“Isn’t that obvious, Mr. Gatlin?” It was, naturally, but I wanted to hear him say it. “If you return, Tranquillia is no longer safe from incursion. The one man who has any inkling of the theory of my machine will never reveal it, but there are other physicists less scrupulous who can reconstruct it, once they know it has been done.”
“And use it, knowing it’s safe to do so. Yes.”
“On the other hand, as you’ve demonstrated a few minutes ago, the habit of violence is so deeply ingrained in you that if you remain here you must become a focus of infection that will imperil all I hope to accomplish.”
“You’re damned if you do, eh, and you’re damned if you don’t.”
“No. There is one way between the horns of the dilemma. You earnestly desire to go back to Earth, do you not?”
“What do you think?”
“I think that you are a man of honor, Mr. Gatlin. Therefore, you shall return provided you give me your solemn promise that you will keep the existence of Tranquillia, and all you have learned about it, secret forever.”
Now wasn’t that a proposition to put to a man who cut his eyeteeth on a Hoe press? The biggest story since the Chinese invented printing, and I should promise to bury it. “Suppose the answer is no, Mr. John Barret? How are you going to keep us from walking back to that cave and pushing the button on that infernal machine of yours?” I shoved erect. “If you want your Tranquillia to see a first rate exhibition of violence, you’ll try it.”
He looked up at me, soberly, but apparently unperturbed. “I don’t have to. You may press that button from now till the end of time and you will still be in the cavern.”
That was what I wanted to know. The reason it hadn’t worked before wasn’t because of power failure from the other side, or because he’d jarred something out of kilter when he fell. “So there’s a switch you’ve got to throw to reverse it, is there? Where is it?”
Would my stratagem work? His wife wasn’t here to keep him from an absentminded slip. “There is no switch,” he smiled. “The machine will not operate unless it is shielded with lead, and the only material it will not bring through the Space-warp is lead. That is why Mary and I have never visited Tranquillia together, one of us has to remain in that lead-lined room, protected by a lead-lined costume, to bring the other back.”
That was that—Maybe not. “What does she do? Stay in there and keep her thumb on the button till you show up?”
“Hardly. As long as one of us is absent, the other visits the room every hour, exactly on the hour, and waits five minutes for the signal that can be given by moving a certain rod in a certain way.” Oh, oh. That “Certain” was the tip-off he was on to me.
“We’ve agreed that if that signal does not come within twelve Earth-hours, which is a far longer period on Tranquillia, the other will come through.”
“And then neither of you goes back.”
“No one goes back,” he agreed. “Unless someone on Earth happens to come along and pushes that button.”
He shook his head. “No. The first thing we shall do is destroy the machine.”
He rose, made a weary, almost sorrowful gesture with his hands.
“But all that is aside from the issue. The point is that you cannot return to. Earth unless and until I give Mary our signal while you are within three feet of the machine. I think you know that you cannot make me give her that signal against my will.”
“Yes.” About him, standing there, there was the awful strength of the gentle, the same strength I’d recognized in Pastor Niemoller as I’d watched him in his pulpit while the iron-jawed Storm Troopers thudded down the aisle of his Church. “Yes, I know,” I admitted defeat, “That I’ll stay here forever unless I give you the promise you ask, and I don’t want to stay here. On my word of honor, John Barret, I will never tell anyone how I got here, or what I’ve seen here, or even that there is such a place as here.”
“Thank you.” He was very still for a long moment and I could see the tautness he’d not betrayed till now drain out of him. Then he turned to George and Helen, who’d also risen but still held hands as they stood waiting for his, “And you? Will you two promise to keep the secret of Tranquillia?”
They hadn’t spoken, either of them, since Helen had made that speech about lying awake at night. I should have heard them if they had. They didn’t speak to one another now.
“No,” George answered the old man, very firmly. “No. We do not.”
To my surprise, Barrett’s lined, gray countenance lit up.
“You wish to remain here?”
“We wish to remain here,” George replied. “In Tranquillia. With our son and daughter—and with each other.”
“And with each other,” Helen echoed him, her eyes shining.
CHAPTER XII
I insisted on leaving at once and John Barret, anxious to reassure his wife that he’d recovered from his heart attack, was as eager. We started immediately but by the time we reached the cave mouth the sun—a sun of another Galaxy so far from ours that the human mind cannot begin to grasp the immensity of the distance—was rising.
I turned and took a last look at the green sea of foliage that from this height was all that could be described of Tranquillia.
Even the gentle breeze that had greeted us here had died down, so that the thin thread of smoke from the children’s campfire rose straight upward to the pellucid sky. Somehow it symbolized the spirit of peaceful aspiration they had brought here.
“Well,” I said soberly. “I hope it all works out the way you think it will.”
“It must,” Helen cried. “It has to.” The two of them had come along, to say good-by to me on the borderline between their new world and the one to which I am returning. “God can’t be giving us a second chance just to have us fail again.”
Barret had gone on into the cavern and this gave George the chance he evidently had been waiting for. “Still time to change your mind, Pop.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sure we can talk the old man into letting you stay.”
“Nothing doing. You can have your Tranquillia.” I pulled away, started into that great hole hollowed out of the unimaginable cliff. “Me. I’m going back where I belong.” I didn’t want them to see my face just then. “Where I belong,” I repeated. “Back to my own kind of people, the kind that can take it without running away.”
The light followed us in, dimming but still strong enough to show me the thread from Helen’s sweater as it trailed across the rocky floor. It unaccountably had frayed during the few hours since she’d unraveled it. Or was it my eyes that made it appear so fuzzy? My eyes. Barrett’s frail, white-haired frame, ahead, was just as fuzzy.
Helen’s heel-dicks, catching up to me, were caught up and multiplied by some reflecting surface. George was on the other side of me, his foot-falls thudding. “Funny,” I mused aloud, “The kind of things come popping into the head of an old fool like me, things that have nothing to do with what’s happening at the time. Like just now I happened to think of something happened on the old World.
“This was a long time ago. I guess you kids are just about old enough to remember its last days, but this was long before that.
“John—Well, call him John Burns—was hell and gone the most promising cub we’d ever had, but one day he gets the pink slip in the pay envelope. Orders from the Big Boss who’d just happened to drop in for a day or two, like he used to about once a year.
“John don’t get it. He don’t get it at all so he barges right into Pulitzer’s sanctum, demanding to know why he’s fired. ‘Haven’t I been turning in the best copy on your sheet?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t I do a whale of a yam just yesterday on that waterfront riot?’
“‘You did,’ Pulitzer acknowledges, looking at him, the way he had, like he could see him with his blind eyes. ‘A humdinger of a story.’
“‘And didn’t we beat every other rag in town by an edition because I was right on top of it when it started?’
�
�‘That’s it,’ the Boss says. ‘That’s why you’re being fired.’ John stares at him, not believing his ears. ‘Weren’t you supposed to be in the Hall of Records,’ Pulitzer goes on, ‘copying off the real estate assessment list?’
“‘Sure. Sure I was, but that’s just a lousy grind anybody knows his a-b-c’s can do. I got this hunch maybe something was brewing over on West Street and tipped a clerk a couple of bucks to take it off my hands. What’s the matter? He get it bollixed up?’
“‘No. No, he did a good job. The only thing is, it was your job he did, the job your editor sent you out to do. Good-by, my boy. I wish you luck.’”
George’s footfalls thudded along on one side of me, Helen’s heels licked on the other. Not far, now, John Barrett’s machine glittered in a beam of sunshine that slanted down across the gloom from some chink in the cave’s front wall.
“And then,” I rambled on, “There was something Roosevelt said in a speech once. I don’t remember it word for word, but it was something about how we’re fighting not just for America nor just for the United Nations, but to make a better world for all the little people of all the world. I don’t remember if he used just those words, ‘the little people’ and I know that if he did he certainly wasn’t thinking just about the children, but I am. I’m thinking about all the millions of kids who’re going to have to keep on living in that world because their fathers weren’t lucky enough to answer John Barrett’s ad—But here he is, looking at his watch impatiently. How about it, Barret? How much time have I left to say good-by to my friends?”
“Less than a minute—Watch that line on the floor, Helen!” he cautioned. “George. If you’re caught inside of it, you’ll go with us.”
I stepped over the faint scratch in the rock that marked out the boundaries of the lead-sheathed room in another world. “Well, my boy, I guess this is it. I—What’s the matter, Son? What do you see on your arm?”
Putting out his hand to grasp the one I’d extended, he’d brought his sleeve into the sunbeam. The gold stripes above its cuff flashed in the light and he was staring down at them as if he’d never seen them before. “George! I’m saying good-by.”
His fingers crushed mine, and then I was looking at Helen. “Good-by, Helen.”
“Good-by,” she whispered. It was the tears between her lashes that the sun made brilliant. “I—Oh, good-by!”
I wanted to wish them luck but I was all choked up and before I could get it out Barret snapped, “Move toward me, Mr. Gatlin.” He was doing something to the machine. There was a thud beside me. Something butted my shoulder—That infernal vibration! The blackness smashed down.
I was dazzled by light, the bluish-white light of a fluorescent double-tube. I was blinking at a grotesque apparition, hooded, shapeless in a cloak of some heavy-seeming material, thick-gloved hand dropping from the pushbutton—
And behind me, as I turned to look for the lead-lined door from this room, was George Carson!
“You win, Pop!” He was trying to grin, but he was making a poor job of it. “I can’t do it. I can’t run out on those millions of kids who’ve got to keep on living on this lousy Earth of ours. I’m going to finish up the assignment I’m on and if I live through it, I’m going on to do my share in making it a better world—”
“And I’m going to do my best to help you, darling.” Helen stepped around from behind the machine. “It’s going to take all of us, it’s going to take every drop of will and energy and brains we’ve got, but we’ll do it, you and I and Pop, and millions of others like us. We will, George. We will in the end build a bright, new world here on Earth for our children—” She broke off, her eyes widening, the exaltation draining from them. “Our children,” she whispered. “Oh, George! Kay, Peter…”
A muscle knotted in his gaunt cheek—“Kay and Peter will be in our care,” a low, musical voice came from behind me, “And in the care of Him who sets different paths for each of us to follow.” Mary Barret had let the lead impregnated heavy folds fall to her feet, had removed the goggled mask, “Paths that may be wearily long but that all come together at last.” Her frail hand clasped her husband’s and standing there like that they seemed more ethereal than ever, more—non-Earthly.
“If you will step out for a moment,” John Barret asked, smiling that vague, endearing smile of his. “Mr. Gatlin. Mrs. Clark. Lieutenant Carson. I should like a word with my wife.”
There was a light in the kitchen, and the gay curtains were blowing in at the open window. “It’s still night here,” Helen exclaimed, then remembered. “Of course—What time is it, George?”
He looked at his watch. “Nine. Nine-seven. I’ve still time to get back to my ship by midnight. But you—”
“I’ll be waiting,” Helen told him. “I’ll be waiting for you—You know that, don’t you?”
“I think—I’m sure I can get leave for another twenty-four hours in a week or so. Pop!” He came around to me. “I’m going to depend on you to make arrangements for—”
The floor was vibrating, the sensation like that of a massage machine against the soles of my shoes.
It ended.
Barrett’s keys were still in the lock, turned in my hand. The light from the kitchen struck into the lead-lined cubicle. It laid my shadow over the ungainly folds of a cloak on the floor, over a goggled hood. Except for this and John Barrett’s machine, the little room was empty.
I felt George and Helen press against my back, felt their breaths on my cheek. A metallic clang half-deafened me. A fragment of shining metal thudded to the floor, another. The clangor filled the little house in Westchester and bit by bit we watched the thing John Barret built disintegrate under the blows of a sledge hammer wielded in a world a billion miles away.
And the clangor ended, and there was nothing in that room but a heap of smashed, unreconstructible metal. “Good luck,” I called into that empty room. “The best of luck for your dreams, John Barret, under the two moons of Tranquillia.”
Me, I can dream better under the one moon I’ve been used to all my life.
GRIM RENDEZVOUS
If the Earth’s surface were not three parts sea to one part land it would be futile even to hope that Johnny Rober still lives. On the other hand, it is virtually certain that no one at all would be alive today had not Johnny been three parts incorrigible scamp to one part scientific genius — and wholly in love with the black-haired, black-eyed minx from whom I have most of this story.
To set the tale down as it came to me, in bits and pieces, would be confusing. I shall tell it therefore as though I had been invisibly present at each event as it occurred, and I shall tell it as objectively as I can.
It began on a Sunday morning with the two of them alone in Midwest University’s Electronics Buildings. Kitty Gardlane, of course, had no right to be there. Neither in fact had Johnny, for all that he was 90% responsible for the advanced design of the radar installation before which he sat. He was only a probational instructor in physics and he had not obtained the Director’s permission to use the apparatus for private research.
That worried Kitty. “Why didn’t you, Johnny? Why didn’t you get his okay?”
“Oh, you know how Gardey is.” Johnny didn’t look up as he mumbled his answer but she was well worth looking at; slim, long-legged, her tan sweater molding curves definitely more entrancing than those on the pages of the astronomical tome over which his carrot-topped head was bent. “I’d have had to tell him what I plan and he’d still be spoiling good paper with figures and formulae demonstrating that it’s impossible.”
That Johnny himself was not hard to look at is attested by the heavy registration in his classes of coeds one hardly would suppose to be interested in Nuclear Physics or the Theory of Microwaves. He wasn’t handsome, not with his pug nose and too-wide mouth, but the corners of his blue eyes crinkled with puckish humor and he possessed a slow, chuckling grin that endeared him even to his own sex.
“What’s that, Johnny?” Kitty had t
o raise her voice to be heard over the deepening whine of the radar’s generator. “What are you up to?”
He moved a dial a fraction of a mil, jotted down the new setting in his notebook.
“Whether Professor Charles D. Gardlane thinks it can be done or not, I’m going to bounce an echo off the planet Venus.”
“Why should Gardey think you can’t? The Army reached the moon, didn’t they? And they’re talking about trying for Mars.”
“Why Mars, when Venus is several million miles nearer Earth just now? Because Mars has no atmosphere, they say, while Venus is surrounded by a thick layer of clouds. I intend to prove it can be done and that they’re wrong.”
“Oh, Johnny! Why must you always be trying to prove someone wrong? I thought you’d learned your lesson when you gave that talk disputing Gardey’s pet hypothesis about the — the — ”
“Orbital patterns of protons.”
“Yes. And he shot your paper so full of holes the Society laughed you off the platform. If he hadn’t pleaded for you, the Faculty would have fired you right then and there, and not another university in the country would have given you a job.”
JOHNNY made another careful adjustment. “Yeah. I’ll be a long time living that down. But — ”
“But now you’re repeating the same kind of nonsense.” Kitty was perilously near tears. “You’re letting Gardey down and you’re letting me down. I love you, Johnny. I’d be happy to work with you and starve with you while you’re rebuilding your reputation. But I can’t face being afraid all my life that everything we’ve worked for will blow up in our faces because you have to show that you’re smarter than anyone else. I can’t and won’t marry you if you keep on this way.”
The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack Page 43