He said, miserably, “I want to know better than that.”
Zeitgeist’s breath hissed out; Joe wondered how long he had been holding it. “Come here, Joe,” he said gently.
Joe went to the bench. Zeitgeist pulled the amplifier front and center. “Remember what I told you about this thing—a mike here to pick up chest tones, band-passes to cut down on what you have too much of, and the amplifier here to blow up those low resonances? And this?” he pointed.
“The power supply.”
“The power supply,” Zeitgeist nodded. “Well, look; there’s nothing wrong with the theory. Some day someone will design a rig this compact that will do the job, and it’ll work just as I said.” His pale gaze flicked across Joe’s perplexed face and he laughed. “You’re sort of impressed with all this, aren’t you?” He indicated the whole lab and its contents.
“Who wouldn’t be?”
“That’s the mythos of science, Joe. The layman is as willing to believe in the superpowers of science as he once did in witches. Now, I told you once that I believe in the ability of science to save our souls … our selves, if you like that any better. I believe that it’s legitimate to use any and all parts of science for this purpose. And I believe the mythos of science is as much one of its parts as Avogadro’s Law or the conservation of energy. Any layman who’s seen the size of a modern hearing-aid, who knows what it can do, will accept with ease the idea of a band-passing amplifier with five watts output powered by a couple of penlite cells. Well, we just can’t do it. We will, but we haven’t yet.”
“Then what’s this thing? What’s all this gobbledegook you’ve been feeding me? You give me something, you take it away. You make it work, you tell me it can’t work. I mean, what are you trying to pull?”
“You’re squeaking. And you’re saying ‘I mean,’ ” said Zeitgeist.
“Cut it out,” Joe said desperately.
The pale eyes twinkled at him, but Zeitgeist made a large effort and went back to his subject. “All this is, this thing you’ve been wearing, is the mike here, which triggers these two diaphragm vibrators here, powered by these little dry cells. No amplifier, no speaker, no nothing but this junk and the mythos.”
“But it worked; I heard it right here on your tape machine!”
“With the help of half a ton of components.”
“But at the office, the liaison meeting, I … I—Oh—”
“For the first time in your life you walked around with your chest out. You faced people with your shoulders back and you looked ’em smack in the eye. You dredged up what resonance you had in that flattened-out chest of yours and flung it in people’s faces. I didn’t lie to you when I said they had to listen to you. They had to as long as you believed they had to.”
“Did you have to drag out all this junk to make me believe that?”
“I most certainly did! Just picture it: you come to me here all covered with bruises and guilt, suicidal, cowed, and without any realizable ambition. I tell you all you need to do is stand up straight and spit in their eye. How much good would that have done you?”
Joe laughed shakily. “I feel like one of those characters in the old animated cartoons. They’d walk off the edge of a cliff and hang there in midair, and there they’d stay, grinning and twirling their canes, until they looked down. Then—boom!” He tried another laugh, and failed with it. “I just looked down,” he said hoarsely.
“You’ve got it a little backwards,” said Zeitgeist. “Remember how you looked forward to graduating—to the time when you could discard that monkey-puzzle and stand on your own feet? Well, son, you just made it. Come on; this calls for a drink!”
Joe jammed his arms into his jacket. “Thanks, but I just found out I can talk to my wife.”
They started up the hall. “What do you do this for, Zeitgeist?”
“It’s a living.”
“Is that streamlined mousetrap out there the only bait you use?”
Zeitgeist smiled and shook his head.
For the second time in fifteen minutes Joe said, “I guess I just don’t understand you,” but there was a world of difference. Suddenly he broke away from the old man and went into the room with the fireplace. He came back, jamming the envelope into his pocket. “I can handle this,” he said. He went out.
Zeitgeist leaned in the doorway, watching him go. He’d have offered him a ride, but he wanted to see him walk like that, with his head up.
New York Vignette
JOHN: We wanted to tell you a story this morning … a New York story but something special … something different and so we asked a special, different sort of writer to send us one. His name is Theodore Sturgeon … and he’s the winner of the International Fantasy Award for the best science fiction novel of 1954—a beautiful and enchanted novel called … “MORE THAN HUMAN.” In just a few days, you’ll be able to see Ted’s award, a gleaming chromium spaceship, in the window of Brentano’s Fifth Avenue shop. We’re really not altogether certain whether Ted’s written us a story or not … but I’ll read you his letter. It begins—Dear “PULSE”:
MUSIC: OPENING CURTAIN … NICE, NORMAL … BRIGHT. UNDER FOR:
JOHN: When I got your note, I was delighted at the idea of doing a story for you. I went straight to the typewriter, unwound the typewriter ribbon from the neck and ears of my baby daughter, Tandy, sat down on my son Robin’s plastic automobile, got up again, picked the pieces of plastic out of myself and the chair, dried Robin’s tears, handed Tandy to her mother for a bath, rewound the ribbon, put some paper in the machine, and nothing happened. You see, what you did is ask for a story at one of those times when a writer can’t write and nothing can make him write. I tried, honestly I did. I played all the tricks on myself I ever learned. I drank two cups of strong, black coffee, I did some knee-bends, I filed my nails, read the morning paper all the way through, ate a stale bagel and a handful of raisins, sniffed at a bottle of aromatic spirits of ammonia to clear my head, and lit my pipe. I don’t like a pipe but it makes me feel like an author. I even had a small quarrel with my wife, which sometimes works wonders. Still no story.
There was nothing for it but to go out and wander. They say New York has something for everyone—you just have to know where to look. I went looking first on Rockefeller Plaza, which never fails to do something to me. I hung over the rail and watched the skaters moving like moths and mayflies to music that came from nowhere, everywhere … anyone who can pass them by without a glance has lost his sense of wonder, and I’m sorry for him. I looked for sunlight high on the clean, clever buildings reaching into the morning and found it. I listened to the whisper of blades on ice, tires on asphalt, of a hundred thousand heels on paving all blended like a great breathing. But it was only magic, its own special kind of magic; it didn’t give me a story idea for you.
So I left and walked west past the place where Dave Garroway holds forth in the early, early hours, towards the Avenue of the Americas, where stores and theaters were beginning to wake, where men can make keys for you and you can buy crepes suzettes and cameras and luggage and lingerie; and I slowly became aware of a neat pair of shoulders and a smooth neat hat. I must have been following the man for minutes without quite realizing it. The coat was one of those banker’s specials—you know, flat and formal and with a smooth narrow collar that might be velvet and might be fur. And the hat was what some people call a bowler and some a derby. Hat and collar were not black, but of the darkest possible brown, and the whole aspect was—well, neat. He was strolling along, turning his head a little from time to time, and though I couldn’t see his face I somehow knew he was smiling at storefronts, automobiles, marquees, people—smiling at the whole, wide world. I wondered what he was smiling about. I wondered, too, what kind of a smile it might be. Was he smiling at? or smiling with?
The first corner we came to was the one where the Radio City Music Hall squats like a kneeling elephant with its big friendly mouth open, and in the entrance stood two girls. One of them
reminded me of mint leaves and the other was as real and pretty as a field of daisies. I saw the man in the brown bowler hat walk up to them and he bowed from the waist, that stiff, slight, quaint little gesture that can only be done by a certain sort of person, because it makes the rest of us look silly. He raised the hard, neat hat a trifle and by the tilt of his head and the pleasure just beginning on the girls’ faces, I knew he was smiling a special smile. From his pocket he drew something and handed it to one of the girls, the field-of-daisies one, and without pausing, with never a break in his leisurely stride, he went on.
Then it was my turn to pass the girls. They stared after the man and their mouths were round as a thumbprint. Then one of them looked down in her hand and “Lark!” she said, “Oh, Lark, look: he gave us tickets for ‘JUPITER’S DARLING!’ How did he know I wanted to see it so much?” They stared after him spellbound as I passed, and happy as Christmas. I followed the man across the avenue, thinking, “Lark, Lark. Now what a nice name for a girl that is!” and watching him. A few doors up from the corner is a hardware store, and the hardware man had set a tall ladder against the building. He was up there looking at a place where his awning had slipped off its little hooks where I suppose the wind had bent them. And before I knew what was happening my man in the brown bowler had skipped up two rungs of the ladder. He stood there balanced easily, and with one hand he tipped his hat and with the other he took from his pocket a pair of pliers and handed them up to the hardware fellow. Then off he went again, up the avenue, and when I passed the ladder I could see from the hardware fellow’s face that he, too, had gotten a special smile from the man: a piece of it was on his lips. He took the pliers, scratched his head. I heard him laugh, and then he began to fix his awning as if the pliers were exactly the tool he needed, which I’m sure they were.
I hurried then, because I wanted to see the face of such a man as this, and I hadn’t, yet. I caught up with him at 50th Street. He had paused there, waiting for something. Maybe he was waiting to decide which way to go, and maybe he was waiting for me; I don’t know. As I drew abreast he turned to face me.
Now, I don’t want to disappoint you but I can’t tell you what his face was like. All I can say is that it was as neat as the rest of him, everything about it just where it should be. He smiled.
It was like looking into a bright light, but it didn’t dazzle. It was warm, like the windows of farmhouses late at night when there’s snow. It made me smile too, the biggest, widest smile that ever happened to me, so wide that I heard a little … (ONE CLEAR CHUCK, AS WHEN ONE CHUCKS TO A HORSE: BUT ONLY ONE) … somewhere in my back teeth. I must have been bemused for a second or two, because when I blinked the feeling away, the man was gone. Still smiling, I got into a cab that pulled up for the light just then; I suddenly wanted to be home, next to Robin and Tandy and my wife, while I felt just that way.
As the cab started to move, I turned and looked through the rear window and I saw the man briefly, just once more. One of those poor, cowed, unhappy men had sidled up to him, and in every line of his shabby figure I recognized him and all like him, and I could all but hear the cringing voice, “Dime fer a cuppa cawfee, mister?” And the last thing I saw was the reflection of that incredible smile on the man’s dirty face, as Mr. Brown Bowler Hat reached into his impossible pocket and handed the man a thick, steaming china mug of hot coffee and walked on.
I leaned back on the cushions and watched New York streaming past outside, and I thought: “Well, if this city has something for everyone, then I suppose it has in it a man who can reach into his pocket and grant anyone’s smaller, happy-making wishes.” And then I thought, “he has tickets and tools and cups of coffee and heaven knows what else for other people, but he apparently couldn’t give me the one thing I wanted at the time, which was a little story for ‘PULSE.’ ” So here I am home again, feeling sort of nice because my wife and kids appreciate the bit of smile I brought in, but otherwise disappointed because, whatever else happened, I don’t have a story for you. I guess the man in the brown bowler hat didn’t have one in his pocket at the time.
Yours very truly,
Theodore Sturgeon
P.S. On the other hand, maybe he did.
The Half-Way Tree Murder
THE MYRTLE BANK HOTEL in Jamaica has a marquee built out over the blood-warm water of Kingston Harbor. It overlooks the swimming pool with its lounging, laughing bathers. Drinks are served swiftly by white-gloved waiters. It is warm and shadowed, restful and luxurious.
Cotrell, the C.I.D. man, sat there with the most extraordinary woman he had ever seen.
This had never happened to him before. He was a good man—the Criminal Investigation Division’s best in the district—and he hung doggedly to a case until he had it cracked. But at the same time he had always been able to separate business from pleasure. For weeks now he had been under the spell of Brunhilde Moot, and yet, for all her effect on him, the Half-Way Tree affair kept circling back into his mind.
He watched her while she watched the sea, the haze across the Harbor that was the wicked sunken pirate city Port Royal, the distant mountains marching up and away to meet the heavy, brazen sky. Her eyes always returned to the fishing boats which worked close inshore, and she watched them … perhaps she watched the crews, the half-naked, sweating, muscular black and brown and bronze and tan bodies as they worked.
Cotrell felt a smoky surge of distress at the thought; he shook himself angrily. He had a great deal more to do than to help an exotic brown-eyed blonde enjoy the mysteries in which she cloaked herself. And he could ill afford to let the spell deepen.
He watched her while she watched the sea, or the mountains, or the boats—or was it the men and their nets, the men and their rippling backs?—and he thought, who is she? She had come off a cruise ship three months before, because she liked Jamaica. She would stay indefinitely, leave when it seemed a good idea—tomorrow, next week, or never.
She apparently had unlimited credit. Her clothes told nothing about her but that she had exquisite taste, and that she shopped wherever she found excellence. He knew she spoke Dutch and Spanish, and her English was accented by no accent at all. Her passport was Swiss, which might mean anything. When pressed for information about herself, she used an ancient, woman’s weapon—an abrupt, courteous, smiling silence which was like a slap in the face.
“You’re hypnotized,” he said abruptly.
She drew her attention in to herself, turned and looked at him and away. When she did that, he felt the heat, as from the opening and closing of an oven door.
“I am,” she admitted. “Jamaica is so—old. The old buildings, the old society, decayed and polished. I met a man at Constant Spring last evening who quite naturally clicked his heels when he bowed. And yet, just back a little from the coast, it’s savage. Wild growth and rot, breeding and steaming and killing itself, and breeding and growing again.”
“You like that.” It was not a question.
She knew, and did not answer. She looked at her drink, lifted it, tilted it so that the liquid beaded up on the edge. Not a drop spilled on her steady hand. “Any news on the Half-Way Tree affair?”
“How did you know I’d been thinking of it? No, nothing new. I was going to ask you—”
“Yes?” Her eyes were so wide apart that he sometimes thought they were set on the sides of her head rather than in front. That, and her sharply pointed teeth, and the breadth and strength of her, were what was so strongly animal, for all her impregnable dignity.
“Forgive me—one shouldn’t make analytical comments. You are not like other people, Brunhilde. You don’t think like other people. I—shall I be frank?”
“Of course.” Was she laughing?
“I can’t say I always like the way your mind works. It—”
“It’s too direct?” She did laugh, now, like wind through a cello. “I’ve heard it before. Too direct … there are things I want, and things I like, and I get them. There are things I have no use f
or, and I avoid them.” She looked again at the boats.
Cotrell hung manfully to what he wanted to say. “I need a new point of view on the Half-Way Tree murder. I would like you to help me.”
“Well,” she breathed. After a moment she said, “Jeff, I’m hardly flattered. I’ve heard a great deal about you. You took in at least four extremely important foreign agents during the war. It was you who broke up the Panamanian drug ring. You have a reputation for cracking cases without any but routine help. And now you ask me to look at a thing like this—a simple murder, a month old, of a crossroads Chinese shopkeeper who was killed by a black hill boy for a few shillings. It’s not worth bothering with, Jeff.”
“It’s murder.”
“Murder!” she said scornfully. “It was killing, and the jungle’s full of it. From what you’ve told me about the case, it’s quite simple. The boy Stanton—”
“Stanley.”
“Whatever—the boy had motive and opportunity and can’t account for his time. Try him and hang him then, mark up another successful case, and go on with your important work. There are a hundred thousand illiterate hill-runners here. One won’t be missed.”
“Stanley could have done it,” said Cotrell carefully, “but he wouldn’t.”
“That,” said Brunhilde Moot flatly, “doesn’t matter.” A large red ant chinned on the overhang of the tabletop. She bent to watch it. It gained the surface and began to amble between the moisture-rings left by their glasses.
She said, “The old Chinaman had a brother who will get all his property—isn’t that so? And he certainly knew where the money was hidden. Hang him, then, and have done with it.”
“He’s my friend,” said Cotrell with some difficulty.
Again he felt the heat and brilliance of her gaze. She bent again over the ant. She blew the ash from her cigarette and swept the glowing tip across the ant’s antennae. It curled up, straightened, blundered into a drop of moisture from one of the sweating glasses, and struggled there.
And Now the News Page 5