“He’s quiet now, Sir.”
A new voice—that voice! Barrows pressed down on the forearm he held over his eyes until sparks shone. Don’t look; because if you’re right, you’ll kill him.
The door. Footsteps. “Evening, Lieutenant. Ever talk to a psychiatrist before?”
Slowly, in terror of the explosion he knew must come, Barrows lowered his arm and opened his eyes. The clean, well-cut jacket with a Major’s leaves and the Medical Corps insignia did not matter. The man’s professionally solicitous manner, the words he spoke—these meant nothing. The only thing in the universe was the fact that the last time he had seen this face, it belonged to a Pfc, who had uncomplainingly and disinterestedly hauled his heavy detector around for a whole, hot day; who had shared his discovery; and who had suddenly smiled at him, pulled the lever, let a wrecked truck and a lifetime dream fall away upward into the sky.
Barrows growled and leapt.
The nightmare closed down again.
They did everything they could to help him. They let him check the files himself and prove that there was no such Pfc. The “degaussing” effect? No observations of it. Of course, the Lieutenant himself admitted that he had taken all pertinent records to his quarters. No, they are not in the quarters. Yes, there was a hole in the ground out there and they’d found what he called his “detector,” though it made no sense to anyone; it merely tested the field of its own magnet. As to Major Thompson, we have witnesses who can prove he was in the air on his way here when it happened. If the Lieutenant would only rid himself of the idea that Major Thompson is the missing Pfc, we’d get along much better; he isn’t, you know; he couldn’t be. But of course, Captain Bromfield might be better for you at that. . .
I know what I did, I know what I saw. I’ll find that device or whoever made it. And I’ll kill that Thompson!
Bromfield was a good man and heaven knows he tried. But the combination in the patient of high observational talent and years of observational training would not accept the denial of its own data. When the demands for proof had been exhausted and the hysterical period was passed and the melancholia and finally the guarded, superficial equilibrium was reached, they tried facing him with the Major. He charged and it took five men to protect the Major.
These brilliant boys, you know. They crack.
So they kept him a while longer, satisfying themselves that Major Thompson was the only target. Then they wrote the Major a word of warning and they kicked the Lieutenant out. Too bad, they said.
The first six months was a bad dream. He was still full of Captain Bromfield’s fatherly advice and he tried to get a job and stay with it until this “adjustment” the Captain talked about should arrive. It didn’t.
He’d saved a little and he had his separation pay. He’d take a few months off and clear this thing out of his mind.
First, the farm. The device was on the truck and the truck obviously belonged to the farmer. Find him and there’s your answer.
It took six months to find the town records (for the village had been preempted when the ack-ack range was added to the base) and to learn the names of the only two men who might tell him about the truck. A. Prodd, farmer. A halfwitted hired hand, name unknown, whereabouts unknown.
But he found Prodd, nearly a year later. Rumor took him to Pennsylvania and a hunch took him to the asylum. From Prodd, all but speechless in the last gasp of his latest dotage, he learned that the old man was waiting for his wife, that his son Jack had never been born, that old Lone maybe was an idiot, but nobody ever was a better hand at getting the truck out of the mud; that Lone was a good boy, that Lone lived in the woods with the animals, and that he, Prodd, had never missed a milking.
He was the happiest human being Hip had ever seen.
Barrows went into the woods with the animals. For three and a half years he combed those woods. He ate nuts and berries and trapped what he could; he got his pension check until he forgot about picking it up. He forgot engineering; he very nearly forgot his name. The only thing he cared to know was that to put such a device on such a truck was the act of an idiot, and that this Lone was a halfwit.
He found the cave, some children’s clothes and a scrap of the silvery cable. An address.
He found the address. He learned where to find the children. But then he ran into Thompson—and Janie found him.
Seven years.
It was cool where he lay and under his head was a warm pillow and through his hair strayed a gentling touch. He was asleep, or he had been asleep. He was so completely exhausted, used, drained that sleeping and waking were synonymous anyway and it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He knew who he was, who he had been. He knew what he wanted and where to find it; and find it he would when he had slept.
He stirred happily and the touch in his hair ceased and moved to his cheek where it patted him. In the morning, he thought comfortably, I’ll go see my halfwit. But you know what, I think I’ll take an hour off just remembering things. I won the sack race at the Sunday school picnic and they awarded me a khaki handkerchief. I caught three pike before breakfast at the Scout camp, trolling, paddling the canoe and holding the fishing line in my teeth; the biggest of the fish cut my mouth when he struck. I hate rice pudding. I love Bach and liverwurst and the last two weeks in May and deep clear eyes like . . . “Janie?”
“I’m here.”
He smiled and snuggled his head into the pillow and realized it was Janie’s lap. He opened his eyes. Janie’s head was a black cloud in a cloud of stars; a darker night in nighttime. “Nighttime?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Sleep well?”
He lay still, smiling, thinking of how well he had slept. “I didn’t dream because I knew I could.”
“I’m glad.”
He sat up. She moved cautiously. He said, “You must be cramped up in knots.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I liked to see you sleep like that.”
“Let’s go back to town.”
“Not yet. It’s my turn, Hip. I have a lot to tell you.”
He touched her. “You’re cold. Won’t it wait?”
“No—oh, no! You’ve got to know everything before he . . before we’re found.”
“He? Who’s he?”
She was quiet a long time. Hip almost spoke and then thought better of it. And when she did talk, she seemed so far from answering his question that he almost interrupted; but again he quelled it, letting her lead matters in her own way, in her own time.
She said, “You found something in a field; you had your hands on it just long enough to know what it was, what it could mean to you and to the world. And then the man who was with you, the soldier, made you lose it. Why do you suppose he did that?”
“He was a clumsy, brainless bastard.”
She made no immediate comment but went on, “The medical officer then sent in to you, a Major, looked exactly like that Pfc to you.”
“They proved otherwise.”
He was close enough to her to feel the slight movement in the dark as she nodded. “Proof: the men who said they were with him in a plane all afternoon. Now, you had a sheaf of files which showed a perturbation of some sort which affected proximity fuses over a certain area. What happened to them?”
“I don’t know. My room was locked, as far as I know, from the time I left that day until they went to search it.”
“Did it ever occur to you that those three things—the missing Pfc, the missing files, and the resemblance of the Major to the Pfc—were the things which discredited you?”
“That goes without saying. I think if I could’ve straightened out any one or any two of those three things, I wouldn’t have wound up with that obsession.”
“All right. Now think about this. You stumbled and grubbed through seven years, working your way closer and closer to regaining what you had lost. You traced the man who built it and you were just about to find him. But something happened.”
“My fault. I bumped into T
hompson and went crazy.”
She put her hand on his shoulder. “Suppose it wasn’t carelessness that made that Pfc pull the lever. Suppose it was done on purpose.”
He could not have been more shocked if she had fired a flashbulb in his face. The light was as sudden, as blinding, as that. When he could, he said, “Why didn’t I ever think of that?”
“You weren’t allowed to think of it,” she said bitterly.
“What do you mean, I wasn’t—”
“Please. Not yet,” she said. “Now, just suppose for a moment that someone did this to you. Can you reason out who it was—why he did it—how he did it?”
“No,” he said immediately. “Eliminating the world’s first and only antigravity generator makes no sense at all. Picking on me to persecute and doing it through such an elaborate method means even less. And as to method, why, he’d have to be able to reach into locked rooms, hypnotize witnesses and read minds!”
“He did,” said Janie. “He can.”
“Janie—who?”
“Who made the generator?”
He leaped to his feet and released a shout that went rolling down and across the dark field.
“Hip!”
“Don’t mind me,” he said, shaken. “I just realized that the only one who would dare to destroy that machine is someone who could make another if he wanted it. Which means that— oh, my God!—the soldier and the halfwit, and maybe Thompson—yes, Thompson: he’s the one made me get jailed when I was just about to find him again—they’re all the same!— Why didn’t I ever think of that before?”
“I told you. You weren’t allowed.”
He sank down again. In the east, dawn hung over the hills like the loom of a hidden city. He looked at it, recognizing it as the day he had chosen to end his long, obsessive search and he thought of Janie’s terror when he had determined to go headlong into the presence of this—this monster—without his sanity, without his memory, without arms or information.
“You’ll have to tell me, Janie. All of it.”
She told him—all of it. She told him of Lone, of Bonnie and Beanie and of herself; Miss Kew and Miriam, both dead now, and Gerry. She told how they had moved, after Miss Kew was killed, back into the woods, where the old Kew mansion hid and brooded, and how for a time they were very close. And then . .
“Gerry got ambitious for awhile and decided to go through college, which he did. It was easy. Everything was easy. He’s pretty unremarkable looking when he hides those eyes of his behind glasses, you know; people don’t notice. He went through medical school too, and psych.”
“You mean he really is a psychiatrist?” asked Hip. “He is not. He just qualifies by the book. There’s quite a difference. He hid in crowds; he falsified all sorts of records to get into school. He was never caught at it because all he had to do with anyone who was investigating him was to give them a small charge of that eye of his and they’d forget. He never failed any exam as long as there was a men’s room he could go to.”
“A what? Men’s room?”
“That’s right.” She laughed. “There was hell to pay one time. See, he’d go in and lock himself in a booth and call Bonnie or Beanie. He’d tell them where he was stumped and they’d whip home and tell me and I’d get the answer from Baby and they’d flash back with the information, all in a few seconds. So one fine day another student heard Gerry talking and stood up in the next booth and peeked over. You can imagine! Bonnie and Beanie can’t carry so much as a toothpick with them when they teleport, let alone clothes.”
Hip clapped a hand to his forehead. “What happened?”
“Oh, Gerry caught up with the kid. He’d charged right out of there yelling that there was a naked girl in the john. Half of the student body dove in there; of course she was gone. And when Gerry caught up with the kid, he just naturally forgot all about it and wondered what all the yelling was about. They gave him a pretty bad time over it.
“Those were good times,” she sighed. “Gerry was so interested in everything. He read all the time. He was at Baby all the time for information. He was interested in people and books and machines and history and art—everything. I got a lot from it. As I say, all the information cleared through me.
“But then Gerry began to . . . I was going to say, get sick, but that’s not the way to say it.” She bit her lip thoughtfully. “I’d say from what I know of people that only two kinds are really progressive—really dig down and learn and then use what they learn. A few are genuinely interested; they’re just built that way. But the great majority want to prove something. They want to be better, richer. They want to be famous or powerful or respected. With Gerry the second operated for a while. He’d never had any real schooling and he’d always been a little afraid to compete. He had it pretty rough when he was a kid; ran away from an orphanage when he was seven and lived like a sewer rat until Lone picked him up. So it felt good to get honors in his classes and make money with a twist of his wrist any time he wanted it. And I think he was genuinely interested in some things for a little while: music and biology and one or two other things.
“But he soon came to realize that he didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. He was smarter and stronger and more powerful than anybody. Proving it was just dull. He could have anything he wanted.
“He quit studying. He quit playing the oboe. He gradually quit everything. Finally he slowed down and practically stopped for a year. Who knows what went on in his head? He’d spend weeks lying around, not talking.
“Our Gestalt, as we call it, was once an idiot, Hip, when it had Lone for a ‘head.’ Well, when Gerry took over it was a new, strong, growing thing. But when this happened to him, it was in retreat like what used to be called a manic-depressive.”
“Uh!” Hip grunted. “A manic-depressive with enough power to run the world.”
“He didn’t want to run the world. He knew he could if he wanted to. He didn’t see any reason why he should.
“Well, just like in his psych texts he retreated and soon he regressed. He got childish. And his kind of childishness was pretty vicious.
“I started to move around a little; I couldn’t stand it around the house. I used to hunt around for things that might snap him out of it. One night in New York I dated a fellow I know who was one of the officers of the I.R.E.”
“Institute of Radio Engineers,” said Hip. “Swell outfit. I used to be a member.”
“I know. This fellow told me about you.”
“About me?”
“About what you called a ‘mathematical recreation,’ anyway. An extrapolation of the probable operating laws and attendant phenomena of magnetic flux in a gravity generator.”
“God!”
She made a short and painful laugh. “Yes, Hip. I did it to you. I didn’t know then of course. I just wanted to interest Gerry in something.
“He was interested all right. He asked Baby about it and got the answer pronto. You see, Lone built that thing before Gerry came to live with us. We’d forgotten about it pretty much.” “Forgotten! A thing like that?”
“Look, we don’t think like other people.”
“You don’t,” he said thoughtfully and, “Why should you?”
“Lone built it for the old farmer, Prodd. That was just like Lone. A gravity generator, to increase and decrease the weight of Prodd’s old truck so he could use it as a tractor. All because Prodd’s horse died and he couldn’t afford another.”
“No!”
“Yes. He was an idiot all right. Well, he asked Baby what effect it would have if this invention got out and Baby said plenty. He said it would turn the whole world upside down, worse than the industrial revolution. Worse than anything that ever happened. He said if things went one way we’d have such a war, you wouldn’t believe it. If they went the other way, science would go too far, too fast. Seems that gravitics is the key to everything. It would lead to the addition of one more item to the Unified Field—what we now call psychic energy, or ‘
psionics.’ ”
“Matter, energy, space, time and psyche,” he breathed, awed.
“Yup,” Janie said casually, “all the same thing and this would lead to proof. There just wouldn’t be any more secrets.”
“That’s the—the biggest thing I ever heard. So—Gerry decided us poor half-developed apes weren’t worthy?”
“Not Gerry! He doesn’t care what happens to you apes! One thing he found out from Baby, though, was that whichever way it went the device would be traced to us. You should know. You did it by yourself. But Central Intelligence would’ve taken seven weeks instead of seven years.
“And that’s what bothered Gerry. He was in retreat. He wanted to stew in his own juice in his hideout in the woods. He didn’t want the Armed Forces of the United Nations hammering at him to come out and be patriotic. Oh sure, he could have taken care of ’em all in time, but only if he worked full time at it. Working full time was out of his field. He got mad. He got mad at Lone who was dead and he especially got mad at you.”
“Whew. He could have killed me. Why didn’t he?”
“Same reason he didn’t just go out and confiscate the device before you saw it. I tell you, he was vicious and vengeful— childish. You’d bothered him. He was going to fix you for it.
“Now I must confess I didn’t care much one way or the other, it did me so much good to see him moving around again. I went with him to the base.
“Now, here’s something you just wouldn’t remember. He walked right into your lab while you were calibrating your detector. He looked you once in the eye and walked out again with all the information you had, plus the fact that you meant to take it out and locate the device, and that you intended to—what was your phrase?—‘appoint a volunteer.’ ”
“I was a hotshot in those days,” said Hip ruefully.
She laughed. “You don’t know. You just don’t know. Well, out you came with that big heavy instrument on a strap. I saw you, Hip; I can still see you, your pretty tailored uniform, the sun on your hair . . . I was seventeen.
“Gerry told me to lift a Pfc shirt quick. I did, out of the barracks.”
American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56 Page 38