He let me drop.
And then—this is the part that seems most unbelievable to me when I look back at it all—I got an idea.
It was a whale of an idea. A piperoo. The one in a lifetime that everyone gets once in a lifetime.
I didn’t tell my uncle Otto the whole thing at the time, I wanted a few days to think about it But I told him what to do. I told him he would have to go to Washington. It wasn’t easy to argue him into it, but, on the other hand, if you know my uncle Otto, there are ways.
I found two ten-dollar bills lurking pitifully in my wallet and gave them to him.
I said, “I’ll make out a check for the train fare and you can keep the two tens if it turns out I’m being dishonest with you.”
He considered. “A fool to risk twenty dollars for nothing you aren’t,” he admitted.
He was right, too.
He was back in two days and pronounced the object focused. After all it was on public view. It’s in a nitrogen-filled, airtight case, but my uncle Otto said that didn’t matter. And back in the laboratory, four hundred miles away, the focusing remained accurate. My uncle Otto assured me of that, too.
I said, “Two things, Uncle Otto, before we do anything.”
“What? What? What?” He went on at greater length, “What? What? What? What?”
I gathered he was growing anxious. I said, “Are you sure that if we bring into the present a piece of something out of the past, that piece won’t disappear out of the object as it now exists.”
My uncle Otto cracked his large knuckles and said, “We are creating new matter, not stealing old. Why else should we enormous energy need?”
I passed on to the second point. “What about my fee?”
You may not believe this, but I hadn’t mentioned money till then. My uncle Otto hadn’t either, but then, that follows.
His mouth stretched in a bad imitation of an affectionate smile. “A fee?”
“Ten percent of the take,” I explained, “is what I’ll need.”
His jowls drooped, “But how much is the take?”
“Maybe a hundred thousand dollars. That would leave you ninety.”
“Ninety thousand—Himmel! Then why do we wait?” He leaped at his machine and in half a minute the space above the dentist’s tray was agleam with an image of parchment.
It was covered with neat script, closely spaced, looking like an entry for an old-fashioned penmanship prize. At the bottom of the sheet there were names: one large one and fifty-five small ones.
Funny thing! I choked up. I had seen many reproductions, but this was the real thing. The real Declaration of Independence!
I said, “I’ll be damned. You did it.”
“And the hundred thousand?” asked my uncle Otto, getting to the point.
Now was the time to explain. “You see, uncle, at the bottom of the document there are signatures. These are the names of great Americans, fathers of their country, whom we all reverence. Anything about them is of interest to all true Americans.”
“All right,” grumbled my uncle Otto, “I will accompany you by playing the ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ on my flute.”
I laughed quickly to show that I took that remark as a joke. The alternative to a joke would not bear thinking of. Have you ever heard my uncle Otto playing the “Stars and Stripes Forever” on his flute?
I said, “But one of these signers, from the state of Georgia, died in 1777, the year after he signed the Declaration. He didn’t leave much behind him and so authentic examples of his signature are about the most valuable in the world. His name was Button Gwinnett.”
“And how does this help us cash in?” asked my uncle Otto, his mind still fixed grimly on the eternal verities of the universe.
“Here,” I said, simply, “is an authentic real-life signature of Button Gwinnett, right on the Declaration of Independence.”
My uncle Otto was stunned into absolute silence, and to bring absolute silence out of my uncle Otto, he’s really got to be stunned!
“I said, “Now you see him right here on the extreme left of the signature space along with the two other signers for Georgia, Lyman Hall and George Walton. You’ll notice they crowded their names although there’s plenty of room above and below. In fact, the capital ‘G’ of ‘Gwinnett’ runs down into practical contact with Hall’s name. So we won’t try to separate them. We’ll get them all. Can you handle that?”
Have you ever seen a bloodhound that looked happy? Well, my uncle Otto managed it.
A spot of brighter light centered about the names of the three Georgian signers.
My uncle Otto said, a little breathlessly, “I have this never tried before.”
“What!” I screamed. Now he told me.
“It would have too much energy required. I did not wish the University to inquire what was in here going on. But don’t worry! My mathematics cannot wrong be.” I prayed silently that his mathematics not wrong were. The light grew brighter and there was a humming that filled the laboratory with raucous noise. My uncle Otto turned a knob, then another, then a third.
Do you remember the time when all of upper Manhattan and the Bronx were without electricity for twelve hours because of the damndest overload cutoff in the main powerhouse? I won’t say we did that, because I am in no mood to be sued for damages. But I will say this. The electricity went off when my uncle Otto turned the third knob.
Inside the lab, all the lights went out and I found myself on the floor with a terrific ringing in my ears. My uncle Otto was sprawled across me.
We worked each other to our feet and my uncle Otto found a flashlight.
He howled his anguish. “Fused. Fused. My machine in ruins is. It has to destruction devoted been.”
“But the signatures?” I yelled at him. “Did you get them?”
He stopped in mid-cry. “I haven’t looked.”
He looked, and I closed my eyes. The disappearance of a hundred thousand dollars is not an easy thing to watch.
He cried, “Ah, ha!” and I opened my eyes quickly. He had a square of parchment in his hand some two inches on a side. It had three signatures on it and the top one was that of Button Gwinnett.
Now, mind you, the signature was absolutely genuine. It was no fake. There wasn’t an atom of fraud about the whole transaction. I want that understood. Lying on my uncle Otto’s broad hand was a signature indited with the Georgian hand of Button Gwinnett himself on the authentic parchment of the honest-to-God, real-life Declaration of Independence.
It was decided that my uncle Otto would travel down to Washington with the parchment scrap. I was unsatisfactory for the purpose. I was a lawyer. I would be expected to know too much. He was merely a scientific genius, and wasn’t expected to know anything. Besides, who could suspect Dr. Otto Schemmelmayer of anything but the most transparent honesty.
We spent a week arranging our story. I bought a book for the occasion, an old history of colonial Georgia, in a secondhand shop. My uncle Otto was to take it with him and claim he had found a document among its leaves; a letter to the Continental Congress in the name of the State of Georgia. He had shrugged his shoulders at it and held it out over a Bunsen flame. Why should a physicist be interested in letters? Then he became aware of the peculiar odor it gave off as it burned and the slowness with which it was consumed. He beat out the flames but saved only the piece with the signatures. He looked at it and the name “Button Gwinnett” had stirred a slight fiber of memory.
He had the story cold. I burnt the edges of the parchment so that the lowest name, that of George Walton, was slightly singed.
“It will make it more realistic,” I explained. “Of course, a signature, without a letter above it, loses value, but here we have three signatures, all signers.”
My uncle Otto was thoughtful. “And if they compare the signatures with those on the Declaration and notice it is all even microscopically the same, won’t they fraud suspect?”
“Certainly. But what can they d
o? The parchment is authentic. The ink is authentic. The signatures are authentic. They’ll have to concede that. No matter how they suspect something queer they can’t prove anything. Can they conceive reaching through time for it. In fact, I hope they do try to make a fuss about it The publicity will boost the price.”
The last phrase made my uncle Otto laugh.
The next day he took the train to Washington with visions of flutes in his head, long flutes, short flutes, bass flutes, flute tremolos, massive flutes, micro-flutes, flutes for the individual and flutes for the orchestra. A world of flutes for mind-drawn music.
“Remember,” his last words were, “the machine I have no money to rebuild. This must work.”
And I said, “Uncle Otto, it can’t miss.”
Ha!
He was back in a week. I had made long-distance calls each day and each day he told me they were investigating.
Investigating.
Well, wouldn’t you investigate? But what good would it do them?
I was at the station waiting for him. He was expressionless. I didn’t dare ask anything in public. I wanted to say, “Well, yes or no?” but I thought let him speak.
I took him to my office. I offered him a cigar and a drink. I hid my hands under the desk but that only made the desk shake, too, so I put them in my pocket and shook all over.
He said, “They investigated.”
“Sure! I told you they would. Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha?”
My uncle Otto took a slow drag at the cigar. He said, “The man at the Bureau of Documents came to me and said, ‘Professor Schemmelmayer,’ he said, ‘you are the victim of a clever fraud.’ I said, ‘So? And how can it a fraud be? The signature a forgery is?’ So he answered, ‘It certainly doesn’t look like a forgery, but it must be!’ ‘And why must it be?’ I asked.”
My uncle Otto put down his cigar, put down his drink and leaned across the desk toward me. He had me so in suspense, I actually leaned forward toward him, so in a way I deserved everything I got.
“Exactly,” I babbled, “why must it be? They can’t prove a thing wrong with it, because it’s genuine. Why must it be a fraud, eh? Why?”
My uncle Otto’s voice was terrifyingly sweet. He said, “We got the parchment from the past?”
“Yes. Yes. You know we did.”
“Well in the past.”
“Over a hundred fifty years in the past. You said—”
“And a hundred fifty years ago the parchment on which the Declaration of Independence was written pretty new was. No?”
I was beginning to get it, but not fast enough.
My uncle Otto’s voice switched gears and became a dull, throbbing roar, “and if Button Gwinnett in 1777 died, you Godforsaken, dungheaded lump, how can an authentic signature of his be on a new piece of parchment found?”
After that it was just a case of the whole world rushing backward and forward about me.
I expect to be on my feet soon. I still ache, but the doctors tell me no bones were broken.
Still, he didn’t have to make me swallow the parchment.
[1] Doctor? Yes. What they call in the profession a “phony doctor”—Ph.D. In biochemistry. Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine, along with all his other activities.
[2] Sixty-plus titles as this book went to press in mid-1965. Pretty good for a fellow born as recently as 19201.
THE DEEP DOWN DRAGON
Judith Merril
Psychotherapy today undoubtedly is a valuable tool for ego reinforcement, confidence-building, and all that. But what of its uses from here on out? Judith Merril has done some thinking about it, and when you consider the sort of problems that must be faced and coped with on the far frontiers of our tomorrows, you will see why her curious sort of transistorized psychodrama might make excellent sense in some not too distant era of planet colonizing.
THE GIRL’S ONE DUTY WAS TO LOOK—AND UNDERSTAND:
White flatness of the wide wall dissolved into mist as the room dimmed. Then whiteness itself broke apart, from all-color to each component.
Pinpoints of brightness swirled and coalesced into new patterns of color and shape. Pinks and yellows here. Silver, blue, black there. Brown, gray, green. Rainbow stripes.
First flat, like a painted scene, then deepening to its own kind of reality, the scene glowed in the center of nothingness where the wall had been before.
The scene had been exactly the same before, she remembered. There was the strangely clear-air atmosphere, thin and sharp. The sketched-in effect of the background—hills, oddly shaped? A domed structure closer?—was simply a matter of her focused attention, not distance haze. Through this transparent air detailed vision would be possible at a far distance. And the background hills were far; for the moment, however, they were only background.
What counted was front-center, bright-colored . . . as real as when she had seen it the first time for herself.
The three footprints. The shoe. The square of cloth. The three bushes. In color, focus and meaning they were identical. Her own shoe, with the silly spike heel and lacy strap unfastened, was lying where it dropped on the pink-hued sand, alongside the alien prints. The first time she had not known why, exactly, the prints were “alien.” Now she saw it was the shoe that accomplished the effect. Plenty of three-toed things left prints in sand, but nothing exactly the length of her own foot was tripartite.
Nothing on Earth.
It was the same thing with the brown-gray-green thorn bushes . . . planted, she suddenly realized, by some insane gardener, to landscape that circular blockhouse thing in the background! Or maybe not so insane. Nowhere else in sight was there a growing or green thing at all. Poor green was better than none. Spikes, spines and thorns did grow. They were alive, if still—alien? Why? Of course, the same thing. The patterned robe. A square of cloth, from the same bolt from which she had made the robe, only last week, hung impaled on the farthest bush.
Farthest? Nearest! Nearest to the door of the house, from which the strange footprints curved down and off-scene.
Half the wall was filled now. Inch by slow fraction of inch the scene widened. She sat forward, breathing almost not at all, tensed with knowing the next print, or the one beyond it, would contain the print-maker, the—alien.
Alien? What an odd thought! That was the second—the third?—time she’d thought it She did not remember the thought from the first seeing of the same scene. “Strange,” maybe. “Unknown.” Not “alien.”
Odd . . . Odder still, as her eyes went unwillingly from the forming print at the far edge of the scene, she saw her own sandal alongside the trail, silly spike heel and lacy strap, still fastened as it had been on her foot . . .
That wasn’t just odd. It was wrong! And the tom strip of fabric ripped from her robe by the thornbush—
“That’s not how it was! That’s not the way it went,” she thought, and the scene faded out.
The light brightened in the room as the wall came back to normality, and she realized that she had not just thought it, but spoken aloud.
“This is his, remember?” Gordon was smiling. “Only the very first frame is identical. It starts branching off right away. The colors, for instance?”
Ruth thought back and of course he was right. Hers had been much yellower. Pink sand was absurd.
She laughed out loud, at the absurdity of thinking anything in the projection absurd. Then she explained. “Pink sand. I was thinking how silly that was, and then I remembered that mine had little pink clouds floating over my pure yellow desert! Why on Earth do you think he’d have pink sand, though?”
Gordon smiled again as she realized how her own question had answered itself. “. . . on Earth . . .” she had said. Of course. Why should it be Earth at all?
With the questioning thought came concern. Why had hers been on Earth? Did that mean . . .? Were they showing her Charles’s sequence just to explain, in the kindest way, why she failed?
She
wouldn’t finish the thoughts, even in her own head. But Gordon was chuckling quietly as he watched her. Of course he knew what had been crossing her—face, she decided, as well as her mind! Other people had been through this whole thing before. Half of them must have gone through the same thoughts.
Half of them would have been worried . . . and how many of them had good cause to be?
“Relax, Ruth,” he said warmly. “You haven’t failed or passed yet. There’s a lot more to it than the sequence. But I can tell you that it makes no difference where you make the setting, or when. At least—” he frowned faintly, and she knew it was impatience with his own imprecision in a vital communication. “At least, it makes no more difference—and no less—than your choice of colors or textures. A good bit less difference than clothing, for instance.”
She looked at him gratefully.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll try to forget my own sequence.”
“The best way is just to let yourself go, as completely as you can. There’s no harm in being aware of the difference, just so you aren’t contrasting. It won’t rationalize. But you don’t have to stop being you to be him for a while, you know.” He smiled again.
She nodded and grinned. Some things did not have to be verbalized.
She shivered and settled back, ready to watch—to feel, to know, be, exist—in his mind and body.
Gordon didn’t say any more. The room dimmed again, and once more the misting wall focused the scene.
When it had covered the wall, Ruth had forgotten that there was a wall there at all. Or that she was herself.
More completely than ever before, or again (unless and until they fused to a new person, their child) she was one with the man who had made her his own.
The trail of prints led tantalizingly out of sight, curving away behind a low ridge of dunes. Unless the creature, whatever it was, moved much more swiftly than the prints promised, it had been more than a few minutes since it happened.
He looked again at her slipper dropped on its side in the sand. The first glimpse had been more incongruous than anything else. The alienness of the prints contrasted ridiculously with the spiced femininity of Ruth’s shoe on the orange-pink sand. Now it seemed to him that the slipper was not dropped but thrown. Or kicked.
13 Above the Night Page 21