A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

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A Large Anthology of Science Fiction Page 449

by Jerry


  “No?” Tyler felt another of those horrible little qualms. He looked at the wall thermometer. Sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit it said—and that was the house temperature that the thermo-couple was supposed to maintain.

  “It seems to be me,” said Tyler, wretchedly. “But I still think if you stick around something will happen that you can detect, too. I could use an independent witness.”

  “I’m afraid I must go soon,” said Sweet, glancing casually around the lab.

  “But I must have someone else with me when these things happen, to put the matter beyond doubt one way or the other. Am I ill—or are things really happening?”

  “Surely the best thing is to see a doctor?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. But if only someone could stay with me. My only real friend is in Italy just now. I don’t know who to ask.”

  “Ask no one,” said Sweet, brutally. “This is my house. It’s not an hotel.”

  “Could I have a servant, then?”

  “What on earth for? This house was especially designed to do without bothersome servants. No, little man. If you don’t like this house the way I like to have it, then you’d better start packing.”

  “Have you another lab anywhere I could work in, Mr. Sweet?”

  Sweet made a noise like a neighing horse. His weak voice cracked on a note of indignation. “Stop trying to cross-examine me, little man. My affairs are my affairs. At the moment, your affairs are also my affairs. If you no longer feel capable of doing serious research work, then you’re wasting my time and apparatus. You’d better leave. I can find another protege.”

  “But where could I go? Someone has taken over my old job, and at my age——”

  “That,” said Sweet, “is one affair that is your affair.” A spark of anger suddenly blazed in Tyler. “You made me give up my job. You brought me here. You promised that I could stay as long as I liked——”

  “Sure. But on condition that you prepare me proper reports of your experiments. Can I help it if your observation begins to fail and your data and deductions must, therefore, always be suspect? We shall get nowhere like that.”

  “Okay,” said Tyler, decisively. “I’ll see a brain specialist right away. If he clears me, will you accept his verdict and let, me stay on?”

  “Of course. Always provided you continue to make out reports that add up to sense. Goodbye, Mr. Tyler.”

  When Sweet had gone, Tyler looked up the number of Bleiker, the brain specialist. He dialed it on the ’phone in the lab. He heard the buzz-buzz of Bleiker’s ’phone ringing, and then it stopped.

  “Hello—Mr. Bleiker?” he asked, tentatively.

  A tinny voice replied: “Hello—Mr. Bleiker?”

  He wondered briefly at the inflection of inquiry, then said: “I should like to make an appointment.”

  The tinny voice said: “I should like to make an appointment.”

  Tyler went tense, and his fear begat anger. “Get off the line!”

  “Get off the line!” came back rudely.

  Tyler slammed the receiver back on the rest. It was still freezing in the lab but sweat started to prickle on his scalp. He hadn’t recognised the telephone voice as his own, but it was clear now that it was.

  The careful experimenter took over for a moment. He dialed the number again.

  “Hello, who’s that?” parroted his own voice.

  He pushed the rest down, thought a moment, then dialed Parkside 2195.

  “Is that Mr. Sweet’s agent?” his own voice asked of him.

  He almost ran out of the house. He went to a bar and had a couple of double Scotches, neat. Then he used the bar ’phone to fix the appointment with Bleiker for four o’clock that afternoon. He walked the streets for hours until four.

  “Well, Mr. Tyler,” said Bleiker, on his entry to the consulting room, “what seems to be the trouble with you? Please sit down.”

  “Could be a brain tumour,” said Tyler, sitting.

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Auditory and visual illusions.”

  “Let’s start with the auditory illusions. What form do they take?”

  “I sometimes hear rumblings like a distant thunderstorm, when there is no storm. I have heard—a voice.” Bleiker stroked his nose thoughtfully. “The rumbling noises are a common delusion with brain tumours,” he said. “The voice—not so common. What about the visual side of it?”

  Tyler told him, in detail. Bleiker had narrow grey eyes, but long before Tyler had finished they were as round as hoops.

  “Amazing!” he exclaimed. “Never heard anything like it in my life, outside of delirium tremens cases. But I can see you’re not an alcoholic. Auditory, visual, and tactile illusions. Smacks of opium.”

  “I assure you——” began Tyler.

  “Okay, Mr. Tyler, that’s not my business. I’m concerned only with the physical condition of your brain. Do you have bad headaches?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Lately?”

  “No.”

  “Any physical sickness—retching?”

  “A couple of times, recently.”

  “Giddiness?”

  Tyler smiled wanly. “When you’ve seen some of the things I’ve seen happen, you can’t help your head spinning.”

  “I see.” Bleiker reached for his ophthalmoscope. “Let me examine your eyes . . .”

  When he had finished, he frowned. “Well, I can set your mind at rest about a tumour, Mr. Tyler—you haven’t one.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “No papillitis. That means blood choking the aperture at the back of the eye.”

  “The papilla?”

  “Yes. The pressure of a growth in the brain forces the blood into the papilla. Not all cases of papillitis are caused by a tumour, but a tumour is always accompanied by papillitis. That symptom, plus those of violent headaches, giddiness, and retching always add up to a tumour. You haven’t papillitis at all, and the other symptoms only slightly. Ergo, no tumour. We shall have to look somewhere else. I propose to take an encephalograph of the alpha wave rhythms of your brain . . .”

  Bleiker did that and a lot more things before he convinced himself that Tyler was a liar, conscious or unconscious.

  Then he said, irritably: “I can find nothing wrong with your brain, Mr. Tyler. If the delusions continue, then I advise you to see a qualified psychiatrist. What is your full name and address?”

  Tyler told him, asked for and got a certificate of clearance, and left. He knew the bill would be pretty heavy. He would have to save for it.

  On the way home he bought a cheap thermometer. Scepticism of the instrument was a constant rule of the research worker, and he didn’t trust the thermometer in the lab. It was nice to be able again to distrust something outside his own mind, and revive the hope that these improbable happenings had a material explanation. After all, if the reports were to be believed, there were a couple of places in the world where the laws of gravity seemed to be rather bent—where you had to accelerate to drive a car downhill and where water flowed uphill. Perhaps Sweet’s house had been built upon some such kind of odd spot. Where time might slip a cog sometimes and you would hear your own voice repeating itself. Where temperature fluctuated irrespective of the weather.

  Maybe he should write an article about it . . .

  When he re-entered the lab it was no longer cold there. When he compared the two thermometers they agreed that the temperature was sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit.

  Perhaps it signalled a return to normality. He took out Bleiker’s certificate, read it again, and then put it away, feeling cheered. He even whistled as he took up the threads of an unfinished experiment concerning precipitates. When he tried to light the Bunsen burner, the gas which hissed out wouldn’t light, but the burning match flared up like a torch.

  Pure oxygen was coming through the gas pipe. Or seemed to be . . .

  He groaned. There was to be no end to it, after all.

  Forty-eight mise
rable hours later he gave up fighting it. The will had deserted him. His nerve was broken. While just a fragment of it remained, he reached for the jar labelled potassium cyanide and tipped a sizeable amount of the white salt into a beaker of water, stirred it, dissolved it.

  He took a last look around the lab with which he was no longer able to cope. He could not live either in it or outside it now. The future offered the choice of helpless and friendless poverty—or of a breakdown near to insanity. Or perhaps both. Further serious research work was impossible, anyhow, and fife was nothing without it.

  Bleiker’s certificate was useless. It would not enable him to prepare one report for Sweet that could follow a coherent line of thought.

  And what competent psychiatrist would certify that he was in his right mind?

  He was done, defeated.

  He gulped down the beaker of liquid.

  The reaction was almost immediate. Salt water is an excellent emetic.

  While he was heaving, a section of the glass-fronted shelving opened slowly like a door and the unsightly Mr. Sweet lumbered from concealment. Not only his face but his whole body also was twitching with excitement. He advanced until he faced Tyler across the bench.

  “I have come to gloat, little man.”

  Tyler leaned against his side of the bench, trembling and feeling very ill. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief.

  “Are you behind this?” he whispered.

  “Yes.” It was a triumphant little squeak of victory. “I didn’t really think you’d go so far as suicide, but I allowed for it, none the less. You can’t gas yourself with oxygen. You can’t poison yourself with common table salt.”

  “What did I ever do to you?” Tyler asked, wearily. He was drained even of the will to be bitter.

  “You murdered me, that’s all. Stole my life.” Sweet had all the bitterness Tyler lacked, and more. He spat hate across the bench. “Scientists!” he said. “Scientists! Devils! I’d like to wipe out the whole brood of them.”

  Tyler summoned a touch of dignity. He said, quietly: “If you’ve chosen me to represent the class, I’m flattered. But I’m only a humble worker in the cause.”

  “The cause!” jeered Sweet. “You call your mumbo-jumbo tricks a cause? You and your kind have never risen above the level of a tribal witch doctor. Most of you are devoid of imagination. You just copy each others’ tricks. Some fool puts a rat in a maze with its food at the other end, lets it learn the path to its food by trial and error, and then keeps changing the layout until the poor creature is baffled into helplessness and is frightened to move at all. Right, he’s proved something—that you can torture a rat into a nervous breakdown. All the rest of you keep doing it over and over again, to see who can drive the most rats mad the fastest. Then some genius gets the idea of trying it on guinea-pigs, dogs, cats, monkeys—I suppose you’ll not be satisfied until you’ve got human beings penned in your damned mazes. Well, I anticipated that. I put you in a maze first—the biter bit. Now I can claim to have discovered that the same methods will drive human beings to attempt suicide. Maybe my name will go down in scientific history.”

  “What did I ever do to you?” Tyler asked again.

  Sweet ignored the question. He went on, spitefully: “I baited you with your dream laboratory. That was your food, the sustenance you needed for your kind of life. For your work is your life, whatever it means to other people’s lives. Then I made it useless to you, until you were frightened to move—you’d learn to distrust every tool of your trade, including your own senses.

  “You were living in a real maze here, little man, full of secret ways and spy-holes. I could watch you in every room. I could roll up and replace lengths of carpet when you were asleep or wrapped up in your idiotic experiments.

  And switch the water pipes and gas pipes behind the wainscoting where you couldn’t trace them. Switch the wiring, too. Best of all, switch the rooms. Ingenious, this house. Cylindrical, so that all the rooms can slide round the stationary pivot of this lab. But they’re also separate units which can be made to glide, elevate, and interlock as smoothly and indetectably as the parts of a puzzle box. Almost indetectably, anyhow. Sometimes the rollers rumble a bit. You probably put it down to head noises.”

  Tyler remained silent, staring at him.

  “Oh, I thought up scores of tricks. For instance, your chemical weights. They’re copper, but they each sheathe a steel ball bearing. Under this bench top”—Sweet tapped it—“there’s fitted an electromagnet, remotely controlled. Need I elucidate further? Behind the walls here—a refrigerating plant. I could turn this whole room into a deep freeze—inconvenient if you’re dealing with relative temperatures, huh? That wall thermometer? Forget it. It’s fixed—can’t show anything else but sixty-five degrees. You really amused me with the telephone. It’s a perfectly ordinary ’phone, but it can be connected to a wire recorder which automatically plays back anything you say to it. I’m afraid my agent often lied when he said I was out of town. I was just as often behind the walls watching you. Not all the time. I have to eat and sleep. I have my own ways in and out of this place—remember, I built it.”

  “Just for me?”

  “Just for you, little man, my pet, my life-long enemy.”

  “What have I ever——”

  “I’ll tell you. It goes back a quarter of a century, to Pavlov’s happy days, and when Dr. J. B. Watson was founding the Behaviourist school. Remember his fear conditioning experiments with a baby—Albert? Watson kept striking a heavy steel bar just behind the baby’s head until Albert was scared and crying—he was only eleven months old. Having established his terror of the noise, Watson kept striking the bar every time Albert tried to play with his pet, a white rat he loved. The fear reflex was transferred to the rat. And so Albert lost his little friend—he became terrified, not only of white rats, but also of rabbits, cats, dogs and anything of a furry nature, including sealskin coats, cotton wool, and even the hair on Watson’s head. You copied those experiments, didn’t you, little man?”

  “I—er—did some work of the sort.”

  “You copied them on me. Charles Weir my name was then, and I was not a year old. You charged my whole nervous system with fear of this and of that. You made me the nervous wreck I’ve since always been. I don’t know what happened to Albert, nor what he felt about it, but I know what happened to me and how I feel about it. What have you ever done to me, you ask. I ask—what had an innocent baby ever done to you?”

  Sweet was white and shaking with anger. There was a rim of saliva on his twisted lips.

  Tyler shrank back. He was in a narrow cul-de-sac formed by the bench and two walls. His eyes flickered about trying to assess the chances of escape.

  Sweet took a deep breath and tried to calm himself.

  “You were playing along with another crank of your kind at the time,” he went on. “His name was Sparks. He died before I could get hold of him, but I got his papers—his precious ‘reports.’ Lord, how you people document these evidences of your crack-brainedness! There were two hundred sheets concerned with how he trained cats to pull boxes along by strings!”

  Sweet put on a childish mimicking voice. “ ‘Tibs pulled the box 33 centimetres due north, then paused to wash. With her leg (left, rear) cocked at an angle of 80 degrees to the floor, she seemed to think (time, nine seconds), then pulled the box another 27 centimetres in a south-westerly direction . . .’ That sort of thing. Note every detail—it might be important. Note every detail—but don’t notice that horses have been pulling carts for hundreds of years, or what goes on at a flea circus—or any circus. Scientists!”

  The fat man spat.

  Then continued: “From further reams of Sparks’ lucubrations I learned how he and you persuaded my rich and foolish father to let you experiment on me for the good of science. In particular, how you monkeyed with my parathyroids and upset the whole chemistry of my body, so that I became gross and ridden by tremors, an object for pity—or ridicule. Yet
I had been a well-formed child . . .”

  He trailed off, looking into space.

  Then, suddenly, he snapped: “Oh, what the hell use would it be trying to make you understand ‘the pangs of despised love’ ? There was a girl I broke my heart over. She was even wealthier than I—I couldn’t buy her. She didn’t laugh at me. She was sorry for me. But not all that sorry. My condition repelled her. It repels all women. And, heaven help me, women are my life! I buy and buy—but I never really possess women. They suffer me, at a price. In short, you murdered me.” There was a pause.

  Then Tyler said, hesitantly: “I’m truly sorry. I meant well. The things Sparks and I conditioned you to fear were dangerous things which might have harmed you. Perhaps we overdid it. As for the glands—I still don’t know what went wrong there. We were trying to lengthen your life.”

  Sweet snorted. “Lengthen it—you took it, you blundering fool! Why can’t your sort leave things alone?”

  “We only try, for the good of us all, to learn what it’s all about.”

  “So you cut open the guts of living dogs to see again what you’ve already seen a thousand times. You play these imbecilic games with rats and mice and rabbits’ legs—what fool trick were you playing with those rabbits’ legs? I watched you. What were you trying to learn ‘for the good of us all,’ little man?”

  “I don’t know. Something might have come of it.”

  “Rabbits’ legs?” sneered Sweet.

  “Why not? Remember the twitching frogs’ legs—and Galvani. That brought the discovery of electricity. Remember the tiny patch of mould Fleming became curious about—and discovered penicillin.”

  “And remember Watt and the boiling kettle!” jeered Sweet loudly. “Galvani, Fleming, Watt—they didn’t rob a baby of its birthright. But you did.” He thumped the bench heavily. “What you did to me can’t be defended——”

  An ill-balanced jar of yellowish fluid was shaken off its high glass shelf by the thump. It fell like a bomb onto another jar standing on the bench which held a brownish-red liquid. Both jars shattered. And liquid fire spurted and ran—aniline and fuming nitric acid make a flaming union, always.

 

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