Over dessert I broke in. By then they were unselfconsciously holding hands. “Look,” I said, “why don’t you two go on and do the town? Julio, I’ll be at the Madison Park Hotel.” I scribbled the address and gave it to him. “And I’ll get a room for you. Have fun and reel in any time.” I rapped his knee. He looked down and I slipped him four twenties. I didn’t know whether he had money on him or not, but anything extra the boy could use he had coming to him.
“Swell,” he said. “Thanks.” And looked shame-faced while I looked paternal.
I had been watching a young man who was moodily eating alone in a corner, reading a paper. He was about Julio’s height and build and he wore a sports jacket much like Julio’s. And the street was pretty dark outside.
The young man got up moodily and headed for the cashier’s table. “Gotta go,” I said. “Have fun.”
I went out of the restaurant right behind the young man and walked as close behind him as I dared, hoping we were being followed.
After a block and a half of this, he turned on me and snarled: “Wadda you, mister? A wolf? Beat it I”
“Okay,” I said mildly, and turned and walked the other way. Higgins and Dalhousie were standing there, flat-footed and openmouthed. They sprinted back to the Porto Bello, and I followed them. But Julio and Rosa had already left.
“Tough, fellows,” I said to them as they stood in the doorway. They looked as if they wanted to murder me. “He won’t get into any trouble,” I said. “He’s just going out with his girl.”
Dalhousie made a strangled noise and told Higgins: “Cruise around the neighborhood. See if you can pick them up. I’ll follow Vilchek.” He wouldn’t talk to me. I shrugged and got a cab and went to the Madison Park Hotel, a pleasantly unfashionable old place with big rooms where I stay when business brings me to New York. They had a couple of adjoining singles; I took one in my own name and the other for Gomez.
I wandered around the neighborhood for a while and had a couple of beers in one of the ultra-Irish bars on Third Avenue. After a pleasant argument with a gent who thought the Russians didn’t have any atomic bombs and faked their demonstrations and that we ought to blow up their industrial cities tomorrow at dawn, I went back to the hotel.
I didn’t get to sleep easily. The citizen who didn’t believe Russia could maul the United States pretty badly or at all had started me thinking again—all kinds of ugly thoughts. Dr. Mines who had turned into a shrunken old man at the mention of applying Gomez’ Work. The look on the boy’s face. My layman’s knowledge that present-day “atomic energy ” taps only the smallest fragment of the energy locked up in the atom. My layman’s knowledge that once genius has broken a trail in science, mediocrity can follow the trail.
But I slept at last, for three hours.
At four-fifteen A.M. according to my watch the telephone rang long and hard. There was some switchboard and long-distance-operator mumbo-jumbo and then Julio’s gleeful voice: “Beel! Congratulate us. We got marriage!”
“Married,” I said fuzzily. “You got married, not marriage. How’s that again!”
“We got married. Me and Rosa. We get on the train, the taxi driver takes us to justice of peace, we got married, we go to hotel here.”
“Congratulations,” I said, waking up. “Lots of congratulations. But you’re under age, there’s a waiting period—”
“Not in this state,” he chuckled. “Here is no waiting periods and here I have twenty-one years if I say so.”
“Well,” I said. “Lots of congratulations, Julio. And tell Rosa she’s got herself a good boy.”
“Thanks, Beel,” he said shyly. “I call you so you don’t worry when I don’t come in tonight. I think I come in with Rosa tomorrow so we tell her mama and my mama and papa. I call you at the hotel, I still have the piece of paper.”
“Okay, Julio. All the best. Don’t worry about a thing.” I hung up, chuckling, and went right back to sleep.
Well, sir, it happened again.
I was shaken out of my sleep by the strong, skinny hand of Admiral MacDonald. It was seven-thirty and a bright New York morning. Dalhousie had pulled a blank canvassing the neighborhood for Gomez, got panicky and bucked it up to higher headquarters.
“Where is he?” the Admiral rasped.
“On his way here with his bride of one night,” I said. “He slipped over a couple of state lines and got married.”
“By God,” the admiral said, “we’ve got to do something about this. I’m going to have him drafted and assigned to special duty. This is the last time—”
“Look,” I said. “You’ve got to stop treating him like a chesspiece. You’ve got duty-honor-country on the brain and thank God for that. Somebody has to; it’s your profession. But can’t you get it through your head that Gomez is a kid and that you’re wrecking his life by forcing him to grind out science like a machine? And I’m just a stupe of a layman, but have you professionals worried once about digging too deep and blowing up the whole shebag?”
He gave me a piercing look and said nothing.
I dressed and had breakfast sent up. The admiral, Dalhousie and I waited grimly until noon, and then Gomez phoned up.
“Come on up, Julio,” I said tiredly.
He breezed in with his blushing bride on his arm. The admiral rose automatically as she entered, and immediately began tongue-lashing the boy. He spoke more in sorrow than in anger. He made it clear that Gomez wasn’t treating his country right. That he had a great talent and it belonged to the United States. That his behavior had been irresponsible. That Gomez would have to come to heel and realize that his wishes weren’t the most important thing in his life. That he could and would be drafted if there were any more such escapades.
“As a starter, Mr. Gomez,” the admiral snapped, “I want you to set down, immediately, the enfieldment matrices you have developed. I consider it almost criminal of you to arrogantly and carelessly trust to your memory alone matters of such vital importance. Here!” He thrust pencil and paper at the boy, who stood, drooping and disconsolate. Little Rosa was near crying. She didn’t have the ghost of a notion as to what it was about.
Gomez took the pencil and paper and sat down at the writing table silently. I took Rosa by the arm. She was trembling. “It’s all right,” I said. “They can’t do a thing to him.” The admiral glared briefly at me and then returned his gaze to Gomez.
The boy made a couple of tentative marks. Then his eyes went wide and he clutched his hair. “¡Dios mio!” he said. “Esta perdido! Olvidado!”
Which means: “My God, it’s lost! Forgotten!
The admiral turned white beneath his tan. “Now, boy,” he said slowly and soothingly. “I didn’t mean to scare you. You just relax and collect yourself. Of course you haven’t forgotten, not with that memory of yours. Start with something easy. Write down a general biquadratic equation, say.”
Gomez just looked at him. After a long pause he said in a strangled voice: “No puedo. I can’t. It too I forget. I don’t think of the math or physics at all since—” He looked at Rosa and turned a little red. She smiled shyly and looked at her shoes.
“That is it,” Gomez said hoarsely. “Not since then. Always before in the back of my head is the math, but not since then.”
“My God,” the admiral said softly. “Can such a thing happen?” He reached for the phone.
He found out that such things can happen.
Julio went back to Spanish Harlem and bought a piece of the Porto Bello with his savings. I went back to the paper and bought a car with my savings. MacDonald never cleared the story, so the Sunday editor had the satisfaction of bulldozing an admiral, but didn’t get his exclusive.
Julio and Rosa sent me a card eventually announcing the birth of their first-born: a six-pound boy, Francisco, named after Julio’s father. I saved the card and when a New York assignment came my way—it was the National Association of Dry Goods Wholesalers; dry goods are important in our town—I dropped up to see them.
Julio was a little more mature and a little more prosperous. Rosa— alas!—was already putting on weight, but she was still a pretty thing and devoted to her man. The baby was a honey-skinned little wiggler. It was nice to see all of them together, happy with their lot.
Julio insisted that he’d cook arroz con polio for me, as on the night I practically threw him into Rosa’s arms, but he’d have to shop for the stuff. I went along.
In the corner grocery he ordered the rice, the chicken, the garbanzos, the peppers and, swept along by the enthusiasm that hits husbands in groceries, about fifty other things that he thought would be nice to have in the pantry.
The creaking old grocer scribbled down the prices on a shopping bag and began painfully to add them up while Julio was telling me how well the Porto Bello was doing and how they were thinking of renting the adjoining store.
“Seventeen dollars, forty-two cents,” the grocer said at last.
Julio flicked one glance at the shopping bag and the upsidedown figures. “Should be seventeen thirty-nine,” he said reprovingly. “Add up again.”
The grocer painfully added up again and said. “Is seventeen thirty-nine. Sorry.” He began to pack the groceries into the bag.
“Hey,” I said.
We didn’t discuss it then or ever. Julio just said: “Don’t tell, Beel.” And winked.
Copyright 1954 by C.M. Kornbluth.
Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents,
Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.
THE [WIDGET], THE [WADGET], AND BOFF
by Theodore Sturgeon
THROUGHOUT THE CONTINUUM TIN as we know it (and a good deal more, as we don’t know it) there are cultures that fly and cultures that swim; there are boron folk and fluorine fellowships, cupro-coprophages and (roughly speaking) immaterial life forms which swim and swirl around each other in space like so many pelagic shards of metaphysics. And some organize into super-entities like a beehive or a slime-mold so that they live plurally to become singular, and some have even more singular ideas of plurality.
Now, no matter how an organized culture of intelligent beings is put together or where, regardless of what it’s made of or how it lives, there is one thing all cultures have in common, and it is the most obvious of traits. There are as many names for it as there are cultures, of course, but in all it works the same way—the same way the inner ear functions (with its contributory synapses) in a human being when he steps on Junior’s roller skate. He doesn’t think about how far away the wall is, some wires or your wife, or in which direction: he grabs, and, more often than not, he gets—accurately and without analysis. Just so does an individual reflexively adjust when imbalanced in his sociocultural matrix: he experiences the reflex of reflexes, a thing as large as the legendary view afforded a drowning man of his entire past, in a single illuminated instant wherein the mind moves, as it were, at right angles to time and travels high and far for its survey.
And this is true of every culture everywhere, the cosmos over. So obvious and necessary a thing is seldom examined: but it was once, by a culture which called this superreflex “Synapse Beta sub Sixteen.”
What came out of the calculator surprised them. They were, after all, expecting an answer.
Human eyes would never have recognized the device for what it was. Its memory bank was an atomic cloud, each particle of which was sealed away from the others by a self-sustaining envelope of force. Subtle differences in nuclei, in probability shells, and in internal tensions were the coding, and fields of almost infinite variability were used to call up the particles in the desired combinations. These were channeled in a way beyond description in earthly mathematics, detected by a principle as yet unknown to us, and translated into language (or, more accurately, an analog of what we understand as language). Since this happened so far away, temporally, spatially, and culturally, proper nouns are hardly proper; it suffices to say that it yielded results, in this particular setting, which were surprising. These were correlated into a report, the gist of which was this:
Prognosis positive, or prognosis negative, depending upon presence or absence of Synapse Beta Sub Sixteen.
The pertinent catalog listed the synapse in question as “indetectible except by field survey.” Therefore an expedition was sent.
All of which may seem fairly remote until one realizes that the prognosis was being drawn for that youthful and dangerous aggregate of bubbling yeasts called “human culture,” and that when the term “prognosis negative” was used it meant finis, the end, zero, ne plus ultra altogether.
It must be understood that the possessors of the calculator, the personnel of the expedition to Earth, were not Watchers in the Sky and Arbiters of Our Fate. Living in our midst, here and now, is a man who occupies himself with the weight-gain of amebae from their natal instant to the moment they fission. There is a man who, having produced neurosis in cats, turns them into alcoholics for study. Someone has at long last settled the matter of the camel’s capacity for, and retention of, water. People like these are innocent of designs on the destinies of all amebae, cats, camels and cultures; there are simply certain things they want to know.
This is the case no matter how unusual, elaborate, or ingenious their methods might be. So—an expedition came here for information.
EXCERPT FROM FIELD EXPEDITION [NOTEBOOK][1]. [VOLUME] ONE CONCLUSION. . . . to restate the obvious, [we] have been on Earth long enough and more than long enough to have discovered anything and everything [we] [wished] about any [sensible-predictable-readable] culture anywhere. This one, however, is quite beyond [understanding-accounting for]. At first sight, [one] was tempted to conclude immediately that it possesses the Synapse, because no previously known culture has advanced to this degree without it, ergo . . . And then [we] checked it with [our] [instruments] [!!!] [Our] [gimmick] and our [kickshaw] gave [us] absolutely negative readings, so [we] activated a high-sensitivity [snivvy] and got results which approximate nonsense: the Synapse is scattered through the population randomly, here non-existent or dormant, there in brief full activity at [unheard-of] high levels. [I] thought [Smith] would go [out of][his] mind] and as for [myself], [I] had a crippling attack of the [ ]s at the very concept. More for [our] own protection than for the furtherance of the Expedition, [we] submitted all our data to [our] [ship]’s [computer] and got what appeared to be even further nonsense: the conclusion that this species possesses the Synapse but to all intents and purposes does not use it.
How can a species possess Synapse Beta sub Sixteen and not use it? Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense!
So complex and contradictory are [our] data that [we] can only fall back on a microcosmic analysis and proceed by its guidance. [We] shall therefore isolate a group of specimens under [laboratory] control, even though it means using a [miserable] [primitive] [battery]-powered [wadget]. [We]’ll put our new-model [widget] on the job, too. [We]’ve had enough of this [uncanny, uncomfortable] feeling of standing in the presence of [apology-for-obscenity] paradox.
CHAPTER ONE
The town was old enough to have slums, large enough to have no specific “tracks” with a right and a wrong side. Its nature was such that a boarding house could, without being unusual, contain such varied rungs on the social ladder as a young, widowed night-club hostess and her three-year-old son; a very good vocational guidance expert; a young law clerk; the librarian from the high school; and a stage-struck maiden from a very small small town. They said Sam Bittelman, who nominally owned and operated the boarding house, could have been an engineer, and if he had been, a marine architect as well, but instead he had never risen higher than shop foreman. Whether this constituted failure or success is speculative; apply to a chief petty officer of top sergeant who won’t accept a commission, and to the president of your local bank, and take your pick of their arguments. It probably never occurred to Sam to examine the matter. He had other things to amuse him. Tolerant, curious, intensely alive, old Sam had appare
ntly never retired from anything but his job at the shipyards back east.
He in turn was owned and operated by his wife whom everyone called “Bitty” arid who possessed the harshest countenance and the most acid idiom ever found in a charter member of the Suckers for Sick Kittens and Sob Stories Society. Between them they took care of their roomers in that special way possible only in boarding houses which feature a big dining table arid a place set for everyone. Such places are less than a family, or more if you value your freedom. They are more than a hotel, or less if you like formality. To Mary Haunt, who claimed to be twenty-two and lied, the place was the most forgettable and soon-to-be-forgotten of stepping stones; to Robin it was home and more: it was the world and the universe, an environment as ubiquitous, unnoticed, and unquestioned as the water around a fish; but Robin would, of course, feel differently later. He was only three. The only other one of the Bittelman’s boarders who breathed what was uniquely the Bittelman quality as if it were air was Phil Halvorsen, a thoughtful young man in the vocational guidance field, whose mind was on food and housing only when they annoyed him, and since the Bittelmans made him quite-comfortable, in effect they were invisible. Reta Schmidt appreciated the Bittelmans for a number of things, prime among which was the lengths to which her dollar went with them, for Miss Schmidt’s employers were a Board of Education. Mr. Anthony O’Banion permitted himself a genuine admiration of almost nothing in these parts. So it remained for Sue Martin to be the only one in the place who respected and admired them, right from the start, with something approaching their due. Sue was Robin’s widowed mother and worked in a night club as hostess and sometime entertainer. She had done, in the past, both better and worse. She still might do better for herself, but only that which would be worse for Robin. The Bittelmans were her godsend. Robin adored them,-and the only thing they would not, do for him was to spoil him. The Bittelmans were there to give him breakfast in the mornings, to dress him when he went out to play, to watch over him and keep him amused and content until Sue rose at u. The rest of the day was for Sue and Robin together, right up to his bedtime, when she tucked him in and storied him to sleep. And when she left for work at 9 P.M.., the Bittelmans were there, safe and certain, ready and willing to cope with anything from a bladder to a blaze. They were like insurance and fire extinguishers, hardly ever used but comforting by their presence. So she valued them . . . but then, Sue Martin was different from most people. So was Robin; however, this is a truism when speaking of three-year-olds.
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