“Eeeek!” cried the little Wave, behind him.
He whirled. The Wave was blushing furiously. She was pointing an outraged finger at Captain Cobble. “Make—make him stop doing that!” she squealed.
Captain Cobble chuckled. His eyes uncrossed themselves.
“Here, here! What’s going on?” snapped the vice admiral.
For just an instant Captain Sir Sebastian Cobble looked round self-consciously. Then:
“Going on, sir?” He winked at Little Anton. “Ah—just a bit more of this scientific know-how. The—the Fledermaus Effect.”
* * * *
It would be profitless to elaborate at too great a length on subsequent events aboard H.M.S. Impressive. The vice admiral delivered a short and stirring address, touching on such subjects as “tradition” and “hands across the sea.” Captain Sir Sebastian Cobble bid a warm farewell to Captain Perseus Otter, assuring him—perhaps with his own vessel’s unadorned prow in mind—that the Royal Navy could always find a place for him if he retired. Finally Papa Schimmelhorn was borne down the gangplank on the shoulders of four stalwart seamen, while the entire ship’s complement sang For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow at the top of their voices.
Immediately afterward, Captain Otter, Papa Schimmelhorn, and Little Anton were flown to Washington, where they were questioned in great secrecy by naval experts, by technical experts, and by envious representatives of the Air Forces and the Army—all of whom, finding themselves beyond their depth, concurred in recommending that the whole business be left in Captain Otter’s obviously able hands.
It was not until four days later that the Board of Directors of the Luedesing Time and Instrument Corporation of New Haven met for the express purpose of establishing a new order.
At the head of the table, old Heinrich Luedesing glared at his son Woodrow and at the Board. “I haff talked to Papa Schimmelhorn,” he said. “Because ve are old friends, he says he vill come back—but only if ve make him Cheneral Manager, und Voodrow vorks for him…”
“This is ridiculous!” Woodrow Luedesing’s indignation was loud and shrill. “The man is utterly unqualified! Why, I’ll resign! I’ll…”
“Bah!” Old Heinrich cut him short. “You vatch oudt, Voodrow, more nonzense und you haff a chob vorking inshtead for Lidtle Anton!” Woodrow Luedesing looked around at the Board members for support—and found them unresponsive. Pouting, he lapsed into a sullen silence.
“Veil, dot iss settled,” his father said decisively. “Now, Herr Doktor Wilen makes his report, and Captain Otter maybe giffs a speech. Then ve haff a vote.”
Ferdinand Wilen stood up, his expression a curious mixture of relaxation and bewilderment. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I know you realize how vital the Schimmelhorn Effect is to our strength and our security. I’m sure you’d like to understand just how it works. Well, so would I. At present the important thing is that it does work.” Several of the directors nodded emphatically. “Your Papa Schimmelhorn—” Wilen grinned, “—did his best to explain the principle. He said that it was all because of Maxie’s Constance, with whom he first became acquainted as a janitor at the Geneva Institute of Higher Physics. It took me quite a while to see what he was getting at. His genius functions at a subconscious level. It absorbs theoretical information which is quite meaningless to him, extrapolates from it, and integrates it with his own primitive technology. Presto, out comes a—dingus! In this instance, by Maxie I think he means Max Planck. The little wheels go round—something happens which may involve the value of Planck’s Constant, and—we have invisibility!”
“Remarkable!” said one or two of the directors. “Astounding!” murmured several others.
“To say the least! And he used the same principle to conceal his extra manufacturing parts. Invisible, they occupied the ‘waste space’ in the unit, and were powered by leads which seemed to go nowhere. That was why it drove me to distraction when I tried to fix it.”
“But why didn’t the—the dingus come out in one piece instead of two?” someone asked.
“Because he missed three weeks of lectures in Geneva. Something just wasn’t in the recipe. And that—” he shuddered slightly, “—brings us to Little Anton Fledermaus, who has turned out to be a perfect substitute for that something that isn’t there. In childhood, rare individuals display supranormal powers—the psychokinetic poltergeist phenomenon, for instance. According to the parapsychologists who have examined him, our Little Anton has retained contact with an area of existence which he describes as ‘just around the corner.’ It seems to have no ordinary spaciotemporal coordinates, but to exist purely in relation to him. Light contact with it—when his eyes cross—enables him to see through such otherwise frustrating substances as silk, wool, and nylon. A closer contact—well, you’ve seen the demonstration. He holds the shell of Assembly M ‘around the corner.’ Half of it seems to disappear. He pops the tube in. And there we are!”
A portly director wrinkled his brow unhappily. “This science stuff’s too deep for me,” he grumbled. “What do we do now? That’s what I want to know.”
Wilen resumed his seat, and Captain Otter rose to address the Board. He was still unshaven. In fact, it was now apparent that he was letting his beard grow.
“I feel that this is not the time,” he stated, “to quibble over theories and petty technicalities. Papa Schimmelhorn has shown his practical ability to my complete satisfaction. Furthermore, he and young Fledermaus disposed adroitly of two extremely dangerous foreign agents. It is the opinion of the Department of the Navy—” he frowned severely at Woodrow Luedesing, “—that Papa Schimmelhorn should be reinstated on his own terms.”
He sat down again. Old Heinrich called the Board to order. And without delay, by a vote of eight to one, Papa Schimmelhorn was promoted to the post of General Manager.
A burst of cheering followed the announcement, and a secretary was instantly sent off to carry the good news. Some minutes passed before the Board became aware that Dr. Wilen had something more to say.
“Though I am not associated with this firm,” he began apologetically, “I should like to make one suggestion…”
Old Heinrich urged him to proceed.
“A suggestion which I trust will be taken in good part by all concerned. Papa Schimmelhorn is undoubtedly a genius. So, in his way, is Little Anton. Besides, both of them have a certain excess of exuberance, of joie de vivre. Perhaps it would be well—tactfully, of course—to take a few precautions in order, to—er, protect them from themselves?”
Old Heinrich nodded soberly. Captain Perseus Otter reluctantly agreed that Dr. Wilen might have a point. But Woodrow Luedesing reacted much more sharply.
His pout vanished. Abruptly his face regained its rosy hue. He smiled beatifically.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “leave that to me.”
* * * *
At three the following afternoon, Woodrow Luedesing found Papa Schimmelhorn and Little Anton in the office which he himself had formerly occupied. They were entertaining the shipping-office blonde. Papa Schimmelhorn, his arms around her slender waist, was telling her all about Sonya Lou…“und Lidtle Anton says dot it vas nodt a cuckoo after all! It vas a bullvinch! Ho-ho-ho!”
“Am I intruding?” Woodrow asked diffidently.
Papa Schimmelhorn assured him that he was not. “Ach, now you vork for me, you come right in! I vas chust telling Mimi here aboudt der lady shpy. Imachine it! To Europe she has gone vith der old shoe box, und opened it, und…Here in der paper, look. Oh, ho-ho-ho!”
Woodrow Luedesing accepted the newspaper, and, while Papa Schimmelhorn almost split his sides, he read a dispatch from Tass which claimed peevishly that the first cuckoo clock had really been invented by an intelligent young peasant from Kiev centuries before the Western world had even heard of such a thing.
“How fascinating,�
� Woodrow remarked politely. “But what I really came to see you about, sir, was a small business matter…”
“Don’dt vorry aboudt business, Voodrow!” cried Papa Schimmelhorn. “I teach you now how nodt to be a stuffed shirt. I teach you to haff fun!”
“That’s very good of you,” replied Woodrow, “but, as you are General Manager, I felt that you should be the first to meet our new Director of Security. She’s quite remarkable.”
“She?” Papa Schimmelhorn flexed his biceps automatically. “Voodrow, iss she beaudtiful?”
“I would say statuesque, sir. But come see for yourself. She’s waiting for you in her office right now.”
Papa Schimmelhorn gave the shipping-room blonde a hasty peck. Taking Little Anton and Woodrow each by an arm, he led the way.
Thus they marched down the hall—but, when they came to the door marked Security, Woodrow stepped aside. “I’ll see you later, sir,” he said, with a broad wink.
“You are a goot boy, after all,” asserted Papa Schimmelhorn, returning it.
Then Papa Schimmelhorn and Little Anton opened the door and went in eagerly. They stopped dead still. They stared—
“Ha—!”said Mama Schimmelhorn.
THE LADIES OF BEETLEGOOSE NINE
It is untrue that there was dancing in the streets when the people of New Haven heard that Papa Schimmelhorn had disappeared. A few biased parents may have rejoiced at the idea of sending their daughters safely back to work at Heinrich Luedesing’s cuckoo clock factory, where he had been foreman. There may have been some celebrating by his male subordinates, who never had been able to compete with the masculine allure of his gigantic stature, bright blue eyes, and great white beard. And certain ministers did use his fate as a text for moral sermons in which there was more than a hint of jubilation.
The rest was mere malicious gossip. Many a modest maiden cried herself to sleep that night. Many a sprightly grass widow stained her lonely pillow with her tears. But the deepest sorrow was Heinrich Luedesing’s, for he had lost a close friend, a jewel of an employee, and all his hopes of capturing the Grand Award, the Gold Medal of the forthcoming International Horological Exposition at Berne. For Papa Schimmelhorn had vanished within an hour after completing the world’s most splendid cuckoo clock, an instrument of such perfection and complexity that even the directors of Patek-Phillipe had been expected to turn pea-green with envy at the sight of it.
Papa Schimmelhorn had vanished. Mama Schimmelhorn, for the first time in their more than sixty years of married life, had vanished with him. So had the perfect cuckoo clock. And so—though few were aware of it at the time—had Gustav-Adolf.
* * * *
The exact chronology has never yet been set forth publicly, science and journalism alike having treated the Schimmelhorn accounts with unseemly levity. Therefore it is necessary to begin at the beginning—namely on May 12th, at precisely 11:58 P.M., Eastern Standard Time.
At that instant, the spaceship Vilvilkuz Snar Tuhl-Y’t (which may be roughly translated as Lovely-Madame Mother-President Vilvilu) was hovering forty miles up over the center of New Haven. The male members of the crew were swabbing decks, twittering petty gossip at each other, and pretending to polish brass. Madame-Captain Groolu Hah, who had just succeeded in orienting the visible signal from the Intellectometer against its map-screen coordinates, was shouting orders at her excited staff in a beautiful bass voice. And Papa Schimmelhorn, in the loot and clutter of his basement workshop, was stepping back to regard his just-finished masterpiece.
Directly over his untidy bench, there was a gaudy poster showing as much as possible of a lady advertised as Ms. Prudence Pilgrim who, wearing only a white Puritan bonnet, was the star performer at a topless-bottomless establishment called Horny Joe’s.
Papa Schimmelhorn stepped back, gave the poster a sentimental glance, and pointed at the perfect cuckoo clock beside it.
“Look, Gustav-Adolf!” he cried out. “Chust like Herr Doktor Jung told me in Geneva, in der subconscience I am a chenius!”
On the bench, Gustav-Adolf placed a large striped paw on the pink catnip mouse he was dismembering, regarded the super-clock disdainfully, and muttered “Maow!” to indicate it was inedible.
Paying no attention to this criticism, Papa Schimmelhorn feasted his eyes upon his handiwork. The clock was four feet high and three feet wide. Its architecture was in the grand tradition of Cuckoo-Clock-Chalet-With-Gingerbread. In addition to the big central dial, it sported Fahrenheit and Centigrade thermometers, a rainfall gauge, a perpetual calendar, two barometers, and a device telling simultaneously the phases of the moon and the most likely times to catch grunion. Leaves and tendrils twined around its carved facade, and around numerous svelte female figures, all in attitudes of extreme abandon, and all modeled with delightful frankness after Ms. Prudence Pilgrim in her working clothes.
“How beaudtiful!” sighed Papa Schimmelhorn. “Under der insize—zo many vheels und chewels und dinguses. But ach! Almost it iss tvelve o’clock. Now, Gustav-Adolf, you chust vait!”
As he spoke, the minute hand moved the last fraction of an inch toward the hour. There was a click. The larger doors flew open to reveal a veritable choir of cuckoos.
The choir popped out and cuckooed in pretty counterpoint, and popped in again. Twelve times it repeated this performance, cleverly varying the theme and accompanied by a tiny glockenspiel. Papa Schimmelhorn winked at Gustav-Adolf. “Und now,” he whispered, “comes der real McCoy.”
The choir vanished. With a gentle brrr-r-t, the upper doors opened suddenly. There was revealed, in miniature, a sylvan scene—a painted backdrop of forests and snowy peaks, a wooden windlass over a rustic well. Grasping the handle, stood a chubby Alpine maid. Sidling up from behind her, around the well, came a smirking Alpine youth.
He came on tiptoe; he stretched out a hand; he gave the maiden an intimate and goosey pinch. The maiden shrieked; briefly she did the bumps; she started cranking at the windlass furiously. And the weights that ran the perfect cuckoo clock rose several inches, drawn upward by their chains.
“Zo cute!” chuckled Papa Schimmelhorn. “Der self-vinding comes from efery pinch. It iss perpetual motion, vhich no vun else invents. For poor old Heinrich, iss a nice surprise.”
He removed the cuckoo clock, set the hands back an hour, and wrapped it, weights and all, in a discarded tartan bathrobe. “But Heinrich must vait vun more day,” he remarked happily. “Tonight iss more important ve show to Prudie die lidtle ladies on der front who look like her.” He smiled to himself, imagining the nature of Ms. Pilgrim’s reaction to this compliment. Then, in case it alone should prove inadequate, he dropped a bag of jelly beans into the pocket of his bright blue sports-coat. Finally, he picked up the remains of the catnip mouse, and hoisted twenty pounds of tough striped tomcat to his shoulder.
“Ve must be qviet like mices,” he cautioned, looking regretfully at his 1922 Stanley Steamer touring car, painted British Racing Green, which he was redesigning to include an antigravity device. “If ve try to drife, Mama maybe hears. She iss a fine voman, Gustav-Adolf—only vith old ideas.”
He was quite right. His wife’s ideas regarding him were indeed old, dating back through six long decades of night-errantry. She had sensed that he was planning some new misdeed, and her suspicions had been thoroughly confirmed by a phone call from her friend Mrs. Hundhammer, the pastor’s wife, who had heard about Ms. Prudence from Mrs. Heinrich Luedesing. At exactly 12:06 A.M., when the basement door clicked shut behind him, she rose from her chair in the living-room, where she had been waiting.
Her stiff black dress creaking threateningly, she seized her black umbrella by the hilt and hefted it. “Anoder naked dancing girl!” she hissed. “Chust like der Vorld’s Fair in 1915! It iss enough. Now I put a shtop!”
Breathing righteous indignation, she left the house, and, clingin
g closely to concealing shadows, trailed her wayward spouse as cleverly as any private eye.
At 12:09 A.M., twenty miles straight up.
Madame-Captain Groolu Hah still stared incredulously at the Intellectometer’s map-screen signal. “I can’t believe it!” she growled, fussing with the fringe of peanut-butter hair allowed her by her rank. “Six-oh-oh-fourteen on the Thil scale—nobody’s ever measured such a mind!” She frowned ferociously at a younger woman at the instrument’s control panel. “Are you sure you didn’t drop a stitch somewhere, Lieutenant?”
The younger woman lifted a gadget like a plastic buttonhook out of a maze of interlacing wires. She touched her single carroty spit-curl in salute. “Fragrant Madame,” she replied respectfully, “I’ve checked the whole resistance network several times, and we’re at exactly the right altitude for accuracy. Besides, this is a close-similarity planet, so there aren’t any Gwip factors to interfere.”
“I know that,” snapped the Captain. “The natives can’t be anything but humanoid. That only makes it more peculiar. Don’t you realize that the highest rating measured yet is two-five-five-eleven, and that was right at home?”
“C-could it be s-some sort of queer male-dominated world, F-Fragrant Madame?”
“Impossible! We’ve found only two, and their inhabitants were savages, as we expected. No, it’s simply a super-intellect down there—one that might actually be able to solve our problem for us. And that’s what worries me. They may get angry at us and retaliate—and I don’t like to think about the weapons they might have. We’ll just have to go in and get back out again fast. I only hope we can catch her in the open, that’s all.”
Decisively, the Captain hitched up her brassiere and half-apron. “Commander, is the landing segment ready?”
“Ready and womanned, Fragrant Madame,” grunted a stocky brunette standing by a large open port. “We’ve transferred the ifk. We can come unstuck anytime.”
The Second Reginald Bretnor Megapack Page 8