The Widget.
Grave and clear-eyed, and sometimes so surprisingly adult, and all the while such a kid, such a baby, so little.
Why not the Widget? The thought came strongly—why not any of them? Didn’t the oscilloscope say that I could negate the beam? I could start with the gain away down out of sight, and increase it slowly, micrometrically, with a vernier. Weren’t the chances in my favor?
I was filled then with self-disgust. I didn’t know enough. Surely I could have learned enough about the physiology of the mind to be able to judge what would happen, have some small guide—even increase the odds in my favor, large as they were.
This was silly. Of course they’d be all right, no matter which one I treated first. But—failure. Any failure. Carole with dementia praecox. The Widget a cretin. Marie a paranoid. Henry, drooling and having to be fed.
Henry. He never did look his age, and asleep he looked like a nine-year-old—a chubby nine-year-old with a two-day beard.
The decision came smoothly and without effort. I just suddenly knew it would be Henry.
“Come on, boy. C’mon, old hawss.” I got him under the armpits and heaved him up. He lolled against me, got his feet under him and walked blearily as I led him. I took him out into the beauty parlor and said “Siddown, you,” and grinned as I shoved his chest, and sat him in the chair. That’s when he really woke up.
“What’sa big idea? In the chair—hey! Godfrey! What are you doing? You dope, the beam’s going to—”
He began to struggle. He said, “You’ve gone crazy, just the way we’re all going to go. Wickersham’s dead, you fool; you don’t have to do this.” After that he didn’t talk. He fought. Once he got out of the chair. I didn’t hit him until I had him back in it, although he kicked me. When I had him in the chair again I brought up the heel of my hand and caught him under the chin with it. It closed his mouth with an astonishingly loud snap, as his teeth clicked together. His head went so far back against the rest that I thought I had broken his neck. I hit him very hard. I backed off from him, sobbing for breath, and when I had some air, I went back and straightened him out. He moved his head a little and moaned, and blood came from his mouth, so I knew he was all right although he must have bitten his tongue.
I limped back into the shop and threw the master switch on the projector. The silly little hair drier motor began to whine like wind around eaves.
I watched the ’scope, and when the wave form of the beam was fully formed, I switched in the plate voltage of the inverter, and started to crank up the gain. It was a feather-touch, a very little at a time. I had my hand braced solidly on the bench top, with my thumb and forefinger just touching the knob; and I brought up the gain only until the first effects got noticeable on the shimmering screen. Then I cut the master switch and ran out to Henry.
He seemed to be asleep, quite normally asleep, and very happy. His smile was all there more cherubic because his lower lip had started to swell, and blood ran freely out of the corner of his mouth. I shook him, and he awakened instantly, opened his eyes, grinned and then winced.
“Godfrey … what hap—” He put his hand to his mouth and stared at the blood on his fingers, and then at me, and fright grew in his eyes. He leaped to his feet and stared around him. “Godfrey! Where are we? What are we doing here? What’s happened to me? Is this a hospit—No; it couldn’t be. Is it morning?”
He shuddered, and I had to guide him back into the chair as his legs started to tremble with weakness. He went back into the chair without the slightest recognition of its being anything but a chair. The blood on his chin looked very red as the weakness bleached his face. I found a handkerchief and wiped it. It didn’t do much good.
“What’s the last thing you remember? I’ll tell you everything I can from then on.”
“Remember? I can’t.… I was—” He leaned forward and put his forehead on his hands. He spat, and grunted. “I was walking down the back road, going to your place. Was I hit by a car?”
“What had happened before you left your house? Do you remember?”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Marie … wouldn’t stop talking about the … time at the Altair when I hit … when she thinks I—”
“Yes boy. I gotcha. I can tell you everything. One more question. Where’s Wickersham?”
“Hm-m-m? Search me. The skunk. Down at the lab, most likely. Why?”
I realized I had been holding my breath, and let it out gratefully.
I had succeeded, and I had failed. My out-of-phase component wiped out the beam effect. It had also wiped out everything else—but completely. Like a refinement on the electric-shock treatment. Sweat ran down behind my ears as I thought of what might have happened if I had not used such a feather-touch on the gain of the inverter. How, without experimentation, could you judge the relative resistance of various minds? Would a woman’s mind resist less, or more? If less, the danger was too great; the effective increase might be geometric, or exponential. If more, how judge the increase? My choice was, if anything, worse than it had been before. And yet—what could be worse than a loved one slowly going mad before your eyes? It would take so long.
I sat down on the floor, and Henry slumped in the chair, occasionally touching his swollen lip tenderly, and I told him everything that had happened. It was an astonishing thing for him, and for me too, to see his amazement at our burglarization of the premises, and my account of his violent contention that Wickersham was dead.
When I had quite finished, Henry said, “Well, we’ll have to try it again.”
“On whom?”
“Me, of course. Who else?”
“Henry, you’re crazy! I can’t do that to you any more!”
“Why not? You had reasons for choosing me in the first place; they still apply.”
“The most important one doesn’t—you weren’t responsible enough to control the experiment, because of your fixation that the Wick was dead, and that therefore the experiment was unnecessary.”
“Godfrey,” said Henry, grinning with the part of his mouth he could still move, “you big lug, how am I going to handle you if you get as violent as I did?”
“That’s right,” I said.
I didn’t decide, though, for all the time that we spent in the shop, going over circuit diagrams, our tired minds refused to help us out much.
“We’ve got to hit it from another angle,” signed Henry after a particularly circular argument involving current versus impedance versus capacitance. “If we only knew something about the mind, something that would give us a hint as to what frequency does what to which part of the brain, to yield a clear, undistorted hallucination like what we’re faced with.”
“And then we’d know what we could do to distort it. Yeah.” “Distort it,” I said again.
Suddenly I was on my feet and a banshee yell was ricocheting off the walls. “For Heaven’s sake, Godfrey,” Henry said startled. “Don’t do that! Remember the neighbors!”
“That’s it!” I chortled. “That’s it! Distortion. Distortion, you idiot!”
“Now wait. I think I—Distortion?”
“Of course!” I grabbed his arm and hurried him over to the bench, and started hauling out coils and sockets and resistors from the racks. “Distortion’s much easier to handle than output! I can blend in any aberration to that wave form—from this to that, from now till then! That’s our cure: it’s got to be. Don’t you see? The hallucination is induced by a wave—and its result is a picture with no distortion whatsoever. Not even facts can distort it. While it lasts, it is clean, consistent, flawless. It’s perfection—something we’re not geared to take. Hence the sense of loss when it’s gone, and the violent subconscious drive to rationalize it or to get it back. Distort the wave ever so slightly, and it’s no longer perfect. It becomes more real, but you can live with it.”
“Well, I will be … but how will you know how to distort it? I mean, what part of the wave should you distort?”
“It
doesn’t matter, don’t you see? The very nature of perfection dictates that. It doesn’t matter where it’s spoiled—it’s still spoiled!”
Henry’s eyes glowed. “And if you distort just a little more, it’ll get fuzzy around the edges. Out of focus. It will be a … a—”
“A dream! Of course, and can be disposed of as such. Let’s go, muscles; I think we’ve got it!”
I rigged up a simple oscillator circuit and hooked it to the oscilloscope. I got a spot on the screen and, carefully working the horizontal and vertical deflectors, got a nearly perfect ring.
“Now watch,” I said. I turned up the gain. The ring expanded. I turned it up more—a little more—suddenly the edge of the ring quivered, zigzagged, and spread out, throwing out a little mutating finger of fluorescence. “There she broke.” I checked with the vacuum-tube voltmeter, and noted the reading. “That’s about the effect we want, on the overall wave structure of that blasted beam.”
“Can do?”
“Can do,” I said, “and a darned sight easier than the inversion.”
In a very short while, with the aid of the little spot welder, we had the rig set up and ready to roll. “It’s safer,” I said. “Bound to be. There’s so much less to be done to get the effect.”
“Here I go,” said Henry, and started toward the chair.
“Now wait. You know I’ve got to give you a shot of the original beam first.” “Why sure. How else you going to cure me if I don’t sicken first?”
He went out and sat down. “Shoot the sherbet to me, Herbert,” he said languidly.
I went to the door of the little shop. “Henry, I can’t.”
He reared up and peered around at me. “You doubtful about whether I should do this?”
“Yes!”
“Well, I’m not. You’re of two minds; one says I shouldn’t, one says I should. I got one only, says I should. You’re outnumbered two to one.” He turned his back again, put his head against the rest, and closed his eyes.
I swore violently. But what can you do with a guy like that? Finding it a little difficult to see, I flipped on the master switch. The drier motor began to moan. It annoyed me more than I like to admit. I had meant to short it out half a dozen times, but never got around to it.
Henry didn’t move and when I got out to him he was asleep. I went back and opened the switch. I dawdled. I was frankly afraid of what might happen to him. When I got out again he hadn’t moved. He was sitting with his eyes open, smiling happily at the far wall. When he saw me he jumped up and took my hand warmly. “Well, you did it!”
“Did what?” I asked stupidly.
“I’m cured! I feel fine! It worked, didn’t it?”
I opened my mouth to tell him exactly what stage he was in, but decided not to. “I have to give you the ‘clincher’ shot,” I said instead.
“What’s that?”
“Why the first one cures you; the second makes it stick,” I explained, hoping earnestly that he wouldn’t start to think about it.
“Oh,” he said, leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.
I nosed into the ’scope and threw up my circle. I figured that was easier to watch than that burbled-up beam wave. I threw in the beam projector, and after it was well warm, started to move in with the distortion. I didn’t dare put in too much. Maybe the brain would be insensitive to an over-distorted wave: and then again maybe Henry’d spend the rest of his life with Lobblies following him. When the upper edge of the circle began to flatten a little, I stopped and sweated a while, and gradually eased it in until the ring broke. Then I cut everything, and, frantic with worry, ran to Henry.
He lay very still. I called him softly and he didn’t move. I tentatively touched his shoulder. To my infinite relief his eyes opened and he grinned thickly at me through his swollen lips.
“Well, did it work?”
“What?” I asked tentatively.
“The cure.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and yawned and stretched. “I had a dream about … Godfrey, what was my fixation that time?”
“I think you’re cured,” I said happily. “What was your dream?”
“Well, a fuzzy sort of something about being cured. But of course, if I was going to dream at all, that would be the logical thing to dream about.”
“Why?”
“Because it was uppermost in my mind. The most important thing.”
“That was your fixation—that you were cured. The logical thing to have a fixation about. I had to lie to you to make you take the cure. You believed you were cured as soon as you were ‘sick’!”
And then I phoned.
I made sure the phone was clear, and then hurriedly dialed. The phone barely had a chance to ring before Carole answered.
“Carole, darling!”
“Oh Godfrey—are you all right, sweetheart?”
“Hungry and sleepy and tired. I love you. We’ve whipped it! We’ve fixed it! You’ll be all right, dear. Listen. I have to get off this phone but quick. Collect Marie and the Widget and get down to Francy’s fast like crazy.”
“Oh, darling—all right. Right away, soon’s I can get a cab. Marie’s here. She’s been wanting to get the police all night. I wouldn’t let her.”
“Bless you! ’Bye!” I hung up. Henry was practically jumping up and down in his impatience to get on the phone and talk to Marie, but I put it behind me. “No you don’t. You’d get to billing and cooing over the phone and Wickersham would ring in on you. We’ve got to get them taken care of first.”
We gathered up our tools and I took them out to the car: I was no Mr. America, but Henry looked like a meat-scrap. I took the precaution to go in and out through the window after nullifying the U.V. I wasn’t going to issue any invitation to Brother Wickersham, if he didn’t already know we were here, which was doubtful.
But when the girls arrived, I felt I could forget about that. They came running up the path from a taxi, the Widget winning by seven lengths. I caught her up and hugged her till she grunted, and then slung her over one shoulder while I hugged Carole. I didn’t look to see what passed between Marie and Henry, but it must have been something similar.
We trooped into the beauty shop. “Marie first,” I said. “You’ve earned it, Henry.”
“Aha!” grinned Henry. “It’s a privilege now!”
“I’m sure of my stuff now. Come along, Carole, Widge!” I led them into the little laboratory. They both watched with some fascination as I switched on the heaters.
“O.K., Godfrey,” Henry’s voice floated in. I switched on.
“Watch the ring,” I said to Carole. “When it breaks a little at the edge, Marie will forget that that thing happened. I mean, she’ll remember it didn’t happen. I mean—”
“I know, dear.” She sighed.
“Hm-m-m! Why the sigh?”
“I was just thinking—she has a real something to lose. So has the Widget. Oh, I’m sorry, darling. I didn’t mean to—”
“Skip it. You’ll get a treatment. I have the littlest hunch why you reacted the way you did to this thing … oh, I can’t explain it all now, beloved, but I will. In a roundabout and rather agonizing way, I’ve been paid a wonderful compliment.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
“Daddy, where’s the cormium hemlet?”
“Busted, finished, and fixed for good,” I said. “Hey you. Your Daddy did something about it. That suit you?”
She looked me over. “S’about time.”
“Widget!” said Carole.
“Mummy, every time you take to cryin’ around the place, I’m gonna be mad at him. Mostly I don’t know why, but I knew men cause womenses tears alla time.”
“Are you precocious, my darling daughter, or are you quoting Mrs. Wilton?”
“Mrs. Wilton,” said the Widget. She considered for a moment, and then said, “Maybe I’m precocious, too.”
Just
then the nictating ring on the oscilloscope’s screen wobbled and frayed at one edge. I cut the master switch. “Cut!” I called.
There wasn’t a sound from the beauty shop. I ran out there, did a quick pivot and came back. “Marie and Henry,” I said around the tongue in my cheek, “seem to appreciate each other again.” Carole smiled. It seemed I had been waiting a long time for that smile. I kissed her. “Go on out there now. Do what Henry tells you. When you come back here, I dare you tell me you’re frightened of anything.”
Completely trusting, she went out. I held on to the child when she tried to follow.
“O.K.!” called Henry after a minute.
“What’s Mummy doing?”
“She’s taking a two-minute nap where the helmet used to be,” I said as I threw the switches.
“Kin I?”
“Are you good?”
“Well … I dunno. I busted your shaving mug.”
“Oh-oh.”
“But then I took care of Mummy when you stayed out all night.”
“What did you do?”
“I told her you was wonderful.”
“You did? Bless your little heart!”
“Shucks. It’s no more than you tell her yourself.”
“Think we have her fooled, Widget?” I asked, laughing.
“We wouldn’t if she thought how bad we were instead of how good we are.”
“Now there you have something.”
“Cut it,” Henry called.
“Now you beat it. G’wan; scat, now!”
“Aw. Just ’Cause you and Mummy’s going to get mushy.”
And we did. One look at those unclouded eyes, and I knew that she was all right again.
“A dream, darling,” she murmured when I let her. “A silly dream. And I can’t even remember what it was about. It was a dream that was—just like all of us, you, and me, and the Widget. I can’t think why it was so bad.”
“I know, now,” I whispered. “Tell you later.”
I went to work on the Widget’s treatment, and when I got Henry’s all clear, I went out there with Carole. The child was fast asleep, smiling. Carole leaned over and kissed her.
Killdozer! Page 32