He was explaining slowly, patiently; and Dr. Cavaness endured the invading words, trying to listen to them separately, to isolate them from their sentences, to quench their meaning before it reached his mind.
Ted Froberg pointed at the Doorstop; he no longer seemed so very young. “When you first brought it to us, we looked it over pretty carefully. We found those two holes in the dumbbell ends—remember them? Well, they’re T-shaped. Inside, at each end of the cross, there is a knob. They’re cupped and knurled, like push buttons. But they weren’t made for fingers, Dr. Howie. Fingers can’t get at them. They’re for—something else.”
Dr. Cavaness forbade the thought to form. Against it he braced the trembling walls that held his world to its perspectives and accustomed measurements. He wiped the perspiration from his palms.
“We pushed the buttons; nothing happened,” Froberg said. “We rigged a business to push all four at once—and the whole thing opened up, and there was all this stuff. It was beyond us; it made no sense at all. We didn’t dare to disassemble anything for fear of wrecking it. We took some specimens, as small as possible. We tried to run analyses, and some of them succeeded. They were unbelievable; we couldn’t even guess at physical conditions where manufacturing such materials would be possible.”
Dr. Cavaness saw the excitement in his eyes, and shrank from it.
“Our next step followed logically. Those points of light had shifted by themselves. Besides, the socket in the base seemed to contain contact elements. We carried through a series of experiments. We found out that the points of light respond at least to radar frequencies; when you were watching them, they must’ve picked up a reflection from a plane, and followed it. We also found that, when this happens, the hemispheres set up a weird sort of field that propagates at half a light-velocity—and that there’s something else inside that reacts to gravitational and magnetic gradients. Each of these functions modifies the others, and at the output end they’re translated into the damnedest wave-forms we’ve seen yet. The oddest part of all is that there simply is no source of power.”
Dr. Cavaness listened—and in the final fastness of his heart he prayed. Voicelessly, in a despairing language without words, he prayed to a parochial God to make this all untrue, to wipe it out, to let his world remain as it had been. Oh, God, preserve these small peripheries against all things incomprehensible; I am my world; its limits limit me; allow the stretches of eternity, the darknesses, to stay unreal; oh, God, deny this living proof that life unthinkable teems in those depths and distance, that they exist—
“Look, Dr. Howie,” Froberg cried, “we don’t know what they use it for—perhaps in navigation, or to direct a weapon of some sort. But we’re certain of one thing—and that may be a little hard to take. It wasn’t made in any country here; it wasn’t even made on Mars or Jupiter. It’s from the stars.”
Here was the answer, stated and defined. Here was the looming nightmare made real. Here was the naked Universe. Dr. Cavaness saw it. He held it still at bay. For moments out of time, time ceased. His mind turned inward, clawing the substance of his dissolving world, trying to fabricate one last escape. He thought of the corrosion which had encased the Doorstop. He thought of Chinese bronzes, ancient urns, green with their many-centuried burial in the earth. The past had vanished; there was safety in the past—
“Well, anyhow,” said Dr. Cavaness, “I guess it’s been a long, long time since they were here—two or three thousand years. It takes that long to get a chunk of bronze all rusted up like that. At least that long, Ted, doesn’t it?”
Ted Froberg looked at him. “It isn’t bronze,” he said. “That’s why we have it in that bell jar there, pumped full of helium, sealed. Maybe corrosion would take all that time, back in their atmosphere. But not in ours. In ours, it took three weeks.”
And Dr. Cavaness sat silently; he stared straight ahead— facing the majesty of God, facing a new maturity for man, facing the open door.
<
* * * *
SILENT BROTHER
by Algis Budrys
It is not true that Algis Budrys uses forty-seven different pen names; nor is it correct to say that all the best stories in all the s-f magazines are his. Both these rumors are wild exaggerations, and this anthology stands in proof of it. With the exception of two authors, one of whom I am reasonably certain lives in Wales, Great Britain, and the other in Chicago, U.S.A. (Budrys is from Jersey), I can personally vouch for the independent existence of every other writer in this book.
The facts in the Budrys case are sufficiently sensational. Over the past two years, writing under four bylines (that I know of, including “Paul Janvier,” who wrote this story, and his twin brother, Ivan), he has filled an astonishing number of printed pages with on astonishing variety of material, ranging in quality from just-good to knockout.
* * * *
THE FIRST STARSHIP was home.
At first, the sight of the Endeavor's massive bulk on his TV screen held Cable's eager attention. At his first glimpse of the starship's drift to its mooring, alongside a berthing satellite, he'd felt the intended impression of human grandeur; more than most viewers, for he had a precise idea of the scale of size.
But the first twitch of ambiguity came as he watched the crew come out and cross to the Albuquerque shuttle on their suit jets. He knew those men: Dugan, who'd be impatient to land, as he'd been impatient to depart; Frawley, whose white hair would be sparsely tousled over his tight pink scalp; Snell, who'd have run to fat on the voyage unless he'd exercised like the very devil and fasted like a hermit; young Tommy Penn, who'd be unable to restrain his self-conscious glances into the cameras.
It was exactly those thoughts which dulled his vicarious satisfaction. He stayed in front of the set, watching through the afternoon, while the four men took off their suits and grouped themselves briefly for the still photographers, while they got past the advance guard of reporters into the shuttle's after compartment, and refused to speak for the video coverage.
It made no essential difference that Snell was lean and graceful, or that all four of them, Frawley and Penn included, were perfectly poised and unruffled. Perhaps it was a little more irritating that they were.
Endeavor's crew was stepping gracefully into history.
The cameras and Cable followed the four men out of the shuttle and across the sun-drenched field at Albuquerque. Together they watched every trivial motion; Dugan's first cigarette in six months; Frawley's untied shoelace, which he repaired by casually stopping in the middle of the gangway and putting a leg up on the railing; Tommy Penn giving a letter to a guard to mail.
Together with a billion other inhabitants of what was no longer Man's only planet, Cable looked into the faces of the President of the United States, of the United Nations Secretary General, of Premier Sobieski, and Marshal Siemens. Less than others, because he had a professional's residual contempt for eulogies, he heard what they had to say.
By nine or nine-thirty that night he had gathered the essential facts about the solar system of Alpha Centaurus. There were five planets, two of them temperate and easily habitable, one of them showing strong hints of extensive heavy metal ores. The trip had been uneventful, the stay unmarked by extraordinary incident. There was no mention of inhabitants.
There was also no mention of anything going wrong with the braking system, and that, perhaps, intensified the crook that had begun to bend one corner of Cable's thin mouth.
"You're welcome," he couldn't help grunting as Frawley described the smoothness of the trip and the simplicity of landing. That decelerating an object of almost infinite mass within a definitely finite distance was at all complicated didn't seem to be worthy of mention.
More than anything, it was the four men's unshakable poise that began to grate against him.
"Happens every day," he grunted at them, simultaneously telling himself he'd turned into a crabby old man at thirty-four, muttering spitefully at his friends for doing what
he no longer could.
But that flash of insight failed to reappear when his part in Endeavor's development was lumped in with the "hardworking, dedicated men whose courage and brilliance made our flight possible." Applied to an individual, phrases like that were meaningful. Used like this, they covered everyone from the mess hall attendants to the man in charge of keeping the armadillos from burrowing under the barrack footings.
He snapped the set off with a peevish gesture. Perhaps, if he stayed up, the program directors, running out of fresh material at last, might have their commentators fill in with feature stuff like "amazing stride forward in electronics," "unified field theory," "five years of arduous testing on practical application to spaceship propulsion," and the like. Eventually, if they didn't cut back to the regular network shows first, they might mention his name. Somebody might even think it important that Endeavor had cost the total destruction of one prototype and the near-fatal crash of another.
But suddenly he simply wanted to go to bed. He spun his chair away from the set, rolled into the bedroom, levered himself up and pulled his way onto the bed. Taking his legs in his callused hands, he put them under the blankets, turned off the lights, and lay staring up at the dark.
Which showed and told him nothing.
He shook his head at himself. It was only twenty miles to the field from here. If he was really that much of a gloryhound, he could have gone. He was a dramatic enough sight. And, in all truth, he hadn't for a minute been jealous while the Endeavor was actually gone. It was just that today's panegyrics had been a little too much for his vanity to stave off.
He trembled on the brink of admitting to himself that his real trouble was the feeling that he'd lost all contact with the world. But only trembled, and only on the brink.
Eventually he fell asleep.
He'd slept unusually well, he discovered when he awoke in the morning. Looking at his watch, he saw it had only been about eight hours, but it felt like more. He decided to try going through the morning without the chair. Reaching over to the stand beside his bed, he got his braces and tugged them onto his legs. Walking clumsily, he tottered into the bathroom with his canes, washed his face, shaved, and combed his hair.
He'd forgotten to scrub his bridge last night. He took it out now and realized only after he did so that his gums, top and bottom, were sore.
"Oh, well," he told himself in the mirror, "we all have our cross to bear."
He decided to leave the bridge out for the time being. He never chewed with his front teeth anyway. Whistling "Sweet Violets" shrilly, he made his way back into the bedroom, where he carefully dressed in a suit, white shirt, and tie. He'd seen too many beat-up men who let themselves go to pot. Living alone the way he did made it even more important for him to be as neat as he could.
What's more, he told himself insidiously, the boys might drop over.
Thinking that way made him angry at himself. It was pure deception, because the bunch wouldn't untangle themselves out of the red tape and de-briefings for another week. That kind of wishful thinking could drift him into living on hungry anticipations, and leave him crabbed and querulous when they failed to materialize on his unreal schedule.
He clumped into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator with a yank of his arm.
That was something else to watch out for. Compensation was all well and good, but refrigerators didn't need all that effort to be opened. If he got into the habit of applying excessive arm-strength to everything, the day might come when he'd convince himself a man didn't need legs at all. That, too, was a trap. A man could get along without legs, just as a man could teach himself to paint pictures with his toes. But he'd paint better with finger dexterity.
The idea was to hang on to reality. It was the one crutch everybody used.
He started coffee boiling and went back out to the living room to switch on the TV.
That was another thing. He could have deliberately stopped and turned it on while on his way to the kitchen. But he'd never thought to save the steps before he'd crashed. More difficult? Of course it was more difficult now! But he needed the exercise.
Lift. Swing. Lock. Lean. Lift other leg. Swing, lock. Lean. Unlock other leg. Lift--
He cursed viciously at the perspiration going down his face.
And now the blasted set wouldn't switch on. The knob was loose. He looked more closely, leaning carefully to one side in order to get a look at the set's face.
He had no depth perception, of course, but there was something strange about the dark square behind the plastic shield over the face of the tube.
The tube was gone. He grunted incredulously, but, now that his eye was accustomed to the dimmer light in this room, he could see the inside of the cabinet through the shield.
He pushed the cabinet away from the wall with an unexpected ease that almost toppled him. The entire set was gone. The antenna line dangled loosely from the wall. Only the big speaker, mounted below the chassis compartment, was still there.
First, he checked the doors and windows.
The two doors were locked from the inside, and the house, being air-conditioned, had no openable windows. He had only to ascertain that none of the panes had been broken or removed. Then he catalogued his valuables and found nothing gone.
The check was not quite complete. The house had a cellar. But before he was willing to go through that effort, he weighed the only other possibility in balance.
His attitude on psychiatry was blunt, and on psychology only a little less so. But he was a pragmatist; that is, he played unintuitive poker with success.
Because he was a pragmatist, he first checked the possibility that he'd had a mental lapse and forgotten he'd called to have the set taken out for repairs. Unlocking the front door, he got the paper off the step. A glance at the date and a story lead beginning "Yesterday's return of the Endeavor" exploded that hypothesis, not to his surprise. The set had been there last night. It was still too early today for any repair shop to be open.
Ergo, he had to check the cellar windows. He hadn't lost a day, or done anything else incredible like that. Tossing the paper on the kitchen table, he swung his way to the cellar door, opened it, and looked down, hoping against hope that he'd see the broken window from here and be able to report the burglary without the necessity of having to ease himself down the steps.
But, no such luck. Tucking the canes under his left arm, he grasped the railing and fought his body's drag.
Once down, he found it unnecessary to look at the windows. The set chassis was in the middle of his old, dust-covered workbench. It was on its side, and the wiring had been ripped out. The big tube turned its pale face toward him from a nest of other components. A soldering iron balanced on the edge of the bench, and some rewiring had been begun on the underside of the chassis.
It was only then--and this, he admitted to himself without any feeling of self-reproach, was perfectly normal for a man like himself--that he paid any notice to the superficial burns, few in number, on the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.
The essence of anything he might plan, he decided, was in discarding the possibility of immediate outside help.
He sat in his chair, drinking a cup of the coffee he'd made after having to scrape the burnt remains of the first batch out of the coffee-maker, and could see where that made the best sense.
He had no burglary to report, so that took care of the police. As for calling anyone else, he didn't have the faintest idea of whom to call if he'd wanted to. There was no government agency, local, state, or federal--certainty not international, ramified though the United Nations was--offering advice and assistance to people who disassembled their own TV sets in their sleep and then proceeded to re-work them into something else.
Besides, this was one he'd solve for himself.
He chuckled. What problem wasn't? He was constitutionally incapable of accepting anyone else's opinion over his own, and he knew it.
Well, then, data thus far:
One ex-TV set in the cellar. Better: one collection of electronic parts.
Three burns on fingertips. Soldering iron?
He didn't know. He supposed that, if he ever took the trouble to bone up with a book or two on circuitry, he could throw together a fair FM receiver, and, given a false start or two, mock up some kind of jackleg video circuit. But he'd never used a soldering iron in his life. He imagined the first try might prove disgracefully clumsy.
Questions:
How did one shot-up bag of rag-doll bones and twitchless nerves named Harvey Cable accomplish all this in his sleep?
The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2 - [Anthology] Page 11