More Tales of the Black Widowers

by Isaac Asimov

  Henry said, “To achieve, perhaps, precisely what he did, in fact, achieve—to convince you he wanted the meteorite and to keep your attention firmly fixed on that. He gave you back the meteorite when you held out your hand for it; he gave you back the letter—but did he give you back the original package?”

  Reed said, “I don't remember him taking it.”

  Henry said, “It was ten years ago. He kept your attention fixed on the meteorite. You even spent some time examining it yourself and during that time you didn't look at him, I'm sure. —Can you say you've seen the package since that time, sir?”

  Slowly, Reed shook his head. “I can't say I have. You mean he fastened my attention so tightly on the meteorite that he could walk off with the package and I wouldn't notice?”

  I’m afraid you didn't. You put the meteorite in your pocket, the letter in your safe, and apparently never gave another thought to the package. This man, whose name you don't know and whom you can no longer identify thanks to your friends' death, has had the package for ten years with no interference. And by now you could not possibly identify what it was he took.”

  “I certainly could,” said Reed stoutly, “if I could see it. It has my great-grandmother's name and address on it.”

  “He might not have saved the package itself,” said Henry.

  “I've got it,” cried out Gonzalo suddenly. “It was that Chinese writing. He could make it out somehow and he took it to get it deciphered with certainty. The message was important.”

  Henry's smile was the barest flicker. “That is a romantic notion that had not occurred to me, Mr. Gonzalo, and I don't know that it is very probable. I was thinking of something else. —Mr. Reed, you had a package from Hong Kong in 1856 and at that time Hong Kong was already a British possession.”

  'Taken over in 1848,” said Rubin briefly.

  “And I think the British had already instituted the modern system of distributing mail.”

  “Rowland Hill,” said Rubin at once, “in 1840.”

  “Well then,” said Henry, “could there have been a stamp on the original package?”

  Reed looked startled. “Now that you mention it, there was something that looked like a black stamp, I seem to recall. A woman's profile?”

  “The young Victoria,” said Rubin.

  Henry said, “And might it possibly have been a rare stamp?”

  Gonzalo threw up his arms. “Bingo!”

  Reed sat with his mouth distinctly open. Then he said, “Of course, you must be right —I wonder how much I lost.”

  “Nothing but money, sir,” murmured Henry. “The early British stamps were not beautiful.”

  3 Afterword

  “The Iron Gem” appeared in the July 1974 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine under the title “A Chip of the Black Stone.” Ordinarily, all things being equal, I go for the shorter title, so I'm changing it back to my original title in this case. (I don't always refuse to accept changes. The first story in this collection was called “No Man Pursueth” when I wrote it. The magazine changed it to “When No Man Pursueth” and I accept the extra word as an improvement.)

  I wrote this story on board the Canberra, which took me over the ocean to the coast of Africa and back in the summer of 1973, to view a total solar eclipse—the first total solar eclipse I had ever seen. Heaven knows, they filled my time, for I was on board as a lecturer, and I gave eight lectures on the history of astronomy, to say nothing of the time it took to be charming and suave to all twelve hundred women on board. (You should see me being charming and suave. Some of them have trouble getting away.)

  Just the same, I did find time to hide out in my cabin now and then to write “The Iron Gem” in longhand. What puzzles me now that I look back on it, however, is why the story didn't have anything to do with a solar eclipse when that (and the twelve hundred women) was all I was thinking of on the cruise.

  To Table of Contents

  4 The Three Numbers

  When Tom Trumbull arrived—late, of course—to the Black Widowers' banquet, and called for his scotch and soda, he was met by James Drake, who was wearing a rather hangdog expression on his face.

  Drake's head made a gentle gesture to one side.

  Trumbull followed him, unpeeling his coat as he went, his tanned and furrowed face asking the question before his voice did. “What's up?” he said.

  Drake held his cigarette to one side and let the smoke curl bluely upward. 'Tom, I've brought a physicist as my guest”

  “So?”

  “Well, he has a problem and I think it's up your alley.”

  “A code?”

  “Something like that Numbers, anyway. I don't have all the details. I suppose we'll get those after the dinner. But that's not the point Will you help me if it becomes necessary to hold down Jeff Avalon?”

  Trumbull looked across the room to where Avalon was standing in staid conversation with the man who was clearly the guest of the evening since he was the only stranger present.

  “What's wrong with Jeff?” said Trumbull. There didn't seem anything wrong with Avalon, who was standing straight and tall as always, looking as though he might splinter if he relaxed. His graying mustache and small beard were as neat and trim as ever and he wore that careful smile on his face that he insisted on using for strangers. “He looks all right.”

  Drake said, “You weren't here last time. Jeff has the idea that the Black Widowers is becoming too nearly a puzzle session each month.”

  “What's wrong with that?” asked Trumbull as he passed his hands over his tightly waved off-white hair to press down the slight disarray produced by the wind outside.

  “Jeff thinks we ought to be a purely social organization. Convivial conversation and all that.”

  “We have that anyway.”

  “So when the puzzle comes up, help me sit on him if he gets grouchy. You have a loud voice and I don't.”

  “No problem. Have you talked to Manny?”

  “Hell, no. He'd take up the other side to be contrary.”

  “You may be right —Henry!” Trumbull waved his arm. “Henry, do me a favor. This scotch and soda won't be enough. It's cold outside and it took me a long time to get a taxi so—”

  Henry smiled discreetly, his unlined face looking twenty years younger than his actual sixtyishness. “I had assumed that might be so, Mr. Trumbull. Your second is ready.”

  “Henry, you're a diamond of the first water” —which, to be sure, was a judgment concurred in by all the Black Widowers.

  “I’ll give you a demonstration,” said Emmanuel Rubin. He had quarreled with the soup which, he maintained, had had just a shade too much leek to make it fit for human consumption, and the fact that he was in a clear minority of one rendered him all the more emphatic in his remaining views. “I'll show you that any language is really a complex of languages. —I'll write a word on each of these two pieces of paper. The same word. I'll give one to you, Mario— and one to you, sir.”

  The second went to Dr. Samuel Puntsch, who had, as was usually the case with guests of the Black Widowers, maintained a discreet silence during the preliminaries.

  Puntsch was a small, slim man, dressed in a funereal color scheme that would have done credit to Avalon. He looked at the paper and lifted his unobtrusive eyebrows.

  Rubin said, “Now neither of you say anything. Just write down the number of the syllable that carries the stress. It's a four-syllable word, so write down either one, two, three, or four.”

  Mario Gonzalo, the Black Widowers' tame artist, had just completed the sketch of Dr. Puntsch, and he laid it to one side. He looked at the word on the paper before him, wrote a figure without hesitation, and passed it to Rubin. Puntsch did the same.

  Rubin said, with indescribable satisfaction, “I'll spell the word. It's u-n-i-o-n-i-z-e-d, and Mario says it's accented on the first syllable.”

  “Yoo-nionized,” said Mario. “Referring to an industry whose working force has been organized into a labor unio
n.”

  Puntsch laughed. “Yes, I see. I called it un-eye-onized; referring to a substance that did not break down into ions in solution. I accent the second syllable.”

  “Exactly. The same word to the eye, but different to men in different fields. Roger and Jim would agree with Dr. Puntsch, I know, and Tom, Jeff, and Henry would probably agree with Mario. It's like that in a million different places. Fugue means different things to a psychiatrist and a musician. The phrase 'to press a suit' means one thing to a nineteenth-century lover and another to a twentieth-century tailor. No two people have exactly the same language.”

  Roger Halsted, the mathematics teacher, said with the slight hesitation that was almost a stammer but never quite, “There's enough overlap so that it doesn't really matter, does it?”

  “Most of us can understand each other, yes,” said Rubin querulously, “but there's less overlap than there ought to be. Every small segment of the culture develops its own vocabulary for the sake of forming an in-group. There are a million verbal walls behind which fools cower, and it does more to create ill feeling—”

  “That was Shaw's thesis in Pygmalion,” growled Trumbull.

  “No! You're quite wrong, Tom. Shaw thought it was the result of faulty education. I say it's deliberate and that this does more to create the proper atmosphere for world collapse than war does.” And he tackled his roast beef with a fierce cut of his knife.

  “Only Manny could go from unionized to the destruction of civilization in a dozen sentences,” said Gonzalo philosophically, and passed his sketch to Henry for delivery to Puntsch.

  Puntsch smiled a little shakily at it, for it emphasized his ears more than a purist might have thought consistent with good looks. Henry put it on the wall with the others.

  It was perhaps inevitable that the discussion veer from the iniquities of private language to word puzzles and Halsted achieved a certain degree of silence over the dessert by demanding to know the English word whose pronunciation changed when it was capitalized. Then, when all had given up, Halsted said slowly, “I would say that 'polish' becomes 'Polish,' right?”

  Avalon frowned portentously, his luxuriant eyebrows hunching over his eyes. “At least that isn't as offensive as the usual Polish jokes I can't avoid hearing sometimes.”

  Drake said, his small gray mustache twitching, “We'll try something a little more complicated after the coffee.”

  . Avalon darted a suspicious glance in the direction of Puntsch and, with a look of melancholy on his face, watched Henry pour the coffee.

  Henry said, “Brandy, sir?”

  Puntsch looked up and said, “Why, yes, thank you. That was a very good meal, waiter.”

  “I am glad you think so,” said Henry. “The Black Widowers are a special concern to this establishment.”

  Drake was striking his water glass with a spoon.

  He said, trying to elevate his always fuzzily hoarse voice, “I've got Sam Puntsch here partly because he worked for the same firm I work for out in New Jersey, though not in the same division. He doesn't know a damn thing about organic chemistry; I know that because I heard him discuss the subject once. On the other hand, he's a pretty fair-to-middling physicist, I'm told. I've also got him here partly because he's got a problem and I told him to come down and entertain us with it, and I hope, Jeff, that you have no objections.”

  Geoffrey Avalon twirled his brandy glass gently between two fingers and said grimly, “There are no bylaws to this organization, Jim, so I'll go along with you and try to enjoy myself. But I must say I would like to relax on these evenings; though perhaps it's just the old brain calcifying.”

  “Well, don't worry, we'll let Tom be griller in chief.”

  Puntsch said, “If Mr. Avalon—”

  Drake said at once, “Pay no attention to Mr. Avalon.”

  And Avalon himself said, “Oh, it's all right, Dr. Puntsch. The group is kind enough to let me pout on occasion.”

  Trumbull scowled and said, “Will you all let me get on with it? Dr. Puntsch— how do you justify your existence?”

  “Justify it? I suppose you could say that trying to have our civilization last for longer than a generation is a sort of justification.”

  “What does this trying consist of?”

  “An attempt to find a permanent, safe, and non-polluting energy source.”

  “What kind?”

  “Fusion energy. —Are you going to ask me the details?”

  Trumbull shook his head. “No, unless they're germane to the problem that's disturbing you.”

  “Only very tangentially; which is good.” Puntsch's voice was reedy, and his words were meticulously pronounced as though he had at one time had ambitions to become a radio announcer. He said, “Actually, Mr. Rubin's point was a rather good one earlier in the evening. We all do have our private language, sometimes more so than is necessary, and I would not welcome the chance to have to go into great detail on the matter of fusion.”

  Gonzalo, who was wearing a costume in various complementing tones of red, and who dominated the table visually more than was usually true, muttered, “I wish people would stop saying that Rubin is right.”

  “You want them to lie?” demanded Rubin, head thrown up at once and his sparse beard bristling.

  “Shut up, you two,” shouted Trumbull. “Dr. Puntsch, let me tell you what I know about fusion energy and you stop me if I'm too far off base. —It's a kind of nuclear energy produced when you force small atoms to combine into larger ones. You use heavy hydrogen out of the ocean, fuse it to helium, and produce energy that will last us for many millions of years,”

  “Yes, it's roughly as you say.”

  “But we don't have it yet, do we?”

  “No, as of today, we don't have it.”

  “Why not, Doctor?”

  “Ah, Mr. Trumbull, I take it you don't want a two-hour lecture.”

  “No, sir, how about a two-minute lecture?”

  Puntsch laughed. “About two minutes is all anyone will sit still for.-The trouble is we have to heat up our fuel to a minimum temperature of forty-five million degrees Centigrade, which is about eighty million Fahrenheit. Then we have to keep the fusion fuel—heavy hydrogen, as you say, plus tritium, which is a particularly heavy variety—at that temperature long enough for it to catch fire, so to speak, and we must keep it all in place with strong magnetic fields while this is happening.

  “So far, we can't get the necessary temperature produced quickly enough, or hold the magnetic field in being long enough, for the fusion fuel to ignite. Delivering energy by laser may be another bet, but we need stronger lasers than we have so far, or stronger and better-designed magnetic fields than we now have. Once we manage it and do ignite the fuel, that will be an important breakthrough, but God knows there will remain plenty of engineering problems to solve before we can actually begin to run the Earth by fusion energy.”

  Trumbull said, “When do you think we'll get to that first breakthrough; when do you think we'll have ignition?”

  “It's hard to say. American and Soviet physicists have been inching forward toward it for a quarter of a century. I think they've almost reached it. Five years more maybe. But there are imponderables. A lucky intuition might bring it this year. Unforeseen difficulties may carry us into the twenty-first century.”

  Halsted broke in. “Can we wait till the twenty-first century?”

  “Wait?” said Puntsch.

  “You say you are trying to have civilization last more than a generation. That sounds as though you don't think we can wait for the twenty-first century.”

  “I see. I wish I could be optimistic on this point, sir,” said Puntsch gravely, “but I can't. At the rate we're going, our petroleum will be pretty much used up by 2000, Going back to coal will present us with a lot of problems and leaning on breeder fission reactors will involve the getting rid of enormous quantities of radioactive wastes. I would certainly feel uncomfortable if we don't end up with working fusion reactors b
y, say, 2010.”

  “Apres moi, le deluge,” said Avalon.

  Puntsch said with a trace of acerbity, “The deluge may well come after your time, Mr. Avalon. Do you have any children?”

  Avalon, who had two children and several grandchildren, looked uncomfortable and said, “But fusion energy may stave off the deluge and I take it your feelings about the arrival of fusion are optimistic.”

  “Yes, there I tend to be optimistic.”

  Trumbull said, “Well, let's get on with it. You're working at Jim Drake's firm. I always thought of that as one of these drug supply houses.”

  “It's a hell of a lot more than that,” said Drake, looking, dolefully at what was left of a cigarette package as though wondering whether he ought to set fire to another one or rest for ten minutes.

  Puntsch said, “Jim works in the organic chemistry section. I work on plasma physics.”

  Rubin said, “I was down there once, visiting Jim, and took a tour of the plant. I didn't see any Tokamaks.”

  “What's a Tokamak?” asked Gonzalo at once.

  Puntsch said, “It's a device within which stable magnetic fields—pretty stable anyway—can be set up to confine the super-hot gas. No, we don't have any. We're not doing anything of the sort. We're more or less at the theoretical end of it. When we think up something that looks hopeful, we have arrangements with some of the large installations that will allow it to be tried out.”

  Gonzalo said, “What's in it for the firm?”

  “We're allowed to do some basic research. There's always use for it The firm produces fluorescent tubes of various sorts and anything we find about the behavior of hot gases— plasma, it's called—and magnetic fields may always help in the production of cheaper and better fluorescents. That's the practical justification of our work.”

  Trumbull said, “And have you come up with anything that looks hopeful? —In fusion, I mean, not in fluorescents.”

  Puntsch began a smile and let it wipe off slowly. “That's exactly it. I don't know.”

  Halsted placed his hand on the pink area of baldness in the forepart of his skull and said, “Is that the problem you've brought us?”