The 27th Golden Age of Science Fiction

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The 27th Golden Age of Science Fiction Page 27

by Stanley G. Weinbaum


  “Why—why is she coming here?”

  “Because,” he said with dignity, “van Manderpootz is here. I am still a friend of de Lisle’s.” He turned and bent over the complex device on the table. “Hand me that wrench,” he ordered. “Tonight I dismantle this, and tomorrow start reconstructing it for Isaak’s head.”

  * * * *

  But when, the following week, I rushed eagerly back to van Manderpootz’s laboratory, the idealizator was still in place. The professor greeted me with a humorous twist to what was visible of his bearded mouth. “Yes, it’s still here,” he said, gesturing at the device. “I’ve decided to build an entirely new one for Isaak, and besides, this one has afforded me considerable amusement. Furthermore, in the words of Oscar Wilde, who am I to tamper with a work of genius. After all, the mechanism is the product of the great van Manderpootz.”

  He was deliberately tantalizing me. He knew that I hadn’t come to hear him discourse on Isaak, or even on the incomparable van Manderpootz. Then he smiled and softened, and turned to the little inner office adjacent, the room where Isaak stood in metal austerity. “Denise!” he called, “come here.”

  I don’t know exactly what I expected, but I do know that the breath left me as the girl entered. She wasn’t exactly my image of the ideal, of course; she was perhaps the merest trifle slimmer, and her eyes—well, they must have been much like those of de Lisle d’Agrion, for they were the clearest emerald I’ve ever seen. They were impudently direct eyes, and I could imagine why van Manderpootz and the Dragon Fly might have been forever quarreling; that was easy to imagine, looking into the eyes of the Dragon Fly’s daughter.

  Nor was Denise, apparently, quite as femininely modest as my image of perfection. She wore the extremely unconcealing costume of the day, which covered, I suppose, about as much of her as one of the one-piece swimming suits of the middle years of the twentieth century. She gave an impression, not so much of fleeting grace as of litheness and supple strength, an air of independence, frankness, and—I say it again—impudence.

  “Well!” she said coolly as van Manderpootz presented me. “So you’re the scion of the N.J. Wells Corporation. Every now and then your escapades enliven the Paris Sunday supplements. Wasn’t it you who snared a million dollars in the market so you could ask Whimsy White—?”

  I flushed. “That was greatly exaggerated,” I said hastily, “and anyway I lost it before we—uh—before I—”

  “Not before you made somewhat of a fool of yourself, I believe,” she finished sweetly.

  Well, that’s the sort she was. If she hadn’t been so infernally lovely, if she hadn’t looked so much like the face in the mirror, I’d have flared up, said “Pleased to have met you,” and never have seen her again. But I couldn’t get angry, not when she had the dusky hair, the perfect lips, the saucy nose of the being who to me was ideal.

  So I did see her again, and several times again. In fact, I suppose I occupied most of her time between the few literary courses she was taking, and little by little I began to see that in other respects besides the physical she was not so far from my ideal. Beneath her impudence was honesty, and frankness, and, despite herself, sweetness, so that even allowing for the head-start I’d had, I fell in love pretty hastily. And what’s more, I knew she was beginning to reciprocate.

  That was the situation when I called for her one noon and took her over to van Manderpootz’s laboratory. We were to lunch with him at the University Club, but we found him occupied in directing some experiment in the big laboratory beyond his personal one, untangling some sort of mess that his staff had blundered into. So Denise and I wandered back into the smaller room, perfectly content to be alone together. I simply couldn’t feel hungry in her presence; just talking to her was enough of a substitute for food.

  “I’m going to be a good writer,” she was saying musingly. “Some day, Dick, I’m going to be famous.”

  Well, everyone knows how correct that prediction was. I agreed with her instantly.

  She smiled. “You’re nice, Dick,” she said. “Very nice.”

  “Very?”

  “Very!” she said emphatically. Then her green eyes strayed over to the table that held the idealizator. “What crack-brained contraption of Uncle Haskel’s is that?” she asked.

  I explained, rather inaccurately, I’m afraid, but no ordinary engineer can follow the ramifications of a van Manderpootz conception. Nevertheless, Denise caught the gist of it and her eyes glowed emerald fire.

  “It’s fascinating!” she exclaimed. She rose and moved over to the table. “I’m going to try it.”

  “Not without the professor, you won’t! It might be dangerous.”

  That was the wrong thing to say. The green eyes glowed brighter as she cast me a whimsical glance. “But I am,” she said. “Dick, I’m going to—see my ideal man!” She laughed softly.

  I was panicky. Suppose her ideal turned out tall and dark and powerful, instead of short and sandy-haired and a bit—well, chubby, as I am. “No!” I said vehemently. “I won’t let you!”

  She laughed again. I suppose she read my consternation, for she said softly, “Don’t be silly, Dick.” She sat down, placed her face against the opening of the barrel, and commanded. “Turn it on.”

  I couldn’t refuse her. I set the mirror whirling, then switched on the bank of tubes. Then immediately I stepped behind her, squinting into what was visible of the flashing mirror, where a face was forming, slowly—vaguely.

  I thrilled. Surely the hair of the image was sandy. I even fancied now that I could trace a resemblance to my own features. Perhaps Denise sensed something similar, for she suddenly withdrew her eyes from the tube and looked up with a faintly embarrassed flush, a thing most unusual for her.

  “Ideals are dull!” she said. “I want a real thrill. Do you know what I’m going to see? I’m going to visualize ideal horror. That’s what I’ll do. I’m going to see absolute horror!”

  “Oh, no you’re not!” I gasped. “That’s a terribly dangerous idea.” Off in the other room I heard the voice of van Manderpootz, “Dixon!”

  “Dangerous—bosh!” Denise retorted. “I’m a writer, Dick. All this means to me is material. It’s just experience, and I want it.”

  Van Manderpootz again. “Dixon! Dixon! Come here.” I said, “Listen, Denise. I’ll be right back. Don’t try anything until I’m here—please!”

  I dashed into the big laboratory. Van Manderpootz was facing a cowed group of assistants, quite apparently in extreme awe of the great man.

  “Hah, Dixon!” he rasped. “Tell these fools what an Emmerich valve is, and why it won’t operate in a free electronic stream. Let ’em see that even an ordinary engineer knows that much.”

  Well, an ordinary engineer doesn’t, but it happened that I did. Not that I’m particularly exceptional as an engineer, but I did happen to know that because a year or two before I’d done some work on the big tidal turbines up in Maine, where they have to use Emmerich valves to guard against electrical leakage from the tremendous potentials in their condensers. So I started explaining, and van Manderpootz kept interpolating sarcasms about his staff, and when I finally finished, I suppose I’d been in there about half an hour. And then—I remembered Denise!

  I left van Manderpootz staring as I rushed back, and sure enough, there was the girl with her face pressed against the barrel, and her hands gripping the table edge. Her features were hidden, of course, but there was something about her strained position, her white knuckles—

  “Denise!” I yelled. “Are you all right? Denise!”

  She didn’t move. I stuck my face in between the mirror and the end of the barrel and peered up the tube at her visage, and what I saw left me all but stunned. Have you ever seen stark, mad, infinite terror on a human face? That was what I saw in Denise’s—inexpressible, unbearable horror, worse than the fear of death could ever be. Her
green eyes were widened so that the whites showed around them; her perfect lips were contorted, her whole face strained into a mask of sheer terror.

  I rushed for the switch, but in passing I caught a single glimpse of—of what showed in the mirror. Incredible! Obscene, terror-laden, horrifying things—there just aren’t words for them. There are no words.

  Denise didn’t move as the tubes darkened. I raised her face from the barrel and when she glimpsed me she moved. She flung herself out of that chair and away, facing me with such mad terror that I halted.

  “Denise!” I cried. “It’s just Dick. Look, Denise!”

  But as I moved toward her, she uttered a choking scream, her eyes dulled, her knees gave, and she fainted. Whatever she had seen, it must have been appalling to the uttermost, for Denise was not the sort to faint.

  * * * *

  It was a week later that I sat facing van Manderpootz in his little inner office. The grey metal figure of Isaak was missing, and the table that had held the idealizator was empty.

  “Yes,” said van Manderpootz. “I’ve dismantled it. One of van Manderpootz’s few mistakes was to leave it around where a pair of incompetents like you and Denise could get to it. It seems that I continually overestimate the intelligence of others. I suppose I tend to judge them by the brain of van Manderpootz.”

  I said nothing. I was thoroughly disheartened and depressed, and whatever the professor said about my lack of intelligence, I felt it justified.

  “Hereafter,” resumed van Manderpootz, “I shall credit nobody except myself with intelligence, and will doubtless be much more nearly correct.” He waved a hand at Isaak’s vacant corner. “Not even the Bacon head,” he continued. “I’ve abandoned that project, because, when you come right down to it, what need has the world of a mechanical brain when it already has that of van Manderpootz?”

  “Professor,” I burst out suddenly, “why won’t they let me see Denise? I’ve been at the hospital every day, and they let me into her room just once—just once, and that time she went right into a fit of hysterics. Why? Is she—?” I gulped.

  “She’s recovering nicely, Dixon.”

  “Then why can’t I see her?”

  “Well,” said van Manderpootz placidly, “it’s like this. You see, when you rushed into the laboratory there, you made the mistake of pushing your face in front of the barrel. She saw your features right in the midst of all those horrors she had called up. Do you see? From then on your face was associated in her mind with the whole hell’s brew in the mirror. She can’t even look at you without seeing all of it again.”

  “Good—God!” I gasped. “But she’ll get over it, won’t she? She’ll forget that part of it?”

  “The young psychiatrist who attends her—a bright chap, by the way, with a number of my own ideas—believes she’ll be quite over it in a couple of months. But personally, Dixon, I don’t think she’ll ever welcome the sight of your face, though I myself have seen uglier visages somewhere or other.”

  I ignored that. “Lord!” I groaned. “What a mess!” I rose to depart, and then—then I knew what inspiration means!

  “Listen!” I said, spinning back. “Listen, professor! Why can’t you get her back here and let her visualize the ideally beautiful? And then I’ll—I’ll stick my face into that!” Enthusiasm grew. “It can’t fail!” I cried. “At the worst, it’ll cancel that other memory. It’s marvelous!”

  “But as usual,” said van Manderpootz, “a little late.”

  “Late? Why? You can put up your idealizator again. You’d do that much, wouldn’t you?”

  “Van Manderpootz,” he observed, “is the very soul of generosity. I’d do it gladly, but it’s still a little late, Dixon. You see, she married the bright young psychiatrist this noon.”

  Well, I’ve a date with Tips Alva tonight, and I’m going to be late for it, just as late as I please. And then I’m going to do nothing but stare at her lips all evening.

  PYGMALION’S SPECTACLES

  Originally published in Wonder Stories, June 1935.

  “But what is reality?” asked the gnomelike man. He gestured at the tall banks of buildings that loomed around Central Park, with their countless windows glowing like the cave fires of a city of Cro-Magnon people. “All is dream, all is illusion; I am your vision as you are mine.”

  Dan Burke, struggling for clarity of thought through the fumes of liquor, stared without comprehension at the tiny figure of his companion. He began to regret the impulse that had driven him to leave the party to seek fresh air in the park, and to fall by chance into the company of this diminutive old madman. But he had needed escape; this was one party too many, and not even the presence of Claire with her trim ankles could hold him there. He felt an angry desire to go home—not to his hotel, but home to Chicago and to the comparative peace of the Board of Trade. But he was leaving tomorrow anyway.

  “You drink,” said the elfin, bearded face, “to make real a dream. Is it not so? Either to dream that what you seek is yours, or else to dream that what you hate is conquered. You drink to escape reality, and the irony is that even reality is a dream.”

  “Cracked!” thought Dan again.

  “Or so,” concluded the other, “says the philosopher Berkeley.”

  “Berkeley?” echoed Dan. His head was clearing; memories of a Sophomore course in Elementary Philosophy drifted back. “Bishop Berkeley, eh?”

  “You know him, then? The philosopher of Idealism—no?—the one who argues that we do not see, feel, hear, taste the object, but that we have only the sensation of seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting.”

  “I—sort of recall it.”

  “Hah! But sensations are mental phenomena. They exist in our minds. How, then, do we know that the objects themselves do not exist only in our minds?” He waved again at the light-flecked buildings. “You do not see that wall of masonry; you perceive only a sensation, a feeling of sight. The rest you interpret.”

  “You see the same thing,” retorted Dan.

  “How do you know I do? Even if you knew that what I call red would not be green could you see through my eyes—even if you knew that, how do you know that I too am not a dream of yours?”

  Dan laughed. “Of course nobody knows anything. You just get what information you can through the windows of your five senses, and then make your guesses. When they’re wrong, you pay the penalty.” His mind was clear now save for a mild headache. “Listen,” he said suddenly. “You can argue a reality away to an illusion; that’s easy. But if your friend Berkeley is right, why can’t you take a dream and make it real? If it works one way, it must work the other.”

  The beard waggled; elf-bright eyes glittered queerly at him. “All artists do that,” said the old man softly. Dan felt that something more quivered on the verge of utterance.

  “That’s an evasion,” he grunted. “Anybody can tell the difference between a picture and the real thing, or between a movie and life.”

  “But,” whispered the other, “the realer the better, no? And if one could make a—a movie—very real indeed, what would you say then?”

  “Nobody can, though.”

  The eyes glittered strangely again. “I can!” he whispered. “I did!”

  “Did what?”

  “Made real a dream.” The voice turned angry. “Fools! I bring it here to sell to Westman, the camera people, and what do they say? ‘It isn’t clear. Only one person can use it at a time. It’s too expensive.’ Fools! Fools!”

  “Huh?”

  “Listen! I’m Albert Ludwig—Professor Ludwig.” As Dan was silent, he continued, “It means nothing to you, eh? But listen—a movie that gives one sight and sound. Suppose now I add taste, smell, even touch, if your interest is taken by the story. Suppose I make it so that you are in the story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is al
l about you, and you are in it. Would that be to make real a dream?”

  “How the devil could you do that?”

  “How? How? But simply! First my liquid positive, then my magic spectacles. I photograph the story in a liquid with light-sensitive chromates. I build up a complex solution—do you see? I add taste chemically and sound electrically. And when the story is recorded, then I put the solution in my spectacle—my movie projector. I electrolyze the solution, break it down; the older chromates go first, and out comes the story, sight, sound, smell, taste—all!”

  “Touch?”

  “If your interest is taken, your mind supplies that.” Eagerness crept into his voice. “You will look at it, Mr.—?”

  “Burke,” said Dan. “A swindle!” he thought. Then a spark of recklessness glowed out of the vanishing fumes of alcohol. “Why not?” he grunted.

  He rose; Ludwig, standing, came scarcely to his shoulder. A queer gnomelike old man, Dan thought as he followed him across the park and into one of the scores of apartment hotels in the vicinity.

  In his room Ludwig fumbled in a bag, producing a device vaguely reminiscent of a gas mask. There were goggles and a rubber mouthpiece; Dan examined it curiously, while the little bearded professor brandished a bottle of watery liquid.

  “Here it is!” he gloated. “My liquid positive, the story. Hard photography—infernally hard, therefore the simplest story. A Utopia—just two characters and you, the audience. Now, put the spectacles on. Put them on and tell me what fools the Westman people are!” He decanted some of the liquid into the mask, and trailed a twisted wire to a device on the table. “A rectifier,” he explained. “For the electrolysis.”

 

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