The Quy Effect

by Arthur Sellings

  Maggie looked under the drapes, then came back, looking sad. “The Chaim Weizmann.”

  “I know, Maggie. I’m sorry. It’s not the Maggie Wentworth. I wanted that. But this is a small proud country. They made this all possible. I couldn’t say no. Even though, if it hadn’t been for you, I—”

  He broke off, looking miserable. Then a smile broke over his face. “But there’s something I can name after you. Come on.”

  “But where are we going?”

  “Back to town and quickly.”

  Eighteen

  The Cadillac pulled up at a large white building in the center of Tel-Aviv.

  “What’s this place?” Maggie asked.

  “The Municipal Center. Come on, I’m going to take you up on an offer.”

  “You mean… Ado, is this the old heart breaker? Where’s the romance?”

  “That can come after, love.”

  “No, it can’t. I don’t care however big the event may be tomorrow, you’re not rushing me into marriage like this in a strange country. I’m not having my head shaved for you or anyone else.”

  “Come off it, Maggie, you know enough Jewish people to know that’s not true. Only one very tiny orthodox sect does that.”

  “Well, whatever they do.”

  “It’ll be a civil ceremony. Just a straightforward—”

  Maggie had found the door catch. She was out of the car before he could stop her.

  He stopped only to tell the driver to wait, then went after her.

  “What is it, Maggie?” He was breathless. “Slow down. Now what’s it all about? This isn’t like you at all.”

  “Let’s go for a little walk, Ado, and talk it over.”

  Quy shrugged.

  “All right, Maggie. Me arm, ma’am.” They set off along the pavement. “Now, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong, Ado. It’s just so, so—”

  He smiled tenderly. “Not—sudden? Not for us after all this time?”

  “No, you old—” She sighed. “No. I’m the one to feel old now. When I said I’d marry you, it was—well, I was offering you peace, security. I—”

  “That’s all it was? Pity?”

  “Of course not. All right, perhaps it was mostly pity, for myself as well. But things arc different now.”

  “How?”

  They were passing a café, with tables outside and striped umbrellas. She tugged at his arm. “Let’s stop here. It’ll be easier over a drink.”

  “All right.” They sat down at a table. “What’ll you have?”

  “What are you having?”

  “My usual out here. Vermouth and tonic.”

  She looked surprised, but said, “All right, I’ll have the same.”

  They did not speak until the drinks came. Then they looked at each other over the rims of their glasses. He took a sip and then said quietly, “Now then, Maggie, come clean.”

  She seemed to have recovered something like her usual poise.

  “Well… one. If it was pity on my part, isn’t it now only gratitude on yours? No, don’t say anything yet. Two, if this project succeeds, will you be satisfied, or will you still want to go on?”

  He waited. Then his expression changed from patient expectancy to something more quizzical.

  “Well, what else? One doesn’t normally start numbering off for only a couple of objections.”

  “Not objections, Ado—questions.”

  “Questions, objections, whatever you want to call them. For the first, if you could offer out of pity I can offer out of gratitude. For the second, what’s wrong with my not being satisfied with this, for wanting to go on? But are you sure you know your motives. Are you sure it’s not been power over me you’ve wanted?”

  “Ado!”

  “I’m not being hostile. But are you sure you didn’t help me in the hope—well, that this time he’d make such a mess of things that he’d finally see the light and come running back?”

  “If that’s what you think—”

  She started to gather up her handbag. He placed a thin, but surprisingly strong, hand over hers.

  “Come on,” he said. “You’re covering up for some other reason. Don’t tell me—” he looked at her from under lowered eyebrows—“that you’ve got married again?” He roared suddenly. “I didn’t interrupt you on your honeymoon?”

  “Of all the arrogance! To think that—” But she could not hold back a chuckle.

  It soon died. “But—oh, this is difficult to explain, Ado. I’ve been widowed getting on for twenty years now. You get used to a man—your relations with him. I don’t mean Relations with a capital R—hark at me getting all coy!—but all the other little intimacies of a man and woman together. It’s easy enough making the offer—”

  “I asked you first.”

  “When you weren’t free to carry it through. But let’s not talk about that. Perhaps I was confident that I could marry again, if the man was—”

  “A failure?”

  “I wasn’t going to say any such thing. No, somebody who possibly needed my help more than I needed his.”

  “That’s pride, Maggie. I do need you. But I won’t say that I’ll ever settle down. You wouldn’t want me to—if you want me at all. But I don’t mind confessing that I’ve got used to a more purposive existence. More comfortable. Free of worries. There’s a middle way.”

  “It’s done you good, too, Ado.” She hesitated. “That’s the real point. I wasn’t being complimentary this morning at your apartment when I said you were looking so much younger. And that only made me feel older. Especially standing next to that secretary of yours.”

  “Rebekkah? Don’t say you think—”

  “I could see the look in her eyes. Another woman always can, you know.”

  “Nonsense.” But his old eyes sparkled and his chest seemed to expand under the flowered shirt. “I never thought of that. We’ve had some good times on the beach together, but—”

  “You see, that’s what I’m frightened of.”

  He began to laugh. Then, seeing the look persisting in her eyes, he stopped abruptly.

  “There was nothing like that. I admit she looks handsome in a bikini, and it’s all very nice and flattering—but she doesn’t look half as handsome as you do right now. Now, come on, I’m a man of influence in these parts, but offices don’t stay open all day, even for me. What do you say?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment.

  “You’ll be losing a title, of course—or will you?”

  “If you think that would worry me—”

  “On the other hand, you’d be gaining a share in a name in the history of science.”

  “That too.”

  “Last chance,” he said, but humbly, gently.

  And she was nodding, smiling through tears.

  Nineteen

  The Cadillac came for them very early the next morning. The sun was red and low on the horizon as they traveled towards it over the desert. In his happiness, Quy hadn’t thought about one particular thing. Now he remembered and he felt a dull ache inside him. Alan hadn’t turned up. Now he would only hear about it, like everybody else in the world except the few hundred people associated with the project—from the papers and television of whatever part of the world he happened to be in.

  If he heard at all. The Israeli government was unlikely to release news of the attempt if it was anything less than a success, They arrived at the grounds. He showed the new Mrs. Quy round the ship and introduced her to the crew of four who were making the trip. One of them, to Maggie’s surprise—another part of the familiar space image gone—was obviously in his fifties.

  “It’s because there’s no need for vicious acceleration,” Quy told her as they moved on. “He’s the best man for the job. I tried to wangle a place myself.” He smiled. “But I didn’t have the right qualifications.”

  “Since when did a little point like that stop you?”

  He smiled. “No, there is an age limit, even on th
is.”

  There was a noon luncheon, at which Maggie was introduced to the President of the Republic and various other dignitaries. A toast was drunk to the venture. The President performed a simple ceremony. The covers were removed from the machine. The crew entered, and the heavy port closed behind them.

  Klaxons sounded round the area. Technicians at radar and TV screens answered final checks.

  A guard came running up to Quy and whispered urgently. The old man gave a start, then nodded. A jeep set off across the desert. It was returning when the klaxons went again.

  The jeep wheeled to a standstill, and a tall figure in mid-blue uniform stepped out of it and came across the baked sand towards them.

  Quy had to turn away and make out he was intent on the centerpiece. It was such a far cry from the last time he had seen the lad. As this was from a village green in Essex and a handful of indifferent reporters.

  “You’re a fine one,” said a voice in his ear. “I arrived on the morning jet and went dashing to the hospital. I had all kinds of horrible visions of what I would find.”

  “The hospital! But I left a message there for you.”

  “That didn’t stop me worrying all the way from Woomera.”

  “So, that’s where you were. My cable followed you half round the world. Sorry if I upset you. But I had to do something pretty drastic. I wouldn’t have wanted you to miss this.” He looked at the boy appraisingly. He had filled out a lot since he had last seen him. He had grown up. He nudged him in the ribs. “Have they got anything like this at Woomera?”

  The boy looked at the strange craft in its cradle.

  “No.”

  “Not yet, you mean,” his grandfather said.

  A low whirring started somewhere in the bowels of the Chaim Weizmann.

  “That’s the atomic generators starting up,” Quy said. The ground trembled slightly, and so did the hand on his arm.

  “Oh sorry, Maggie. This is Alan, my grandson. Alan, meet your new grand—Heavens! That sounds all wrong.” He grinned. “This is MQ.”

  The boy blinked.

  “We got married yesterday. We—”

  A final klaxon went. A hush settled on the assembly. Through the observation port the men could be seen moving controls. Then a face looked out; a hand gave the thumbs-up.

  Its movement was not unlike that of a rocket as it rose slowly. But there was no roar of detonations, no flaring of vapor from the sides, no cushion of flame. Just an eerie silence, accentuated, if anything, by the quiet hum of generators. Nothing in the history of mankind had ever stayed in the air like this before. Unmoving now, no part of it moving.

  A bird hovering. A sail-plane. But even these drifted on a current of air. Nijinsky, they said, had managed to stay like this at the peak of his leap, some aching artistry of muscle and fiber nullifying gravity. But only for a split second. Then the fall.

  But this held. And none of the watchers, the hardest-headed guard to the most intent radar operator, but felt the stir in him of age-old race dreams. And race aspiring. This was the enemy—and it was being vanquished. Not the symbol of brute conquest—as Freud had said, a sexual symbol… though the onlookers felt the ache of it in their loins like sex… but more than that, much more than that—the libido, the urge of man to throw off the mud of one planet. The dream in the seed that had driven men to martyrdom from cliff tops. Set man-made angels—pitiful mechanical simulacra—to fly in Santa Sophia in Byzantium. The craft began to lift.

  As smoothly as a limousine it gathered speed.

  Alan was gaping upwards. When he lowered his eyes for a moment from the light of the sun, he noticed his grandfather’s fingers crossed behind his back, so hard that the knuckles were white against the tan.

  He lifted his eyes again to see the ship gleam once before it disappeared from visibility. Only then did the cheering break out, then that too stopped as people crowded round the TV screens.

  “When will it go into orbit?” Alan asked in a strained voice.

  “Oh, in about thirty hours from now.”

  “Thirty hours? I remember you telling me that it didn’t need sharp acceleration, but this is ridiculous.”

  “Round the moon, I mean,” his grandfather said, beaming.

  “Wha-at?”

  “Well, you didn’t think we’d be satisfied with a mere Earth orbit, did you? Rockets can do that. Personally, I thought it was too modest a target. I wanted Mars. But I’ll be satisfied. They can go to Mars next time. And don’t be so disparaging about acceleration. This thing can accelerate a damn sight quicker than your thunder-gutted ships. We don’t have to, that’s all. Of course, when it comes to interstellar flight—”

  Alan was shaking his head dazedly, watching the pictures on the screen. “Everything’s fine,” a voice was saying. The face showed none of the strain of rocket pilots. “Handling perfectly. All systems go.” The familiar words sounded strange in the different circumstances.

  Adolphe Quy was standing there, one arm around Maggie’s waist, still looking up into the sky.

  But his thoughts were not on the ship. That was on its way. He was free of it now. The team could carry on. But the possibilities of that molecule weren’t exhausted yet—not by a long shot.

  Superconductivity meant that an impulse could be stored indefinitely, unwasting… a memory bank. It wasn’t a coincidence that it was akin to the fundamental life molecule, DNA. Somewhere there was a clue here to what gave life its meaning. Its intelligence. In each cell. Like the way they had found that primitive creatures, nematodes, fed on their fellows, which had been taught to follow certain primitive directives, themselves following those directives. He had read it somewhere. He must check it.

  And the fact that the body renewed itself so that in a few years the body, cell for cell, had been replaced, yet the intelligence—the identity—remained. Whatever Miss T. eats turns into Miss T. It was hazy yet. But it would fall into place. Time enough—till tomorrow anyway.

  He chuckled. “Whatever Miss T. eats—”

  “What did you say?” Maggie asked.

  “Eh? Oh, nothing.” Then he felt a twinge of guilt in his new role of husband—until he realized that his fingers Were still tightly crossed.

  He uncrossed them. “Just thinking,” he said.