This was the reason for the apparent failure of the whole modulator circuit. Because of it, he had assumed his theory of mass modulation was faulty.
Spence was obviously one of them, he thought. That meant other untold numbers of bugs throughout the mass of equipment. During the remainder of the morning and in the afternoon he adjusted the amplifiers and got the modulator into operation. He uncovered another serious bug in an out-of-tolerance dropping resistor in the modulator. He contemplated the probability of that one defective resistor among the hundreds of thousands of satisfactory ones the plant used—the probability of its being placed in exactly the critical spot. The figure was too infinitesimal to be mere chance.
By quitting time he had the circuit as far as the mass modulator functioning fairly smoothly. He called Janice and told her he wouldn’t be home until late. Then he worked until past midnight to try to get the transmission elements to accept the modulated carrier. The only result was failure and at last he went home in utter exhaustion.
The next morning, refreshed, he was filled with an unnatural exuberance, however. He had the key to the cause of his failures and he felt success was only a matter of time. If he could just get that necessary time.
The broad parking lot was dotted with infrequent cars at the early hour of the morning at which he arrived. Gail, the lab secretary, was already at her desk, however, when he walked in. She called to him, “Mr. Borge wants you to come up, Reg.”
“O.K. Thanks.”
He turned and went back out the door towards the chief engineer’s office. This would be the new project, he thought. He strode in and Borge looked up with a brief nod.
“Sit down, Reg.” The lines of Borge’s face seemed to have eroded into deeper valleys in the short time since Reg had last seen him.
“I hear some things I don’t like,” said Borge suddenly. “About you.”
“What sort of things? I haven’t — “
“Dickson and Hansen have been saying you’ve accused them of deliberate sabotage on your project. True or not, whatever is implied by these rumors can’t go on. It can wreck this shop in a month.”
“I didn’t accuse them of anything!” Reg flared. “I just asked if they wanted the project to fail. Of course, I didn’t expect them to say that they did, but their manner showed me what I wanted to know.”
“And what was that?”
Reg hesitated. This development was nothing that he had expected. How would Borge, as one of the Persons from Porlock, react to Reg’s knowledge of them? Did Borge even understand his own motives? Whether he did or not, Reg could make no rational answer except the truth.
“I found that they did, subconsciously, want the project to fail. I believe this is the explanation of the numerous blunders without which my project would have been a success.”
“You believe, then, that your failure is due to the … ah, persecutions … of these persons, rather than to any inherent impossibility in the project itself or your own inability to bring it off?”
“I haven’t a persecution complex, if that’s what you’re trying to say,” Reg said hotly. “Look, Borge, did you ever hear of accident prones, who plague insurance companies?”
“Vaguely. I don’t know much about the subject.”
“I can prove there is another kind of prone, a blunder prone, whose existence is just as definite as that of the accident prone. I call these blunder prones ‘Persons from Porlock’ after the one named by the poet, Coleridge, when his great poem, ‘Kubla Khan,’ was ruined by one of them.”
“And just what do these … er, Persons from Porlock do?”
“They make mistakes in important work entrusted to them. They interfere with others who are doing intense and concentrated work so that trains of thought are broken and perhaps lost forever, as in the case of Coleridge. And as in my own case. I could tell of at least a hundred times when I have been deliberately interrupted at critical points of my calculations so that work had to be repeated and some points, only faintly conceived, were totally lost.”
“Which couldn’t have been due to your own nervous strain and overworked condition?”
“No.”
“I see. These Persons of Porlock generally persecute the intelligent and superior people of the world, is that it?”
Reg’s anger flared. “I’m not a psychoneurotic case and I’m not suffering from a persecution complex!”
Suddenly, cold fear washed over Reg. Borge’s pattern of reason was clear, now. He would dismiss the whole matter as a neurotic complex and let Reg out of the lab. He would be blackballed with every other company in which he might have another try at BW work.
“I know you’re not,” Borge was saying, “but you are tired! For six years you’ve been turning out miracles. I hate like the devil to see you come up with something like this, Reg. Surely you must realize it’s all the result of overwork and fatigue. No one is going around interfering with your work. Your mind refuses to admit defeat so it’s automatically throwing it off on someone else. I’m no psychologist, but I’ll bet that’s close to the right answer. I want you to have Walker at the Clinic examine you. I’m willing to bet he recommends a long rest. I’ll give you six months with pay if necessary. But I can’t let you back in the lab unless you do this. A repetition of yesterday’s performance and the whole place would be shot up. You’ve got to get rid of this Person from Porlock business.”
The pieces of the whole puzzle locked into place with startling clarity for Reg. He knew that the last uncertainty had been removed. They were not random, subconsciously motivated performers. These Persons from Porlock were skillfully conscious of what they were doing. Borge could not hide the knowledge that his eyes revealed.
But what were they doing?
Six months—it would be too late, then. His sense of blind urgency told him that. Borge was simply showing him that there was no possible way that he could win.
He tried again. “I can’t expect you to believe these things. I know it sounds fantastic. Any psychiatrist would no doubt diagnose it as a persecution complex. But I promise that no more incidents like yesterday’s will take place. Give me the new assignment, but let me work on the BW just six weeks in my spare time, on my own. I’ll guarantee I’ll have it working in that time.”
Borge shook his head. “That’s the main trouble with you already—overwork. You’ve been pushing yourself so hard that your nerves are all shot. Anyone walking by while you are computing is such a disturbance that you think he’s deliberately interfering with you. Put yourself in the care of a good doctor and let me know his report. That’s the only condition upon which I can let you stay with the company. I hate to put it that way. I wish you’d try to understand for yourself—but if you won’t, that’s the way it’s got to be.”
Reg stood up, his body trembling faintly with the fury of his anger. He leaned forward across the desk. _”I know who you are!_ But I warn you that I won’t stop. Somehow I’m going to carry this work through, and all you and your kind can do won’t stop me!”
He whirled and strode from the office, conscious of Borge’s pitying glance upon his back. Conscious, too, that he was walking out for the last time.
The fury and the anger didn’t last. When he got outside, he was sick with frustration as he glanced back at the plant. He had acted stupidly through the whole thing, he thought, letting them cut him off from any access to the BW equipment without a struggle.
Yet, how else could he have conducted himself? The whole thing was so fantastic at first that he couldn’t have outlined a rational program to combat it.
Maybe Borge was right in one respect. He was devilishly tired and exhausted from the long war years of uninterrupted work. There’d been that micro-search system on which he’d spent two years at Radiation Lab. One such project as that would have sent the average engineer nuts. As soon as it was in production he’d tackled an equally tough baby in the radar fire-control equipment that had gone into fighter planes four months after he took over
the project cold.
Yeah, he was tired —* * * *
Janice was surprised to see him, and was shocked by the pain and bewilderment on his face.
Slowly, and carefully, he explained to her what had happened. He told her how Borge had built up a case against him out of the things he’d said to Dickson and Hansen. He told her how they and Spence and the rest had sabotaged his project.
“They’ve got me licked,” he finished. “They’ve done what they started out to do, knocked out the BW project.”
Janice had sat quietly during his recital, only her eyes reflecting the growing terror within her.
“But, darling, why should they want to hinder the project? What possible reason could there be behind it, even if these mysterious Persons from Porlock actually existed?”
“Who knows? But it doesn’t make any difference, I suppose. They’re so obvious that I don’t see how the world has failed to recognize them. Yet … you don’t believe a thing I’ve said, do you?”
“They can’t exist, Reg! Borge is right. You’re tired. This notion is only something that your mind has seized upon out of Coleridge’s fantasy. It has no basis in reality. Please, for my sake, take a visit to the Clinic and see if they don’t advise rest and psychiatric treatment for you.”
Like a cold, invisible shell, loneliness seemed to coalesce about him. There was the illusion of being cut off from all sight and sound, and he had the impression that Janice was sitting there with her lips moving, but no sound coming forth.
Illusion, of course, but the loneliness was real. It cut him off from all the world, for where was there one who would understand and believe about the Persons from Porlock? They surrounded him on every side. Wherever he turned, they stood ready to beat down his struggles for the right to work as he wished. Perhaps even Janice —But that premise had to be denied.
“I’ll let them tap my knees and my skull if it will make you happier,” he said. “Maybe I’ll even beg Borge to take me back if that’s the way you want it. It doesn’t matter any more. The BW project is dead. They killed it—but don’t ever try to make me believe they don’t exist.”
“They don’t! They don’t Reg. You’ve got to believe that. Quit deluding yourself — “
Quite suddenly, it was beyond his endurance. He strode from the room and out into the brilliance of the day, brilliance that was like a cold, shimmering wall surrounding him, moving as he moved, surrounding but not protecting.
Not protecting from the glance of those who passed on the street nor from those who came towards him, nor those who followed after in a steady, converging stream.
He felt their presence—the Persons from Porlock—like tangible, stinging auras on every side. They surrounded him. They were out to get him.
His stride broke into a half run. How long his flight continued he never knew. It was dimming twilight when he sank, half sobbing from exhaustion, onto a park bench miles from home.
He looked about him in the gathering darkness, and somehow it seemed less evil than the light and the thousand faces of the Persons from Porlock who drifted by on every side.
If only he could drag one of them out into the open where all the world could see it and believe—that would be one way of escape from the soundless, invisible prison in which they had encased him. He had to show that they existed so that no one in the world would doubt his word again. But how?
What incontrovertible proof of their existence did he possess? What was there besides his own feelings and beliefs? He shuddered with realization that there was nothing. His knowledge, his evidence of them was of the flimsiest kind. There had to be something tangible.
But could there be more? Insidiously, doubts began to creep into his mind. He remembered the look in Borge’s eyes, the pity and the fear in Janice’s.
He rose stiffly from the park bench, cold fear driving his limbs to carry him out into the lights. If he were to remain sure of his own sanity, he had to first prove to himself beyond any doubt that the Persons from Porlock existed in actuality, not merely in his own suspicions.
There was one way by which he might be able to do this. That way lay through the report of Carl Millen and the mathematics by which he had “proved” the BW effect impossible of mass exploitation.
The math was deliberately false, Reg knew. If he proved it, confronted Millen with the fact —* * * *
He caught a taxi home. Janice met him, dry-eyed and with no questions or demands for explanations. He offered none, but went to his study and took out Millen’s report. He asked Janice to brew up a pot of coffee and he began the slow weaving of a pathway through the tortuous trail of Millen’s abstruse mathematical reasoning.
Sleep at last forced abandonment of his work, but he arose after a few hours and turned to the pursuit again, All through the day he kept steadily at it, and in the late afternoon he caught his first threads of what he was searching for. A thread of deliberate falsification, a beckoning towards wide paths of illogic and untruth.
It was so subtle that he passed it twice before recognizing it. Something of the intense deliberation chilled him when he realized the depths of the insinuations. It was like the devil’s nine truths and a lie that he’d heard country preachers talk about when he was a boy.
This work of Carl Millen’s was certainly the nine truths—and the one, black, insidious lie.
Now that he recognized it, following its development became easier until he trailed it to the final, colossal untruth that the free atomic concentration in the dispersion field made large scale application impossible.
This was it! Proof!
The triumph of his discovery swept away the exhaustion that had filled him. Let them call it a persecution complex now!
He put the report and his pile of computations in his brief case and told Janice he was going to Millen’s.
As he drove with furious skill towards town he wondered what Millen’s reaction would be. He could call Reg crazy, deny he was a Person from Porlock—but he could never deny the evidence of his deliberate falsifications.
The secretary told Reg that Millen was busy and would he sit down?
“Tell him it’s Reg Stone, and I’ve found out what he tried to do in the BW report,” said Reg. “I think he’ll see me.”
The girl glanced disapprovingly at the engineer’s disheveled appearance and relayed the information. Then she nodded towards the polished hardwood door.
“He’ll see you.”
Reg opened the door sharply. Carl Millen looked up from behind the desk in the center of the room. His face was unsmiling.
Then Reg saw the second person in the room. Spence, his junior engineer on the BW project. The man’s unexpected presence gave him a moment’s uneasiness, but it would make no difference, Reg thought, since Spence was one of them, too.
“So you think you’ve found something in my report?” said Millen. “Pull up a chair and show me what you mean.”
Reg sat down with slow deliberation, but he left his brief case closed.
“I think you know what I mean,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s necessary to go into the details. You deliberately invented a false line of reasoning to prove the BW effect useless.”
“So? And what does that prove?”
His failure to deny the accusation took Reg aback. There was no trace of surprise or consternation on Millen’s face.
“It proves that you are one of them,” said Reg. “One with Dickson, Hansen, Borge, and Spence here—one of those who fought to keep me from developing teleportation. I want to know why!”
Millen’s face relaxed slowly. “One of your Persons from Porlock?” Amusement touched his face at the words.
“Yes.”
Millen leaned forward, his almost ominous seriousness returning.
“You’ve done a good job, Reg. Better than we hoped for a while. It looked for a time as if you weren’t going to get it.”
Reg stared at him. The words made no sense, but yet there was as admiss
ion here of the unknown that chilled him.
“You admit that you falsified the facts in your report? That you are one of the Persons from Porlock?”
“Yes.”
The stark admission echoed in the vast silences of the room. Reg looked slowly from one face to the other.
“Who are you? What is your purpose?” he asked hoarsely.
“I’m just like you,” said Millen. “I stumbled into this thing when I first opened my consulting service. Spence is the one that can tell you about it. He’s the different one—your real Person from Porlock.”
Reg turned to his former junior engineer. Somehow, this was what be had known since he first entered the room. Spence’s face held a look of alien detachment, as if the affairs of common engineers were trivial things.
His eyes finally turned towards Reg’s face and they seemed to burn with a quality of age despite the youth of his face.
“We came here a long time ago,” said Spence slowly. “And now we live here and are citizens of Earth—just as are. That is our only excuse for meddling in your affairs. Our interference, however, gives you the same safety it does us.”
Reg felt as if he were not hearing Spence, only seeing his lips move. “You came here? You are not of Earth — “
“Originally, no.”
And suddenly Reg found Spence’s words credible. Somehow, they removed the fantasy from the Person from Porlock concept.
“Why haven’t you made yourselves known? What does all of this mean?”
“I did not come,” said Spence, “but my ancestors did. They had no intention of visiting Earth. An accident destroyed their vessel and made landing here necessary. The members of the expedition were scientists and technicians, but their skill was not the kind to rebuild the ship that had brought them across space, nor were the proper materials then available on Earth.
“They became reconciled to knowing the chance of communication with the home planet, and knowing that the chance of being found, was infinitely remote. They were skilled in the biologic sciences and managed in a generation or two to modify their physical form sufficiently to mingle undetected with Earthmen, though they kept their own group affiliation.
Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics Page 24