Costigan's Needle
Page 20
Devan heard men talking. How were the people in the hospital going to go through the Needle? They would go later and therefore someone would have to remain for a short time, Orcutt explained. There were people out exploring, too, he understood, and something would have to be done about them. But Devan’s mind was not on what was being said there. His mind was on what Betty had said. It dwelt on the fact that she had wanted to stay even though she thought she could go back to Chicago. It made his heart sing. It gave him a freedom of thought and expression and feeling he hadn’t had for years and it was then that he realized for the first time that the Needle, instead of being a blessing as far as he and Betty were concerned, had stood in the way of their complete happiness.
For reasons that even those who have the feeling are unable to discover, Devan felt that Betty was in the mass of people on the inland slope, turned and found her looking at him. He waved and she and the children and some of his friends near by waved in return. His gladness at staying was only lessened by the thought that all the faces he saw before him wore the expression of people who thought they were going back home. What was going to happen when they found out there was no Chicago to anticipate?
“Devan.” He looked up to find Dr. Costigan at his elbow. “About Tooksberry,” he began, trying to keep others from hearing.
Devan smiled and said, “Later, Doctor.”
“But you know he couldn’t have...”
Devan nodded. “I understand, Doctor.”
“Ladies and gentlemen of New Chicago.” Orcutt was on one of the picnic-type tables, facing the crowd as he had ten years before. “And the kids, too.” There was a little laughter. Orcutt looked good, Devan thought. He had the audience waiting on every word. He was a magnetic man, no denying that. Would his magnetic personality be enough to hold and master the crowd when it discovered what he would be saying was a lie?
“The day you have been waiting ten years for is here at last,” Orcutt said. “We’ve gone without a lot of things to build this Needle. Devan Traylor here—stand up, Devan, and let them all have a look at you—and Dr. Winfield Costigan, come on Doc, show them what, as if anybody doesn’t know, you look like—have spared no time (I can’t say expense because we don’t have money here) to perfect this device.
“Last night your representatives met here in the Needle building and Howard Tooksberry—has anyone seen Howard? Yes, there he is—went into the Eye and walked the streets of Chicago for a few minutes. He doesn’t have a glowing account because it was at night, but he says it’s Chicago, all right, and he read a little in the Chicago Tribune to prove it. He wanted to bring it back with him, but he couldn’t of course.
“Some time ago the council, knowing that the Needle was nearly completed, worked on the problem of who should be permitted to go back first. I think everybody will agree we can’t all make a rush for the Eye. There was to be an efficient system established. So, remembering the days of the draft, we have set up on the table here a glass bowl in which we have deposited a number of slips of paper with numbers on them, ranging from one to two hundred and fifty, the idea being that a man who draws a number takes himself only if he is single, or himself and his entire family, if he has a family.
“We’re all set to go and you can come up one at a time and pick your slips and then walk away and make room so others can come up. We don’t want any crowding. Now, are there any questions?”
A hand shot up. It belonged to Gus Nelson.
“Yes, Gus?”
“Mr. Orcutt,” Nelson said, “can the person who pulls number one just walk right into the Eye or does he have to wait until all the numbers are drawn?”
“He has to wait, Gus. We’ll start the parade through the Eye as soon as all the slips are drawn and everyone knows where he is in the big line. It shouldn’t take long for everyone to go through. Any other questions?”
“How did it look when Tooksberry went through?” a man in the crowd wanted to know.
“Howard says it looks pretty much as Chicago always did,” Orcutt said.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” the man said.
People laughed.
“All right,” Orcutt said. “We’re all ready. I’m going to step down now. You folks just come up and get your numbers and then find yourselves your right place in the line.”
He stepped down and gave a final swirl of the slips with the wooden spoon.
Nothing much can happen yet, Devan said to himself. Wait until they all get their slips and find out there’s no Chicago!
Orcutt put the wooden spoon down slowly, looked at the people in wonderment.
No one stepped forward.
People were looking at each other in surprise.
Orcutt went back to the top of the table. “Didn’t you all hear me right? You can get your slips now for the Needle’s Eye. You can go back to Chicago. Don’t you understand?”
The people were smiling now and some were laughing.
“Gus!” Orcutt said. “Gus Nelson. You asked about whether or not you can walk into the Eye right away. Don’t you want a slip?”
Nelson shook his head. “I don’t want a slip, Mr. Orcutt. I just wondered what happened to the person who pulled number one. I knew I wouldn’t pick it because I’m not going to pull any out. I’m staying here.”
“You’re staying? Why?”
“I’ve got my work. Making steel is pretty important and I have a special high-grade type of carbon steel I’m working on right now and it’s got another day to go in the charcoal. I couldn’t leave before then, anyway.” He smiled rather sheepishly. “Besides, there’s a girl—a woman. She and I talked about staying and we don’t care what the rest do. We’re staying.”
First a few giggles rippled through the crowd. Then there was scattered applause and this became stronger, increasing until it seemed everybody was clapping. Then it tapered off.
“I can tell you why I’m not going,” a voice came across the crowd from the outside fringe. It was Dr. Van Ness. Everybody turned to look at him. “Back in Chicago I’d have no practice. Too old. I’m over sixty-five and people used to say, ‘Why don’t you retire and give some young fellow a chance?” Even my colleagues said that. Well, I did. I retired and I was unhappy. I developed so many aches and pains life was just plain miserable.
“That’s the way it was until I came to New Chicago. Here I was wanted and here I want to stay. I want to die here, not in Chicago. I’ve been so busy putting in fillings the way they ought to be put in I’ve had no chance to think about anything else. I make every one of them a work of art and I’m proud of them and I hate to think of all those fine fillings dropping out as everyone goes through the Needle. And another thing: I’ve got three young assistants and they’re doing a fine job. I hope they stay with me and I think they will. We’ll take care of the teeth of anybody who stays. And, as in the past, it won’t cost you a cent.”
“If you think I’m going to walk along dirty old Chicago streets again, you’re mad.” It was Mrs. Petrie. “All I used to do is knit and listen to the radio and attend board of directors meetings. You know about that, Mr. Orcutt. I never had anything interesting happen to me before I came through the Eye. And I have had fun working here with the looms, making the cloth your suits are made of. I couldn’t be going now, anyway. I’ve got a new design worked out on the loom and it will take me all day to do that. Besides, I’ve got lots of other designs to work out. I just can’t keep up with them. Anybody who thinks I’m going to give all that up for knitting and radio is crazy.”
There was a deafening applause. Devan was profoundly moved. There was a lump in his throat and there were tears in his eyes and smiles on the faces of people around him. He got to the top of the table and looked out over the people and saw Betty and she saw him and they laughed and waved.
A man jumped upon the table, held his arms aloft for silence. “Most of you know me,” he said, when they had quieted. “My name’s Elmo Hodge. If you don’t know me too well
it’s because I’ve been so busy building telescopes and making star maps. Beats the grocery business all to hell.”
When they laughed he held his hands high again. “There are faces in the crowd I recognize as belonging to people who owe me money. They had run up bills at my store. We were living in an awful inflationary time, remember?” More laughter. They remembered. “Well, it’s not just because I like telescopes better that I’m staying. Not just. I’ll tell you why. I just got awful tired of making out reports in duplicate and triplicate and quintuplicate. It got so I was spending more time making out reports for the state and national governments than I was waiting on my customers. I had to hire an extra bookkeeper to help me out. Do I want to go back to that? I’ll let you folks answer for me.”
The crowd yelled “No!” while Hodge jumped off the table platform. Somebody yelled a solo that could be heard above the general noise, “Not only ‘No!’ but ‘Hell, no!’”
Orcutt spied Eric Sudduth. “How about you, Eric? Don’t you want to go back?”
“Haven’t finished my work here,” he said. “Got the Bible almost all done. Just a few places missing and I’ll think of those and others I’m sure will help. But I’ll never have time to finish it if I go back.”
“We don’t need the Needle!” someone yelled.
“Without the Needle we can make other things.”
“Let’s use the Needle parts for what we need.”
“Tear it down!”
“Push it over!”
“Let’s burn it!”
Orcutt’s voice bellowed out over the clamor. His arms beat the air in a command for silence and, after a while, he got it.
“No,” he said. “We won’t wreck it. We need parts from it too much to do that. We’ll take it apart piece by piece and use the pieces. Well have some things we’ve been holding back on now. Our own radio station, an airplane perhaps. We’ll never need automobiles. We have a lot of exploring to do, do you people realize that? Now without the Needle to think about we can start finding out what kind of a world this is we find ourselves in. We’ve got map-making and charting to do—we have a world here we can make whatever we want it to be. We can start all over again and make it the way we want it, the way it ought to be.”
Dr. Costigan brought out bottles of wine and set them on the table and from somewhere produced a number of glasses. People, the tension over, without the Needle to worry about, with no Chicago as an eventuality, talked gaily and happily and made plans for the coming years.
The men laughed and spun yarns on the golden, sunlighted hill and women visited and children ran over the sand and across the beach.
Once Devan looked at Orcutt and wondered if he knew. But he couldn’t have because only Tooksberry, Dr. Costigan and Devan himself knew. And now Devan knew what Tooksberry meant about having faith in Chicago. The people had to deny themselves Chicago, had to denounce it when it was possible. If they had thought it was not so, they would have been unhappy, would have wanted it too much.
“What’s the look for, Dev?” Orcutt said, in between sips of wine. “You don’t have to answer. I think I know. How can a man leave his reading glasses on one side of the Needle and read the classified ad section of the Chicago Tribune on the other side? Is that what you were thinking?”
“Something like that,” Devan said.
“It was a terrible spot to be in,” Tooksberry said. Beatrice was beside him. “I stood on that rocky plain for a long time. It was quiet and peaceful, though. I’ll say that for it. It gave me the time I needed to figure it out. It was the only thing I could do. Don’t you believe that?”
“Yes,” Devan said. “I believe that. Now.”
Betty, who was sitting next to him, squeezed his hand and they watched their children running with others under the late morning sun.
They jerked to attention at shouts from the direction of the lake. Devan thought: Someone has fallen in.
Many people were running to the top of the sand ridge, were running along it, looking at the water. Many were pointing.
Devan looked where they were pointing.
A man was swimming off the shore a hundred feet, his white arms and back a strange sight for bronzed New Chicagoans, and when he came within seventy-five feet of the beach, he found his footing.
The man started to walk out of the water.
He was naked.
He smiled.
He waved to the people on the sand hill.
About the Author
An Introduction to Jerry Sohl
by Jennifer Sohl
Best known for his scripts for TV series such Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and his many movies and novels, my father first sharpened his writing skills in newspapers. He reported news and reviewed drama and music as a freelance writer and photographer for The Daily Pantagraph in Bloomington, Illinois from 1946-1958.
He loved SF and back then he was struggling to find a more creative outlet for his talent. One Evening in 1951 my father interviewed famous Science Fiction writer Wilson (Bob) Tucker for an article about him in the Daily Pantagraph. During the interview my father explained an idea for a book he thought Bob should write.
Bob suggested “You should write the Book, Jerry, being that you know the plot line.” (Bob Tucker didn’t think very highly of Newspaper Reporters. He thought they all were cynical, ego-inflated. cigarette-smoking boozeheads, who hated fiction, especially anything as crazy as Science Fiction or Fantasy.)
So this was a bluff.
After the interview my father went home, and that evening began writing “The Haploids.”
It was published in 1952 by Rinehart & Co.
And surprised the hell out of Bob Tucker.
That was only the beginning... The Haploids was the first of several novels that marked him as a professional craftsman.
In 1958 we moved to California where my father wanted to break into television. At an SF convention my father met 4 other SF writers, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Theodore Sturgeon, and George Clayton Johnson. They called themselves “The Green Hand” (a play on the “Black Hand” of the Mafia). But the television producers didn’t seem to understand what they were pitching, because when ever the producers were visited it was always with one person at a time; so they finally gave up and went their separate ways.
As one biography put it, Jerry Sohl delighted in contributing to viewers’ sleepless nights.
The overall feeling he had was that it would have been a mistake for him to do anything else.
In a 1988 interview he said, “Then you have people come up to you and say ’I really loved that novel. It changed my life.’ I get so much of that and it is a tremendous feeling of accomplishment. What it all comes down to is that it has all been great fun and should I die in the next minute I don’t think I would regret anything I’ve done.”
People are made for what they do–and my father was indeed made for writing. It was the only thing he wanted to do.
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Here are more ebooks you’ll enjoy from ReAnimus Press (plus lots more on the web site):
Night Slaves, by Jerry Sohl
The Mars Monopoly, by Jerry Sohl
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The Transcendent Man, by Jerry Sohl
I, Aleppo, by Jerry Sohl
The Altered Ego, by Jerry Sohl
The Anomaly, by Jerry Sohl [Author's Official Site]
Death Sleep, by Jerry Sohl
The Odious Ones, by Jerry Sohl
Point Ultimate, by Jerry Sohl
The Haploids, by Jerry Sohl
Prelude to Peril, by Jerry Sohl
The Resurrection of Frank Borchard, by Jerry Sohl
&nbs
p; The Lemon Eaters, by Jerry Sohl
The Spun Sugar Hole, by Jerry Sohl
Underhanded Chess, by Jerry Sohl [Author's Official Site]
Underhanded Bridge, by Jerry Sohl [Author's Official Site]
Night Wind, by Roberta Jean Mountjoy [Author's Official Site]
Black Thunder, by Roberta Jean Mountjoy [Author's Official Site]
Dr. Josh, by Jerry Sohl
Blowdry, by Jerry Sohl
Mamelle, by Jerry Sohl
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The Exiles Trilogy, by Ben Bova [Author's Official Site]
The Star Conquerors (Standard Edition), by Ben Bova [Author's Official Site]
Escape!, by Ben Bova [Author's Official Site]
Colony, by Ben Bova [Author's Official Site]
The Kinsman Saga, by Ben Bova [Author's Official Site]
Star Watchmen, by Ben Bova [Author's Official Site]
As on a Darkling Plain, by Ben Bova [Author's Official Site]
The Winds of Altair, by Ben Bova [Author's Official Site]
Test of Fire, by Ben Bova [Author's Official Site]
The Weathermakers, by Ben Bova [Author's Official Site]