The Quy Effect

by Arthur Sellings

  “It’s an open-end contract. So we can’t put in a completion date.”

  “It’s open at both ends. Where’s the starting date?”

  “We can’t commit ourselves to one. But let’s say we pencil in—” he looked at a desk calendar which said May 24—“July ten?”

  “July ten my backside. And let’s say we do the writing in ink. I’ll give you fourteen days to begin it. If you want the contract, that is.” He started to get to his feet.

  The young man stiffened. “Just a moment.” He reached for the phone, changed his mind and got up. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Before you go haring off,” Quy told him, “let me tell you that I don’t go along with this open-end gobbledegook one little bit. There is a closed end to this. Ten thousand pounds.” He cursed himself silently at the mistake in tactics. His brain couldn’t be as agile as it used to be. He added quickly, “Not that there isn’t plenty more after that, if necessary. Ah, when I go into production, that is. But this is all time-rates and overheads. You can get one of your costing clerks to turn up a figure on just how many days that’ll add up to.”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” the other said. “But I’ll see what I can do.” In a slightly more genial tone, he added, “Make yourself at home while I’m gone.”

  Quy looked around him, wondering who could make himself at home in a glass house with metal fittings like this. A robot? But things were going well. He didn’t kid himself for one minute that ten thousand pounds paid the overheads on this one office for many weeks. On the other hand, this was a new branch of the industry, and his a novel order. He picked up a copy of Fortune from a stainless steel magazine rack, and riffled through it while he waited. He stopped at a feature article, headlined “The Boom in the Rocket Industry” and chuckled. Well, that was one boom whose days were numbered.

  The young man came back finally.

  “It’s settled. We can start clearing the ground for this and put a fixed starting date of July first in the contract.”

  “And delivery date?”

  The young man coughed into the tips of his fingers. “We call it terminal cost date.”

  “Call it what you bloody well like.”

  “Terminal cost date,” the other repeated, unperturbed. “August ten.”

  Quy frowned disgustedly, then heaved his shoulders. “All right.”

  “Fine, Mr. Quy.” The other hesitated ever so briefly. “We should, of course, require the full cash payment before we proceed.”

  Quy reached in his jacket pocket and flung down a bundle of notes on the desk. “Count those. I think you’ll find two hundred fifties there.”

  The young man recoiled. “I didn’t mean actual cash.” But he brought himself to pick up the bundle. “I’ll get you a receipt for this, get the dates typed in the contract and we can sign.” He started to leave the room again, then turned.

  “Oh, one small point. We had an enquiry in, a week or two ago, on very similar lines—engineering a molecule very much like this one. From an organization called Organic Research Bureau. You’re not connected with them, are you?”

  “Never heard of them,” said Quy blandly.

  He spent the intervening time in the backyard, rigging up a contraption that looked like a sled. It was about six feet wide, something over two feet wide and made of heavy angle iron. He hired a welding kit from the garage up the road. From a government surplus store he got a petrol engine with a name on it that he recognized as makers of marine engines, an electric generator, Field Model Mark IV, and a transformer. It made a pretty clumsy power unit but it would have to do.

  He welded them into the top of the frame. Underneath it, a foot or so from the ground, he fixed a dural plate through which, heavily sheathed, two cables led from the generator to thick terminals. He walked around it for a day, then went back to the surplus store, got a walkie-talkie set, stripped it down, and made a radio control unit out of it. He welded the receiving half of that, too, onto the frame and connected it up. And covered the lot with a tarpaulin. Finally, he staked the tarpaulin down, linked the stakes to a crude but effective alarm circuit and tucked the bell of the alarm under the stretched tarpaulin. The whole assembly was too weighty, and of too little value—except to him and his hopes—to be worth stealing, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  And then he waited—for that was all there was to do.

  He tried to get down to scraps of projects from the past, anything to keep his mind engaged, but it was no use. His mind kept returning to the suspended project in hand. He started to go to the public library every day, asking Norman to keep an ear cocked—for both the callbox phone and the burglar alarm.

  Neither sounded. It was a long, yawning summer. By the end of July his patience was wearing thin, and he couldn’t stand the sight of any more books. “The blasted human brain’s like a bathtub,” he grumbled, frustration squeezing heresy out of him. “If you add a gallon of facts from the tap, a gallon that’s already there slops over down the overflow. What precious facts am I sending down the waste pipe?”

  Sometime during that hot dry summer a brightly colored card came from Alan from Austria, and a week later one from Yugoslavia. Then, one morning at the beginning of August, the lad himself turned up, his legs brown in brief lederhosen, his face even browner under hair bleached almost white.

  Old Quy was standing by the callbox at the end of the passageway—a favorite haunt of his these past few days. He was too startled at the apparition to notice the look of misery on the boy’s face for a moment. Then it registered.

  “What’s up, son?”

  “I got back from Europe last night to find my exam results waiting for me. I failed.”

  “Oh.”

  “I passed Math easily. I knew I would; I told you. And I got through Physics. But I failed English, French and Chemistry. Oh, I passed Geography. Lord knows how. And as if it mattered.”

  “You can take them again, can’t you? What’s a year at your age?”

  “A bloody sight more than it is at yours!” the boy burst out. Then he bit his lip. “Oh, I’m sorry, AQ, I didn’t mean that.”

  “All right, son. I know what you mean. It isn’t true, though. But come on—I’ve got something I want to show you.”

  He led the way into the yard and fumbled with the stakes. A shrill ringing started. “Well, the burglar alarm works all right, anyway,” he said. He silenced it, then lifted up the tarpaulin.

  The boy gaped at the contraption. Then his eyes went from one component to another. Finally, he squatted down looked under the plate.

  “It’s the machine! That’s where the strip of whaddyamacallit goes in, isn’t it?”

  “That’s a bloody scientific name! Still, it hasn’t got one yet, has it?”

  “Quyite?” the boy essayed. “No, that hasn’t got the right ring to it—not like The Quy Effect. We’ll have to think of something. Wait a minute—you mean you’ve managed to get a sample made?”

  “I’ve got one on order, boy. I’m expecting it any day now.”

  Alan looked at him sadly, suspiciously, remembering school stories that he had given up reading only a few years before. His grandfather wasn’t exactly the build of Billy Bunter, but he was just as much the incurable optimist.

  AQ got the message. “Honest, son. I raised the wind. As soon as the strip arrives we’ll bolt it in and have the maiden flight.”

  “What—here?” The boy looked around him—at the little yard, the houses clustered round.

  “Well, maybe we’d better choose a more isolated spot. The neighbors are too nice to risk what happened the last time happening again. But I think I’ve got it under control. We’ll have to have somewhere where there’s room for all the pressmen, too.”

  “Pressmen? You’re going to show it to the world, then?”

  “Of course. That’s the whole idea.”

  “But isn’t that—well—risky? Oughtn’t you to get it patented first?”

  �
��You can only patent an appliance—not just an idea. Until I get the strip I won’t know whether this will work. I’ve got every confidence, of course, but I still don’t know just what’s going to happen when I switch on. Last time I was dead beat, after working pretty near continuously for several days. I’m not sure just how long I built up the current. I know I was jotting down the details, but my notes went up with everything else.

  “But I tidied up the specification of the molecule. Not enough to alter its superC but enough to render it more stable—I hope. For all the computers and electron microscopes and general paraphernalia of molecular engineering, it’s still a hit-and-miss matter. You’ve got to feel it, more than think it. I’d better qualify that. It’s out in a region where intuition’s as important as reason. Probably that’s why I like this field so much, though I didn’t know much about it before. My few months at Hypertronics were the happiest in my life. I only wish I could have a real go at this molecular tinkering—get right down there in the spaces between the atoms! Where was I? Oh yes.

  “I’m hoping that this time the effect will show itself at a lower voltage level. I think… I hope… it’ll build up gradually, controllably. It’s all hope, I suppose. If it works I’ll have no more difficulty raising money—all the money I need to develop it as a real practical means of locomotion. I’ll have the bastards eating out of my hand yet. If it doesn’t—”

  He hunched his shoulders.

  “It’ll work, AQ. But you’ll want proof. I’ll bring my movie camera along.”

  “That’s an idea, son. But I’ll make sure there’s proof, all right. The press, the TV boys, the newsreel companies, they’ll all be there, you’ll see. I’ll send out proper invitations to all of ’em.”

  “Fine! We’ll drink to it. Come on, I’ll buy you a beer.”

  The old man squinted at him. “Beer now, is it?” He licked his lips. “I won’t say I couldn’t do with one at that.”

  In the Swan, having got two pints of bitter, Alan looked around him. “A bit different from Austria.” He took a swig at his jug and pulled a face. “Bit different from their beer, too. The beer in Salzburg is the best in the world.”

  “You’re an authority now, then?” his grandfather said sarcastically.

  “Well, it’s supposed to be. It’s light and cold—and strong.” He tried his best to look a man of the world, one young brown arm draped over the arm of his chair. “But it didn’t have any effect on me. One of the lads in our party, though—”

  “You watch it,” his grandfather said roughly. “There more important things in the world at your age than guzzling beer.”

  The boy’s man-of-the-world air collapsed. His arm dropped and he sat hunched up in the chair, looking hopelessly in front of him.

  “Why’d you have to remind me?”

  “Sorry, son. Don’t brood over it. You said a year’s more important at your age than it is at mine. At least you can reckon on another year—unless you drink yourself to death.”

  The boy could only raise a feeble smile.

  “How about me?” went on Quy. “I might peg out before I get anywhere with the Quy Effect. I might peg out tonight. Then there won’t be any Quy Effect, because it hasn’t happened as far as anyone knows. Just a handful of notes that won’t mean a thing to anyone else, and a handful of decomposing brain cells.”

  “Grand-dad!” The boy looked shocked out of his depression now. “I’ve never heard you talk like that before. You mustn’t.”

  “It’s a fact.” The old boy seemed to be luxuriating in the morbid speculation now. “And, in a few years’ time, or a month’s time, somebody else will discover it and it’ll be known as the Petrov Effect or the Wang-Fu Field. And somewhere, rotting in the stainless steel vaults of Biotechnics Limited, will be a specification and a strip of stuff that nobody came to collect and that nobody there will have the slightest clue to the use of.”

  He sighed a rumbling sigh.

  Alan clapped his hands over his ears. “Stop!” A face looked up at the other end of the bar. More quietly, but insistently, “You mustn’t talk like that.”

  The old boy grinned. “Well then, stop moaning about your own lot, boy. Self-pity is sterile. I suppose I’ve done my share of it at times—not without reason, probably—but to hell with it! I know competition’s fierce at your age. But you can put next year to good use. Don’t just look at it as making up lost ground, or getting the required mark, but getting a better understanding of the subject. A better base, a better springboard. Even if it has taken you a year longer.”

  The boy winced. “Dad said more or less the same thing—after he’d cooled down. But he was hopping mad. And disappointed. He wants me to join his department at the Ministry. It’s his dream, I know.”

  “And not yours?”

  “Some dream!” His voice was withering.

  “Hey—don’t lose all perspective.”

  “Well, what do you think about dad’s work? It’s all right, you don’t have to tell me.”

  “It could be a good job for you. If you’re good at Math. That was never my strong point.”

  The boy looked at him with an intensely puzzled expression on his face. “I know what you think of Ministries and government departments. And I know you don’t get on with dad. But—how can you be against his work and yet recommend it for me?”

  The old man took a swig of his beer before answering. And even then he didn’t immediately.

  “I probably couldn’t answer that if I wanted to,” he said finally. “I know I wasn’t much of a father to your father. Maybe it’s guilt. But I’m not going to make the same mistake twice. I’ll give you advice—for what it’s worth—but I’m not going against your father’s wishes—at least, as far as you’re concerned. Transference comes into this. He wanted to follow in my footsteps. Perhaps that was why I was brusque with him, because I knew that my footsteps led through a lot of struggle and misery at times, and I wouldn’t want my son to have to go through it all. Perhaps I realized that he wasn’t as tough as me. I could do that for him, at least. Perhaps the poor b—” he stopped, and coughed—“perhaps he feels that it was somehow his fault. It wasn’t. Anyway he wants to make it good in you. And I want to make it good, if I can, in you. Nobody’s made the same, and there aren’t many made the same way as me—thank God. So, if your father wants you to join him—join him, unless you’ve got something else in mind.”

  “I haven’t—yet. Oh, it’s so blasted difficult!”

  “I know, son. But things will sort themselves out.”

  “It isn’t working with the old man. It’s—well—I’m against what he does. He’s in weapons.”

  “I see. You’re against weapons, then?”

  “I’m against the kind of weapons we’ve got today. Isn’t everyone?”

  “Everyone’s against death, too. We live in a complex world. So the weapons are bound to be complex.”

  “Complex?” The boy sneered. “Inhuman, you mean. It’s not war any more. It’s destruction. I’m not a pacifist—at least, I don’t think I am. If somebody punches me on the nose, I’ll punch ’em back, and bloody quick. War might have been honorable once, but it isn’t now. Joining the old man’s department would be as bad as putting a uniform on.”

  The old man sighed. It was almost to himself that he said, “The world is complex. So bloody complex that in one lifetime you’ve got to clear your own path and not be distracted.”

  “What—by human feelings? Is that what you mean? Principles, everything?”

  “Oh, can it, son. Or I’ll hit you on the nose right now. There’s a pernickety strain in the Quy family. Have another drink.” Quy got to his feet.

  “I’ll get them, AQ.”

  His grandfather wrenched his jug from him. “What, do you think I’m an old cripple, or something?”

  When he got back from the bar, his grandson had got over his depression, at least for the time being.

  “Cheers, AQ.” He looked up from his be
er and said, suddenly, “Why do you call yourself Kwye and my father pronounces it Key?”

  “You call yourself Key, too, don’t you?”

  “Only because he does, because I’ve always known that that was the way it was pronounced.”

  “Well, that’s why I do my way.” Quy took a swig at his jug. “You still haven’t got out of a child’s habit of asking questions you know the answers to. Your father regards me as something of an embarrassment to him. I suppose I have been at times. It wouldn’t be so bad for him if our name was Smith and Jones, there’d be nothing to connect us. But with an unusual name like ours, it’s different. Especially as our paths have come close—not to mention crossing—several times since he started to make his own career.”

  “He says it’s an old French name. He says that my great-great-great-grandfather fought in the American War of Independence with Lafayette.”

  “So he did, boy. Well, it was one more great, I think. And with implies a rather more exalted rank.” He chuckled. “What—the Comte de Quy?” He pronounced it the French way himself now. “No, he was a private soldier, son of a peasant. He settled in the States when the war was over. His grandson, my grandfather, was of less heroic mould. He came to England to dodge the Civil War draft. Set up as a pastry cook in Liverpool and built up a prosperous business—which my father promptly drank into bankruptcy.”

  “That’s not quite the same way I heard it from my father.”

  “Ach, what are we talking about the past for, anyway? Heredity’s bunk. That’s what Henry Ford said about history. It’s nurture, not nature.”

  “But how about the families that several generations made names for themselves? Like—well, the Huxleys?”

  The old man snorted. “That could prove nurture as easily as nature. Geniuses can have idiot children and idiots occasionally have geniuses. A man’s what he is.” He downed his beer. “You’re on your own. So you get off home now and start studying. I’m going to stop and have another one.”

  The boy got up reluctantly.

  “But—you will let me know as soon as the… you know… arrives.”