“Nonsense. Certainly he can’t fly.”
There was the wild patter of feminine feet down the hallway outside the office, the door was flung open, and Margie tottered in. She clung to the desk and gasped, too out of wind to talk.
“What’s wrong?” cried Hank.
“Art—” Margie managed, “flew out—lab window.” Hank jumped to his feet, and pulled his chair out for her. She fell into it gratefully.
“Nonsense!” said Arlie. “Illusion. Or—” he scowled at Margie, “collusion of some sort.”
“Got your breath back yet? What happened?” Hank was demanding. Margie nodded and drew a deep breath.
“I was testing him,” she said, still breathless, “he was talking a blue streak and I could hardly get him to stand still. Something about Titus Quintus Flamininius, the three-body problem, Sauce Countess Waleska, the family Syrphidae of the order Diptera—all mixed up. Oh, he was babbling! And all of a sudden he dived out an open window.”
“Dived?” barked Arlie. “I thought you said he flew?”
“Well, the laboratory’s on the third floor!” wailed Margie, almost on the verge of tears.
Further questioning elicited the information that when Margie ran to the window, expecting to see a shattered ruin on the grass three stories below, she perceived Art swinging by one arm from the limb of an oak outside the window. In response to sharp queries from Arlie, she asserted vehemently that the closest grabable limb of the oak was, however, at least eight feet from the window which Art had jumped, fallen or dived.
“And then what?” said Hank.
Then, according to Margie, Art had uttered a couple of tarzanlike yodels, and swung himself to the ground. When last seen he had been running off across the campus through the cool spring sunlight, under the budding trees, in his slacks and shirt unbuttoned at the throat. He had been heading in a roughly northeasterly direction—i.e., toward town—and occasionally bounding into the air as if from a sheer access of energy.
“Come on!” barked Hank, when he had heard this. He led the way at a run toward the hospital parking lot three stories below and his waiting car.
On the other side of the campus, at a taxi stand, the three of them picked up Art’s trail. A cab driver waiting there remembered someone like Art taking another cab belonging to the same company. When Hank identified the passenger as a patient under his, Hank’s care; and further identified himself as a physician from the University hospitals, the cab driver they were talking to agreed to call in for the destination of Art’s cab.
The destination was a downtown bank. Hank, Arlie and Margie piled back into Hank’s car and went there.
When they arrived, the learned that Art had already come and gone, leaving some confusion behind him. A vice-president of the bank, it appeared, had made a loan to Art of two hundred and sixty-eight dollars and eighty cents; and was now, it seemed, not quite sure as to why he had done so.
“He just talked me into it, I guess,” the vice-president was saying unhappily as Hank and the others came dashing up. It further developed that Art had had no collateral. The vice-president had been given the impression that the money was to be used to develop some confusing but highly useful discovery or discoveries concerning Hannibal, encyclopedias, the sweat fly and physics—with something about champagne and a way of preparing trout for the gourmet appetite.
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 (Moet et Chandon) 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 Waleska 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 hospitals.”
“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 hospitals, and—”
“When I was child,” announced Ait, “thought as child, played child; now man—put away childish things.”
“Here’s the young lady, sir.”
“But who will take care of pet racoon?”
“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 Wehauck 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 exami
ned the object: It appeared to be an ordinary movable 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 up 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 passes 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 Margie.”
“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 featherheaded butterfly who never lit on one notion for more than five 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,” he 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 in to 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 that 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. They do 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 down. As long as I’m going to be a married man shortly.”
“We can turn you loose today, if you want,” said Hank.
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 comer 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 around.
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 Syriphidae 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.
&nb
sp; COUNTER SECURITY
James White
Britishers do this sort of thing so well! Here is mastery of the English style of detailed, workmanlike, understated realism that can make even the most unlikely of fantastic situations seem inevitably real. We are given a picture of a business (department store), a profession (security officer, otherwise known as night watchman), and an Event (capital E, indeed!), with a vividness which seems astonishing when you examine the tale for signs of excitement No real dialogue, almost no action in the melodramatic sense, great long paragraphs, and very little verbal effort to arouse your emotions (that is left to the nature of the Event itself!)—and yet the reader is continuously enthralled from start to ironic last word. At least, I was!
THE OBJECT LYING ON MR. STEELE’S DESK WAS the remains of a large, black plastic doll, Tully saw as he took the chair which the Store Manager indicated to him. The doll had lost a leg and both arms, one eye socket was empty and the nose had been pulled out of shape. There were also patches of hair missing from the scalp, and a narrow band of spotted material—the collar of the doll’s dress, no doubt—still encircled its neck. Altogether it was an intriguing and rather pitiable object, Tully thought, but hardly the sort of thing to cause the Store Manager to send for the night security man as soon as he came on duty.
Tully was about to voice his curiosity when Steele’s receptionist announced Tyson of Hardware and Dodds, the Toy buyer. The SM waited until they had stopped moving in their chairs, then cleared his throat and began to speak.
“In the ordinary way, Mr. Tully,” he said in his soft, unhurried voice, “all cases of malicious damage to stock by members of the staff are dealt with by the departmental buyer or floor supervisor and are not usually the concern of the night security people. Neither, I might add, are they the direct concern of the Store Manager, since I have slightly more important matters to occupy me.”
His tone became gently sarcastic and he looked pointedly at the Toy buyer, who looked at the carpet.
“. . . However,” he went on, “this seems to be an unusual case, in that neither Mr. Dodds nor the supervisor on that floor have been able to do anything beyond establishing the fact that these occurrences do not take place during shop hours. Meanwhile the Toy department is being terrorized by an epidemic of armless dolls—”
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