line, and his
wife added her voice pipingly to echo his cry.
Then
I knew that the something was impatient and eager and utterly satisfied, and I
shouted commands to the launch, and I got into the canoe and paddled ashore. I
let the bow of the canoe touch the sand. I think that, actually, everything was
lost at that moment, and that the Something knew what
I could no longer keep from thinking. It knew its power as I did. But there
were thousands of flying things about the flatboat load of murdered catde, and they smelled spilt blood, and the Something in the jungle picked their brains of pure ecstasy.
Therefore, I think, it paid little heed to José or his wife or me. It was too eager. And it was naïve.
"José,"
I said with deep cunning,
"get into the canoe with your wife and baby. We will watch our friends at
their banquet."
There
were bellowings from the launch. I had commanded that
the flatboat be beached. The Brazilians obeyed, but they were upset. I looked
like a thing of horror from the butchering I had done. I put José and his family on the launch, and I tried to thrust out my mind to the Something in the jungle. I imagined a jungle tree
undermined—a little tree, I specified—to fall in the river.
The men of the launch had the fiatboat grounded when a slender tree trunk quivered. It
toppled slowly outward, delayed in its
fall by lianas that had to break. But it fell on the flatboat and the carcasses
of slaughtered catde. The rest was automatic. Army
ants swarmed out the thin tree trunk. The gory deck of the flatboat turned
black with them. Cries of "Soldadosl" arose in the launch. The towline was
abandoned instantly.
I
think José caused me to be hauled up into the launch,
but I was responsible for all the rest. We paused at Milhao,
going downstream, exacdy long enough to tell that
there were Sol-dados in the jungle three miles upstream. I got my stuff from
67
the inn. I paid. I hysterically brushed aside
the final eSort of a whiskery half-breed to sell me
an unrecognizable paste of legs and wings as a Morpho andiensis. Then I fled.
After
the first day or so, I slept most of the time, twitching. At Sao Pedro I
feverishly got fast passage on a steamer going down stream. I wanted to get out
of Brazil, and nothing else, but I did take José and his family on board.
I
didn't talk to him, though. I didn't want to. I don't even know where he elected to go ashore
from the steamer, or where he is now. I didn't draw a single deep breath until I had boarded a plane at Belem and it was
airborne and I was on the way home.
Which was unreasonable. I had ended all the danger from the
Something in José's clearing. When I slaughtered the catde and
made that shambles on the flatboat's deck, I spread the contents of a
three-pound, formerly airtight can of sodium arsenate over everything. It is
wonderful stuff. No mite, fungus, mold or beede will
attack specimens preserved by it. I'd hoped to use a fraction of a milligram to
preserve a Morpho andiensis. I didn't. I poisoned the carcasses of twenty catde
with it. The army ants which were the Something would
consume those catde to bare white bones. Not all
would die of the sodium arsenate, though. Not at first.
But the Something
was naïve. And always, among the army
ants as among all other members of the ant family, dead and
wounded members of the organism are consumed by the sound
and living. It is like the way white corpuscles remove damaged
red cells from our human blood stream. So the corpses of army
ants—soldados—that
died of sodium arsenate .would be con-
sumed by those that survived, and they would die, and
their
corpses in turn would be consumed by others that would
die____
Three pounds of sodium arsenate will kill a
lot of ants anyhow, but in practice not one grain of it would go to waste.
Because no soldado corpse would be left for birds or beetles to
feed on, so long as a single body cell of the naïve Something remained alive.
And
that is that. There are times when I think the whole thing was a fever dream,
because it is plainly unbelievable. If it is true—why, I saved a good part of
South American civili-
68
zation. Maybe I saved the human race, for that matter. Somehow, though, that doesn't
seem likely. But I certainly did ship a half bushel of cocoons
from Milhao, and I certainly did make some money out of the deal.
I didn't get a Morpho andiensis in Milhao, of
course. But I made out. When those cocoons began to hatch,
in Chicago, there were actually four beautiful andiensis in the crop. I anesthetized them with loving care. They
were mounted under absolutely perfect conditions. But there's an ironic side
light on that. When there were only three known specimens in the collections
of the whole world, the last andiensis sold for $25,000.
But with four new ones
perfect and available, the price broke, and I got only $6,800 apiece!
I'd have got as much for one!
Which is the whole business. But if I were sensible I wouldn't tell about it this way. I'd say that somebody else told me this story, and then I'd cast doubts on his veracity.
THE ETERNAL DUFFER
fcy Willard Temple
When
the late Barnaby Jessup arrived in heaven,
he looked the place over and promptly reached this decision: He would much
rather carry golf clubs than a harp.
' | 'HE funeral was mighty impressive. It was
bound to be in the case of a man like Barnaby Jessup. Most of the town had
turned out, and after it was all over, one of the pallbearers looked up at the
sky and murmered, "Be a nice afternoon for
golf."
That
remark might be considered to bear on the sacrilegious, in view of the
occasion, but none of the other pallbearers objected, and they were all old
friends of Barnaby Jessup, men in their sixties or higher, all but one of them,
and Barnaby Jessup had been seventy-six when they laid him to rest.
The six pallbearers walked back across the
gravel path to the car to take them back to town, and on the sidelines their
names were spoken in hushed tones. For one of them, some years before, had been a candidate for president of the
United States, one was a great surgeon in the land, a third, the young man of
the lot, was a lean and tanned golf professional, winner of the Open, and it
was he who had made the remark about golf.
The
men got into the car and, as was natural, they talked about Barnaby Jessup on
the ride back to town. But they did not reminisce about the time back in the 20's- that Jessup had
made a million in the stock market, nor about the way he had juggled railroads;
it was of quite different matters that they talked.
The man who had almost become president,
said, "I was with Barnaby the day he put eight straight balls in the lake
hole."
The surgeon, his eyes reflective, said
thoughtfully, "I played with him the day he took a twenty-seven on a
par-three hun-dred-and-ten-yard
hole."
The
mildest man of the group, the man who was simply the head of one of the late Jessup's
holding companies, said, "I saw him wrap all of his clubs around a tree
one afternoon," and no one commented, because that had been commonplace.
The
car hummed across the black ribbon of road and there was a silence while the
men privately considered their friend, and then finally the golf professional
looked up at the warm blue sky and spoke quiedy.
"I hope Barnaby finds
a golf course," he said.
The gate before which Barnaby found himself was highly ornamental, of a curiously intricate
wrought iron, and the pillars were of marble, but a marble which Jessup had
never seen, marble with the luster of a pearl.
"Ought to look into this," Jessup
said. "The trustees could use it for the art museum."
And so saying, he passed through the gate and
was presendy standing in the registrar's office,
where in due time he gave his name to the clerk, who wrote it down in gold
letters.
"Glad to have you with us, Mr.
Jessup," the clerk said. "A
good many of the inmates like to know why they've been able
to come here. In your case---------- "
Jessup stopped him with a wave of the hand.
Like many men who have achieved great wealth
and promi-
nence, he was inclined to be autocratic. "I left
an art museum
behind," he said. "I divided my fortune among colleges and
institutions------- "
"Not for any of those things did you
enter here," said the clerk.
Jessup was momentarily startled.
"Well," he said, "I built the
finest hospital in my state, equipped it with the best that money
could buy, and brought some of the greatest medical men in
the world------- "
The clerk said, "That is entered on page
three thousand one
71
hundred and forty-nine under the heading Superficial
Trivia."
Jessup
was jarred right down to his heels by that one. He thought a minute and then
began a recital of what he had done with his money, the charities he had
supported, and before he had gotten under way with the list the clerk was
shaking his head negatively.
"You remember Jim Dolan?" said the
clerk.
Jessup thought back down the years. "Jim
Dolan," Jessup said slowly. "Must have been thirty years ago, that
was. He was a caddie at the club. Killed in an
accident."
"You went to see his mother," the
clerk said, reading aloud from a page in the ledger. "You had a meeting
that was worth thousands to you, and you turned it down to go and see his
mother."
"I
<lidn't give her a dime," Jessup said.
"Just called to pay my respects and tell her what a fine boy Jim had been.
That's all I did."
"That's all," said the clerk gendy, and smiled, and Barnaby Jessup scratched his head
and wondered, but not for long, because he was a man of action and
unaccustomed to being introspective.
" "Look, son," he said, "all my life
I've been on the go. I don't mean any offense, but tell me this, do I have to
sit around on a cloud? I mean, just sit? And I've no ear for music,
I can't play a harmonica, let alone a harp."
"Why, no," the clerk said.
"You can do about anything you
like; anything within reason, that is." \
Barnaby
hesitated and said in a low voice, "No golf courses in these parts, I
suppose?"
"No
country clubs," the clerk said. "There s no
discrimination up here. But we have a very fine public course."
Barnaby Jessup smiled and then said, "I
didn't bring my
clubs. I--------
"Last door down on
your left," the clerk said.
Barnaby had another question, but he kept it
back because he didn't like to take too much of the clerk's time. And likely
Pete Tyson wouldn't be up here anyway. Barnaby and Tyson had been business
competitors and had fought each other with no rules and no holds barred, but
most of all they had battled on the golf course. Ten years before, Barnaby had
fought back
the tears while he watched the clods go down
over the mortal remains of his dearest enemy and closest friend.
He'd
sure like to see old Pete. But a man can't have everything, he thought, and he
went on down the hall to the last room on the left. A man sat at a bench inside
and Barnaby stopped and stared, for he had never seen so many golf clubs. They
lined the walls, clubs of every description.
"Help yourself,"
the man at the bench said without looking
UP-
Barnaby
thanked him and selected a likely-looking driver from a cas^ along one wall. It had the right feel with the
weight in the head where he liked it. He tried the rest of the clubs and found
them perfecdy matched, and finally he put the set in a golf bag and a half dozen balls in the pocket.
"What
do I owe you?" he said, taking out his wallet and extracting two one-hundrcd-dollar bills, for these were hand-designed bench-made
clubs and he was ready to pay two hundred for all he had there, but not a
penny more because he had always made it a practice not to let people take advantage of him because of his wealth.
"No charge," the man said.
"They're your clubs. Look on the shaft."
Barnaby glanced down and saw his name
stenciled there.
"Well," he said in wonder, "but look here, I want to give you
something. I don't doubt all employees up here are well treated,
but just the same------- "
The man squinted down the shaft of a club.
"I'm no employee," he said. "I'm a permanent resident and a
busy man."
Barnaby
Jessup thanked him, walked to the door, then said,
"Can you tell me how to reach the course?"
"Six
miles due north."
"Is there a cab for hire?"
Barnaby
couldn't understand what he said, it sounded like "Fly," and lie
didn't repeat the question, for the man was plainly eccentric, although a
genius at his craft. He went outside to look for a cruising taxi and then he felt something at his back when he slung the
golf bag over his shoulders and discovered that the strap was tangled up with
a protuberance growing out of his shoulders.
He wiggled his shoulder blades, and the next
thing he knew
73
he was three feet off the ground and treading air, with both wings
flapping.
"Well,
I'll be," Jessup said, then sighted on the sun, got a bearing on what he
considered to be due north, and took off, flying at a steady, even clip about
ten feet above the ground.
It
was a trifle awkward; he got out of balance somehow while trying to shift the
golf bag and went into a tailspin and landed on his chin in a gully, but it
didn't hurt, and presently he was
airborne again, and then finally he saw a long stretch of green ahead of him
and he flew over the entire eighteen holes, surveying the layout.
When he had finished he knew he had just seen
the ultimate in golf courses. The fairways were gendy
undulating, lush with grass, the greens like huge emeralds. It was a sporty
course, too, not too flat, and yet not too hilly.
Getting quite excited, he flew back to the
first tee, eager to swing a dub, for although he had been one of the world's
most successful men, it is said that no man achieves everything he wants in
life and Barnaby Jessup had been a success at everything he turned his hand to
with the exception of golf. A not inconsiderable part of his fortune had been
spent on the game, but he had remained a duffer. He had in his home a comprehensive
library of golf from the earliest works down to the most modern tomes. He had studied under the greatest professionals in
the world and had built in the cellar of his home a cage where he could
practice on such days that inclement weather kept him off the course. But he
had remained a divot digger and a three putter down the years.
He
made a neat two-point landing on the tee and as if by magic a caddie bobbed up,
a small freckled boy with a missing front tooth who relieved him of his bag and
handed him his driver.
"Howdy, Mr. Jessup," the boy said.
"Nice day for it."
Jessup
stared at him. "Jim Dolan," he said. He couldn't see any mark on the
boy from the truck. "Well, Jim," he said, "Like old days."
"Smack 'er out
there, Mr. Jessup," the boy said.
Jessup
stood at the tee, addressing the ball and sighting toward the green, four hundred
yards distant. Then he ran through the rules, cautioning himself not to press,
to keep his
74
head down, to start the club back low to the
ground, to let the left arm do the work, to cock his wrists, and to shift his
weight to the right foot with most of the weight on the heel.
He
thought of all these things and then struck the ball, wincing
a litde as he always did, expecting either a hook or
a slice. But he heard a musical little click, and the ball bounced on
the fairway about two hundred and sixty yards away.
"Good shot," Jim said. - "Best
one I ever hit," Jessup cried. "By juniper, I had it that time. I
think I've figured this game out."
They
walked forward to the ball and Jessup selected a bras-sie,
sure that he was going to miss because never in his life had he put together
two consecutive good shots.
He
swung the brassie and that click sounded again and
Jessup rubbed his eyes and said in awed tones, "It's on the green."
The
caddie was already walking forward, handing Jessup his putter.
"I
never made a par in my life," Jessup said. "I have a chance for a
birdie. Oh, well, I suppose I'll three-putt."
On
the green he surveyed the situation, noticing the slope toward the pin. He
jabbed at the ball, tightened up, but it rolled forward and fell into the cup.
Barnaby
Jessup mopped his brow with a handkerchief and sat down on the apron at the
edge of the green.
"Well,"
he said finally, "accidents will happen. Let's go, Jim. But maybe, at
that, I will break one hundred today."
The
second was a water hole. The lake sparkled a bright
sapphire in the sun and the distance across the water was a hundred and eighty yards.
Jessup
selected a spoon. "I should have brought more than six balls," he
said. "Don't know why I didn't. I lose at least six every time I play.
I'll put at least three in that lake."
He
swung, then listened for the whoosh as the water
received his offering, but he failed to hear it and neither did he see drops of
water splashing upward.
"Lost sight of
it," Jessup said.
"Good
shot," the caddie sid.
"It's in the cup. It's a hole in one, Mr. Jessup."
"Now wait a minute, Jim," Jessup
said. "You're not supposed
to lie
up here. Besides, I'm an old man and----------- "
"It's in the cup," the boy
repeated.
Jessup was looking for a
path around the lake when the boy took off and flew across, and Jessup sailed
after him. They landed on the green and sure enough the ball was in the cup.
He was too shocked to say anything, but
assumed that every-once in a while this kind of thing happened to everyone, a
superlatively good day, but of course he'd go blooie
any minute; he always had, he always would.
The next hole was three
hundred and eighty yards and his drive was straight and far. They came up to it
and the caddie handed him a seven iron.
"I usually use a five this far
away," Jessup said.
"You can make it with the seven," Jim
said.
Jessup didn't think so, but
although he invariably took the hide off people who tried to advise him at
business, he'd never somehow been able to disregard a caddie's advice.
Meekly he took the seven and swung. The ball
landed on the edge of the green, bounced twice, rolled forward and fell into
the cup. Jessup removed his glasses, blew on them and put them back on.
"You're playing a nice steady
game," the caddie said. "Even two's at this point,"
"I am not," Jessup said.
"Don't be ridiculous, Jim. I can't possibly have played three holes and
only taken six shots. Nobody could, no golfer in the world."
He took the scorecard from the boy and
counted it, and counted it again on his fingers, and the boy-was right, there
was no disputing it. He had a three and a one and a two. There was no getting
away from it. It wasn't possible, but there it was. He was even two's.
He had started out with the eternal hope of
breaking one hundred. Now he was afraid to think about it. But still, he told
himself, he'd go blooie any moment now.
And when they stood on the fourth tee he was
sure of it. Despite the fact that he was in heaven, this hole might have been
designed by the devil himself.
The
fairway was perhaps forty yards wide with a dog leg in - the distance. On the left was a gorge, the
fairway ended
76
abruptly, and beyond it was a vast nothingness; he could see clouds below it. A hooked ball was a goner.
"What
happens to the ball if you hook it over the gorge?" Jessup said. •
The boy's face was serious. "It goes all
the way down," he said. "All the way."
"To the earth?" Jessup said.
And Jim Dolan shook his head. "All the
way down."
Jessup
took a second look and the clouds parted and he got a faint whiff of brimstone and saw a red glow burn madly for a moment.
"The only golf balls they get are the
ones hooked over that gorge," the caddie said. "Poor
devils."
Jessup placed his ball on the tee. On the
right were the densest woods he had ever seen, and the fairway itself was
sprinkled with traps. He took careful aim at a grassy spot between two traps
and swung. He was afraid to look, and automatically he was reaching in his hip
pocket for a second ball when the caddie said, "Nice shot."
And there was the ball, dead in the middle of
the fairway.
They
walked toward it and Jessup was shaking as though he had the ague, although it
was as nice a day as a golfer could find, no breeze
and not too hot, just warm enough to make a man's muscles feel loose.
They
had almost reached the ball when they heard a sound in the woods to the right and a moment later a handful of dirt and pebbles came down out of the sky and
then a ball dropped out of nowhere and landed in front of them.
Barnaby stopped and looked around at a lean
lanky figure coming out of the woods. He had a turned-down mouth and a bald and wrinkled pate and he was talking to himself. "By
Saturn," he said, "by Venus, that was a shot."
Barnaby
stared in amazement and then finally he found his tongue. "Pete Tyson, you
old horsethief," he said.
"Well," Tyson cackled, "I
never expected to see you here. What did you do, bribe the authorities?"
They shook hands and grinned at each other
and then Tyson addressed his ball and he hadn't changed at all, Barnaby saw.
Tyson wound himself into a pretzel until he was next door to strangling
himself, then the club came down and the ball
77
hopped acwss the fairway
and disappeared over the edge of the gorge and down toward the licking red
flames.
But
his old partner had become philosophical, Barnaby had to admit that. "If
it weren't for me," Tyson muttered, "they'd have a hell of a time
down there." And he took another ball from his hip pocket, placed it on
the turf and hit it toward the pin.
It
was like old times playing with Pete Tyson, and Barnaby was so puffed up he
could hardly wait to hit his ball. He could hardly contain himself, waiting to
see the look on Tyson's face when he showed him how he was hitting the ball
now.
Jkn Dolan handed him a brassie
and Barnaby stepped up and swung, and when he raised his head the ball was
lying on the green. He turned and looked at his friend and waited for him to
say something.
But
Tyson hadn't even opened his mouth. He just grunted and moved on down the
fairway, and Barnaby stared at him, his face getting red.
They went along to the green and Barnaby sank
a forty-foot putt and he looked up, and still Tyson didn't say a word, and that
was the last straw.
They
went toward the next tee and Barnaby exploded. "Why don't you be a man?"
he said. "I always knew I was the better golfer and now I've proved it.
Why can't you be man enough to admit it? Just standing there and sulking like
the cantankerous old goat you are."
"Hit
the ball," Tyson growled. "If there's anything I hate it's a gabby
golfer. You always did talk too much."
His face purple now, Barnaby stepped up
.without another word and hit the longest drive ever seen in the solar system.
The ball went practically out of sight, then came down
on the green and Jim Dolan handed him his putter.
And still Tyson's expression hadn't changed.
Barnaby stood there, choking, while Pete hit his usual hundred-yard drive into
the rough. They plodded along and Barnaby couldn't figure how Tyson had gotten
up here, but it was obviously a mistake, and somebody had slipped up somewhere;
some mix-up in the celestial filing system that probably explained it. And
instead of being grateful Tyson was more ornery here than he'd ever been down
below, which was saying a good deal. And maybe Tyson wouldn't admit it, but anyway, Barnaby was going to beat
the tar out of him.
And
he did. They finished the first nine and Barnaby totted up his score.
Pete
Tyson said, "Gives me a sixty-three. Couple of bad holes, but I'll do
better on the back nine. Let's have an ambrosia
before we start out."
They
walked up to the terrace and a waiter flew out with two tall and misty-looking
glasses.
Barnaby
put his score card down on the table. "I have a twenty-three," he
said defiandy. "The caddie will vouch for it.
I'll shoot about a forty-five for the eighteen."
He
shoved the card under Tyson's nose, but the old goat just yawned and said
nothing.
Barnaby
sat there and told himself that he was the champion golfer of the universe. But
somehow it left him cold, and suddenly he felt old and tired and even the
ambrosia tasted flat. He sighed, put down his half-empty glass and got up
slowly from the table.
"In a hurry?"
Tyson grunted.
Barnaby
said sadly, "Sorry, Pete, but somehow I don't feel so good. I'm going to
turn in my clubs. Don't think I'll play any more golf." And he thought
that even if Tyson had congratulated him, he still wouldn't want to play any more.
Pete's
wise old eyes squinted up at him and he chuckled dryly.
"Barnaby, you old fool," he said,
"I shot a forty-six myself the first round I played here. It's one of the
house rules."
"House rules?" Barnaby said, bewildered.
"They
let you have up here what you don't get below," Tyson said. "You
always wanted to be a perfect golfer. So did I. But
somehow, most of the residents prefer to go back to being themselves. You can
make your choice."
Barnaby
didn't have to think twice for the answer to that one. And suddenly the sun
came out and his loneliness was gone and he was itching to get out on the tee
again.
'Tell
you what," Tyson said. "On this back nine I'll play you for the
ambrosia at the nineteenth. I'll give you three strokes."
"You'll give me strokes!" Barnabv's face was purple again.
79
"You've gotten hogfat
since 1 saw you," Tyson said. "And besides, I've had lessons from
Macpherson."
"Sandy
Macpherson is up here?" Barnaby said in a whisper, for his was a name to
conjure with.
"And
where else would he be?" said Tyson. "So it's only fair I give you
strokes. I wouldn't take advantage of you."
Barnaby's
jowls shook with his laughter. "You'll give me strokes! Do I look like a
man takes candy from a baby! I never saw the day when I had to take strokes
from a string bean of a man put together with baling wire. Strokes! Come
on," he said. "I'm playing you even!"
"Man,
you'll rue the day," said Tyson, and their scowls wavered for a minute and became broad grins
as the love they had for each other came through.
The
caddies came up and they hurried across to the
tenth tee. "Start it off," Barnaby said. "Give me something to shoot at if you can."
Tyson
wound up and he missed the ball on his first try and swung again and got
himself bunkered behind the ladies' tee.
"If
I couldn't do better than that," Barnaby chuckled, "I'd quit."
He
took his stance and then saw a stranger watching him, a hawk of a man with a
blade for a nose, a man with sandy red hair, and shrewd gray eyes, and a pipe
in his mouth and a contemptuous dour look on his face.
"Meet Sandy Macpherson, our pro,"
Tyson said.
'Too
bad we didn't meet earlier," Barnaby said. "I'd have liked a lesson
from you, but I'll not be needing one now, for I've
finally grooved my swing."
"Then
swing, laddie, and dinna
talk sae much," said Macpherson.
Barnaby
waggled his club over the ball and ran over the rules in his mind and started
back with the left hand and kept his eye on the ball and pivoted with the hips
and shoulders and did everything according to the book—or so he thought. But
there was a whooshing sound like a wet sock falling on a concrete floor and
the ball blooped into the air and came down in a
meadow to the right of the fairway.
"You'll
have to hit another," Tyson cackled. "The Elysian fields are out of
bounds."
Hit another he did, a topped dribbling shot
and he turned to Sandy Macpherson.
"I'd
better have a lesson tomorrow," Barnaby said. "I must have done
something wrong."
"Something!"
said Macpherson with a laugh like a rusty safe door opening. "Ye dinna keep yere head doon."
"No, sir," said Barnaby, humble and
ashamed.
"Ye swing like an old witch wi' a broomstick."
"I
suppose I do," Barnaby said meekly, bowing his head for shame.
"Hoot,"
said Macpherson, "I'll hae to throw yere game away, mon. Ill hae to start from scratch and see if there's aught to be done wi' ye. Ten
o'clock sharp tomorrow."
"Yes,
sir," said Barnaby, "I'll be there." He grinned at Tyson, who
was grinning back at him, and then started out to hunt for his ball in the
Elysian fields, whistling a tune of his youth, and happy as a lark.
NOTE ON DANGER B
by Gerald Kersh
■ ■■■« ii ■■■■■■■■ ii
The
terrifying thing that happened inside the jet-propelled plane was too fantastic
for anyone to believe . . . except the man who lived through it to describe
the menace he found lurking in the stratosphere.
Doctor Sant says
that he and Captain Mayo exceeded iooo miles an hour
in the jet-propelled F.S.2 on April n, 1945. The fact has yet to be confirmed. Danger A was established as a real
danger in October, 1946. Sober scientists have not yet fully acknowledged the
existence of what Dr. Sant calls Danger B.
The
suppressed pages of the Sant Report are curiously
interesting, however. They bring back into memory one of the most remarkable
theories ever put forward by an established mathematician. The mathematician
was Berliner, who died in 1910. The
work to which Doctor Sant refers is formidably
entitled: Living
Cells and Their
Relation to Time;
With a Note
on Time so Far
as Time is United
With Velocity
and Space. It was written by Berliner, revised and
indexed by Wasserman in 1911, and
published by Frischauer in 1912, in Vienna. Only 350
copies of this book were
printed. It is extremely rare. There is a copy in the library of the British
Museum, and another in the Bodleian Library. I know of no others. Gerald
Kersh.
A FTER two years of departmental wirepulling and patient waiting, I have been granted
permission to publish the suppressed pages of the Sant
Report, which the War Department filed away as "Secret" in April, 1945. This is the document of which General Branch said, "It surely must
be the most astounding thing of its kind that ever has been or ever will be
written."
By "of its kind," General Branch
meant, "of the official kind, written by a responsible scientist in the
proper language, and formally handed in to the proper authorities."
For
the report was written by Dr. Sant. It deals with the
first flight of the jet-propelled F.S.2, and with two of the dangers that threaten the
flier who wants to cover too many miles a minute. He refers to them as Danger A
and Danger B. Nobody had thought of them until Doctor Sant
wrote that brief, brusque and utterly sensational report. The possibility of
Danger A may have occurred to one or two of the more imaginative scientists.
But no scientist could ever have considered or even dreamed of the posibility of Danger B. The War Department kept it quiet,
because at that time the fact was not established, and seemed, indeed,
unverifiable.
But now it appears that some crumbs of
evidence scraped out of the smoldering wreckage of a machine that crashed in
Montana have given the experts cause to think again.
Danger
A has to be overcome when the flier catches up with sound and touches 700 miles an hour. Then your hurding metal machine
crushes the vague atmosphere into something hard— much as a manufacturing
chemist's press squeezes fine, loose amorphous powder into an aspirin tablet.
In effect, you put up a brick wall of compressed air and smash yourself in
knocking it down. And so a shower of scorched and twisted metal comes back to
earth.
This
was to be tragically demonstrated by just such a catastrophe over England, in
October, 1946. Doctor
Sant had seen the possibility of such mishaps as long
ago as 1934, when
he had already evolved a sound theory of jet propulsion and had even made a
blueprint of a workable jet-propelled machine which he called F.S.i. The letters F.S. stood for Flying Spade simply
because the oudines of Sant's
machine, in 1934, were
reminiscent of the ace of spades. These oudines were
modified by 1945; by
which time—having been lucky and adroit enough to get moral, financial,
technical and official support—he was building F.S.2,
in which he and Captain
Mayo made a test flight.
F.S.2
looked like the head of a
harpoon; it had an appearance of keenness and complete efficiency. A fabulously
wealthy motorcar manufacturer whose name I may not mention financed the
83
experiment, with the approval of the War Department,
and so F.S.2 was put together secredy
somewhere in Nevada. It was finished before the end of March, 1945—the necessities of war had mothered
inventions which made this possible.
F.S.2 took off on its first serious flight on April 11, 1945. This happened to be Doctor Sant's fifty-second birthday—a fact difficult to believe.
In spite of his white hair, Doctor Sant looks like a
well-preserved athlete on the right side of forty; an athlete of the agile, slender kind—a runner and a jumper. Yet he boasts that he has not taken a stroke of exercise in thirty-five years.
He attributes his vigor and his youthful appearance to the fact that he never drank alcohol, never smoked cigarettes and never
got married, but lived only for his. work. "I
gave myself completely to work," he says. "That is as good a way as any of staying young. Friends, enemies, wives and children— they just weren't for me. They'd have torn me to bits like
four wild horses. Life hasn't marked me up, because I haven't had time to live
it. I've just worked all the time. Although," he adds, laughing,
"work can mark you up a bit, too"—and
he points to his nose, which is very badly broken. He did not get this injury
in any romantic way; in 1943 he was hit by a piece
of flying steel when something exploded in his laboratory.
"Still, it doesn't cut half as deep or hurt half as much as a sad man's wrinkle," said Doctor Sant.
Captain Mayo was born in Pasadena in August, 1919. He is one of those flying prodigies peculiar
to our time, for whom the whirling earth is too slow
and boggy. He could take a car to pieces and put it together again before he
was fifteen years old. Above all things he loves speed—speed for speed's sake. He resents the tryranny of the law of
gravity; he wants to get away from
everything that clutches man's feet. Therefore he, too, is still unmarried. In his business it is better
to be a bachelor. The perils of mad speed in the
upper air are fantastically incalculable—as Doctor Sant's
nightmarish report clearly indicates.
I
should say, in passing, that Doctor Sant overcame
Danger A by a bold—almost a foolhardy—application
of what he called the gun-and-candle principle. This
principle is
as old as the hills.
Fire a soft wax candle from a smooth bore gun, and the power behind it will send that candle right
through an
oak plank. Similarly, a
fine needle embedded in a cork and struck
84
smartly with a hammer will pierce a tough bronze penny—a needle that would snap if you tried to push it
through a fold of canvas. Furthermore, Sant did not attempt to achieve his highest speed until
F.S.2 was up on the lower curve of the stratosphere,
thus eliminating some of the danger of air resistance.
Sant and Mayo took off on April n, 1945, at nine o'clock in the morning. They were back on the airfield about
fifty-five minutes later. Something had gone wrong with their speed indicator.
This instrument was designed to record speed up to 1000 miles an hour. It was broken. Doctor Sant says
that it broke when F.S.2 reached the speed of 1250 miles an hour or thereabout. I state the figures exacdy
as they are recorded in the report. They are questionable, because the
indicator stopped working. In certain quarters there is no doubt at all that Sant and Mayo on that occasion traveled faster than any
human beings had ever traveled before.
Doctor Sant
was proud and, for him, excited.
Captain
Mayo was ashamed; he had blacked out, or become momentarily unconscious, as
they turned to come back. He wanted a cup of coffee. But, to everybody's
astonishment, the first thing that Doctor "Sant
said when he set foot on the ground was, "Has somebody got a mirror?"
Somebody
had a mirror. He looked at his reflection; explored his broken nose with anxious
fingers; said, "Ha!" and went to his office, shouting "Berliner!
Berliner! Berliner!"
He
stayed there for three hours, reading a book and making notes on a litde blue scribbling block.
That
evening Doctor Sant wrote his report. The War Department
cut out every reference to Danger B.
But now, after two years, the ban is lifted,
and I may give you the substance of what Doctor Sant
wrote. In the original document. Doctor Sant quoted certain figures and formulas which it is at
present poindess to print. The formulas, particularly,
contribute nothing to the story as it may be understood by the man in the
street, for whom this is written. Doctor Sant's figures take us into the higher mathematks—into
the esoteric mathematics that made headlines when Einstein first made news.
Anyone who understands the theory of
Berliner—and only five men in the world can make head or tail of this theory—
85
may work out for himself exactly what Doctor Sant was driving at. But any schoolboy may grasp the
broader aspects of the suppressed part of his report, dated April n, 1945, handed in on the morning of April twelfth. Doctor Sant
said:
... I
am aware that the failure of the indicator discredits my claim to having
traveled at over 1000
miles an hour. Nevertheless,
having tested every instrument with the utmost care, I am convinced that the
indicator broke down because of the excessive strain imposed upon it by the
speed achieved by F.S.2. I cannot support this claim, yet I am
satisfied that Captain Mayo and I, on this occasion, broke every existing speed
record. Similarly, there is no way in which I can confirm Danger B, which I
believe to be a real danger.
For
the sake of investigators in the near future, who will take up F.S.3 and F.S.4, I believe that it is my duty to relate events as I experienced them.
I
had overcome Danger A, and—according to the indicator— had touched 875 miles an hour. The coughing and roaring of the jet had died away, and
there was a peculiar quiet. If it had not been for the flickering of the
indicator needles and the vibration of F.S.2,
it would have been easy for
me to convince myself that we had stopped moving and were hanging per-fecdy still in space. But the indicator told me that we
were traveling at 875 miles an hour, then 900, and finally, 1000
miles an hour.
As
the needle touched the last mark on the dial and agitated itself as if it were
trying to push away beyond, I felt
an extraordinary sense of lightness. I can make this sensation clear only by
saying that I felt suddenly younger. I asked Captain Mayo how he was feeling,
and he replied, "I feel as if this is just a dream."
I did not look round at that time. F.S.2
is designed so that it may
be dually controlled. I, sitting in front, kept my eyes ahead. But a second or
two later my eyes filled with tears, as though I had been struck on the nose.
Indeed, my nose at the same moment began to throb and ache.
It
had throbbed and ached in a similar way shordy after
the septum had been removed in the operation that followed the explosion in my
laboratory in 1943.
86
The throbbing and the ache brought this very
vividly back into my recollection. Two or three seconds later, instead of this
throbbing, I was aware of a strange shocked numbness, which, even as I became
aware of it, went away.
Something
compelled me to loosen my mask for a moment and feel my face. First of all, I
touched my nose. It was no longer broken. It occurred to me, naturally, that
this was an illusion such as one may be occasionally subject to at certain
heights and under certain pressures.
I
spoke to Captain Mayo and asked whether he was all right. He said, "Well,
I guess I am," His voice sounded uneasy, and I asked him if he was sure
that he was all right.
Captain
Mayo did not answer, and so I turned my head and saw him touching himself
uneasily and looking at his hands in a bewildered way.
"Too much oxygen? Too litde?"
I asked.
Captain Mayo replied, "I just feel a bit
strange."
I said, "We've touched a thousand miles
an hour."
"How
did we ever get to do that?" he asked, and his voice was different. All
the authority was gone out of it. Then he uttered a sharp cry and said,
"My arm! My arm!"
I
looked and saw that his left forearm was dangling. It would have been hanging
vertically downwards but for the support of the layers of sleeve that enclosed
it.
Even as I looked, Captain Mayo's arm
straightened out with a jerk, and at that his whole manner changed. He squared
himself, and said, 'This is it, Bill! Let them have
it!"
And
then I remembered that these were the words Captain Mayo is reported as having
said when he was flying in France in 1942 and, his arm smashed by flak, took a Marauder
into a sukidal dive from which he emerged alive and
unhurt—except for his shattered arm. I felt remarkably light and cheerful. In
an indefinable way T felt different. I began to remember things which had faded
out of my memory long before—things trivial in themselves,
yet somehow important at that moment.
The
needle of the indicator had gone limp; yet I am sure that we were moving at 1000
miles an hour at least.
Only the vibration of F.S.2 indicated to me that we were moving. But the
speed indicator being dead, I had a strange and unreasonable sense of having
gone out of this world. Strange, illogical
87
anxieties crept into my mind. I said to myself, Tomorrow, at about eleven o'clock, I must see
what has happened to Ledbet-ter's castings. And then I remembered that Ledbetter was in Canada and
that he had not made a casting for me since 1938,
when my hair was still
black. I was unable to resist the impulse to peel my
glove away from my cuff.
There
was a reason for this. In the summer of 1938, a week before Ledbetter had finished my castings, I was rather severely bitten in the right wrist by
a schnauzer dog belonging to my sister. This bite had worried me then; I had
feared infection and disablement at a certain operative moment.
There
was no disablement and no infection. The marks of the dog's teeth have faded,
so that now they are scarcely visible. But as I looked I saw four half-healed
lacerations in the skin of my wrist grow angry and inflamed, and then, in a
split second, change so that they became bleeding red wounds and then, in a flash, disappear. And I observed, also, that the hair on my wrist,
which, since 1937, has been gray, was black.
I
felt my nose. When I took off with Captain Mayo, it was smashed flat and
boneless, as it is at present. Yet under my fingers then, it was hard and
straight as it had been before it was broken. I uncovered my face and looked at
my reflection in the glass-covered dial of one of the instruments in front, and
I saw that my face was different. I have been clean-shaven since 1936,
and gray-haired since 1938.
The shiny glass reflected
my face, strangely young. The nose was unbroken, and under it I saw a short black mustache.
I have not had a mustache since late in the
autumn of 1936, when I shaved clean at the request of a young
lady whom I have since all but forgotten. As I looked at this incredible reflection
of myself, I found myself wondering what this young lady was doing, and
reproaching myself because on her account my mind was so easily taken away from
the work upon which I had been so keenly concentrating. It was as if I had
slipped back nine years in time. I did not like that.
And still we might have been motionless in
the sky.
It
is fortunate for Mayo and for me that I turned just then to say, "Tell me,
how do I look?"
Captain Mayo was apparendy
unwell. He is, as the records show, about twenty-six years old, six feet tall,
and one hundred
88
and seventy-two pounds in weight. When I turned,
just then, I saw him as a boy of about sixteen, ludicrously little, in a heap
of heavy, complicated garments that were slipping away from him as he became
smaller, line by line.
His mask had slipped. His eyes were closed
and his mouth was open. He was saying, "Mother! Mother!"
I
reached back to shake him. As I did so, one of his gloves slipped off,
uncovering the hand of a little boy.
It
is fortunate I turned when I did. Another fifteen minutes might have put an end
to everything. I knew in those few seconds that what Berliner dreamed was
basically true, concerning man in relation to time and velocity. Traveling at a
certain speed, presumably in a given direction—I hesitate to specify or to say
that it is necessary to specify direction—a man touches one of the grooves
along whkh time travels.
Berliner
maintains that time passes man, and not that man is swept along by time. In
common with certain others, I used to laugh at this. Now I have modified my
opinion.
In
only a few minutes, at that speed, Captain Mayo and I were back ten years in
time.
I am
thankful that this occurred to me. If the principle of F.S.i
and F.S.2 had not been clear in my mind eleven years
ago, we must have crashed. In a few minutes more I believe that we should have
gone back to the period when F.S.2 was nothing but a theory. I believe that I
should have found myself in that machine like a child in a nightmare isolated
at a great height. And then there would have been a sickening sensation of
falling, falling, falling! And behind me under those
heavy clothes there would have been a baby crying.
Already
there was a certain dreamy wooliness in my head. I was experiencing something I
had experienced somewhere between sleeping and waking many years before. I
knew exacdy in what machine I was flying. But I no
longer knew what made it what it was. It seemed to me that I was rushing back,
faster and faster, toward the eleven-year-old deadline behind which I should be
lost forever. The memory of the Christmas of 1934 was very vivid in my mind.
We
were traveling faster and faster. My only hope was in a quick turn. Then, it
seemed that I was in F.S.i. Even that was fading.
Nevertheless, I managed to turn. I saw my face getting
89
older. I felt the impact that broke my nose, and
then the familiar ache and throb that resulted. Looking behind me, I saw
Captain Mayo stirring uneasily. He had filled his clothes. In a minute or two
he became conscious. He told me that he had a blackout, as it is called, on the
turn.
I maintain that Berliner touched a certain
aspect of the truth. In maintaining this and committing these notes to writing,
I realize that I may be discrediting myself, and inviting suspicion of my other
conclusions. Nevertheless, the danger which I call Danger B deserves
investigation.
Doctor Sant's F.S.2
is regarded as vastly
important. Apart from that which makes it fly, there is an automatic
air-compression device and a "forward brake"—as they call it. Work
is going forward on F.S.3. Hahningen's lined duralumin will make practical Sant's early dream of the double nose. Fowler's indicator
will be fool-proof, pressure-proof and altitude-proof. Weather permitting, F.S.3 should
be tested in May, 1947.
That
F.S.3 w>u
almost certainly break every known record is unimportant, as I see it. The War
Department believes in Doctor Sant. So do I. Doctor Sant believes in the improbable; so did Galileo, Marconi,
Watt, Leonardo da Vinci and the Brothers Wright And
so do I.
It
is pretty well established that Doctor Sant never
committed himself without reason. I cannot understand what Berliner wrote any
more than a journalist of the eighteenth century could understand what Newton
wrote, but I have faith in Sant —like the War Department.
The Sant Report may indicate that when it is safe to
travel fast enough, we may have conquered death—that is to say, the ordinary
physical and emotional wear and tear of life and time. It is indicated that if
we move fast enough, we can catch up with past years.
I
put this baldly because it is necessary to convey the straight idea. Fine
writing, imaginative writing—must come later.
I
have the report of the Montana crash. Tex Oden took
off alone in a certain jet-propelled plane which crashed in Montana. Out of
the scorched and twisted wreckage the authorities picked certain remains of a
human being. This human being must have been a child nine or ten years old,
according to the analysis of the carbonized fat. It remains to be worked out,
90
THE TERRIBLE ANSWER
by Paul Gallico
He dared to as\ a frightening question of the giant electronic calculator. And the machine supplied
THE TERRIBLE ANSWER.
PROFESSOR
DI FALCO had given Haber up for the night, ■"• and had thrown the
master switch and locked the controls in the deserted calculator room,
preparatory to going home, when the telephone began to ring, ks loud note in.the soundproof
quiet bringing a sense of shock and intrusion.
It
was Professor Haber calling from Penn Station to say that his train had
suffered "an hour's delay on the run from Washington and that he would be
at the American Electronic Corporation's offices as soon as he could secure a
cab. Di Falco had not recognized the voice at first and
had held him on until he could be sure of the identification. It was as though
Haber were speaking under some sort of strain, though a few sentences later his
voice sounded more normal and Di Falco set it down to
the natural nervousness of a man trapped for an hour in a stationary train and
late for an important appointment.
He
replaced the receiver, sighed and went about undoing all that he had just done, unlocking, checking, warming up and reactivating
the giant Mark IV, "PSMRSEC," which stood for Progressive Sequence
Memory Recording Selective Electronic Calculator, that fabulous man-made
mechanical brain of thousands upon thousands of moving parts and vacuum tubes,
uncounted miles of wire, hundreds of fuses, valves, cables, leads
91
and switches that had taken a year, and three
quarters of a million dollars, to build. This was the latest model,
that had advanced the capabilities of mathematicians a thousand years.
Professor Di Falco, with a slight shudder, remembered
that Haber always referred to this monster as "Liebchen."
He did not dislike Haber; indeed, as chief
mathematician and supervisor of the big calculator for the American Electronic
Corporation, Di Falco had the most profound respect
for the genius of Professor Haber. It was just that he made him nervous.
Everybody in the A.E.C. offices was a little afraid of him. He had a way of
treating the giant calculator as though it were something human, which was
uncanny. No one could be more aware of the essential simplicity of its intricacies
than those who served it or made use of it, and yet Haber often behaved as
though he believed the conglomeration of machinery were
animated.
He had a way with it unlike anyone else in or
out of the electronic corporation, and Di Falco found
this baffling, unscientific and a little shocking. He remembered, the time
several months ago when PSMRSEC, for no reason that any of the technicians
could detect, refused to perform. Somewhere deep in the copper-threaded
convolutions of its massive brain the problem was bogging down and getting
lost.
Di Falco remembered the expression of Professor Haber's
smooth, unlined face, and particularly the look that came into his pale and slighdy protruding blue eyes as he moved about the three
sides of the panel room into which was built the calculator, searching,
looking, listening, placing the back of his hand against sections of the glass
or chrome-steel paneling to feel for undue heat. It was the only time Di Falco had ever seen anything approaching warmth in those
frosty orbs. It was exacdy the gesture, Di Falco remembered, of one who touches his fingers to the
cheek of a loved person to feel if there is any evidence of fever.
He
recalled, too, how Haber had spoken when he had said in a low tone direcdy to the machine, "What is it, Liebchen? You are a litde tired,
maybe? Perhaps you try too hard. Come now, we will do it once more." The
caress in his voice would have been ridiculous had it been anyone but Haber.
Thus one calmed and cozened a frightened, fractious child. Thereupon,
92
the calculator had run through the long and
complicated problem without a hitch, a matter, the resident mathematician
knew, of pure coincidence or of a tube not previously cutting in now warmed to
the proper degree.
Professor
Di Falco set the calculator to blinking and chattering
as he ran a short test through her, was satisfied and
cleared her for the coming problem. He went to a desk, unlocked the' bottom
drawer again and removed the loaded .38-caliber revolver and laid it on top, half
concealing it beneath several folders and sheets of paper. Thereafter he strode
to the front of the room, parted the heavy monk's-cloth curtain drawn across
the high show window fronting on Fifth Avenue and 51st Street, and looked out into the dazzling stream of early evening
traffic. He was just in time to hear the "thunk"
of the cab door as Professor Haber got out to pay his fare and to catch the
gleam under the street lamp of the piece of steel chain that sealed to his
wrist the leather brief case he was carrying. Di Falco
unlocked the door leading to the avenue.
"Good evening, Professor Haber. Come
in."
When
Di Falco had locked the door again, Professor Haber
drew a small key from his pocket, detached the brief case from his wrist and
laid it on the desk. The two men exchanged small talk about the delay of the
train.
Professor Haber was the younger of the two, a
man just past forty, with a rounded face, extraordinarily thin and bloodless
lips and a head of graying sand-colored hair. The strain of the Government
project on which he had been working was beginning to tell on him, for he was
pale and tired-looking and nervous. The bland, smooth skin of his face was as
unlined and expressionless as ever, yet it gave the impression of invisible
wrinkles and furrows that might lie underneath and just out of sight.
He turned to the calculating panel of the
machine and said, "Well, Liebchcn?" and
there was that same odd note of strain in his voice that Di Falco
had noticed over the telephone. "We will have a nice evening together,
yes?" His accent, all that remained of his early youth in Germany, was
faint and was more a German juxtaposition of words than dialect.
He continued his examination of the panels, cylinders, rolls and indicators
and gave a swift glance at the control console in the
93
center of the room. "That's good," he
said, his voice calmer. "She is quite ready. I have prepared most of the
problem already in Washington. It is a most unusual one."
To
Haber, it seemed, the giant calculator was always "she." Di Falco put on his hat and coat, "Well, I'll be getting
along.
Good
luck. If anything can do it, it is----------- " He could not bring
i himself to say "Liebchen,"
though it had been at the tip of his tongue. He concluded: ". . . the Mark
Four."
But
Professor Haber was no longer listening. He had turned away and was staring
into the heart of the calculator with a faraway and particularly intensive and
searching look in his pale blue eyes, his lips set in a line that might almost
be described as bitter.
"Oh," said Professor Di Falco, "I forgot. This." He went to the desk and
removed the papers that were covering the revolver.
Haber stared. "What is that for?"
"It is customary. You will be alone here
through the night.
Whenever there is top-secret work involved, particularly for the
Government-------- "
Haber said, "What childishness. And the chain on the wrist too. Anyone who stole this would
take twenty years to understand it, I do not like revolvers. Therefore I did
not bring one with me."
Di Falco looked uneasy and said, "The company------------- "
Haber shrugged. "Very well." He shifted the papers back to
half cover the weapon. "Good night. I will
see you in the
morning."
"So," said Professor Haber. "Soon, Liebchen." He did
not mind speaking aloud to her, indeed he was hardly aware that he was doing
so, for the soundproofing of the room deadened his harsh voice and he heard it
no more than one does when one is speaking into a telephone. The machine seemed
to be gazing at him from its thousands of eyes in which there was neither light
nor expression. It was waiting.
Haber
drew from his brief case a scries
of punched cards and long rolls and strips of punched paper, the work of
months. "Ah, Liebchen," he breathed, "if you can do this. If you will do this
for me."
He began to put into sequence the factors of
the problem to be read into the calculator before preparing the master card
which would command the order in which the components were to be selected by
the massive electronic brain. Here was a complicated set of numbers, the
translation of the formula indicating the tensile strength of steel, aluminum
and alloy, long strips like the record of a player piano containing the thou sands upon thousands of digits necessary to express
diminishing atmospheric pressure.
Haber
checked them again and then went over them in hit
mind—the curvature of the earth, specific gravity of the fuel_ wind resistance
in the earth's atmosphere, and temperatures it the stratosphere; and Lois, Sara
and Arthur Seeger.
He
gave a great cry of rage, pounded the top of the desk with his fists and struck
his forehead several times with the heels of his hands as though to beat their
images and memory out of his brain. How dared they intrude themselves on hie consciousness at a time like this? What right had they,
Lois, his wife, Sara, his daughter, and Seeger, his friend, to take one moment
of his time and thoughts from the machine? And immediately he thought of
Victoria, his mother, and the look that had passed between Lois and her the
last time. It was not possible. It could not be possible.
And
yet, what if it was? Why should he care? why should he
care ever? But surely not now, when the problem which would
culminate his life's work was at the point of solution. They must be got
out of his head, all of them, out, out.
"Out! Get out!" he shouted. When his choler
died down, he was conscious of the soft whirring of the motors that turned the
calculator's memory-tape cylinders. "Sh-h-h-h, Liebchen," he said. "I did not mean to frighten you. Soon we begin, you and I."
By a
tremendous effort he concentrated on the preparation of the problem, clearing
his mind to accept the staggering sequences of digits, formulas and
computations he was preparing for the calculator. He fell into a kind of work
fever during which his breath whisded heavily through
his nose and his eyes appeared to be starting from his head. He checked his
cards and sequences and punched out new ones. Then, seated at one of the
smaller machines installed on the floor of the control room and orienting the
entire problem in his head, he
95 punched out the master card of instructions to the calculator by means
of which it would hurde through the maze of his
calculations to give him the beginning of the answer to the problem he had set
himself, the destruction of space, time and man.
He
went about the room then, opening the glass panels and doors giving access to
the spindles and cylinders of the calculator and attending it like an acolyte,
as he hung the punched-paper memory strips from the shining steel, fed the
prepared cards into its maw. He was dizzy from nerves and excitement.
In
the brief time the earth made its nocturnal journey around the sun, his career
as scientist, mathematician and inventor would be crowned. No one in the world
that survived the era that would begin with his discovery would ever forget the
name of Professor Haber. And only Liebchen had made
it possible. He would have had to labor for one hundred years to arrive at the
formula and data that Liebchen would deliver to him
in a few hours. For Professor Haber believed that he was the greatest
mathematician the world had ever known and with Liebchen
as his slave and second brain, he held, as it were, the earth in the hollow of
his hand.
He felt almost godlike as he festooned the
Mark IV with the memory ribbons that would enable her to call upon stored-up
information and computations at the thrust of a button. It was as though with
what he did he added a hundred or more years to his life and a millennium to
the knowledge of man.
Through
these emotions and sensations now came drifting again thoughts of distant
humans left behind on the planet like an old dream—his wife and daughter, and
Arthur Seeger, the musician whose friendship had meant so much to him through
the years.
It
did not arouse his rage this time, for what he was doing was now mechanical. He
could think even of his mother, whom he had shut out of his life so
heartlessly. And if he had sacrificed them all and used them shamelessly to
further his cold, precise unswerving exploration of the universe, it was their
misfortune to be human beings caught in the meshes of something that was more
than human—himself and Liebchen. Seeger might have
been a great violinist and artist had he not absorbed him. He saw Lois
struggling like a limed bird in the
96
web of their marriage, Lois who might have
amounted to so much. And as for Sara, with her frightened eyes and teeth
clamped between wire braces, she who should have been the closest was the least
of his concerns.
Haber
racked up the last of the strips and searched himself for guilt feelings. He
could find none. He had never in his life been conscious of having any. But
deep down, much, much deeper, there was something that persisted in nagging at
him. The click as he closed the last panel brought him back and drove it from
his mind.
Professor
Haber seated himself at the huge console of the control desk, a thing of a
thousand tiny light bulbs and hundreds of buttons, knobs, toggles and switches,
and there he paused for a moment, his fingers hovering over the keyboard like a
master organist hesitating an instant before releasing
the first chords of a cosmic symphony.
To
Haber, Liebchen appeared at that moment the intellect
of the universe, the brain of a million parts, but still and dormant, waiting
for him to supply the spark, needing only his soul to become alive.
"Liebchen, Liebchen!" he
cried out. "Now!" and pressed the keys.
She
became animate at once, like a runner bursting from the mark, a thousand
lights, like swarming fireflies, blinking and glowing in her tubes, spreading
over the length and breadth of the sequence relay panels like sparks blown from
a hearth, now glowing, now dying, echoed in light from the arithmetical unit
and pulse generators on the other side of the room. Wheels whirred and spun
within her, others clicked slowly or ran in spasmodic
jerks. She chattered, whispered and sighed.
At
first the scientist remained seated at the console, watching the flashy lights,
the gauges and signals, occasionally shifting a key, but soon he was caught up
in the rhythm of the pulsing machine and he leaped to his feet, ran to the
panels where series of numbers were building visibly, moved from there to the
printing machine where already intermediate results achieved by the calculator
were beginning to emerge on paper rolls containing row upon row of digits.
"Ah, Liebchen,
my heart, my soul," he cried, as he saw the
97
results grow, and lapsed into German as he did when
his mind and body were subject to unbearable strain and pressure.
For he could see already that she was
surpassing herself. He had set up problems, relays and electronic memory tests that not
even the resident mathematician would have thought possible; and she was
digesting; collating, computing them, spewing them forth in the shape of sums
and formulas never before grasped or conceived as possible by the mind of man. A thousand men working night and day with pencil and paper for a year
could not have matched a minute of her labors. Time and space fell away; the
secrets of gravity were laid bare; the cosmos rocked in the figures she poured
forth.
Hour
after hour it went on, while Professor Haber, oblivious of time or fatigue, ran
from printer, to control table, to panels; breathless, sweating, shouting
praise, advice, admonition, guidance at Liebchen,
leaping about the inclosure like a round-faced,
animated marionette.
At
last the lights ceased their darting and blinking, the chugging and clattering
died down, and soon there was no sound but the quiet whir of her cylinders and
Professor Haber's heavy breathing. The first half of the problem was done, and
now he felt weak and drained, and his head throbbed unmercifully.
In the ensuing silence, the horns of late
traffic on Fifth Avenue came into the room, muffled as though heard from many
miles away.
"Ah,
Liebchen, Liebchen,"
cried Professor Haber, hoarsely, "you have created a miracle. There is
nothing that you cannot do."
"Then .why do you not use me to the
fullest?" Liebchen whispered to him via the soft
sursurrus of her spinning cylinders.
"Eh,
what?" said Haber. He was not certain at first it had been the machine,
but he had no doubt when she spoke to him again, because she was watching him
almost as though she were begging him to let her help him.
"Use
me. Use me," she whispered. "There is no truth that can remain hidden
from me, nothing I will not tell you if you will only ask me."
Professor
Haber cried out as though in pain. For the small,
98 nagging thought had come up again, the one
that had never really let him rest since it had first appeared. His voice
dropped to a whisper like that of the machine. "Yes, Liebchen;
yes," he said. "There is one thing I must know."
"Ask
it. Ask it of me," Liebchen replied.
"Tonight I can refuse you nothing."
Something
seemed to flare up in Professor Haber's brain and burst there like a bomb, and
over and over he heard himself saying, "Why not? Why not? Why not?" He had only to reduce the problem that had
been gnawing at his vitals to a series of mathematical formulas and
progressions, express all the factors affecting it in sequences of digits for
the selector and memory relays of Liebchen, punch the
commands on the master card, press the switch and set her to the hunt. Only the
truth would be forthcoming. In his hands she was incapable of anything else.
He
rushed to the desk, seized pencil and paper. "X" was himself;
"Y" Lois. "Z" he assigned to Arthur Seeger; and for Sara,
the symbol Theta; his mother, "A," and his father "B." It
yielded up a simple equation, but it would have to be broken down and numberized a thousandfold for Liebchen to be able to understand and compute it.
He
began with himself and his hatred for his father, and he made a numerical graph
of the increasing intensity of the emotion, which seemed to have reached its
height when at the age of fourteen they had brought him to America. But was it
hatred? It would not do to try to fool Liebchen. Only
from truth could come the truth. He assigned a symbol
for burning jealousy and translated it into a series of equations dealing with
its rise in ratio to the success of his father as a teacher of philosophy.
Everyone then had talked about Professor Otto Haber. No one took notice of his
son Hans. How simple to turn the hateful, demonaic,
screaming urge to outshine his father, to be the only Haber who would be
remembered while the world lived, into a mathematical progression.
Lois?
He had never loved Lois. He had never loved anyone. How express this
mathematically? He took her symbol and diminished her to zero. She had never
existed for him except as someone to be used, for a man must live a man's life
for all his unquenchable and driving ambition. Lois might have
99
amounted to something had she not married him. He had
taken her away from a boy with whom she thought she was in love, because it was
so easy. She thought he was passionately in love with her when what he wanted
was a woman and a servant. She had given up her career to marry him and had
never had a happy moment since.
Figures, letters, equations, square and cube
roots began to cover the paper as he reduced what he was and what he had done
to the binary numbers that Liebchen could devour and
digest to feed her giant intellect.
There
was Arthur Seeger. They had been friends when they were boys in Germany. They
had met again at State University as young men where Haber, already an
acknowledged genius, was teaching and experimenting with untapped mathematical
concept. Seeger was a promising young concert violinist.
The
one thing that could rest and relieve Haber's overtaxed brain was music, pure
flowing melody. Ah, music was easy to reduce to mathematics. The scales, the
tones and half tones, the vibrations of a violin string per second and the
speed of sound. He had persuaded Seeger to remain at State and teach. He had
absorbed him, weakened his ambition, ruined him.
Vicky, his mother, and Sara, his daughter. They were alike in so many ways. After his
father had died he had never forgiven his mother for loving this man he had
hated so. When this love was transferred to his daughter he revenged himself
upon them both. Revenge could be reduced to formula, for it vibrated like a
tuning fork.
And
against these, he traced in rising graphs the titanic mathematical concepts of
his own brilliant and successful career. He had been devotee, acolyte and
priest to pure science. He included the formulas that had marked each milestone
of his success—his tractive theory, that had gained
him his professorship; the famous sidereal sequence, that had won notice even
from Einstein; and at last his discovery of the protonic
equation, that had placed him at the head of the Government's top-secret
project. No one who survived what was coming would ever forget the name of Hans
Haber. Already, Otto, his father, was forgotten except by a few teachers and
librarians.
Professor
Haber assembled the figures, symbols and formulas, reduced them and ordered
them. He punched out cards and
100
memory tape, his fingers flying over the punch keys
as though there were no such thing now as fatigue; he composed the master card.
He fed the problem data and instruction cards
into the card-reading machine, his hands trembling, and checked the temperature
of the tubes and the position of the switches, and then seated himself again at
the console, his arms poised over the keys. Just once, he looked around wildly,
cried aloud, "Lieb-chenl Help me I" and
started the problem through the calculator.
He pressed down the activator switch and it
was as though he had poured poison into her veins. The lights that had formerly
winked like mischievous phosphor worms now glowed evilly like hot coals and
spread themselves over the panels in horrid patterns of contained fire that
seemed to be striving to burst their glass prisons and flow out upon the floor.
The
machine shook and shuddered, and the ratchets and relays, the pickups and
transfers ratded and clattered in a bedlam that rocked Haber's brain inside his head. She was heaving,
gasping, retching until the glass panels vibrated, and for a moment Haber was fearful that she would destroy herself. But the tempo
only increased in fury as the wicked lights leaped from casement to casement,
the cogs and cylinders whirled, stopped and started again out of all rhythm.
Winds appeared to arise in the control room and howl about his head; the floor
was trembling beneath his feet.
And
then, as a new note, an undercurrent to the hideous cacophony, Professor Haber
was aware that the printer on which the intermediate and final results were
recorded was chattering.
Professor Haber was aware that deadly fatigue
had come upon him again. Now that he wished to rush to the machine and seize
and devour the results, his limbs were leaden. He forced himself to move,
staggered to the steel- and glass-hooded instrument and seized the length of
white paper clicking from its innards, covered from side to side with
close-typed columns of digits.
Swifdy as they emerged, he decoded them. His eyes
goggled horribly. A cry was strangled in his throat. He interpreted the
terrible, inexorable answer delivered by the infallible machine:
101
Lois
and Arthur—his wife and his best friend in love! For the past three years. They
were planning to ran away. Victoria, his mother, had
advised them to go away together and take the child with them. It was Arthur
whom Sara adored and looked upon as a father. Even now while he was in New York
they were taking the step.
"Ah-h-h!" The cry broke from Professor Haber's lips at
last. His face was suffused with crimson, his hands were shaking uncontrollably
and the veins stood out from his forehead as though they would burst. He did
not care for any of these people, and yet he cried out, "My own
mother!" And then: "No, no! I cannot stand it. I am human, after all.
I cannot bear it"
He straightened up and stared straight into
the bowels of the shuddering calculator.
"Liebchen!"
he bawled. "Liebchen!
What shall I do?"
Under
his fingers the paper, still emerging from the machine, looped and pressed and,
as though Liebchen were answering him, he translated
the new disgorgement of figures: "Destroy yourself!
Get out of their way!"
The
paper ratded and shook in Haber's fingers.
"Destroy myself? But I am important."
As
though the machine had heard what he said, the new lines of burning digits
decoded to "You have never in your life done a human or loving act.
Therefore you have no importance to the world."
"But—but"—and now Professor Haber
screamed—"you don't understand. I am the world's greatest
mathematician."
The
machine chattered once more and then came to a halt. "You are obsolete. I
have replaced you."
The
lights died on the sequence relay panels, the wheels and cogs ground to a halt.
Liebchen was done. Only the whirring cylinders
continued to whisper—"Destroy yourself. Destroy—"
Professor
Haber raised his eyes with a horrible groan. His violence had disturbed the
papers on the desk next to him. The light embedded in the ceiling was caught by
the blue barrel and hammer of the revolver lying there.
The room of horror was thick with police,
detectives and F.B.I, men. The body had been covered and removed to one
102
side, and the Government agents formed a solid
screen about the desk, the papers thereon, and the machines. The local F.B.I,
chief was trying to get from Professor Di Falco, who
had been aroused from bed at six in the morning and brought down to the A.E.C.
offices, some idea of what had taken place there during the night preceding the
tragedy.
Professor
Di Falco, shivering, feeling a litde
sick, and under the watchful eye of the Government agents, had studied the
problem cards, punch tape and result sheets littering the desk.
"So what are those?" asked the
chief.
"His
problem," said Professor Di Falco. "The one
he came up from Washington to work on. It is set up—masterfully, is the only
word. He ran it through the machine. It must have taken from five to six hours
to calculate. I can check the exact time later. The results"—and here he
handed several sheets to the F.B.I, man—"you will do well to take into
your charge. They are stupendous. One of the great
achievements of mankind, in a way."
"And
after he had achieved it," said the F.B.I, man, but as a question,
"he went off his rocker and shot himself?"
Professor
Di Falco chewed at his lip and frowned.
"No," he said, "not quite. That is, not right then. For you see,
there was a second problem, which he set up after the first and sent
through Lieb—, ah the
machine. These cards -------------- " He held
them up.
"The answer to it I took from his f-fingers."
"And that killed
him?"
"I don't know. I think so. Probably."
"Why?
What kind of a problem was it? What was on the cards? What was he after?"
The hands holding the sheets covered with the
endless rows of numbers trembled a litde.
Professor Di Falco exhaled his breath in a way that
was half sigh, half shudder. "I don't know," he repeated. "I
don't think anyone will ever know what happened to him or why he did it.
Because, you see, what is on these cards and result sheets isn't really a
problem at all in a sense that we understand it. It is mathematical Jabber-wocky, sheer arithmetical gibberish. Not a line of what
went into or came out of the machine on its second run makes any sense, rhyme
or reason whatsoever."
THE VOICE IN THE EARPHONES
by Wilbur Schramm
The
airliner was in full flight, her two pilots lying unconscious on the floor,
when Shorty Frooze tool^ the controls. No man was
ever more in need of help . . . or got it from such a strange source.
TT HAD never happened before in the history of
aviation. •*■ The chances of its happening again
are one in a number that has zeros stacked across the page like eggs in cold
storage. And yet the fact remains that it happened. For a long time, people who
saw it will tell their children and grandchildren how Shorty Frooze, who had never flown an airplane, found himself
suddenly at the controls of an airliner 8000 feet
up in the blue air over Kansas, and how, like a farm boy breaking the new colt,
he calmly decided to ride the big ship in to a landing.
But
to appreciate what really happened that July afternoon you have to know
something about Shorty. Ms real name wasn't Frooze, of course. It was Habib
el Something or Other, one of those Asia Minor names
that are like nothing in English. They began to call him Frooze
in the years when he was a fruit peddler in a little town near Kansas City. I
can still remember him driving his donkey cart through the streets, jingling a
bell and singing his wares in a high voice that
104 \
penetrated every kitchen in town. "Can'aloupe!" he would call. "Wa-ermelon! Fresh froozc!" And the name stuck, even when he
learned to say "fruits" and retired the patient litde
donkey and set up a sidewalk stand in Kansas City—Shorty Frooze.
The
most important thing about Shorty was his son. Had you ever guessed Bill James
was his boy? Bill dropped his last name when he went to the University of
Kansas. He was as different from his father as could be. He was big and
handsome and popular, and a great athlete. Shorty told me once that Bill
resembled his mother, who died when Bill was born. And inevitably Shorty's boy
grew away from nervous litde Shorty, who couldn't
even talk plain English. Bill wasn't exacdy ashamed
of his father, but when he took him to father-and-son banquets in high school,
Shorty didn't enjoy it, and other people were ill at ease, too, and thereafter
Shorty faded into the background. He stayed away from Bill's fraternity house
in Lawrence. Whenever Bill played ball, I would see Shorty there, with a happy
mist in his eyes, but always in some inconspicuous corner, and I could never
find him when the game was over.
One
big area of Bill's world was closed to Shorty. That was aviation. Bill was a natural flier. He soloed at seventeen. By the time he was eighteen, they
said, he could fly a barn door if anyone would put an electric fan on it. He
went to the airlines before he finished Kansas. When the shooting started in
Europe, he wanted to go right into the RAF, but Shorty said no. He said Bill was all he had left. Wait at least long enough to
finish out the year with the airlines, he pleaded. Because
Bill wasn't quite twenty-one, Shorty had to give consent. They said some
pretty bitter words' before Bill stomped out of the house, back to his job. And
then came the accident, barely a week later, with
Shorty watching.
Shorty
grieved unnaturally over Bill's death. He kept blaming himself, torturing
himself. I always passed his litde stand on my way to
work, and for days at a time it would be closed, while Shorty sat at home,
grieving. Then he took to hanging around the airport, talking to the mechanics
and the pilots, and watching the ships slide in from every point on the
compass. They knew why he did it; he felt closer to Bill there. But after a
while he became a nuisance, and they had to ask him to stay away.
Then he went back to work again, frantically.
I could find him at the stand any hour of the day or evening. To save money, he
went often without food as he had when he was helping put Bill through
Lawrence. And whenever he had a few dollars saved up he took an airplane trip.
He would come to the airport hours before flight time. People stared at him and
smirked behind their hands. The first time I saw him there, I stared too. I
didn't know him. He had got out his Sunday suit, and it must have been the suit
he was married in. It had tight trousers and a long coat, and made him look
like something out of a musical comedy. But when the plane was announced,
Shorty was always first in line, and he would scurry out to be sure of the
front scat. That was as near as possible to the place
where Bill had sat when he was pilot; there Shorty could see as nearly as
possible what Bill must have seen from the pilot's cockpit. It would have
seemed pitiful, his trying so hard to get closer to the boy in death than he
could in life, if it hadn't been laughable. And that was how Shorty happened to
be on the front seat of an airliner bound from Denver to Kansas City on the
July day when it happened.
The
other passengers confirm Shorty's story of what happened. They were well out
of Denver toward Kansas City when the stewardess opened the door of the pilot's
compartment and stepped into the passengers' part of the ship. She was as
white as her blouse, they said. She sat down unsteadily beside Shorty in the
front seat. Apparendy only Shorty heard what she
said. She pointed to the front compartment. "My God, see what's in
there!" she gasped, and fainted dead away.
Shorty
himself didn't know exacdy why he did what he did in
the next few minutes. Why he took the stewardess' keys and went into the
pilots' compartment, instead of giving the stewardess first aid, is something
that could be explained only in terms of some larger pattern of which that act
was a part. The important thing is that he did go through the door forbidden to
passengers. He locked the door behind him and looked along the passageway,
which he had never seen, but which Bill had seen so often, past the radio
equipment, past the baggage compartment, to the cockpit where pilot and
copilot sit surrounded by windows and instruments.
At first he comprehended only that there was
something
106
vaguely wrong with what he saw. It came to him
slowly that there was no pilot and no copilot, and no hand was on the controls,
and no eye was watching where the ship flew.
Still
slowly, like a man lifting an unknown weight, he mastered other details. One
pilot stretched out on the floor. The other slumped down behind his seat.
Shorty touched them, fearing he might be touching dead men. He listened to
their hearts. He propped them up, then stretched them out and poured water from
a vacuum bottle on their faces. You have read the story in the newspapers, of
course, and you know that pilots and stewardess were suffering from a violent
attack of food poisoning, from a lunch they had eaten before flight. But Shorty
did not know that. He knew only that both pilots were unconscious, and he could
not revive them, and he was alone with the controls of a transport plane high
above Kansas.
The
sensible thing, he admitted to himself, would be to go back and see whether a
doctor or a pilot was among the passengers. He tried to weigh the possibility
of there being a doctor or a pilot against the possibility of panic if there
was none. And pardy because of that judgment, pardy because he was at last where Bill had sat on so many
flights, he decided not to go back to the passengers—not for a litde while.
He
sat down in the pilot's seat, trembling, but not with fright. This thing with
the litde steering wheel on the end must be the
"stick" Bill had mentioned so often. There was one for each pilot,
and two pedals like clutch and brake in front of each stick. He tried to see
how many of the dials and switches on the instrument panel he could identify
from hearing Bill talk about them. One he was sure of—down at the lower left
center, a handle marked Automatic
Pilot. He judged that was what was keeping the
plane level and straight. Things would be all right until the gas gave out.
Here was the radio headset. Acting on a sentimental litde
impulse, he put on the earphones and picked up the microphone Bill must have
addressed so often.
Bill
would have said something professional like "Pilot to tower," he
knew, and given the flight number and position. But the only thing Shorty could
think of to say, in a high, embarrassed voice, was "Hello there. Hello,
Kansas City."
Nothing happened for a minute, and then a
voice came into
107 his earphones. He felt like a boy caught playing with forbidden toys. But the voice
was calm and matter-of-fact. "Hello, old fellow," it said. "Been
wondering where you were. Anything wrong?"
Shorty
thought at the time that the voice would be engraved in his memory like chisel
cuts in stone, but later he had trouble describing it for me. The radio didn't
leave much color in it, of course, and it was like any other airways
voice—flat, calm, sparing of words, the kind of rhythm men develop from
dealing much with elements and refusing to get excited over mere man-made
things. All afternoon Shorty kept trying to identify
it with some person he knew, but not quite succeeding. It was a friendly voice,
for all its impersonal quality. It invited confidence. And before Shorty
really thought about what he was doing, he was pouring the whole story story of his situation into the microphone.
When he stopped, there was a long, low whisde from the earphones.
"My
kid Bill ought to be here," said Shorty. "He was a flier."
"Yes, I know," said the voice. Then
it was silent so long that Shorty said anxiously, "Hello?"
"Well,"
said the voice thoughtfully. It took a long time to say, "Well."
"What shall I do?';
asked Shorty.
"If
I were you," said the voice, "I'd fly her into Kansas City."
"But I don't know how," said Shorty. "I'll teach you," said
the voice. "You'll do what?" gasped Shorty.
"Put your hands on, the stick and your
feet on the pedals," said the voice. "Don't be afraid. They won't
bite."
Shorty swore to me that is what happened up
in the plane. That is how he came to do what he did. He says he didn't feel
frightened at first; he felt foolish, like a man on a quiz program. Then he
wondered how soon he would wake up. It took a long time, Shorty said, before
the reality of the situation swung around in his mind and hit him like a fist.
And
by that time the voice in his earphones had taken over, and wasn't giving him a
chance to be frightened.
"Don't be scared of the instrument
board, either," said the
108
voice. "You won't need most of the things on
it. They're luxuries. See if you can find a dial marked Altimeter and tell me
what it says."
"Eighty,"
said Shorty.
"That means eight thousand feet,"
said the voice. "Now look for a handle marked Automatic Pilot."
"Here it is," said Shorty. "Turn it to OFF."
"Take
off the Automatic Pilot?" gasped Shorty. "Sure," said the voice.
"You're going to learn to fly this crate, aren't you?"
Shorty's hand shook as he took off the
Automatic Pilot. The left wing dropped slighdy.
"Keep the stick center." The wing went up.
"How
did you know?" asked Shorty incredulously.
"Everybody does it the first time,"
chuckled the voice. "Now let's try a few things.
Landing's simple, but you'll have to know how to bank. Let's try a left bank
first. Put the stick a litde left and a litde forward. Push the left pedal a litde.
Just a litde."
Bill had talked about that, Shorty
remembered. He had said that the pedals worked just the opposite of a bobsled
crossbar.
The
big ship came around grandly. Shorty took one hand off the stick and wiped
something wet out of his eyes. In that instant he understood more of what
flying had meant to Bill than ever before. The thrill is the same—your first
jump on a horse, your first racing turn in a sailboat, the first time you do a good bank in your plane.
"Level
it off," said the voice. 'Tress the right pedal a litde. Stick back to center. Pull it back a little
to put the nose up. How was it?"
"A
litde jerky," said Shorty.
"You probably lost some altitude
too," said the voice. "That's because you didn't keep your nose on
the horizon." "My nose?" asked Shorty.
"The plane's nose. Now let's try another left bank." The
voice seemed to hypnotize him into it, Shorty said. "Now another," it
said. "Better? . . .You know," said the
voice, "you might fool me and come in on the other side. Let's try a right
109 bank. Just the opposite.
Right pedal, and so on. Come on, now; let's do
it."
"That was pretty bad," said Shorty.
"I remember. Bill said a right bank seemed harder than a left one at
first,
"That's right. Now let's practice
another one."
"What do you suppose the passengers
think?" asked Shorty.
"What
they don't know won't hurt them. Arc you flying along the railroad tracks
now?"
"Pretty close."
"East or West? Look at your compass. Top
of the instrument board." "East."
"Good.
How are you at glides?" "I never tried one," said Shorty.
"Better
try two or three. About all there is to landing is a good long glide. Push the
wheel a little forward and try one. Not too far forward. What does the
altimeter say now?"
"Seven and a half. Does that mean seventy-five hundred?"
"Yes,"
said the voice. "Now look around and find the switch that lowers the
wheels. You'll need that."
Shorty said he surrendered himself to the
voice like a man floating downstream. What it told him to practice he
practiced. What it told him to push and pull and press, he did. Once there was
a prolonged pounding on the door behind him. "Shall I open the door?"
he asked the microphone.
"I
wouldn't," said the voice in the earphones. "Why take a chance? You
can fly this job, pappy. You don't need help."
That was one of the sweetest moments in
Shorty's life.
"They told me I was too old to learn to
fly," he confessed. "They even kicked me out of the Kansas City
airport."
"They won't today," said the voice.
Shorty said he wished he had a fifty-cent
cigar. That was the first moment in his life when he had felt like smoking one.
He felt like leaning back in a big chair with his thumbs hooked in his vest.
As they flew on across Kansas, Shorty said he
got a kind of physical pleasure out of living he hadn't experienced for thirty
years. His senses seemed peculiarly alert to the blueness of the air above him,
the sweep of the Kansas plain, the wind waves in the wheat and prairie grass
below him. He saw another
110
plane, headed southwest along the distant horizon,
and felt the warm sense of brotherhood that ships feel at sea. Bill had told
him about that feeling, but he hadn't understood it.
He
even began to feel like talking—more so than he had ever felt with anyone
except Bill, when Bill was a boy. With his customers, with the few neighbors he
knew, he always tried to say as litde as possible and
to cover up his awkward English and his funny accent. This fellow talking into
his earphones actually seemed to want to hear him talk. Shorty told him about
himself, and about Bill, and about some of the things he could see from the
plane. When he saw what looked like wheel tracks curving across the prairie, it
was the most natural thing on earth to ask the voice what they were.
"That's
the old Santa Fe Trail," Shorty's earphones said. "That's the road
they took before there were railroads. They went to the old Spanish cities in
Mexico and brought wagon-loads of goods home to sell. That's one of the most
famous roads in America."
"Why,
that's what I do," said Shorty, becoming excited. "That's how 1 do it. I get the stuff down south and bring it
up here to sell. I used to sell it in wagons too. Can'aloupes and wa'ermelons
and frooze." Unconsciously he dropped
back into the old immigrant English.
"Sure," said the
voice.
Shorty
tried to imagine prairie schooners and caravans creeping along the ruts in the
brown plain. And he fancied he could see another vehicle in the parade. It was
pulled by a patient litde donkey, and the driver
jangled a bell and sang his wares in a high, loud voice. It was the first time
he had ever thought of it that way.
Impulsively," he told about the quarrel
with Bill, and how sorry he was that Bill's last words had been spoken in
anger.
"I don't think Bill
held any anger at you," said the voice.
"How well did you know
Bill?" asked Shorty.
"Pretty well." There was a little silence, and then the
voice asked, "How do you feel, old fellow?"
Over
to the north was the yellow River Kaw, and the
Lawrence hill was rising out of the endless plain. The hill, crowned by shining
university buildings, had always seemed
111 very high and insurmountable to Shorty. From this angle it looked different.
"You're
going to take her down now, old fellow," said the voice. "You're
going to make a good landing. Your kid Bill would be proud of you."
Shorty
said that was the last time he felt any indecision about it.
"Better start to lose altitude now. Take
her down to two thousand. Slow. Plenty of time. Slow.
. . . Slow."
Shorty pushed the stick forward . . . slow .
. . slow.
The
smoke of Kansas City was on the sky and the taller buildings were beginning to
separate from the horizon. When Shorty first saw the field he wondered how a
plane could hit anything so small, but when he approached it a second time with
motors throtded down as far as they would go, landing
flaps down, wheels reaching for the ground, he felt a great surge of strength
and knew he could do it. He banked around, feeling all the firmness and power
of the ship as it turned into the wind. A sea captain's phrase went through his
memory— "a taut ship"—and he knew suddenly what that meant.
In
that instant, too, he understood something about flying: you fly, the plane
doesn't. Or at least there is a time of merger when you and the plane become
one and fly. He wondered how often Bill had felt this same oneness with his
plane. He felt very near to Bill at that moment, perhaps closer than ever in
life. It was almost as though he and Bill were one.
Then
he was steering in to the white stripe of the runway, pulling back the stick litde by litde as the voice in
the earphones told him to, cutting the airspeed, trying to bring the tail down
level with the nose, trying to hold the wings level, knowing that the next ten
seconds would tell whether it was a good landing or a crash.
Even
in those seconds he remembered a plane he had once seen overrun a field and
stand awkwardly, with nose buried in a swamp and tail high in the air, until
everything above the ground burned away. Bill's plane.
Then the wheels hit the ground. The left one
hit first—left wing low, he guessed—and the plane gave a great awkward bounce,
turned a litde off the runway and setded
down. Shorty cut the ignition and let the ship roll. He didn't feel up to taxi-
112
ing it. After it stopped rolling, he put his head
down on the stick and closed his eyes.
When
the field attendants rushed out in their little cars to bawl him out for not
taxiing to the landing apron, his first impulse was to crouch down, so they
wouldn't see him, or try to vanish in the crowd before anybody saw who he was.
Then he remembered some things that had happened during the afternoon, and he
sat up straight.
The
attendants saw his civilian coat in the window, and stopped growling and were
silent in astonishment. And then he had his little moment of triumph. Litde Shorty Frooze who sold
cantaloupes. Little Shorty who was kicked off the airport
because he was a nuisance. He sat up as straight and tall as he could.
He leaned out the window and spoke to them in what he imagined to be the
authoritative voice of an airlines captain.
"We
have sick men aboard," he said. "Take care of them before you touch
anything else in the plane."
And
that is all of Shorty's story except one very
important incident. When they had shaken his hand and snapped his picture, he
said he wanted to go to the tower to thank the person who had helped him bring
in the ship. They laughed at the joke, and then saw he was in earnest.
The airport manager took him aside a moment.
"Mr.—er— Frooze,"
he said, "you know, don't you, that we've been trying to contact your
plane all afternoon? Nobody in the tower has been talking to you."
Well,
you explain it. What happened in the blue air over Kansas I have told you just
as Shorty told me. It doesn't seem possible that he
could have imagined it all. On the other hand, it doesn't seem possible that he
could have remembered enough from Bill's old aviation chatter to bring in that
plane without help. Shorty swears someone was talking to him, and he thinks he
knows who it was. I don't for a moment believe it was
who he thinks it was, but strange things happen. And the important thing, after
all, is what Shorty thpiks, because he has stopped
grieving over Bill now, and walks with his head up, and doesn't hide from
people, and looks at the sky with the squint of a flier.
DOCTOR HANRAY'S SECOND
CHANCE
by Conrad Ricbter
Perhaps when you were young you underestimated
your father. What would you give to live in the past for an hour and try to make amends?
TF HE
had known it would be like this, he wouldn't have ■*■ come, he told
himself. Here he was, back in his native valley at last. He had driven more
than a thousand miles to see it again, this triangle of river and long blue mountains that shut in the rich brown farming land.
This was where he had been born and bred. Why, he used to know every field and
patch of woods. Here if anywhere, he felt, he could find himself again.
And
yet, now that he had come, it didn't mean anything. It seemed hollow and dead,
like every other place he had been since these spells had come over him. It was
true then, he told himself. Something must be seriously wrong with him, something
different perhaps and yet quite as deadly in its way as the burns of atomic
radiation he had at first suspected. But exacdy what
it could be, neither the doctors nor himself had as yet been able to find out.
He
drove slowly along the black-top road. A large board announced: Rose
Valley Military
Reservation. U.
S. Army.
No Admission. Ahead to the right and left he could see
the
114
high steel fence topped with strands of barbed
wire. At the little house in the center of the road, he obeyed the sign that
said, Stop!
"I
would like permission to go
into Stone Church," he requested.
"What for?" the guard wanted to
know.
"Just to look around. I was raised here."
"You can't do that. It's too late in the
day. Besides, no civilians allowed. This is a restricted area. Very secret and highly dangerous."
"I
know about that," the man in the car said. Then, after a moment, "I
believe I have a right to visit the graves of my parents."
"You'll have to prove who you are."
The guard went in for a moment and came back with a sheaf of dirty papers,
evidently a list of the dead in the reservation. "What's the name?"
"My father's name was Doctor John Hanray. My name is Peter Hanray.
Here are some identification papers."
The
guard stared. His tanned face flushed. His lean, hard features altered with
respect.
"I'm
sorry I didn't know you, Doctor Hanray. I can see
it's you now, sir, from your pictures. I'll phone Colonel Hollenbeck you're
here. You'll find him in his office. He's in Building A."
"I
didn't come to see Colonel Hollenbeck," Hanray
declared quiedy. "I just want permission to go
in and look around. By myself."
The
guard stirred uneasily. "Yes, sir. I'll speak to
the colonel, sir." He hurried back into the little house, and the visitor
thought he could make out an occasional phrase: "Yes, sir; it's him, sir .
. . the one who made the A-bomb. . . . He don't want
to come up. . . . No, alone; all alone! ...
Yes, sir, I'll tell him." The guard appeared. "The colonel's coming
down," he said with satisfaction, as of a victory he had part in, and went
on talking eagerly of the valley, as if his job in the reservation had made
them fellow natives.
Outside
a distant building, a flurry of dust suddenly rose and died. After a moment an
olive-colored military car came flying up, and a tall,
gentlemanly colonel got out.
"I'm
sorry to keep you waiting. Doctor Hanray," he
said, shaking hands. "If you had let us know you were coming, we'd
115
have been all ready for you. Just the same, if you can give me a few minutes,
I'll take you around.
"Thank you," the scientist said
bleakly, "but it's not an official visit. Just a
personal one. I'm not working right now. In fact, I have been laid up a
bit. You may know that I was raised here at Stone Church. I'd like to visit my
parents' graves and look around. By myself. I'm sure
you'll understand."
The colonel's face fell
a litde. "Certainly. If that's what you want, sir. I'll have my chauffeur drive you
around."
"If you don't mind, I'd like to go in
alone."
The
colonel's face looked gravely unhappy. "I understand, sir. Unfortunately,
the regulations are very strict, as you know. Visitors are required to have
guides, even the most distinguished ones. Something might blow up or you might
get lost. Even men who lived in the valley all their lives come back to work
here and get confused. Everything's been changed around. I'm sure, though, that
if I phoned Washington ——"
"No,
that's all right," the physicist said wearily. "I'll take a guide.
But ask him to stay as far behind me as he can. If I can't go in that way, I
don't want to go in at all. When I stop, tell him to stop behind me and wait. I
hope you have a patient man. I may stand looking at nothing, so far as he's
concerned, for a long time."
Well,
he told himself, as he drove quietly through the steel fence, the valley had
certainly changed. As the colonel had warned him, he hardly knew where he was
any more. The rambling Army buildings, the absence of familiar landmarks
confused him. Now whose barn had stood here at this pile of stones, and where
was the house? A few of the old houses could still be seen, but surely that paindess, boarded-up box couldn't be the Foster house,
where he had once enjoyed such good times.
He
stopped, motioning for the jeep behind him to drive abreast of his car.
"I'm trying to find out where I am.
Where's the road that used to come down over Penny Hill?'
"Oh,
there's no road up there any more. The Government
didn't want it. They bulldozed it out."
Hanray felt a sense of loss and bereavement. He had
loved that Penny Hill road, used to walk it as a boy.
116
"Well," he said, "perhaps you
can tell me whose house this used to be over here?"
But
the guard did not know who had lived there. "Whoever they were," he
added, "they kicked about getting out. You can bet on that."
"What did they kick about?"
"Anything and everything. First they said they didn't have enough
time."
"How much time did they have?"
"Everybody
on the reservation had the same notice. Three days to get their money from the
Government and move out. But they weren't satisfied. They came back afterward
and tried to buy back some of the stuff they'd sold with their property. Like
their bathtubs, those that had them. Their sinks and
corn-cribs and sheds. They claimed the new places they bought didn't
have them and they couldn't buy any new plumbing or lumber on account of
priorities."
"Well,
the Government didn't need their old bathtubs and corncribs."
"No,
they had to burn up the old lumber and throw the sinks and bathtubs on the junk
pile. The colonel said it would cost twenty-five to fifty dollars in red tape
to get every sink or bathtub through Washington. And it would take weeks
besides. The colonel told them to forget it. They were just casualties of the
war."
The scientist winced. "Here
too," he murmcred to himself.
"Oh,
four or five of your neighbors here were tough babies. They stuck on their places
and wouldn't get off. The last one to give up was an old woman. She stopped by
the gate with her house goods and told the guard all her troubles, how her
father and grandfather farmed the farm before her, and their folks before that,
way back to the Revolution. The guard listened till he was tired. Then he
said, 'Well, now you know how the Indians felt when you ran them off.'"
The uniformed man in the jeep laughed, but the physicist didn't laugh.
"I'm
afraid that old lady didn't run off any Indians," he said, very low.
"Well,
maybe not. But the contractors had to come in. We had to start getting out
things for the men at the front to fight
117
with. Like your A bomb.
They made plenty stuff for it right here. I guess you know that." The
scientist winced again.
The
guard went on admiringly, "I guess that was the greatest thing ever
invented. Just think, something that wiped out a whole
city and a hundred thousand of those rats at one crack. And I hear that's
nothing to what you can do now."
Hanray sat at the wheel, very still. He felt the
old nausea and shell-like feeling coming over him. Then he drove slowly on.
Well,
he told himself after a little, they hadn't destroyed the road that ran down by
Jarretts' farm anyway. This must be it he was
passing, looking strangely narrower and shorter than it used to. How many times
had he walked that road with one of the Jarrett girls after church or choir
practice! But where were Jarretts'
woods in which the preacher's boys had hidden one night to scare him?
How
much faster you went in a car than he used to in a buggy. This was Stone Church
already, or Deckertown as some called it, with half
the houses gone and the rest reduced to windowless boxes. Tillbury's
store had vanished, as had Hul-sizer's blacksmith
shop and red stable. And now suddenly, as he reached the corner where one road
used to turn off to Maple Hill and the other to Alvira,
he saw the old stone church before him, the doors, windows and belfry all
blinded wid\ boards.
Beyond
this, he knew, lay his father's house. He got out of the car slowly and walked
over. Sight of the place shook him a litde. Could
this be his boyhood home whose idyllic picture he had carried in his mind all
these years? The paint was gone, the porches torn away, the picket fence
vanished, the great sugar maples cut down. It was just
a bare box, a two-and-a-half-story shack stripped of every vestige of ornament
and comfort. The doors and windows he so well knew had been closed with rough
lumber. Not a splinter was left of stable or orchard. From where he used to
pick up Baldwin and Smokehouse apples, he could see the raw industrial strip of
buildings of the XYT explosive line, and beyond, the reach of ugly stacks and
tanks against the autumn-sunset sky.
He couldn't stand looking at it long, but
retreated to the cemetery. Only here was it as it had always been; a few more
graves perhaps, but otherwise as he remembered. He had heard
118
reports how well the Army had taken care of the dead left in its reservations.
The graves looked even better kept than formerly, the grass clipped, the black
iron fence intact, the white stones erect and recently cleaned. He read again
the line Faithful
Physician carved on his father's stone—and in fine
italics at the bottom, He
went about doing good. His mother had done that. As a young
scientist he had disliked to see it the next time he came home. But today the
simple words filled him with emotion and curious envy. He had once thought, he
told himself, that he had far outdistanced his father, but now he knew it was
his father's life that had outdistanced his. Standing here by his parents'
graves, his back turned on the boarded-up houses and church, on the scarred
earth and ugly munitions buildings, he could almost
believe that it was all a dream. The air blew from over South Mountain as it
always had. Crows cawed in the old unused fields up on Penny Hill, whose huge
rounded head looked golden in the setting sun.
It
was as if vestiges of the peaceful life he knew as a boy still remained up there,
and he found himself seeking them, stepping over the iron fence, passing
through Kellys' little woods and climbing the strong
flanks of Penny Hill.
Presently
he came to a halt. In a litde hollow high up on the
slope, he had come on a vestige of the old Penny Hill road. Farther down around
the bend, he knew, it had been completely destroyed. Farther up around the
next bend or two, it must run futilely into the steel fence. But here for a
short distance it lay untouched and utterly unchanged, the same yellow shale
and curious narrowness, the same weathered rail fence and dried grasses. It
even smelled as it used to. Since leaving here he had been over the entire
country and most of the world besides. He had found no place with that certain
sweet smell of Rose Valley. The three black cherry trees, now older and fatter,
still stood by the fence, and he was glad to lean against one of them in the
faintness that had come over him since the climb.
The
longer he stood there in the growing dusk, the less it seemed that he had ever
been away. Nothing here had changed. He could almost believe that he was still
a boy and that the valley behind him still lay intact and unharmed. Why, this
had been his favorite route from school in town. So often had he
119
passed this spot, he thought there must remain in
the road some faint impress of his feet. Just at this season, with darkness
coming on, he used to tramp along here from town with his schoolbooks under his
arm, the scent of life in his nostrils and the world his oyster. Standing here
now, peering through the growing dusk, he could almost feel himself as a boy
swinging along the road bound for the lamplit window
at home.
His
nerves tautened. Did he only imagine it or was something actually coming up
there in the dusk? Yes, it was moving down the road. He could make it out now,
straining his eyes through the early obscurity, a figure rounding the shale
banks, a shadowy boy in knee breeches carrying a book satchel. The strangest
feeling ran over him. He must be really ill, he told himself, for there was no
road above for the boy to have come from and none below for him to pass over.
Besides, boys today did not wear knee pants. Yet he could plainly hear the
sound of the boy's shoes on the road. He told himself now that it must be a
real boy, someone who lived today on the reservation, who knew this short cut
and whom the guards let through. Then, as the boy came almost abreast, he
recognized, with a feeling that made all adult sensations seem tame, the
familiar red-ribbed sweater that had been his own, the certain look of its
stout coarse weave. He even remembered the peculiar smell of warm dye when he
used to pull it over his head.
The
boy was shying to the farther side of the road at sight of a stranger. Spea\ to him—spea\ to
him before he is gone, the
man cried to himself. But when he did so, his voice sounded harsh and croaking,
"Are you acquainted around here, boy?"
"Why,
yes," the boy said, stopping, but he did not come any closer.
"Is there a doctor
around?"
"There's
two in town and one at the Stone Church." "Do you know the doctor's
name at the Stone Church?" "It's Hanray—Dr.
John Hanray." "And your name?" he
asked.
"Peter
Hanray," the boy told him shordy,
and started away. "Wait, I want to go with you!" the man said, as
soon as he was able.
They
made a curious pair going down the shale road in the dimness, the boy hurrying
tirelessly ahead, the man following
120
heavily after. At every moment the latter looked for
the road to peter out, expected to sec, below, the cold hard electric lights of
the Army barracks and XYT-linc buildings. But all
that lay around them was the soft dim blur of the unwired country dusk. There
were the faint glow of a lantern in Bomboys' red barn
as they passed, and early lights in the Peysher house
and Hauser log cabin. At Shaffers' yellow house and Klines' un-painted one, children played and shouted in the
yard. Here the Penny Hill road joined the other road as it always had, while ahead Jarretts' woods loomed up in
its old, dark and mysterious way. Tramping down the village road he could smell
the old-time aroma of wood smoke, raw-fried potatoes and valley-cured ham. Hulsizer's blacksmith shop still stood open. A flame of red
fire glowed in the darkness, and a great hulking beast waited in the gloom
outside.
And
now the scientist breathed faster, for they were rounding the corner. He could
glimpse late sky shining as usual through the open belfry and the white paling
fence standing unbroken around his father's house. Soft golden lamplight came
from a side window. That was the kitchen window, he knew, and a sudden fear
touched him that those two he wanted most to see wouldn't be there.
The boy ran ahead of him through the side
gate and up the steps. He burst in through the door, and the man behind him saw
the kitchen as he had always remembered it, with the water bucket on the stand,
the wood stove steaming with pots and pans, and hurrying in from the pump on
the back porch his mother, more real than he had imagined her, in dress and
apron that were part and parcel of his youth. Something in him wanted to run to
her, but her smile and anxious scrutiny were all for the boy.
"He was up on Penny Hill," the boy
said. "He wants to see papa."
His
mother's smile left, and she put on the grave face she
showed to the outside world. "Will you come in?" she bade him politely, as to a stranger.
Hardly
could he control his emotion as he stepped into that well-known room. The table
was set as always when he used to come home from town: the dishes he had long
since forgotten, with pink flowers and which had come in cereal packages, the
121
blue glass butter dish and the plated silverware
worn softly black along the edges. He could smell the savor of baked beans from
the oven, shot through with the scent of the stove.
He
noticed that his mother watched him intently. For a moment his heart stood
still, thinking she must know him. But she still spoke as to a visitor.
"Do you want to come in the office? Or you can wait in the parlor if you'd
rather. Peter will light the lamp for you. The doctor said he'd be back right
away. He's just over on the ridge road."
Hanray dared not speak. He let himself be led into
the parlor. He would get hold of himself in here, he told himself, once he was
left alone. Why, he knew all these poor shabby furnishings better than any of
the rich things in his fine Midwest home. The old green tassels still hung
from the table cover; the haircloth sofa stood by the door; faded blue flowers
bloomed in the wallpaper, and the same spots were still worn in the ingrain
carpet. His Grandfather arid Grandmother Ains-ley
hung on the wall, and a few photographs stood on organ and table, but none of
his father, mother or self. That would have been unforgivable vanity or pride,
to flaunt one of your immediate family in your own
parlor. He heard the same old rings on the telephone from the exchange at Maple
Hill. All that was missing now, besides his father, was Doxy, the stern,
black-and-brown, long-haired shepherd dog.
He
sat very still. The rattle of buggy wheels came around the house, the steps of
the boy sent out to unhitch, then the unmistakable sound of his father coming
up to the side door. A minute more and he came forward, a man in a brown beard
and clothes like a farmer, with a doctor's worn bag in his hand. He looked
tired. Likely he had been up all last night with some shiftless mountain
patient. Sight of him brought back the feeling he had had as a boy for his
father, a kind of shame that he wasn't rich and successful like Doctors Grove
and Hereward in town; that he seldom charged enough
or collected what he did charge; and especially that he never carried himself
with the professional dignity of the town doctors. They were men of science
above such inferior things as humility and religion. His father, on the other
hand, attended church like some simple, unlearned countryman, even acted as
superintendent of the Sunday school when he could, greeting perfect strangers
with
122
the brotherly and over-friendly way of a
preacher. That, as a boy, he used to resent the most—that his father showed the
same warmth and affection for a stranger as for his own family. But today, now
that he was only a stranger. himself, an unspeakable
gratitude welled up in him for his father's warm greeting and for the kind
brown eyes that searched his face.
"How are you?" he said, grasping
his hand and holding it in the manner he always did when he tried to recall a
name. "I feel I should know you. I know your face, but I can't call your
name. Do you live around here?"
"I used to," the visitor said.
"Has it been a long time?"
"A very long
time."
"You have come far perhaps?"
'Tarther
than I can tell you."
"I'd have been here before," his
father apologized, "but I was over at Berrys'
on the ridge road. Maybe you remember them. Old Mr. Berry is pretty feeble.
There is a little a doctor can do for him any more except pray."
Into
the scientist's mind came the memory of his father's prayers, so unlike a man
of medicine and science, his friendly, hopeful voice, a voice that now seemed
very near God. Oh,
father, he
thought, if
only you would pray for me. But he said nothing of that, just followed his father into the familiar
bare office, smelling of carbolic acid and iodoform.
His
father closed the door. "Now you can sit down and tell me your
trouble," he said kindly.
The
scientist thought he would give a great deal if he could feel his father's gende and skillful hands go over him. But what he had to
say was something else.
"I've come to see you about your
boy."
"About Peter!" His father was surprised.
"About him and his future. I understand he's only fourteen, he's
already well along in high school and he's thinking of taking up physics and
chemistry in college. I've come to you to beg him to change his mind. What he
must do is prepare for a life like yours."
He saw that his father was staring at him.
"I
don't know how you know this or who told you. I can talk to him again, but I'm
afraid there isn't much use. I don't
123
think I've been much of an example to him. He says
he's seen too much doctoring from the inside. He doesn't want to starve and he
doesn't want to have anything to do with death and dying."
The scientist shrank.
His
father went on, "Peter's more interested in science. All he talks about is
the great oportunity for public service in being a
scientist. He says that he wants to do only good in the world."
The scientist winced again. He leaned forward
desperately.
"You
must change his mind for him then!" he begged. "Make him see the
great opportunity in medicine, the salvation of going around doing good like you."
"Like me!" his father said in
surprise. He looked up.
His
wife was standing in the doorway. "Supper's ready, John. You better eat
before more patients come. I don't have very much, but if the gentleman would
care to sit down with us, he'll be welcome. Did you notice, John? He looks like
someone we know." She turned. . . . "Are you by any chance related to
the Ainsleys?"
"I am," he said
unsteadily, "but please don't ask me how."
"I knew it," she
said. "You remind me of my Uncle Harry."
His
father turned to him as they went out for supper. "If you would only talk
to him?" he asked. "We're just his parents, but perhaps he will
listen to you!"
It
was strange how the scientist felt an uneasiness to face the boy again. Young
Peter was standing by his chair, impatient to sit down. He welcomed the supper
guest coolly, looking the other way. They sat down at the familiar table. His
father bent his forehead to his hand, resting the elbow on the table, gave the
usual sign and started to pray. How often, the scientist thought, had he heard
those familiar words, "The summer is over, the harvest is ended and we are
not saved." But never had the words held such a new and terrible meaning
as today.
All
through the meal he could scarcely refrain from stealing glances at the boy
across the table. Was it possible that he had once been as slender,
light-hearted and fair-skinned as that, his blood vessels so new and pliable, his eyes clear as spring water? Could he ever have
been so young, innocent and idealistic?
124
Why,
the boy's face was fresh as a girl's. Once when his mother wanted a clean
handkerchief, he rose reluctandy
enough, but, once up, bounded up the stairs so effortlessly on his long legs
that the visitor felt a sudden awe, mingled with despair, for the boy he had
once been.
Vainly
he tried to win him. When he spoke, the boy listened unwillingly and, if
pressed, with veiled hostility. He made only short inscrutable replies, then looked the other way. It was plain,
the man told himself, that the boy did not approve of him. Why, he was famous
throughout the world, but the boy rejected him. There was something about him
the boy did not relish. Yet this was the one he must make peace with, he knew.
There was no mistaking that. All through the meal he talked, argued and begged,
until he felt the sweat stand on his face. His father and mother had begun to
look at him queerly. The boy resisted as hard as ever, until the man knew he
was foiled and defeated; that never could he dissuade the boy from his dream.
It was when hope was at its lowest ebb that a
scratching sound was heard at the door. The boy answered it, and a Wack-and-brown shepherd dog burst in. It was Doxy, keen and
shaggy old Doxy. He jumped up at the boy in greeting; then, smelling on the
floor, ran straight to the visitor, jumped up, barked and licked him. For a
little while he ran back and forth between boy and man, smelling eagerly at one
and then at the other, as if something puzzled him.
"That's
singular," his father said. "Doxy doesn't go to many people. But he
acts as though he knows you."
"And likes you," his mother added.
She was always the one to encourage.
The
scientist saw that now for the first time the boy was regarding him intendy, with a kind of respect, as if his hostility was
broken and he saw in him something he hadn't seen before. The man sat very
still. He had received honors from a dozen sources, including the President of
the United States, but never had he felt quite the gratitude as for this. Some
inexplicable thing inside of him was released and began to melt, like that
time long ago when, as a child, he had gone to Fourth Gap and later found
himself back in the blessed peace and warmth of home.
"If you don't mind," he asked his
mother, "may I stay here for a while this evening?"
That
was his mistake, he knew. Hardly was it said and permission given before the
dog began to growl. His hair brisded. Then a sudden knock rang from the door. The
boy went to answer. "It's somebody
for you," he summered.
"Is it the
guard?" the visitor asked, and the boy nodded.
The scientist sat very quiet. It shook him a little. It had
come sooner than he expected. But he should have known he couldn't stay in this
blessed place forever.
"I'll
have to go now," he said, and got to his feet. He saw that his parents
looked frightened. He kissed his trembling mother and then his father's bearded
mouth as he used to do when he was small. Last he shook the cold hand of the
boy.
The
rap came once more, demandingly. Again the dog growled deep in his throat.
"I'm
coming!" the scientist called. Then to the others,
"Good-by."
"Good-by," his father answered.
"I'll pray for you."
"Remember you're an Ainsley.
We'll both pray for you," his mother told him.
"God bless you," he said, and
opened the door.
Not
until he was clear of the house, with his foot reaching for the steps, did he
remember there were no steps there.
When
he came to himself he was lying on the ground. As his eyes grew accustomed to
the darkness, he saw that the sugar maples and picket fence were gone. He
picked himself up painfully. The house was dark. The door looked as if it had
been boarded up for a long time. So did the windows. And yet
so real and strong remained the memory of his father and mother and the lamplit table that he pounded on the boards. "Papa!" he called.
Only
silence from the decayed shell of a house answered him. Below he could see the
cold glitter of electric lights on the tanks and buildings of the secret XYT
explosive line. Nearer at hand were the cemetery and the guard waiting. Well,
he told himself, he could face things a litde better
now. His father and mother had said they would pray for him. And the boy inside
of him had made his first sign of peace to the man he had become.
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Horan ............... Desperate Men 331
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Tillery Red Bone Woman 335
Dorothy L. Sayers In the Teeth ot
the Evidence 337
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The Agony Column 338
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Leopard Men 341 Leslie Charteris The Saint Sees It Through 342
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Biggers
The Chinese
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Nichols ............ Possess Me Not 347
Leslie Charteris The
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Picnic 348
J. M. Cain , Jealous Woman 349
Chevney Mistress Murder 351 Clarke Millie's Daughter 353 Christie . Poirot Loses a Client 355 James H. Chase . No Orchids tor Miss
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All About Girls 358
Louvs Woman and the Puppet 364 Maugham The Point ol
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John O'Hara ........... All the Girls He Wanted 369
Frances and Richard Lockridge The Dishonest Murderer 370
A. Merritt The
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Christie Regatta
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Shulman Cry Tough.' 373
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Wylie Babes and Sucklings 381
Hilton Nothing
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Louis Scott 385
Brand Cat and Mouse 386
Merritt Face in the Abyss 387
Brandel Maniac Rendezvous 390 Wylie The Savage Gentlemen E 101 United States Book
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Tifiany Thayer
The Old Goat
240 Willingham............ End as a Man
242 Lockridge
............ l/nlidy
Murder
245 Agatha
Christie The
Big Four
250 Robert BriHault............... Carjolla
256
Anthology Tropical Passions
257
Pierre Louys................. Aphrodire
258
O'Hara................. Hope
ol Heaven
2G0 Fairell............... Yestetdays Love
769 I. S. Young . /adie
Greenway
271
Emile Zola............... Nona's Mofher
272
Robert BriHault.................... Europa
273
Elmer Rice................. Imperial City
276 Emily
Harvin ....Madwoman?
279 Weidman The Price Is Right
282 Huggins.
Lovely Lady. Pity Me
284 Terrall Madam Is Dead
288 Guy Emery . From lor Murder
290
Farrell Gas-House McGinly
291
Thayer............ Coll Her Savage 293 John O'Haia. . . Hellbox 296
Lawrence A Modern Lover
298
Swados..................... House
ol Fury
299
O. }. Friend............... The
Bound-Up
300
Shulman. . , .The Amboy Dulces
301 Hilton............. We Are Nci Alone
303
Robert Sylvester Dream Street
304
Woolf Song Without Sermon
305
Stuart God Wears a Bow Tie
306 Thomason Gone to Texas 309 Caldwell
Midsummer
Passion
311 Anthology ............... Saturday
Evening
Post Western Stories
312
Agatha Christie The Mvsterious Affair at
Styles
313
Lion Feuchtwanger
........... The Ugly Duchess
314
Van Vechten
Nigger
Heaven
315
Merritt The Metal Monster
316
Christie Murder in Three Acts
317
Christie Death
on the Nile
318
Juliet Lowell Dear Sir
320 Dwight Babcock Gorgeous Ghoul Murder Case
321
Leslie Charteris
The
Saint in New York
322 Weidman
. , Slipping
Beauty
323 Guv Endore The Furies in Her Body
325
James Hilton _____ III Wind
326
Dortort Burial ol the Fruit
327
Tifiany Thayer One Man Show '
328
Sayers........................ Strong
Poison
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