I wandered around the neighborhood for a while and had a couple of beers in one of the ultra-Irish bars on Third Avenue. After a pleasant argument with a gent who thought the Russians didn’t have any atomic bombs and faked their demonstrations and that we ought to blow up their industrial cities tomorrow at dawn, I went back to the hotel.
I didn’t get to sleep easily. The citizen who didn’t believe Russia could maul the United States pretty badly or at all had started me thinking again—all kinds of ugly thoughts. Dr. Mines, who had turned into a shrunken old man at the mention of applying Gomez’s work. The look on the boy’s face. My layman’s knowledge that present-day “atomic energy” taps only the smallest fragment of the energy locked up in the atom. My layman’s knowledge that once genius has broken a trail in science, mediocrity can follow the trail.
But I slept at last, for three hours.
At four-fifteen A.M. according to my watch the telephone rang long and hard. There was some switchboard and long-distance-operator mumbo-jumbo and then Julio’s gleeful voice: “Beel! Congratulate us. We got marriage!”
“Married,” I said fuzzily. “You got married, not marriage. How’s that again?”
“We got married. Me and Rosa. We get on the train, the taxi driver takes us to justice of peace, we got married, we go to hotel here.”
“Congratulations,” I said, waking up. “Lots of congratulations. But you’re under age, there’s a waiting period—”
“Not in this state,” he chuckled. “Here is no waiting periods and here I have twenty-one years if I say so.”
“Well,” I said. “Lots of congratulations, Julio. And tell Rosa she’s got herself a good boy.”
“Thanks, Beel,” he said shyly. “I call you so you don’t worry when I don’t come in tonight. I think I come in with Rosa tomorrow so we tell her mama and my mama and papa. I call you at the hotel, I still have the piece of paper.”
“Okay, Julio. All the best. Don’t worry about a thing.” I hung up, chuckling, and went right back to sleep.
Well, sir, it happened again.
I was shaken out of my sleep by the strong, skinny hand of Admiral MacDonald. It was seven-thirty and a bright New York morning. Dalhousie had pulled a blank canvassing the neighborhood for Gomez, got panicky, and bucked it up to higher headquarters.
“Where is he?” the admiral rasped.
“On his way here with his bride of one night,” I said. “He slipped over a couple of state lines and got married.”
“By God,” the admiral said, “we’ve got to do something about this. I’m going to have him drafted and assigned to special duty. This is the last time—”
“Look,” I said. “You’ve got to stop treating him like a chesspiece. You’ve got duty-honor-country on the brain and thank God for that. Somebody has to; it’s your profession. But can’t you get it through your head that Gomez is a kid and that you’re wrecking his life by forcing him to grind out science like a machine? And I’m just a stupe of a layman, but have you professionals worried once about digging too deep and blowing up the whole shebang?”
He gave me a piercing look and said nothing.
I dressed and had breakfast sent up. The admiral, Dalhousie, and I waited grimly until noon, and then Gomez phoned up.
“Come on up, Julio,” I said tiredly.
He breezed in with his blushing bride on his arm. The admiral rose automatically as she entered, and immediately began tongue-lashing the boy. He spoke more in sorrow than in anger. He made it clear that Gomez wasn’t treating his country right. That he had a great talent and it belonged to the United States. That his behavior had been irresponsible. That Gomez would have to come to heel and realize that his wishes weren’t the most important thing in his life. That he could and would be drafted if there were any more such escapades.
“As a starter, Mr. Gomez,” the admiral snapped, “I want you to set down, immediately, the enfieldment matrices you have developed. I consider it almost criminal of you to arrogantly and carelessly trust to your memory alone matters of such vital importance. Here!” He thrust pencil and paper at the boy, who stood, drooping and disconsolate. Little Rosa was near crying. She didn’t have the ghost of a notion as to what it was about.
Gomez took the pencil and paper and sat down at the writing table silently. I took Rosa by the arm. She was trembling. “It’s all right,” I said. “They can’t do a thing to him.” The admiral glared briefly at me and then returned his gaze to Gomez.
The boy made a couple of tentative marks. Then his eyes went wide and he clutched his hair. “Dios mlo!” he said. “Estd per dido! Olvidado!”
Which means: “My God, it’s lost! Forgotten!”
The admiral turned white beneath his tan. “Now, boy,” he said slowly and soothingly. “I didn’t mean to scare you. You just relax and collect yourself. Of course you haven’t forgotten, not with that memory of yours. Start with something easy. Write down a general biquadratic equation, say.”
Gomez just looked at him. After a long pause he said in a strangled voice: “No puedo. I can’t. It too I forget. I don’t think of the math or physics at all since—” He looked at Rosa and turned a little red. She smiled shyly and looked at her shoes.
“That is it,” Gomez said hoarsely. “Not since then. Always before in the back of my head is the math, but not since then.”
“My God,” the admiral said softly. “Can such a thing happen?” He reached for the phone.
He found out that such things can happen.
Julio went back to Spanish Harlem and bought a piece of the Porto Bello with his savings. I went back to the paper and bought a car with my savings. MacDonald never cleared the story, so the Sunday editor had the satisfaction of bulldozing an admiral, but didn’t get his exclusive.
Julio and Rosa sent me a card eventually announcing the birth of their first-born: a six-pound boy, Francisco, named after Julio’s father. I saved the card and when a New York assignment came my way—it was the National Association of Dry Goods Wholesalers; dry goods are important in our town—I dropped up to see them.
Julio was a little more mature and a little more prosperous. Rosa—alas!—was already putting on weight, but she was still a pretty thing and devoted to her man. The baby was a honey-skinned little wiggler. It was nice to see all of them together, happy with their lot.
Julio insisted that he’d cook arróz con polio for me, as on the night I practically threw him into Rosa’s arms, but he’d have to shop for the stuff. I went along.
In the corner grocery he ordered the rice, the chicken, the gar-banzos, the peppers, and, swept along by the enthusiasm that hits husbands in groceries, about fifty other things that he thought would be nice to have in the pantry.
The creaking old grocer scribbled down the prices on a shopping bag and began painfully to add them up while Julio was telling me how well the Porto Bello was doing and how they were thinking of renting the adjoining store.
“Seventeen dollars, forty-two cents,” the grocer said at last.
Julio flicked one glance at the shopping bag and the upside-down figures. “Should be seventeen thirty-nine,” he said reprovingly. “Add up again.”
The grocer painfully added up again and said, “Is seventeen thirty-nine. Sorry.” He began to pack the groceries into the bag.
“Hey,” I said.
We didn’t discuss it then or ever. Julio just said: “Don’t tell, Beel.” And winked.
1955
The Adventurers
Now why wouldn’t a space-pilot be welcomed into the membership rolls of an Adventurers Club?
IT WAS a fair-to-middling afternoon at the Adventurers Club. Cleveland was not pre-blitz London, so it looked little enough like a club; instead of oak paneling, the walls were a bilious green plaster. The waiters were not ancient and subservient Britons, but mostly flippant youths in overstarched mess-jackets; they wore chronometer wristwatches and finger-rings. The Club did not radiate the solid certainty of the fixed a
nd immovable, which is supposed to be such a comfort to the English. It had, as a matter of fact, been established in its present two floors of a business district office building for only three months, having been evicted from a Lake Boulevard loft-building destined to be torn down and replaced by a garage and parking lot. The Adventurers, however, had done their best in the brief quarter-year to make the place homey. Mounted heads covered the walls like a rash, and an obviously non-functional fireplace had been assembled of polished marble slabs and over it written the Adventurers’ motto: “A Hearth and Home for Those Who Have Strayed Far from the Beaten Path.” On two new brass andirons in the center of the big fireplace were two small, uncharred logs crossed at an angle of 45 degrees.
If the Club was out of character, however, so were most of its members. Over his roast beef, the Man Who Had Known Dr. Cook was presiding. He puffed, between sleepy chews: “I tell you, sir, the Doctor is one of the most maligned men in the history of exploration. I have been a naval officer myself and know what it is to lay aloft in a gale, but I hold no sort or kind of brief for Peary, the man who crucified the Doctor.” It was an impossible stretch of the imagination to picture the Man Who Had Known Dr. Cook laying aloft in a gale or, for that matter, doing anything but exactly what he was doing: sloppily chewing roast beef that would add to the many inches of his paunch and further lubricate his greasy face.
At a coffee-table, Captain Trevor-Beede was drinking, but not coffee. “Prunes,” he was thickly saying to a waiter, “prunes are what you need. Here in the States, here you don’t know how to cook prunes. Another b. and s.” The waiter went for the b. and s., and Captain Trevor-Beede continued to address a moth-eaten springbok head opposite him: “prunes should be soaked. That’s all there is to cooking prunes. Prunes should be soaked overnight, and then you should cook them. That’s all there is to cooking prunes.” Captain Trevor-Beede was in the diplomatic service.
At a quarter slot-machine in a corner, under a mournful and rather small walrus-head with chipped ivories, the Headshrinker was losing money with nervous haste. Click-whiz-whirr-bump, bump, bump. Click-whiz-whirr-bump, bump, bump. Click-whiz-whirr-bump, bump, bump. A minor payoff broke the rhythm, and he frowned as some quarters clunked into the scoop. He picked them up and began again. Click-whiz-whirr-bump, bump, bump. He had contributed one of the most unusual of the exhibits which filled a glass case against a wall: the doll-size, shrunken body of his eight-year-old son, born to him during his captivity, by his Jivaro wife. The son had died during the rigorous escape to the sea, and the Headshrinker had used his acquired tribal knowledge to do a really superior job of shrinking before he continued on his lighter way. Click-whiz-whirr-bump, bump, bump. “I was delirious, you know,” he would shyly explain, “but it’s really an ambitious bit of work. There weren’t the right kind of ants there, you know, and I was in a perfect funk for fear they’d botch the skin all up.” He was a one. Click-whiz-whirr-bump, bump, bump.
A waiter slouched up to a placid young man in a grey uniform. “Betcha nervous,” he said in a chummy way. “You want a drink?”
“Drink? Oh, no!” he said, very much surprised. He thought most people knew by then that the Shield was a lot stronger guarantee of Sobriety than the White Ribbon had ever been. But it was news to the waiter; he shrugged and walked away, and the young man continued to wait in a comfortable armchair that would have suggested a London club if its leather upholstery had not been Cocktail-Lounge Red.
The Man Who Had Known Dr. Cook was through with his roast beef, his baked potato, his chef’s salad, his two baskets of French bread, his innumerable pats of butter, his sweetened coffee and his pie a la mode. He wobbled over to the young man and said: “I think we’re ready for you now, youngster; the committee-room’s back there.” He followed him and on the way the Man collected Captain Trevor-Beede, who shambled after like a bear in tweeds, and the Headshrinker, who had finally lost all his quarters. The youth had met them at dinner the day before.
THE COMMITTEE-ROOM had a long table and carved-oak chairs with the names of late adventurers engraved on brass plates sunk into their backs. The Man closed the door solemnly, wobbled to the head of the table and wedged himself into an armchair. The others sat down, but the young man didn’t know whether he was supposed to until the Headshrinker cracked a nervous smile and jerked out the chair next to him. “It’s quite all right, you know,” he told him; “we don’t stand on ceremony here.”
He sat down, and the Man started: “I tell you, sir, it’s good to see young blood about the old Hearth and Home again. And I venture to say, there is none of us who has strayed as far from the beaten path as you, youngster!”
The idea surprised him; he’d never thought of it that way. He tried to explain: “It’s very good of you, sir, but I wouldn’t put it like that at all. In fact, I suppose I’ve stuck closer to beaten paths than anybody else here; why, I wouldn’t be here at all if I hadn’t!”
“Paradox,” grunted Captain Trevor-Beede. “Let’s have the rest of it and get on with the business.”
“It’s no paradox, sir. Why, where would I be if I’d got any ideas of my own about the trajectory, instead of taking Plot Room’s word for it? I’d be nowhere, that’s where I’d be, sir!”
“You needn’t be modest with us, you know,” said the nervous little Head-shrinker. “After all, Lieutenant, over the dinner-table we do like to keep ourselves within bounds—” Here he shot a quick look at the Man, who went red. “—but we’re out to assess your qualifications for membership.”
“Yes, Leff-tenant,” said Captain Trevor-Beede. “Now if you’d be so good as to give us some idea of the perils of your explorations—” He took out a pigskin notebook and pencil. That paralyzed the youth.
“Well, captain, they aren’t really explorations, I guess. I just follow the plot on the table, keep her turned, you know, and then I set her down in the cradle; I generally sleep and play some handball until she’s loaded up and ready to rip again. You should see that handball court they have up there at Luna Three! It’s three times the right size, but you can really cover ground up there. Boy, can you hit some fancy shots!”
He was aware that the membership-committee was dismayed by something or other he had said, and hastened to make amends: “Oh, you shouldn’t get the idea that handball’s all I do, of course.”
“Tennis?” asked the Headshrinker wryly.
“Now you’re joking, sir. But the handball’s necessary to keep in trim; sometimes you have to tune that table awfully fast!” He whistled and wiped his dry and healthy brow. “On the new involute approach it’s all partial differentials, all the way in from Luna gravity—sometirnes four sets of four every minute for fifteen minutes; you really have to whip out your approximations. And man, they’d better be right! It isn’t like the old grazing-spiral days, I’ll tell you that, sir!”
The Man Who Had Known Dr. Cook said: “You do—mathematics—up there? In the ship?”
“I should say so!” the young man told him enthusiastically. “Why, mathematics is all you’ve got up there—you can’t see because the ports are closed; you can’t hear anything because of the jets; and there isn’t anything to hear. The instruments can’t be sensitive and last out a take-off at the same time. All you have is what you know about the weight and the motion of the ship, and the weight and the motion of the Earth and Moon and Sun, so you have to take it from there. What have you got except mathematics? But the Plot Room does all the really tough stuff before the takeoff. All a pilot has to do is keep one jump ahead of the pointers under the table and keep his control-pointers lined up with them. That’s what we call ‘tuning the table,’ maybe I should have said; and the way I told you, the first approximation’s good enough for that.”
“What if it isn’t?” asked the Man.
The space pilot shrugged his grey-clad shoulders. “That’s all,” he said. “You take a trip.” He thought of three classmates.
“If you were admitted,” asked the Capta
in, “you would, of course, take a Club Flag to the moon on one of your—runs?”
The young man looked troubled. “I’m afraid I couldn’t do that, sir,” he said. “You know, it takes an awful lot of money to get there and back. I’d never be able to justify it to the supercargo. I ferry heavy elements, after all—it’s the job.” He thought a moment. “But tell you what, Captain! I could take a microfilm of the flag—wouldn’t that be just as good?”
“Um,” said the captain, who had planted his flag on Everest.
“Well, you know . . .” said the Headshrinker, who had planted his flag on a ridgepole deeper in Jivaro country than any other white man had ever gone.
“Urg!” strangled the Man Who Had Known Dr. Cook. He had planted his flag at the North Pole, long before that hypothetical point was the Times Square of global air traffic.
THE CAPTAIN asked bluntly, “What adventures have you had?”
“Adventures?” asked the young man. “Well, sir, the way I look at it, it’s like this. People don’t have adventures any more; if they do, they don’t live to tell about it. You see, we’re all so tied up and meshed together in a thing like the Moon-run—if one man makes a mistake, then he can make up for it himself. That’s what you call an Adventure—doing something wrong and having it come out all right anyway because you used your head. But up there—well, if I do something wrong, then it’s out of my hands right away. And I can’t expect Plot Room, by dumb luck, to compensate for just that mistake of mine, can I? No; sir—the way it looks to me, Adventure is just about washed up, if you’ll pardon me saying so.”
The Headshrinker said flatly. “Mr. Chairman, I move that the examination be closed and the candidate’s qualifications be voted on.” He turned apologetically to the young man. “You’ll have to leave now, you know—while we make up our minds.”
Collected Short Fiction Page 230