II
Well, there were business reverses. Due to the reverses, I was forced to miss the next few reunions. But I had a lot of time to think and study, in between times at the farm and the shop where we stamped out license plates for the state.
When I got out, I began looking for El Greco.
I spent six months at it, and I didn’t have any luck at all. El Greco had moved his laboratory and left no forwarding address.
But I wanted to find him. I wanted it so badly, I could taste it, because I had begun to have some idea of what he was talking about, and so I kept on looking.
I never did find him, though. He found me.
He came walking in on me in a shabby little hotel room, and I hardly recognized him, he looked so prosperous and healthy.
“You’re looking just great, Greek,” I said enthusiastically, seeing it was true. The years hadn’t added a pound or a wrinkle—just the reverse, in fact.
“You’re not looking so bad yourself,” he said, and gazed at me sharply. “Especially for a man not long out of prison.”
“Oh.” I cleared my throat. “You know about that.”
“I heard that Pudge Detweiler prosecuted.”
“I see.” I got up and began uncluttering a chair. “Well,” I said, “it’s certainly good to—How did you find me?”
“Detectives. Money buys a lot of help. I’ve got a lot of money.”
“Oh.” I cleared my throat again.
Greco looked at me, nodding thoughtfully to himself. There was one good thing; maybe he knew about my trouble with Pudge, but he also had gone out of his way to find me. So he wanted something out of me.
He said suddenly, “Virgie, you were a damned fool.”
“I was,” I admitted honestly. “Worse than you know. But I am no longer. Greek, old boy, all this stuff you told me about those demons got me interested. I had plenty of time for reading in prison. You won’t find me as ignorant as I was the last time we talked.”
He laughed sourly. “That’s a hot one. Four years of college leave you as ignorant as the day you went in, but a couple years of jail make you an educated man.”
“Also a reformed one.”
He said mildly, “Not too reformed, I hope.”
“Crime doesn’t pay—except when it’s within the law. That’s the chief thing I learned.”
“Even then it doesn’t pay,” he said moodily. “Except in money, of course. But what’s the use of money?”
There wasn’t anything to say to that. I said, probing delicately, “I figured you were loaded. If you can use your demons to separate U-235 from U-238, you can use them for separating gold from sea water. You can use them for damn near anything.”
“Damn near,” he concurred. “Virgie, you may be of some help to me. Obviously you’ve been reading up on Maxwell.” “Obviously.”
It was the simple truth. I had got a lot of use out of the prison library—even to the point of learning all there was to learn about Clerk Maxwell, one of the greatest of physicists, and his little demons. I had rehearsed it thoroughly for El Greco.
“Suppose,” I said, “that you had a little compartment inside a pipe of flowing gas or liquid. That’s what Maxwell said. Suppose the compartment had a little door that allowed molecules to enter or leave. You station a demon— that’s what Maxie called them himself—at the door. The
demon sees a hot molecule coming, he opens the door. He sees a cold one, he closes it. By and by, just like that, all the hot molecules are on one side of the door, all the cold ones— the slow ones, that is—on the other. Steam on one side, ice on the other, that’s what it comes down to.”
“That was what you saw with your own eyes,” Theobald Greco reminded me.
“I admit it,” I said. “And I admit I didn’t understand. But I do now.”
I understood plenty. Separate isotopes—separate elements, for that matter. Let your demon open the door to platinum, close it to lead. He could make you rich in no time.
He had, in fact, done just that for Greco.
Greco said, “Here. First installment.” He pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was metallic —about the size of a penny slot-machine bar of chocolate, if you remember back that far. It gleamed and it glittered. And it was ruddy yellow in color.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Gold,” he said. “Keep it, Virgie. It came out of sea water, like you said. Call it the down payment on your salary.”
I hefted it. I bit it. I said, “By the way, speaking of salary …”
“Whatever you like,” he said wearily. “A million dollars a year? Why not?”
“Why not?” I echoed, a little dazed.
And then I just sat there listening, while he talked. What else was there to do? I won’t even say that I was listening, at least not with the very fullest of attention, because that thought of a million dollars a year kept coming between me and his words. But I got the picture. The possibilities were endless. And how well I knew it!
Gold from the sea, sure. But energy—free energy—it was
there for the taking. From the molecules of the air, for instance. Refrigerators could be cooled, boilers could get up steam, homes could be heated, forges could be fired—and all without fuel. Planes could fly through the air without a drop of gasoline in their tanks. Anything.
A million dollars a year …
And it was only the beginning.
I came to. “What?”
He was looking at me. He repeated patiently, “The police are looking for me.”
I stared. “You?”
“Did you hear about Grand Rapids?”
I thought. “Oh—Wait. A fire. A big one. And that was you?”
“Not me. My demons. Maxwell demons—or Greco demons, they should be called. He talked about them; 1 use them. When they’re not using me. This time, they burned down half the city.”
“I remember now,” I said. The papers had been full of it. “They got loose,” he said grimly. “But that’s not the worst. You’ll have to earn your million a year, Virgie.” “What do you mean, they got loose?”
He shrugged. “Controls aren’t perfect. Sometimes the demons escape. I can’t help it.”
“How do you control them in the first place?”
He sighed. “It isn’t really what you would call controls,” he said. “It’s just the best I can do to keep them from spreading.”
“But—you said sometimes you separate metals, sometimes you get energy. How do the demons know which you want them to do, if you say you can’t control them?” “How do you make an apple tree understand whether you want it to grow Baldwins or Macintoshes?”
I gawked at him. “Why—but you don’t, Greek! I mean it’s either one or the other!”
“Just so with demons! You’re not so stupid after all, are you? It’s like improving the breed of dogs. You take a common ancestral mutt, and generations later you can develop an Airedale, a dachshund or a Spitz. How? By selection. My demon entities grow, they split, the new entities adapt themselves to new conditions. There’s a process of evolution. I help it along, that’s all.”
He took the little slab of gold from me, brooding.
Abruptly he hurled it at the wall. “Gold!” he cried wildly. “But who wants it? I need help, Virgie! If gold will buy it from you, I’ll pay! But I’m desperate. You’d be desperate too, with nothing ahead but a sordid, demeaning death from young age and a—”
I interrupted him. “What’s that?”
It was a nearby raucous hooting, loud and mournful.
Greco stopped in mid-sentence, listening like a hunted creature. “My room,” he whispered. “All my equipment—on the floor above—”
I stepped back, a little worried. He was a strange man, skinny and tall and wild-eyed. I was glad he was so thin; if he’d been built solidly in proportion to his height, just then he would have worried me, with those staring, frightened eyes and that crazy way of talking. But I
didn’t have time to worry, in any case. Footsteps were thundering in the halls. Distant voices shouted to each other.
The hoot came again.
“The fire whistle!” Greco bayed. “The hotel’s on fire!”
He leaped out of my room into the corridor.
I followed. There was a smell of burning—not autumn leaves or paper; it was a chemical-burning smell, a leatherburning smell, a henyard-on-fire smell. It reeked of an assortment of things, gunpowder and charred feathers, the choking soot of burning oil, the crisp tang of a wood fire. It was, I thought for a second, perhaps the typical smell of a hotel on fire, but in that I was wrong.
“Demons!” yelled Greco, and a bellhop, hurrying by,
paused to look at us queerly. Greco sped for the stairs and up them.
I followed.
It was Greco’s room that was ablaze—he made that clear, trying to get into it. But he couldn’t. Black smoke billowed out of it, and orange flame. The night manager’s water bucket was going to make no headway against that
I retreated. But Greco plunged ahead, his face white and scary.
I stopped at the head of the stairs. The flames drove Greco off, but he tried again. They drove him off again, and this time for good.
He stumbled toward me. “Out! It’s hopeless!’’ He turned, stared blindly at the hotel employees with their chain of buckets. “You! What do you think you’re doing? That’s—“ He stopped, wetting his lips. “That’s a gasoline fire,” he lied, “and there’s dynamite in my luggage. Clear the hotel, you hear me?”
It was, as I say, a lie. But it got the hotel cleared out.
And then—
It might as well have been gasoline and dynamite. There was a purplish flash and a muttering boom, and the whole roof of the four-story building lifted off.
I caught his arm.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
He looked at me blindly. I’d swear he didn’t know me. His eyes were tortured.
“Too late!” he croaked. “Too late! They’re free again!”
III
So I went to work for Theobald Greco—in his laboratory in Southern California, where we replaced some of the things that had been destroyed.
And one morning I woke up and found my hair was white.
I cried, “Greek!”
Minnie came running in. I don’t believe I told you about Minnie. She was Greco’s idea of the perfect laboratory assistant—stupid, old, worthless to the world and without visible kin. She came in and stared and set up a cackling that would wake the dead.
“Mister Hampstead!” she chortled. “My, but ain’t you a sight!”
“Where’s Greco?” I demanded, and pushed her out of my way.
In pajamas and bathrobe, I stalked down the stairs and into the room that had once been a kitchen and now was Greco’s laboratory.
“Look!” I yelled. “What about this?”
He turned to look at me.
After a long moment, he shook his head.
“I was afraid of that,” he mumbled. “You were a towhead as a kid, weren’t you? And now you’re a towhead again.”
“But my hair, Greek! IPs turned white”
“Not white,” he corrected despondently. “Yellow. It’s reverted to youth—overnight the way it happens sometimes. I warned you, Virgie. I told you there were dangers. Now you know. Because—”
He hesitated, looked at me, then looked away.
“Because,” he said, “you’re getting younger, just like me. If we don’t get this thing straightened out, you’re going to die of young age yourself.”
I stared at him. “You said that before, about yourself. I thought you’d just tongue-twisted. But you really mean—”
“Sit down,” he ordered. “Virgie, I told you that you were looking younger. It wasn’t just looks. It’s the demons —and not just you and me, but a lot of people. First Grand Rapids. Then when the hotel burned. Plenty have been exposed—you more than most, I guess, ever since the day you walked into my lab and I was trying to recapture some that had got away. Well, I don’t guess I recaptured them all.”
“You mean I—”
He nodded. “Some of the demons make people younger. And you’ve got a colony of them in you.”
I swallowed and sat down. “You mean I’m going to get younger and younger, until finally I become a baby? And then—what then, Greek?”
He shrugged. “How do I know? Ask me in another ten years. Look at me, Virgie!” he cried, suddenly loud. “How old do I look to you? Eighteen? Twenty?”
It was the plain truth. He looked no more than that. Seeing him day by day, I wasn’t conscious of change; remembering him from when we had gone to school, I thought of him as younger anyway. But he was forty, at the very least, and he didn’t look old enough to vote.
He said, “I’ve had demons inside of me for six years. It seems they’re a bit choosy about where they’ll live. They don’t inhabit the whole body, just parts of it—heart, lungs, liver. Maybe bones. Maybe some of the glands—perhaps that’s why I feel so chipper physically. But not my brain, or not yet. Fortunately.”
“Fortunately? But that’s wrong, Greek! If your brain grew younger too—”
“Fool! If I had a young brain, I’d forget everything I learned, like unrolling a tape backwards! That’s the danger, Virgie, the immediate danger that’s pressing me—that’s why I needed help! Because if I ever forget, that’s the end. Not just for me—for everybody; because there’s no one else in the world who knows how to control these things at all. Except me—and you, if I can train you.”
“They’re loose?” I felt my hair wonderingly. Still, it was not exactly a surprise. “How many?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea. When they let the first batch of rabbits loose in Australia, did they have any idea how many there would be a couple of dozen generations later?”
I whistled. Minnie popped her head in the door and giggled. I waved her away.
“She could use some of your demons,” I remarked. “Sometimes I think she has awfully young ideas, for a woman who’s sixty if she’s a day.”
Greco laughed crazily. “Minnie? She’s been working for me for a year. And she was eighty-five when I hired her!”
“I can’t believe you!”
“Then you’ll have to start practicing right now,” he said.
It was tough, and no fooling; but I became convinced. It wasn’t the million dollars a year any more.
It was the thought of ending my days as a drooling, mewling infant—or worse! To avert that, I was willing to work my brain to a shred.
First it was a matter of learning—learning about the “strange particles.” Ever hear of them? That’s not my term —that’s what the physicists call them. Positrons. The neutrino. Pions and muons, plus and minus; the lambda and the antilambda. K particles, positive and negative, and antiprotons and anti-neutrons and sigmas, positive, negative and neutral, and—
Well, that’s enough; but physics had come a long way since the classes I cut at Old Ugly, and there was a lot to catch up on.
The thing was, some of the “strange particles” were stranger than even most physicists knew. Some—in combination—were in fact Greco’s demons.
We bought animals—mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, even dogs. We infected the young with some of our own demons —that was simple enough, frighteningly simple; all we had to do was handle them a bit. And we watched what happened.
They died—of young age.
Some vital organ or another regressed to embryonic condition, and they died—as Greco and I would die, if we didn’t find the answer. As the whole world might die. Was it better than reverting past the embryo to the simple lifeless zygote? I couldn’t decide. It was dying, all the same. When an embryonic heart or liver is called on to do a job for a mature organism, there is only one way out. Death.
And after death—the demons went on; the dog we fed on the remains of the guinea pigs followed them to extin
ction in a matter of weeks.
Minnie was an interesting case.
She was going about her work with more energy every day, and I’ll be blasted if I didn’t catch her casting a lingering Marilyn Monroe sort of look at me when Greco’s back was turned.
“Shall we fire her?” Tasked El Greco when I told him about it.
“What for?”
“She’s disrupting the work!”
“The work isn’t worth a damn anyhow,” he said moodily. “We’re not getting anywhere, Virgie. If it was only a matter of smooth, predictable rates—But look at her. She’s picking up speed! She’s dropped five years in the past couple weeks.”
“She can stand to drop a lot more,” I said, annoyed.
He shrugged. “It depends on where. Her nose? It’s shortened to about a fifteen-year-old level now. Facial hair? That’s mostly gone. Skin texture? Well, I suppose there’s no such thing as a too-immature skin, I mean short of the embryonic capsule, but—Wait a minute.”
He was staring at the doorway.
Minnie was standing there, simpering.
“Come here!” he ordered in a voice like thunder. “Come here, you! Virgie, look at her nose!”
I looked. “Ugh,” I said, but more or less under my breath. “No, no!” cried Greco. “Virgie, don’t you see her nose?” Foolish;
Then I saw.
“It’s growing longer,” I whispered.
“Right, my boy! Right! One curve at least has reversed itself. Do you see, Virgie?”
I nodded. “She’s—she’s beginning to age again.”
“Better than that!” he crowed. “It’s faster than normal aging, Virgie! There are aging demons loose too/”
A breath of hope!
But hope died. Sure, he was right—as far as it went. There were aging demons. We isolated them in some of our experimental animals. First we had to lure Minnie into standing still while Greco, swearing horribly, took a tissue sample; she didn’t like that, but a hundred-dollar bonus converted her. Solid CO2 froze the skin; snip, and a tiny flake of flesh came out of her nose at the point of Greco’s scalpel; he put the sample of flesh through a few tricks and, at the end of the day, we tried it on some of our mice. They died.
The Expert Dreamers (1962) Anthology Page 5