A further check with the cab company produced the information that Art's taxi had taken him on to a liquor store. They followed. At the liquor store they discovered that Art had purchased the single jeroboam of champagne (Moët et Chadon) that the liquor store had on hand, and had mentioned that he was going on to a restaurant. What restaurant, the cab company was no longer able to tell them. Art's driver had just announced that he would not be answering his radio for the next half hour.
They began checking the better and closer restaurants. At the fourth one, which was called the Calice d'Or, they finally ran Art to ground. They found him seated alone at a large round table, surrounded by gold-tooled leather volumes of a brand-new encyclopedia, eating and drinking what turned out to be Truite Sauce Countess Walewska and champagne from the jeroboam, now properly iced.
"Yahoo!" yelped Art, as he saw them approaching. He waved his glass on high, sloshing champagne liberally about. "Champagne for everybody! Celebrate Dr. Rapp's pill!"
"You," said Hank, "are coming back to the hospital."
"Nonsense! Glasses! Champagne for m'friends!"
"Oh, Art!" cried Margie.
"He's fried to the gills," said Arlie.
"Not at all," protested Art. "Illuminated. Blinding flash. Understand everything. D'you know all knowledge has a common point of impingement?"
"Call a taxi, Margie," commanded Hank.
"Encyclopedia. Champagne bubble. Same thing."
"Could I help you, sir?" inquired a waiter, approaching Hank.
"We want to get our friend here home –"
"All roads lead knowledge. Unnerstand ignorance, unnerstand everything –"
"I understand, sir. Yes sir, he paid the check in advance –"
"Would you like to speak three thousand, four hundred and seventy-one languages?" Art was asking Arlie.
"Of course," Arlie was saying, soothingly.
"My assistant has gone to get a taxi, now. I'm Dr. Rapp of the university hospital, and –"
"When I was child," announced Art, "thought as child, played child; now man – put away childish things."
"Here's the young lady, sir."
"But who will take care of pet raccoon?"
"I flagged a taxi down. It's waiting out front."
"Hoist him up," commanded Hank.
He and Arlie both got a firm hold on a Willoughby arm and maneuvered Art to his feet.
"This way," said Hank, steering Art toward the door.
"The universe," said Art. He leaned confidentially toward Hank, almost toppling the three of them over. "Only two inches across."
"That so?" grunted Hank.
"Hang on to Arlie, Art, and you won't fall over. There –" said Margie. Art blinked and focused upon her with some difficulty.
"Oh . . . there you are –" he said. "Love you. Naturally. Only real woman in universe. Other four point seven to the nine hundred seventeenth women in universe pale imitations. Marry me week Tuesday, three P.M., courthouse, wear blue." Margie gasped.
"Open the door for us, will you?"
"Certainly, sir," said the waiter, opening the front door to the Calice d'Or. A pink and gray taxi was drawn up at the curb.
"Sell stock in Wehauk Cannery immediately," Art was saying to the waiter. "Mismanagement. Collapse." The waiter blinked and stared. "News out in ten days."
"But how did you know I had –" the waiter was beginning as they shoved Art into the back seat of the cab. Margie got in after him.
"Ah, there you are," came Art's voice from the cab. "First son Charles Jonas – blond hair, blue eyes. Second son, William –"
"I'll send somebody to pick up that encyclopedia and anything else he left," said Hank to the waiter and got into the taxi himself. The taxi pulled away from the curb.
"Well," said the waiter, after a long pause in which he stared after the receding cab, to the doorman who had just joined him on the sidewalk, "how do you like that? Ever see anything like that before?"
"No, and I never saw anyone with over a gallon of champagne in him still walking around, either," said the doorman.
". . . And the worst of it is," said Hank to Arlie, as they sat in Hank's office, two days later, "Margie is going to marry him."
"What's wrong with that?" asked Arlie.
"What's wrong with it? Look at that!" Hank waved his hand at an object in the center of his desk.
"I've seen it," said Arlie.
They both examined the object. It appeared to be an ordinary moveable telephone with a cord and wall plug. The plug, however, was plugged into a small cardboard box the size of a cheese carton, filled with a tangled mess of wire and parts cannibalized from a cheap portable radio. The box was plugged into nothing.
"What was that number again . . . oh, yes," said Arlie. He picked up the phone and dialed a long series of numbers. He held the phone tip so that they could both hear. There was a faint buzzing ring from the earphone and then a small, tinny voice filled the office.
". . . The time is eight forty-seven. The temperature is eighteen degrees above zero, the wind westerly at eight miles an hour. The forecast for the Anchorage area is continued cloudy and some snow with a high of twenty-two degrees, a low tonight of nine above. Elsewhere in Alaska –"
Arlie sighed, and replaced the phone in its cradle.
"We bring him back here," said Hank, "stewed to the gills. In forty minutes, before he passed out, he builds this trick wastebasket of his that holds five times as much as it ought to. He sleeps seven hours and wakes up as good as ever. What should I do? Shoot him, or something? I must have some responsibility to the human race – if not to Marcie."
"He seems sensible now?"
"Yes, but what do I do?"
"Hypnosis."
"You keep saying that. I don't see –"
"We must," said Arlie, "inhibit the connection of his conscious mind with the intuitive mechanism. The wall between the two – the normal wall – seems to have been freakishly thin in his case. Prolonged sleeplessness, combined with the abnormal stimulation of your monster, has caused him to break through – to say to the idiot solvant, 'Solve!' And the idiot solvant in the back of his head has provided him with a solution."
"I still think it would be better for me to shoot him."
"You are a physician –"
"You would remind me of that. All right, so I can't shoot him. I don't even want to shoot him. But, Arlie, what's going to happen to everybody? Here I've raised up a sort of miracle worker who can probably move the North American continent down to the South Pacific if he wants to – only it just happens he's also a feather-headed butterfly who never lit on one notion for more than live minutes at a time in his life. Sure, I've got a physician's responsibility toward him. But what about my responsibility to the rest of the people in the world?"
"There is no responsibility being violated here," said Arlie patiently. "Simply put him back the way you found him."
"No miracles?"
"None. At least, except accidental ones."
"It might be kinder to shoot him."
"Nonsense," said Arlie sharply. "It's for the good of everybody." Hank sighed, and rose.
"All right," be said. "Let's go."
They went down the hall to Art's room. They found him seated thoughtfully in his armchair, staring at nothing, his books and maps ignored around him.
"Good morning, Art," said Arlie.
"Oh? Hello," said Art, waking up. "Is it time for tests?"
"In a way," said Arlie. He produced a small box surmounted by a cardboard disk on which were inked alternate spirals of white and black. He plugged the box into a handy electric socket by means of the cord attached to it, and set it on a small table in front of Art. The disk began to revolve. "I want you to watch that," said Arlie.
Art stared at it.
"What do you see?" asked Arlie.
"It looks like going down a tunnel," said Art.
"Indeed it does," said Arlie. "Just imagine yourself going down tha
t tunnel. Down the tunnel. Faster and faster . . ." He continued to talk quietly and persuasively for about a minute and a half, at the end of which Art was limply demonstrating a state of deep trance. Arlie brought him up a bit for questioning.
". . . And how do these realizations, these answers, come to you?" Arlie was asking a few minutes later.
"In a sort of a flash," replied Art. "A blinding flash."
"That is the way they have always come to you?"
"More lately," said Art.
"Yes," said Arlie, "that's the way it always is just before people outgrow these flashes – you know that."
There was a slight pause.
"Yes," said Art.
"You have now outgrown these flashes. You have had your last flash. Flashes belong to childhood. You have had a delayed growing-up, but from now on you will think like an adult. Logically. You will think like an adult. Repeat after me."
"I will think like an adult," intoned Art.
Arlie continued to hammer away at his point for a few more minutes; then he brought Art out of his trance, with a final command that if Art felt any tendency to a recurrence of his flashes he should return to Arlie for further help in suppressing them.
"Oh, hello, Doctor," said Art to Hank, as soon as he woke up. "Say, how much longer are you going to need me as a test subject?"
Hank made a rather unhappy grimace. "In a hurry to leave?" he said.
"I don't know," said Art, enthusiastically, rubbing his long hands together as he sat up in the chair, "but I was just thinking maybe it's time I got to work. Settled clown. As long as I'm going to be a married man shortly."
"We can turn you loose today, if you want," said Hank.
Illustration by RICK BRYANT
When Art stepped once more into his room, closing the door behind him and taking off his leather jacket to hang it up on the hook holding his bagpipes, the place seemed so little changed that it was hard to believe ten full days had passed. Even the raccoon was back asleep in the wastebasket. It was evident the landlady had been doing her duty about keeping the small animal fed – Art had worried a little about that. The only difference, Art thought, was that the room seemed to feel smaller.
He sighed cheerfully and sat down at the desk, drawing pencil and paper to him. The afternoon sun, shooting the gap of the missing slat on the venetian blind at the window, splashed fair in Art's eyes, blinding him.
"Blast!" he said aloud. "Got to do something about that –"
He checked himself suddenly with one hand halfway up to shield his eyes, and smiled. Opening a drawer of the desk, he took out a pair of heavy kitchen scissors. He made a single cut into the rope slot at each end of the plastic slat at the bottom of the blind, snapped the slat out of position, and snapped it back in where the upper slat was missing.
Still smiling, he picked up the pencil and doodled the name Margie with a heart around it in the upper left-hand corner as he thought, with gaze abstracted. The pencil moved to the center of the piece of paper and hovered there.
After a moment, it began to sketch.
What it sketched was a sort of device to keep the sun out of Art's eyes. At the same time, however, it just happened to be a dome-shaped all-weather shield capable of protecting a city ten miles in diameter the year round. The "skin" of the dome consisted of a thin layer of carbon dioxide such as one finds in the bubbles of champagne, generated and maintained by magnetic lines of force emanating from three heavily charged bodies, in rotation about each other at the apex of the dome and superficially housed in a framework the design of which was reminiscent of the wing structure found in the family Syrphidae of the order Diptera.
Art continued to smile as the design took form. But it was a thoughtful smile, a mature smile. Hank and Arlie had been quite right about him. He had always been a butterfly, flitting from notion to notion, playing.
But then, too, he had always been a bad hypnotic subject, full of resistances.
And he was about to have a wife to care for. Consequently it is hard to say whether Arlie and Hank would have been reassured if they could have seen Art at that moment. His new thinking was indeed adult, much more so than the other two could have realized. Where miracles were concerned, he had given up playing.
Now, he was working.
The 1966 Nebula Award-winning novelette. Do not begin reading it if you are likely to be interrupted.
CALL HIM LORD
"He called and commanded me
– Therefore, I knew him;
But later on, failed me; and
– Therefore, I slew him!"
"Songs of the Shield Bearer"
The sun could not fail in rising over the Kentucky hills, nor could Kyle Arnam in waking. There would be eleven hours and forty minutes of daylight. Kyle rose, dressed, and went out to saddle the gray gelding and the white stallion. He rode the stallion until the first fury was out of the arched and snowy neck; and then led both horses around to tether them outside the kitchen door. Then he went in to breakfast.
The message that had come a week before was beside his plate of bacon and eggs. Teena, his wife, was standing at the breadboard with her back to him. He sat down and began eating, rereading the letter as he ate.
". . . The Prince will be traveling incognito under one of his family titles, as Count Sirii North; and should not be addressed as 'Majesty.' You will call him 'Lord' . . ."
"Why does it have to be you?" Teena asked.
He looked up and saw how she stood with her back to him.
"Teena –" he said, sadly.
"Why?"
"My ancestors were bodyguards to his – back in the wars of conquest against the aliens. I've told you that," he said. "My forefathers saved the lives of his, many times when there was no warning – a Rak spaceship would suddenly appear out of nowhere to lock on, even to a flagship. And even an Emperor found himself fighting for his life, hand to hand."
"The aliens are all dead now, and the Emperor's got a hundred other worlds! Why can't his son take his Grand Tour on them? Why does he have to come here to Earth – and you?"
"There's only one Earth."
"And only one you, I suppose?"
He sighed internally and gave up. He had been raised by his father and his uncle after his mother died, and in an argument with Teena he always felt helpless. He got up from the table and went to her, putting his hands on her and gently trying to turn her about. But she resisted.
He sighed inside himself again and turned away to the weapons cabinet. He took out a loaded slug pistol, fitted it into the stubby holster it matched, and clipped the holster to his belt at the left of the buckle, where the hang of his leather jacket would hide it. Then he selected a dark-handled knife with a six-inch blade and bent over to slip it into the sheath inside his boot top. He dropped the cuff of his trouser leg back over the boot top and stood up.
"He's got no right to be here," said Teena fiercely to the breadboard. "Tourists are supposed to be kept to the museum areas and the tourist lodges."
"He's not a tourist. You know that," answered Kyle, patiently. "He's the Emperor's oldest son and his great-grandmother was from Earth. His wife will be, too. Every fourth genera- tion the Imperial line has to marry back into Earth stock. That's the law – still." He put on his leather jacket, sealing it closed only at the bottom to hide the slug-gun holster, half turned to the door – then paused.
"Teena?" he asked.
She did not answer.
"Teena!" he repeated. He stepped to her, put his hands on her shoulders and tried to turn her to face him. Again, she resisted, but this time he was having none of it.
He was not a big man, being of middle height, round-faced, with sloping and unremarka- ble-looking, if thick, shoulders. But his strength was not ordinary. He could bring the white stallion to its knees with one fist wound in its mane – and no other man had ever been able to do that. He turned her easily to look at him.
"Now, listen to me –" he began. But, before he c
ould finish, all the stiffness went out of her and she clung to him, trembling.
"He'll get you into trouble – I know he will!" she choked, muffledly into his chest. "Kyle, don't go! There's no law making you go!"
He stroked the soft hair of her head, his throat stiff and dry. There was nothing he could say to her. What she was asking was impossible. Ever since the sun had first risen on men and women together, wives had clung to their husbands at times like this, begging for what could not be. And always the men had held them, as Kyle was holding her now – as if understanding could somehow be pressed from one body into the other – and saying nothing, because there was nothing that could be said.
So, Kyle held her for a few moments longer, and then reached behind him to unlock her intertwined fingers at his back, and loosen her arms around him. Then, he went. Looking back through the kitchen window as he rode off on the stallion, leading the gray horse, he saw her standing just where he had left her. Not even crying, but standing with her arms hanging down, her head down, not moving.
He rode away through the forest of the Kentucky hillside. It took him more than two hours to reach the lodge. As he rode down the valleyside toward it, he saw a tall, bearded man, wearing the robes they wore on some of the Younger Worlds, standing at the gateway to the interior courtyard of the rustic, wooded lodge.
When he got close, he saw that the beard was graying and the man was biting his lips. Above a straight, thin nose, the eyes were bloodshot and circled beneath as if from worry or lack of sleep.
"He's in the courtyard," said the gray-bearded man as Kyle rode up. "I'm Montlaven, his tutor. He's ready to go." The darkened eyes looked almost pleadingly up at Kyle.
"Stand clear of the stallion's head," said Kyle. "And take me in to him."
"Not that horse, for him –" said Montlaven, looking distrustfully at the stallion, as he bac- ked away.
Gordon R. Dickson's SF Best Page 10