Back at the hotel, the ovoid hovered over his sleeping body and thought bitter thoughts. He was ashamed of himself for underestimating the subtle nuances of human behavior. He had succeeded in making something ridiculous out of this biped he had created, and the fact annoyed him. There was a challenge in it; Elron could control powers that would easily disintegrate this whole tiny galaxy and spread its dust through seven dimensions, if he so wished it; and yet he was most certainly being made a fool of by a woman. It occurred to him that in all the universes there was nothing quite as devious and demanding as a woman’s mind. It likewise occurred to him that a woman is easy to control as long as she always has her way. He was determined to see how closely a man could resemble a woman’s ideal and still exist; and he was going to do it with this man he had made himself responsible for.
It was a long and eventful three months before Ari Drew saw Elron again. He went away in his ten-gallon hat and his blatant plaids and his yellow shoes; and he took away with him his conversational variants and Chauncey the bum. He went to the greatest city of them all and sought out people who knew about the things that he must be to achieve the phenomenal status of a man good enough for Ariadne.
He found it a fascinating game. In the corridors of universities, in prizefight training camps, in girls’ schools and kindergartens and gin mills and honkytonks and factories he cornered people, spoke with them, strained and drained and absorbed what their minds held. Sorting and blending, he built himself an intellect, the kind of mentality that awed lightweights like Suzy Greenfield, who spell Intellect with a capital I. Instead of trying to suit each man’s speech by using each man’s speech, he developed a slightly accented idiom of his own, something personal and highly original. He gave himself an earthly past, from a neatly photostated birth certificate to gilt-edged rent receipts. He sounded out the minds of editors and publishers, and through the welter of odd tastes and chaotic ideology therein he extracted sound and workable ideas on what work was needed. He actually sold poetry.
While his body slept in luxury, his mind hurtled over the earth, carried by its illimitably powerful golden shell. Elron could lecture a New York audience on the interesting people he had met in Melbourne, Australia, and the next day produce a cablegram from one or two of those people whom he had visited during the night. Scattered all over the earth were individuals who believed they had known this phenomenal young man for years.
It was at one of those pale-pink and puffy poetry teas that Ariadne saw Elron again. Suzy gave the tea as a current-celebrity show. Ari came gracefully late, looking lovely in something powder-blue, chastely sophisticated. Elron was scheduled to speak—something about “Metempsychosis and Modern Life.” Ari was scheduled to sing. But she—
He was watching for her. He was dressed in soft gray, and the Homburg awaited him by the door. Her entrance was as ever in the grand manner, and all realized it; but for her it was that breath-catching experience of realizing that she was putting on the show for just one person in all that crowded room. She’d heard of him, of course. He was the “rage,” which is a term used in polite society to describe current successes. Would-bes and has-beens are known as outrages.
But she had never seen him that she remembered. He rose and stood over her and smiled, and he wordlessly took her arm, bowed at the hostess, and led her out. Just like that. Poor Suzy. Her protruding teeth barely hid the tiny line of foam that formed on her lips.
“Well!” Ariadne said as they reached the street. “That was a terrible thing to do!”
“Tsk, tsk!” he said, and helped her into his new sixteen-cylinder puddle-jumper. “I imagine Suzy will get over it. Think of all the people she’ll be able to tell!”
Ari laughed a little, looking at him strangely. “Mr. Elron, you’re not … not the same man that—”
“That you picked up on the pike three months ago, dressed like a comedian?”
She blushed.
“Yes, I’m the man.”
“I was … rude when I left you.”
“You had a right to be, Ariadne.”
“What happened to that hideous little tramp you were traveling with?”
“Chauncey!” Elron bellowed, and the trimly uniformed chauffeur swiveled around and nodded and smiled.
“Good heavens!” said Ariadne.
“He doesn’t offend any more with his atrocious diction,” said Elron precisely. “I found it possible to change his attitude toward work, but to change his diction was beyond even me. He no longer speaks.”
She looked at him for quite a while as the huge car rolled out into the country. “You’re everything I thought you might possibly be,” she breathed.
He knew that.
That was their first evening together. There were many others, and Elron conducted himself perfectly, as befitted a brilliant and urbane biped. Catering to every wish and whim of Ari’s amused him, for she was as moody as a beautiful woman can be, and he delighted in predicting and anticipating her moods. He adjusted himself to her hour by hour, day by day. He was ideal. He was perfect.
So—she got bored. He adjusted himself to that, too, and she was furious. If she didn’t care, neither did he. Bad tactics, and something that supercosmic forces could do nothing about.
Oh, he tried; yes, indeed. He questioned her and he psychoanalyzed her and he even killed off all the streptococci in her bloodstream to see if that was the trouble. But all he got was a passive resentment from her. Half as old as time itself, he knew something of patience; but his patience began to give way under the pressure applied by this very human woman.
And, of course, there was a showdown. It was one afternoon at her home, and it was highly spectacular. He could read her mind with ease, but he could know only what thoughts she had formed. She knew he annoyed her. She also knew she liked him immensely; and for that reason she made no attempt to analyze her hostility toward him, and therefore he was helpless, tangled in her tenuous resentment.
It started with a very little thing—he came into the room and she stood at the window with her back to him and would not turn around. She did not speak or act coldly toward him, but simply would not face him. A very petty thing. After ten minutes of that he strode across the room and spun her around. She caught her heel in the rug, lost her footing, fell against the mantel, and stretched becomingly unconscious on the floor in a welter of broken gew-gaws. Elron stood a moment feeling foolish, and then lifted her in his arms. Before he could set her down she had twined her arms around his neck and was kissing him passionately. Poor, magnficent thing, he didn’t know what to do.
“Oh, Elron,” she blubbered. “You brute! You struck me. Oh, darling! I love you so! I never thought you would do it!”
A great light of understanding burst for Elron. That was the basic secret of this thing called woman! She could not love him when he acted in a perfectly rational way. She could not love him when he was what she thought was ideal. But when he did something “brutish”—a word synonymous with “unintelligent”—she loved him. He looked down at her beautiful lips and her beautiful black eye, and he laughed and kissed her and then set her down gently.
“Be back in a couple of days, darling,” he said, and strode out, ignoring her cries.
He knew what to do now. He was grateful to her for amusing him for a while and for teaching him something new. But he could not afford to upset himself by associating with her any longer. To keep her happy he would have to act unintelligent periodically; and that was one thing he could not stand. He went away. He got into his huge automobile and drove away down the turnpike.
“It’s a pity that I’m not a man,” he reflected as he drove. “I’d really like to be, but—Oh, I can’t be bothered keeping track of anything as complicated as Ariadne!”
He pulled up at the outskirts of a small town and found his laboratory. Once inside, he lay down on the table, popped open his skull and emerged. Going to the machine in the corner, he added and took away and changed and tinkered, an
d the glow began to form again around the still body. Something was happening inside the skull. Something took shape inside, and as it happened the skull slowly closed. In three hours Elron the man climbed off the table and stood looking about him. The golden egg flew up to his shoulder and nestled there.
“Thank you for this … this consciousness,” said Elron.
“Oh, that’s all right,” replied the ovoid telepathically. “You’ve had it for some months, anyway. Only I’ve just given you what you needed to appreciate it with.”
“What am I to do?” asked the man.
“Go back to Ariadne. Carry on from where I left off. You can—you’re a man, perfect in every cell and gland and tissue.”
“Thank you for that. I have wanted her but was never directed—”
“Never mind that. Marry her and make her happy. Never tell her about me—you have history enough to carry you through your lifetime, and brains enough, now, to do the work you have been doing. Ari’s been good to me; I owe her this much.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. Just one thing; but burn this in your brain in letters of fire: A woman can’t possibly love a man unless he’s part dope. Be a little stupid all the time and very stupid once in a while. But don’t be perfect!”
“Okay. So long.”
“Be happy … er … son—”
Elron the man left the laboratory and went out into the sunlight. The golden egg settled to the floor and lay there an hour or so. He laughed once within himself and said, “Too perfect!”
Then he felt terribly, terribly lonely.
Two Percent Inspiration
DR. BJORNSEN WAS a thorough man. He thought that way and acted that way and expected others to exceed him in thoroughness. Since this was an impossibility, he expressed an almost vicious disappointment in incompetents, and took delight in pointing out the erring one’s shortcomings. He was in an ideal position for this sort of thing, being principal of the Nudnick Institute.
Endowed by Professor Thaddeus MacIlhainy Nudnick, the institute was conducted for the purpose of supplying brilliant young assistants to Professor Nudnick. It enrolled two thousand students every year, and the top three of the graduating class were given subsistence and a considerable salary for the privilege of entering Nudnick’s eight-year secondary course, where they underwent some real study before they began as assistants in the Nudnick laboratories.
Bjornsen never congratulated an honor student, for they had behaved as expected. He found many an opportunity of delivering a kick or two in the slats to those who had fallen by the wayside; and of these opportunities, the ones that pleased him the most were the ones involving expulsion. He considered himself an expert disciplinarian, and he was more than proud of his forte for invective.
It was with pleasurable anticipation that he summoned one Hughie McCauley to his office one afternoon. Hughie was a second-year student, and made ideal bait for Bjornsen’s particular line of attack. The kid was intelligent to a degree, and fairly well read, so that he could understand Bjornsen’s more subtle insults. He was highly sensitive, so that he could be hurt by what Bjornsen said, and he showed it. He lacked sense, so that he continually retorted to Bjornsen’s comments, giving the principal blurted statements to pick meticulously apart while the victim writhed. Hughie was such perfect material for persecution that Bjornsen rather hated to expel him; but he comforted himself by recalling the fact that there were hundreds of others who could be made to squirm. He’d take his time with Hughie, however; stretch it out, savor the boy’s suffering before he kicked him out of the school.
“Send him in,” Bjornsen told the built-in communicator on his luxurious desk. He leaned back in his chair, put the tips of his fingers together, lowered his head so that only the whites of his eyes were visible as he stared through his shaggy brows at the door, and waited.
Hughie came in, his hair plastered unwillingly down, his fear and resentment sticking out all over him. The kid’s knees knocked together so that he stumbled against the doorpost. There was a gloss of cold sweat on his forehead. From previous experience, he had no difficulty in taking up the front-and-center position before the principal’s desk.
“Y-yes, sir!”
Bjornsen made a kissing noise with his wrinkled lips before he spoke, threw back his head and glared. “You might,” he said quietly, “have washed your ears before you came in here.” He knew that there is no more painfully undignified attack for an adolescent, particularly if it is not true. Hughie flushed and stuck out his lower lip.
Bjornsen said, “You are an insult to this institution. You were in a position, certainly, to know yourself before you applied for admission; therefore, the very act of applying was dishonest and insincere. You must have known that you were unfit even to enter these buildings, to say nothing of daring to perpetuate the mistake of the board of examiners in staying here. I am thoroughly disgusted with you.” Bjornsen smiled his disgust, and it was a smile that perfectly matched his words. He bent to flip the switch on the communicator, cutting off its mellow buzz. “Yes?”
“Dr. Bjornsen! Professor Nudnick is—”
The annunciator’s hollow voice was drowned out in the crashing of a hard, old foot against the door. Nudnick kicked it open because he knew it could not be slammed, and he liked startling Bjornsen. “What sort of nonsense is this?” he demanded, in a voice that sounded like flatulence through ten feet of lead pipe. “Since when has that vinegar-visaged female out there been instructed to announce me? Damn it, you’ll see me whether you’re busy or not!”
Bjornsen had bounced out of his chair to indulge in every sort of sycophantism short of curtsying. “Professor Nudnick! I am delighted to see you!” This was perfect. The only thing that could possibly increase Hughie McCauley’s agony was to have an audience to his dismissal; and what better audience could he have than the great endower of the school himself? Bjornsen rubbed his hands, which yielded an unpleasant dry sound, and began.
“Professor Nudnick,” he said, catching Hughie’s trembling shoulder and using it to thrust the attached boy between him and Nudnick, “you could not have picked a better time to arrive. This shivering example of negation is typical of the trash that has been getting by the examiners recently. Now I may prove to you that my recent letter on the subject was justified.”
Nudnick looked calmly at Hughie. “I don’t read your letters,” he said. “They bore me. What’s he done?”
Bjornsen, a little taken aback, put this new resentment into his words. “Done? What he hasn’t done is more important. He has neglected to tidy up his thinking habits. He indulges in reading imaginative fiction during his hours of relaxation instead of reading books pertaining in some way to his studies. He whistles in corridors. He asks impertinent questions of his instructors. He was actually discovered writing a letter to a … a girl!”
“Tsk, tsk,” chuckled the professor. “This during classes?”
“Certainly not! Even he would not go that far, though I expect it hourly.”
“Hm-m-m. Is he intelligent?”
“Not very.”
“What kind of questions does he ask?”
“Oh—stupid ones. About the nature of a space-warp, whatever that may be, and about whether or not time travel is possible. A dreamer—that’s what he is, and a scientific institution is no place for dreamers.”
“What are you going to do with him?”
“Expel him, of course.”
Nudnick reached over and pulled the boy out of Bjornsens’s claw. “Then why not post him as expelled and spare him this agony? It so happens, Bjornsen, that this is just the kind of boy I came here to get. I’m going to take him with me on a trip to the Asteroid Belt. Salary at two thousand a month, if he’s willing. Are you, what’s-your-name?”
Hughie nodded swimmingly.
“Eh.” Beckoning the boy, Nudnick started for the door. “My advice to you, Bjornsen,” grated the scientist, “is as follows. Keep your nose out of the stu
dents’ lives on their off hours. If you must continue in these little habits of yours, take it out in pulling the wings off flies. And get married. Take this advice or hand in your resignation effective this date next month.”
Hughie paused at the door, looking back. Nudnick gave him a quick look, shoved him toward Bjornsen. “Go ahead, kid. I’d like it, too.”
Hughie grinned, walked up to Bjornsen, and with a quick one-two knocked the principal colder than a cake of ice.
They were eight days out now, and these were the eight:
The day when the unpredictable Professor Nudnick had whisked Hughie up to his mountain laboratory, and had put him to work loading the last of an astonishingly inclusive list of stores into the good ship Stoutfella. Hughie began to regard the professor as a little less than the god he had imagined, and a little more as a human being. The old man was perpetually cheerful, pointing out Hughie’s stupidities and his little triumphs without differentiating between them. He treated Hughie with a happy tolerance, and seemed to be more delighted with the lad’s ignorance than by his comparatively meager knowledge. When Hughie had haltingly asked if he might take a suitcase full of fiction with him, Nudnick had chuckled dryly and sent him off to the nearest town with a pocketful of money. Hughie arrived back at the laboratory laden and blissful. They took off.
And the day when they heard the last broadcast news report before they whisked through the Heaviside layer. Among other items was one to the effect that Dr. Emil Bjornsen, principal of the Nudnick Institute, had resigned to accept a government job. Hughie had laughed gleefully at this, but Nudnick shook his shaggy old head. “Not funny, Hughie,” he said. “Bjornsen’s a shrewd man. I’ve an idea why he did that, and it has nothing to do with my … our … ultimatum.”
Struck by the scientist’s sober tone, Hughie calmed down to ask, “What did he do it for?”
Nudnick clapped a perforated course card into the automatic pilot, reeled its lower edge into the integrator, and checked his controls before switching them over to the “Iron Mike.”
Microcosmic God Page 38