The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B

by Ben Bova (Ed)

  "Well, Hiram, I see you got it fixed."

  Taine jackknifed upright and stood there slightly frozen and completely speechless.

  Henry Horton stood foursquarely and happily on the stairs, looking very pleased.

  "I told Abbie that you wouldn't have it done, but she said for me to come over anyway—Hey, Hiram, it's in color! How did you do it, man?"

  Taine grinned sickly. "I just got fiddling around," he said.

  Henry came down the rest of the stairs with a stately step and stood before the set, with his hands behind his back, staring at it fixedly in his best executive manner.

  He slowly shook his head. "I never would have thought," he said, "that it was possible."

  "Abbie mentioned that you wanted color."

  "Well, sure. Of course I did. But not on this old set. I never would have expected to get color on this set. How did you do it, Hiram?"

  Taine told the solemn truth. "I can't rightly say," he said.

  Henry found a nail keg standing in front of one of the benches and rolled it out in front of the old-fashioned set. He sat down warily and relaxed into solid comfort.

  "That's the way it goes," he said. "There are men like you, but not very many of them. Just Yankee tinkerers. You keep messing around with things, trying one thing here and another there and before you know it you come up with something."

  He sat on the nail keg, staring at the set.

  "It's sure a pretty thing," he said. "It's better than the color they have in Minneapolis. I dropped in at a couple of the places the last time I was there and looked at the color sets. And I tell you honest, Hiram, there wasn't one of them that was as good as this."

  Taine wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve. Somehow or other, the basement seemed to be getting warm. He was fine sweat all over.

  Henry found a big cigar in one of his pockets and held it out to Taine.

  "No, thanks. I never smoke."

  "Perhaps you're wise," said Henry. "It's a nasty habit."

  He stuck the cigar into his mouth and rolled it east to west.

  "Each man to his own," he proclaimed, expansively. "When it comes to a thing like this, you're the man to do it. You seem to think in mechanical contraptions and electronic circuits. Me, I don't know a thing about it. Even in the computer game, I still don't know a thing about it; I hire men who do. I can't even saw a board or drive a nail. But I can organize. You remember, Hiram, how everybody snickered when I started up the plant?"

  "Well, I guess some of them did, at that."

  "You're darn tooting they did. They went around for weeks with their hands up to their faces to hide smart-aleck grins. They said, what does Henry think he's doing, starting up a computer factory out here in the sticks; he doesn't think he can compete with those big companies in the east, does he? And they didn't stop their grinning until I sold a couple of dozen units and had orders for a year or two ahead."

  He fished a lighter from his pocket and lit the cigar carefully, never taking his eyes off the television set.

  "You got something there," he said, judiciously, "that may be worth a mint of money. Some simple adaptation that will fit on any set. If you can get color on this old wreck, you can get color on any set that's made."

  He chuckled raoistly around the mouthful of cigar. "If RCA knew what was happening here this minute, they'd go out and cut their throats."

  "But I don't know what I did," protested Taine.

  "Well, that's all right," said Henry, happily. "I'll take this set up to the plant tomorrow and turn loose some of the boys on it. They'll find out what you have here before they're through with it."

  He took the cigar out of his mouth and studied it intently, then popped it back in again.

  "As I was saying, Hiram, that's the difference in us. You can do the stuff, but you miss the possibilities. I can't do a thing, but I can organize it once the thing is done. Before we get through with this, you'll be wading in twenty-dollar bills clear up to your knees."

  "But I don't have-"

  "Don't worry. Just leave it all to me. I've got the plant and whatever money we may need. We'll figure out a split."

  "That's fine of you," said Taine mechanically.

  "Not at all," Henry insisted, grandly. "It's just my aggressive, grasping sense of profit. I should be ashamed of myself, cutting in on this."

  He sat on the keg, smoking and watching the TV perform in exquisite color.

  "You know, Hiram," he said, "I've often thought of this, but never got around to doing anything about it. I've got an old computer up at the plant that we will have to junk because it's taking up room that we really need. It's one of our early models, a sort of experimental job that went completely sour. It sure is a screwy thing. No one's ever been able to make much out of it. We tried some approaches that probably were wrong—or maybe they were right, but we didn't know enough to make them quite come off. It's been standing in a corner all these years and I should have junked it long ago. But I sort of hate to do it. I wonder if you might not like it—just to tinker with."

  "Well, I don't know," said Taine.

  Henry assumed an expansive air. "No obligation, mind you. You may not be able to do a thing with it—I'd frankly be surprised if you could, but there's no harm in trying. Maybe you'll decide to tear it down for the salvage you can get. There are several thousand dollars' worth of equipment in it. Probably you could use most of it one way or another."

  "It might be interesting," conceded Taine, but not too enthusiastically.

  "Good," said Henry, with an enthusiasm that made up for Taine's lack of it. "I'll have the boys cart it over tomorrow. It's a heavy thing. I'll send along plenty of help to get it unloaded and down into the basement and set up."

  Henry stood up carefully and brushed cigar ashes off his lap.

  "I'll have the boys pick up the TV set at the same time," he said.

  "I'll have to tell Abbie you haven't got it fixed yet. If I ever let it get into the house, the way it's working now, she'd hold onto it."

  Henry climbed the stairs heavily and Taine saw him out the door into the summer night.

  Taine stood in the shadow, watching Henry's shadowed figure go across the Widow Taylor's yard to the next street behind his house. He took a deep breath of the fresh night air and shook bis head to try to clear his buzzing brain, but the buzzing went right on.

  Too much had happened, he told himself. Too much for any single day—first the ceiling and now the TV set. Once he had a good night's sleep he might be in some sort of shape to try to wrestle with it.

  Towser came around the corner of the house and limped slowly up the steps to stand beside his master. He was mud up to his ears.

  "You had a day of it, I see," said Taine. "And, just like I told you, you didn't get the woodchuck."

  "Woof," said Towser, sadly.

  "You're just like a lot of the rest of us," Taine told him, severely. "Like me and Henry Horton and all the rest of us. You're chasing something and you think you know what you're chasing, but you really don't. And what's even worse, you have no faint idea of why you're chasing it."

  Towser thumped a tired tail upon the stoop.

  Taine opened the door and stood to one side to let Towser in, then went in himself.

  He went through the refrigerator and found part of a roast, a slice or two of luncheon meat, a dried-out slab of cheese and half a bowl of cooked spaghetti. He made a pot of coffee and shared the food with Towser.

  Then Taine went back downstairs and shut off the television set. He found a trouble lamp and plugged it in and poked the light into the innards of the set.

  He squatted on the floor, holding the lamp, trying to puzzle out what had been done to the set. It was different, of course, but it was a little hard to figure out in just what ways it was different. Someone had tinkered with the tubes and had them twisted out of shape and there were little white cubes of metal tucked here and there in what seemed to be an entirely haphazard and illogical manne
r—although, Taine admitted to himself, there probably was no haphazardness.

  And the circuit, he saw, had been rewired and a good deal of wiring had been added.

  But the most puzzling thing about it was that the whole thing seemed to be just jury-rigged—as if someone had done no more than a hurried, patch-up job to get the set back in working order on an emergency and temporary basis.

  Someone, he thought!

  And who had that someone been?

  He hunched around and peered into the dark corners of the basement and he felt innumerable and many-legged imaginary insects running on his body.

  Someone had taken the back off the cabinet and leaned it against the bench and had left the screws which held the back laid neatly in a row upon the floor. Then they had jury-rigged the set and jury-rigged it far better than it had ever been before.

  If this was a jury-job, he wondered, just what kind of job would it have been if they had had the time to do it up in style?

  They hadu't had the time, of course. Maybe they had been scared off when he had come home—scared off even before they could get the back on the set again.

  He stood up and moved stiffly away.

  First the ceiling in the morning—and now, in the evening, Abbie's television set.

  And the ceiling, come to think of it, was not a ceiling only. Another liner, if that was the proper term for it, of the same material as the ceiling, had been laid beneath the floor, forming a sort of boxed-in area between the joists. He had struck that liner when he had tried to drill into the floor.

  And what, he asked himself, if all the house were like that, too?

  There was just one answer to it all: There was something in the house with him!

  Towser had heard that something or smelled it or in some other manner sensed it and had dug frantically at the floor in an attempt to dig it out, as if it were a woodchuck.

  Except that this, whatever it might be, certainly was no woodchuck.

  He put away the trouble light and went upstairs.

  Towser was curled up on a rug in the living room beside the easy chair and beat his tail in polite decorum in greeting to his master.

  Taine stood and stared down at the dog. Towser looked back at him with satisfied and sleepy eyes, then heaved a doggish sigh and settled down to sleep.

  Whatever Towser might have heard or smelled or sensed this morning, it was quite evident that as of this moment he was aware of it no longer.

  Then Taine remembered something else.

  He had filled the ketde to make water for the coffee and had set it on the stove. He had turned on the burner and it had worked the first time.

  He hadn't had to kick the stove to get the burner going.

  He woke in the morning and someone was holding down his feet and he sat up quickly to see what was going on.

  But there was nothing to be alarmed about; it was only Towser who had crawled into bed with him and now lay sprawled across his feet.

  Towser whined softly and his back legs twitched as he chased dream rabbits.

  Taine eased his feet from beneath the dog and sat up, reaching for his clothes. It was early, but he remembered suddenly that he had left all of the furniture he had picked up the day before out there in the truck and should be getting it downstairs where he could start reconditioning it.

  Towser went on sleeping.

  Taine stumbled to the kitchen and looked out of the window and there, squatted on the back stoop, was Beasly, the Horton man-of-all-work.

  Taine went to the back door to see what was going on.

  "I quit them, Hiram," Beasly told him. "She kept on pecking at me every minute of the day and I couldn't do a thing to please her, so I up and quit."

  "Well, come on in," said Taine. "I suppose you'd like a bite to eat and a cup of coffee."

  "I was kind of wondering if I could stay here, Hiram. Just for my keep until I can find something else."

  "Let's have breakfast first," said Taine, "then we can talk about it."

  He didn't like it, he told himself. He didn't like it at all. In another hour or so Abbie would show up and start stirring up a ruckus about how he'd lured Beasly off. Because, no matter how dumb Beasly might be, he did a lot of work and took a lot of nagging and there wasn't anyone else in town who would work for Abbie Horton.

  "Your ma used to give me cookies all the time," said Beasly. "Your ma was a real good woman, Hiram."

  "Yes, she was," said Taine.

  "My ma used to say that you folks were quality, not like the rest in town, no matter what kind of airs they were always putting on. She said your family was among the first settlers. Is that really true, Hiram?"

  "Well, not exactly first settlers, I guess, but this house has stood here for almost a hundred years. My father used to say there never was a night during all those years that there wasn't at least one Taine beneath its roof. Things like that, it seems, meant a lot to father."

  "It must be nice," said Beasly, wistfully, "to have a feeling like that. You must be proud of this house, Hiram."

  "Not really proud; more like belonging. I can't imagine living in any other house."

  Taine turned on the burner and filled the kettle. Carrying the kettle back, he kicked the stove. But there wasn't any need to kick it; the burner was already beginning to take on a rosy glow.

  Twice in a row, Taine thought. This thing is getting better!

  "Gee, Hiram," said Beasly, "this is a dandy radio."

  "It's no good," said Taine. "It's broke. Haven't had the time to fix it."

  "I don't think so, Hiram. I just turned it on. It's beginning to warm up."

  "It's beginning to—Hey, let me see!" yelled Taine.

  Beasly told the truth. A faint hum was coming from the tubes.

  A voice came in, gaining in volume as the set warmed up.

  It was speaking gibberish.

  "What kind of talk is that?" asked Beasly.

  "I don't know," said Taine, close to panic now.

  First the television set, then the stove and now the radiol

  He spun the tuning knob and the pointer crawled slowly across the dial face instead of spinning across as he remembered it, and station after station sputtered and went past.

  He tuned in the next station that came up and it was strange lingo, too—and he knew by then exactly what he had.

  Instead of a $39.50 job, he had here on the kitchen table an all-band receiver like they advertised in the fancy magazines.

  He straightened up and said to Beasly: "See if you can get someone speaking English. I'll get on with the eggs."

  He turned on the second burner and got out the frying pan. He put it on the stove and found eggs and bacon in the refrigerator.

  Beasly got a station that had band music playing.

  "How's that?" he asked.

  "That's fine," said Taine.

  Towser came out from the bedroom, stretching and yawning. He went to the door and showed he wanted out.

  Taine let him out.

  "If I were you," he told the dog, "I'd lay off that woodchuck. You'll have all the woods dug up."

  "He ain't digging after any woodchuck, Hiram."

  "Well, a rabbit, then."

  "Not a rabbit, either. I snuck off yesterday when I was supposed to be beating rugs. That's what Abbie got so sore about."

  Taine grunted, breaking eggs into the skillet.

  "I snuck away and went over to where Towser was. I talked with him and he told me it wasn't a woodchuck or a rabbit. He said it was something else. I pitched in and helped him dig. Looks to me like he found an old tank of some sort buried out there in the woods."

  "Towser wouldn't dig up any tank," protested Taine. "He wouldn't care about anything except a rabbit or a woodchuck."

  "He was working hard," insisted Beasly. "He seemed to be excited."

  "Maybe the woodchuck just dug his hole under this old tank or whatever it might be."

  "Maybe so," Beasly agreed. He fiddled wit
h the radio some more. He got a disk jockey who was pretty terrible.

  Taine shoveled eggs and bacon onto plates and brought them to the table. He poured big cups of coffee and began buttering the toast.

  "Dive in," he said to Beasly.

  "This is good of you, Hiram, to take me in like this. I won't stay no longer than it takes to find a job."

  "Well, I didn't exactly say-"

  "There are times," said Beasly, "when I get to thinking I haven't got a friend and then I remember your ma, how nice she was to me and all-"

  "Oh, all right," said Taine.

  He knew when he was licked.

  He brought the toast and a jar of jam to the table and sat down, beginning to eat.

  "Maybe you got something I could help you with," suggested Beasly, using the back of his hand to wipe egg off his chin.

  "I have a load of furniture out in the driveway. I could use a man to help me get it down into the basement."

  "I'll be glad to do that," said Beasly. "I am good and strong. I don't mind work at all. I just don't like people jawing at me."

  They finished breakfast and then carried the furniture down into the basement. They had some trouble with the Governor Winthrop, for it was an unwieldy thing to handle.

  When they finally horsed it down, Taine stood off and looked at it. The man, he told himself, who slapped paint onto that beautiful cherrywood had a lot to answer for.

  He said to Beasly: "We have to get the paint off that thing there. And we must do it carefully. Use paint remover and a rag wrapped around a spatula and just sort of roll it off. Would you like to try it?"

  "Sure, I would. Say, Hiram, what will we have for lunch?"

  "I don't know," said Taine. "We'll throw something together. Don't tell me you're hungry."

  "Well, it was sort of hard work, getting all that stuff down here."

  "There are cookies in the jar on the kitchen shelf," said Taine. "Go and help yourself."

  When Beasly went upstairs, Taine walked slowly around the basement. The ceiling, he saw, was still intact. Nothing else seemed to be disturbed.

  Maybe that television set and the stove and radio, he thought, was just their way of paying rent to me. And if that were the case, he told himself, whoever they might be, he'd be more than willing to let them stay right on.