“Well,” I said, “let’s see what we’ve got. First, the broadcasts leave the studios as scheduled and as written. Shall we accept that?”
“Yes,” said Berbelot. “Then, since so far no black-and-white broadcasts have been affected, we’ll consider that this strange behavior is limited to the polychrome technique.”
“How about the recordings at the studios? They were in polychrome, and they weren’t affected.”
Berbelot pressed a button, and an automatic serving table rolled out of its niche and stopped in front of each of us. We helped ourselves to smokes and drinks, and the table returned to its place.
“Cineradio’s wasn’t a television recording. Hamilton. It was a sound camera. As for Associated’s … I’ve got it! Griffis recording was transmitted to his recording machines by wire, from the studios! It didn’t go out on the air at all!”
“You’re right. Then we can assume that the only programs affected are those in polychrome, actually aired. Fine, but where does that get us?”
“Nowhere,” admitted Berbelot. “But maybe we can find out. Come with me.”
We stepped into an elevator and dropped three floors. “I don’t know if you’ve heard that I’m a television bug,” said my host. “Here’s my lab. I flatter myself that a more complete one does not exist anywhere.”
I wouldn’t doubt it. I never in my life saw a layout like that. It was part museum and part workshop. It had in it a copy of a genuine relic of each and every phase of television down through the years, right from the old original scanning-disk sets down to the latest three-dimensional atomic jobs. Over in the corner was an extraordinarily complicated mass of apparatus which I recognized as a polychrome transmitter.
“Nice job, isn’t it?” said Berbelot. “It was developed in here, you know, by one of the lads who won the Berbelot scholarship.” I hadn’t known. I began to have real respect for this astonishing man.
“Just how does it work?” I asked him.
“Hamilton.” he said testily, “we have work to do. I would he talking all night if I told you. But the general idea is that the vibrations sent out by this transmitter are all out of phase with each other. Tinting in the receiver is achieved by certain blendings of these out-of-phase vibrations as they leave this rig. The effect is a sort of irregular vibration—a vibration in the electromagnetic waves themselves, resulting in a totally new type of wave which is still receivable in a standard set.”
“I see,” I lied. “Well, what do you plan to do?”
“I’m going to broadcast from here to my country place up north. It’s eight hundred miles away from here, which ought to be sufficient. My signals will be received there and automatically returned to us by wire.” He indicated a receiver standing close by. “If there is any difference between what we send and what we get, we can possibly find out just what the trouble is.”
“How about FCC?” I asked. “Suppose—it sounds funny to say it—but just suppose that we get the kind of strong talk that came over the air during my `Seashell’ number?”
Berbelot snorted. “That’s taken care of. The broadcast will be directional. No receiver can get it but mine.”
What a man! He thought of everything. “O.K.,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Berbelot threw a couple of master switches and we sat down in front of the receiver. Lights blazed on, and through a bank of push buttons at his elbow, Berbelot maneuvered the transmitting cells to a point above and behind the receiver, so that we could see and be seen without turning our heads. At a nod from Berbelot I leaned forward and switched on the receiver.
Berbelot glanced at his watch. “If things work out right, it will be between ten and thirty minutes before we get any interference.” His voice sounded a little metallic. I realized that it was coming from the receiver as he spoke.
The images cleared on the view-screen as the set warmed up. It gave me an odd sensation. I saw Berbelot and myself sitting side by side—just as if we were sitting in front of a mirror, except that the images were not reversed. I thumbed my nose at myself, and my image returned the compliment.
Berbelot said: “Go easy, boy. If we get the same kind of interference the others got, your image will make something out of that.” He chuckled.
“Damn right,” said the receiver.
Berbelot and I stared at each other, and back at the screen. Berbelot’s face was the same, but mine had a vicious sneer on it. Berbelot calmly checked with his watch. “Eight forty-six,” he said. “Less time each broadcast. Pretty soon the interference will start with the broadcast, if this keeps up.”
“Not unless you start broadcasting on a regular schedule,” said Berbelot’s image.
It had apparently dissociated itself completely from Berbelot himself. I was floored.
Berbelot sat beside me, his face frozen. “You see?” he whispered to me. “It takes a minute to catch up with itself. Till it does, it is my image.”
“What does it all mean?” I gasped.
“Search me,” said the perfume king.
We sat and watched. And so help me, so did our images.
They were watching us!
Berbelot tried a direct question. “Who are you?” he asked. “Who do we look like?” said my image; and both laughed uproariously.
Berbelot’s image nudged mine. “We’ve got ‘em on the run, hey, pal?” it chortled.
“Stop your nonsense!” said Berbelot sharply. Surprisingly, the merriment died.
“Aw,” said my image plaintively. “We don’t mean anything by it. Don’t get sore. Let’s all have fun. I’m having fun.”
“Why, they’re like kids!” I said.
“I think you’re right,” said Berbelot.
“Look,” he said to the images, which sat there expectantly, pouting. “Before we have any fun, I want you to tell me who you are, and how you are coming through the receiver, and how you messed up the three broadcasts before this.”
“Did we do wrong?” asked my image innocently. The other one giggled.
“High-spirited sons o’ guns, aren’t they?” said Berbelot. “Well, are you going to answer my questions, or do I turn the transmitter off?” he asked the images.
They chorused frantically: “We’ll tell! We’ll tell! Please don’t turn it off!”
“What on earth made you think of that?” I whispered to Berbelot.
“A stab in the dark,” he returned. “Evidently they like coming through like this and can’t do it any other way but on the polychrome wave.”
“What do you want to know?” asked Berbelot’s image, its lip quivering.
“Who are you?”
“Us? We’re … I don’t know. You don’t have a name for us, so how can I tell you?”
“Where are you?”
“Oh, everywhere. We get around.”
Berbelot moved his hand impatiently toward the switch.
The images squealed: “Don’t! Oh, please don’t! This is fun!”
“Fun, is it?” T growled. “Come on, give us the story, or we’ll black you out!”
My image said pleadingly: “Please believe us. It’s the truth. We’re everywhere.”
“What do you look like?” I asked. “Show yourselves as you are!”
“We can’t,” said the other image. “because we don’t `look’ like anything. We just … are, that’s all.”
“We don’t reflect light,” supplemented my image.
Berbelot and I exchanged a puzzled glance. Berbelot said, “Either somebody is taking us for a ride or we’ve stumbled on something utterly new and unheard-of.”
“You certainly have,” said Berbelot’s image earnestly. “We’ve known about you for a long time—as you count time—”
“Yes,” the other continued “We knew about you some two hundred of your years ago. We had felt your vibrations for a long time before that, but we never knew just who you were until then.”
“Two hundred years—” mused Berbelot. “That was about, the time o
f the first atomic-powered television sets.”
“That’s right!” said my image eagerly. “It touched our brain currents and we could see and hear. We never could get through to you until recently, though, when you sent us that stupid thing about a seashell.”
“None of that, now,” I said angrily, while Berbelot chuckled.
“How many of you are there?” he asked them.
“One, and many. We are finite and infinite. We have no size or shape as you know it. We just … are.”
We just swallowed that without comment. It was a bit big. “How did you change the programs? How are you changing this one?” Berbelot asked.
“These broadcasts pass directly through our brain currents. Our thoughts change them as they pass. It was impossible before; we were aware, but we could not be heard. This new wave has let us be heard. Its convolutions are in phase with our being.”
“How did you happen to pick that particular way of breaking through?” I asked. “I mean all that wisecracking business.”
For the first time one of the images—Berbelot’s—looked abashed. “We wanted to be liked. We wanted to come through to you and find you laughing. We knew how. Two hundred years of listening to every single broadcast, public and private, has taught us your language and your emotions and your ways of thought. Did we really do wrong?”
“Looks as if we have walked into a cosmic sense of humor,” remarked Berbelot to me.
To his image: “Yes, in a way, you did. You lost three huge companies their broadcasting licenses. You embarrassed exceedingly a man named Griff and a secretary of state. You”—he chuckled—”made my friend here very, very angry. That wasn’t quite the right thing to do, now, was it?”
“No,” said my image. It actually blushed. “We won’t do it anymore. We were wrong. We are sorry.”
“Aw, skip it,” I said. I was embarrassed myself. “Everybody makes mistakes.”
“That is good of you,” said my image on the television screen. “We’d like to do something for you. And you, too, Mr.—”
“Berbelot,” said Berbelot. Imagine introducing yourself to a television set!
“You can’t do anything for us,” I said, “except to stop messing up color televising.”
“You really want us to stop, then?” My image turned to Berbelot’s. “We have done wrong. We have hurt their feelings and made them angry.”
To us: “We will not bother you again. Good-by!”
“Wait a minute!” I yelped, but I was too late. The view-screen showed the same two figures, but they had lost their peculiar life. They were Berbelot and me. Period.
“Now look what you’ve done,” snapped Berbelot.
He began droning into the transmitter: “Calling interrupter on polychrome wave! Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Calling—”
He broke off and looked at me disgustedly. “You dope,” he said quietly, and I felt like going off into a corner and bursting into tears.
Well, that’s all. The FCC trials reached a “person or persons unknown” verdict, and color broadcasting became a universal reality. The world has never learned, until now, the real story of that screwy business. Berbelot spent every night for three months trying to contact that ether-intelligence, without success. Can you beat it? It waited two hundred years for a chance to come through to us and then got its feelings hurt and withdrew!
My fault, of course.
That admission doesn’t help any. I wish I could do something—
POKER FACE
Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1941
“Face” was a remarkable poker player. Even more remarkable than his fellow players thought. It wasn’t just the way he stacked decks—
We all had to get up early that morning, and we still hadn’t sense enough to get up from around that poker table. We’d called in that funny little guy from the accounting department they called Face to make a foursome with the three of us. It had been nip and tuck from nine o’clock on—he played a nice game of stud. By one in the morning we had all lost six weeks’ pay and won it back again, one, two bucks more or less, and all of us were a little reluctant to go in the hole. We had a two-bit straight bet —a nice way for the lucky man to clean up quickly so that everyone could go home. But tonight there was no one lucky man, and when Harry jokingly bet a nickel on a pair of fours and Delehanty took him up on it, the game degenerated into penny-ante. After a while we forgot whose deal it was and sat around just batting the breeze.
“Screwy game,” said- Delehanty. “What’s the use of squattin’ here all this time just to break even?
Must be your influence, Face. Never happened before. We generally hand all our money over to Jack here after four deals. Hey, Jack?”
I grinned. “The game still owes me plenty, bud,” I said. “But I think you’re right about. Face. I don’t know if you noticed it, but damn if that winning didn’t go right around behind the deal—me, you, Face, Harry, me again. If I won two, everyone else would win two.”
Face raised an eyebrow ridge because he hadn’t any eyebrows. There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about his features except that they were absolutely without hair. The others carried an a.m. stubble, but his face gleamed nakedly, half luminous. He’d been a last choice, but a pretty good one. He said little, watched everyone closely and casually, and seemed like a pretty nice guy. “Noticed that, did you?” he asked. His voice was a very full tenor.
“That’s right,” said Harry. “How’s about it, Face? What is this power you have over poker?”
“Oh, just one of those things you pick up,” he said.
Delehanty laughed outright. “Listen at that,” he said. “He’s like the ol’ mountain climber who saw a volcano erupting in the range he’d scaled the day before. ‘By damn,’ he says, ‘why can’t I be careful where I spit?’ ”
Everybody laughed but Face. “You think it just happened? Would you like to see it happen again?”
That stopped the hilarity. We looked at him queerly. Harry said, “What’s the dope?”
“Play with chips,” said Face. “No money, no hard feelings. If you like, I won’t touch the cards. Just to make it easy, I’ll put it this way. Deal out four hands of stud. Jack’ll win the first with three threes.
Delehanty next with three fours. Me next with three fives. Harry next with three sixes. Each three-spread will come out hearts, diamonds, clubs, in that order. You, Delehanty, start the deal. Go on—shuffle them all you like.”
Delehanty was a little popeyed. “You wouldn’t want to make a little bet on that, would you?” he breathed.
“I would not. I don’t want to take your money that way. It would be like picking pockets.”
“You’re bats, Face,” I said. “There’s so little chance of a shuffled deck coming out that way that you might as well call it impossible.”
“Try it,” said Face quietly.
Delehanty counted the cards carefully, shuffled at least fifteen times with his very efficient gambler’s riffle, and dealt around quickly. The cards flapped down in front of me—a jack face down, a six, and then—three threes; hearts, diamonds, clubs, in that order. Nobody said anything for a long time.
Finally, “Jack’s got it,” Harry breathed.
“Let me see that deck,” snapped Harry. He swept it up, spread it out in his hands. “Seems O. K.,” he said slowly, and turned to Face.
“Your deal,” said Face woodenly.
Harry dealt quickly. I said, “Delehanty’s s’posed to be next with three fours—right?” Yeah—right!
Three fours lay in front of Delehanty. It was too much—cards shouldn’t act that way. Wordlessly I reached for the cards, gathered them up, pitched them back over my shoulder. “Break out a new deck,”
I said. “Your deal, Face.”
“Let Delehanty deal for me,” said Face.
Delehanty dealt again, clumsily this time, for his hands trembled. That didn’t matter—there were still three
fives smiling up at Face when he was through.
“Your deal,” whispered Harry to me, and turned half away from the table.
I took up the cards. I spent three solid minutes shuffling them. I had Harry cut them and then cut them again myself and then passed them to Delehanty for another cut. I dealt four hands, and Harry’s was the winning hand, with three sixes —hearts, diamonds, clubs.
Delehanty’s eyes were almost as big now as his ears. He said, “Heaven. All. Might. Tea.” and rested his chin in his hands. I thought I was going to cry or something.
“Well?” said Face.
“Were we playing poker with this guy?” Harry asked no one in particular.
When, by a great deal of hard searching, I found my voice again, I asked Face, “Hey, do you do that just any time you feel like it, or does it come over you at odd moments?”
Face laughed. “Any time,” he said. “Want to see a really pretty one? Shuffle and deal out thirteen cards to each of us, face down. Then look them over.”
I gave him a long look and began to shuffle. Then I dealt. I think we were all a little afraid to pick up our cards. I know that when I looked at mine I felt as if someone had belted me in the teeth with a night stick. I had thirteen cards, and they were all spades. I looked around the table. Delehanty had diamonds.
Face had hearts. Harry had clubs.
You could have heard a bedbug sneeze in the room until Harry began saying, “Ah, no. Ah, no. Ah, no,” quietly, over and over, as if he were trying to tell himself something.
“Can they all do things like that where you come from?” I asked, and Face nodded brightly.
“Can everyone walk where you come from?” he returned. “Or see, or hear, or think? Sure.”
“Just where do you come from?” asked Harry.
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