“This is my associate,” said Caldicott ambiguously. He snapped off the soapie just as Vera Venable, the Alienist’s niece, was pleading with Professor Sykes not to fire her uncle from the clinic staff.
“Turn it on!” she screamed. “You’ve left poor Vera hanging in the ether! Call her back! Don’t leave her out there!”
Caldicott resignedly turned the soapie back on, and the woman said, arching her brows: “Why—thank you, darling! That was . . . very sweet!” Running the last two words together and simultaneously lowering her eyes with a shy little smile. The line was another oldie, used several times a day to cover everything from passing an ashtray to a diamond ring.
WE LEFT and went to the hospital refectory.
The refectory soapie screen was on, of course, and I was alarmed to find I was alarmed at the number of people who were watching it. Caldicott read my expression, and gave a sour grin.
“She’s the first,” he said simply.
“Go to Dachau! I don’t believe it!”
“You will soon. I tell you, she’s the first. There are going to be more—and more—and more.”
“Consider: as long ago as the twentieth century there were housewives who never differentiated between real persons and the audio-performers whom they listened to daily. They worried with them, laughed with them, discussed them as though they were absent neighbors. With the slow development of the additional circuits—video, oleo, full-color and tactile for those who like it—the effect was magnified. With the Krebski Formula of the last century, which related the numerical quantities of music to the numerical quantities of the electroencephalogram curves produced by the music, the effect was perfected.
“The housewife of today, frankly, has a soft touch. She dusts, washes dishes, waxes floors and so on by tapping buttons. With her spare time she watches the soapie screen, and she has a lot of spare time. I’ve drawn a graph—”
He took out a sheet of paper and smoothed it carefully. I don’t pretend to understand such things; I’m a consolist, not a tube-jockey, and I told him so.
“But look,” he urged. “Here’s the abscissa meaning log-log of number of Caldicott Syndrome cases at one time’—”
“Caldicott Syndrome?”
“That’s what I call it,” he said modestly. “And this red circle indicates where we stand on the time-axis now. You see the rise—”
I finally looked and laughed at what I saw. “You really think,” I said, “that the saturation point’s been reached?”
“I predicted it a year ago,” he said solemnly. “I was actually waiting for the case you just saw to turn up. I believe that there will be five hundred cases tomorrow, two thousand cases the next day, and so on. Pfannkuchen’s studies in mass hysteria—”
I got up. “If you’re right,” I said, “I’ll be the first man to run out and join the wild-men in the Utah Reserve. But, Caldicott, I think you’re all wet. That woman upstairs is weak-minded and that’s all there is to it. I work with the soapies; I can’t believe that any normal person, like my wife, say, could be knocked off the trolley by them. I’ve got to go now; I’ll be seeing you around.”
I left and took a flit for Linden, where I live. Pfannkuchen’s studies in mass hysteria, my eye!
But my wife met me at the door and said, with surprise, delight and apprehension: “Darling—you’re . . . back!”
Would you pass me some more of that beef stuff?
THE END
The Silly Season
The Air Force is adamant in insisting that you must not believe that “flying saucers” have any extra-terrestrial origin, or, for that matter, that they exist. Science fiction enthusiasts, from professional authors to fan magazines, take for granted that you must, like a man of good sense, see that this phenomenon is obviously an interplanetary exploration or invasion. Tom as you are between these conflicting attitudes, you can now learn that both are wrong, as you hear the terrible truth from one of the Old Hands of science fiction—a man whom you’ve read under more pseudonyms than we have space to print.
IT WAS a hot summer afternoon in the Omaha bureau of the World Wireless Press Service, and the control bureau in New York kept nagging me for copy. But since it was a hot summer afternoon, there was no copy. A wrapup of local baseball had cleared about an hour ago, and that was that. Nothing but baseball happens in the summer. During the dog days, politicians are in the Maine woods fishing and boozing, burglars are too tired to burgle, and wives think it over and decide not to decapitate their husbands.
I pawed through some press releases. One sloppy stencil-duplicated sheet began: “Did you know that the lemonade way to summer comfort and health has been endorsed by leading physiotherapists from Maine to California? The Federated Lemon-Growers Association revealed today that a survey of 2,500 physiotherapists in 57 cities of more than 25,000 population disclosed that 87 per cent of them drink lemonade at least once a day between June and September, and that another 72 per cent not only drink the cooling and healthful beverage but actually prescribe it—”
Another note tapped out on the news circuit printer from New York: “960M-HW KICKER? ND SNST-NY.”
That was New York saying they needed a bright and sparkling little news item immediately—“soonest.” I went to the eastbound printer and punched out: “96NY-UPCMNG FU MINS-OM.”
The lemonade handout was hopeless; I dug into the stack again. The State University summer course was inviting the governor to attend its summer conference on aims and approaches hi adult secondary education. The Agricultural College wanted me to warn farmers that white-skinned hogs should be kept from the direct rays of the summer sun. The manager of a fifth-rate local pug sent a writeup of his boy and a couple of working press passes to his next bout in the Omaha Arena. The Schwartz and White Bandage Company contributed a glossy eight-by-ten of a blonde in a bathing suit improvised from two S. & W. Redi-Dressings.
Accompanying text: “Pert starlet Miff McCoy is ready for any seaside emergency. That’s not only a darling swim suit she has on—it’s two standard all-purpose Redi-Dressing bandages made by the Schwartz and White Bandage Company of Omaha. If a broken rib results from too-strenuous beach athletics, Miff’s dress can supply the dressing.” Yeah. The rest of the stack wasn’t even that good. I dumped them all in the circular file, and began to wrack my brains in spite of the heat.
I’d have to fake one, I decided. Unfortunately, there had been no big running silly season story so far this summer—no flying saucers, or monsters in the Florida Everglades, or chloroform bandits terrifying the city. If there had, I could have hopped on and faked a “with.” As it was, I’d have to fake a “lead,” which is harder and riskier.
The flying saucers? I couldn’t revive them; they’d been forgotten for years, except by newsmen. The giant turtle of Lake Huron had been quiet for years, too. If I started a chloroform bandit scare, every old maid in the state would back me up by swearing she heard the bandit trying to break in and smelled chloroform—but the cops wouldn’t like it. Strange messages from space received at the State University’s radar lab? That might do it. I put a sheet of copy paper hi the typewriter and sat, glaring at it and hating the silly season.
There was a slight reprieve—the Western Union tie-line printer by the desk dinged at me and its sickly-yellow bulb lit up. I tapped out: “WW GA PLS,” and the machine began to eject yellow, gummed tape which told me this:
“WU CO62-DPR COLLECT—FT HICKS ARK AUG 22 105P—WORLDWIRELESS OMAHA—TOWN MARSHAL PINKNEY CRAWLES DIED MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES FISHTRIPPING OZARK HAMLET RUSH CITY TODAY. RUSHERS PHONED HICKSERS ‘BURNED DEATH SHINING DOMES APPEARED YESTERWEEK.’ JEEPING BODY HICKSWARD. QUERIED RUSH CONSTABLE P.C. ALLENBY LEARNING ‘SEVEN GLASSY DOMES EACH HOUSESIZE CLEARING MILE SOUTH TOWN. RUSHERS UNTOUCHED, UNAPPROACHED. CRAWLES WARNED BUT TOUCHED AND DIED BURNS.’ NOTE DESK—RUSH FONECALL 1.85. SHALL I UPFOLLOW?—BENSON—FISHTRIPPING RUSHERS HICKSERS YESTERWEEK JEEPING HICKSWARD HOUSESIZE 1.85 428P CLR . . .”
It was just what the doctor ordered. I typed an acknowledgment for the message and pounded out a story, fast. I punched it and started the tape wiggling through the eastbound transmitter before New York could send any more irked notes. The news circuit printer from New York clucked and began relaying my story immediately:
“WW72 (KICKER)
FORT HICKS, ARKANSAS, AUG 22—(WW)—MYSTERIOUS DEATH TODAY STRUCK DOWN A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER IN A TINY OZARK MOUNTAIN HAMLET. MARSHAL PINKNEY CRAWLES OF FORT HICKS, ARKANSAS, DIED OF BURNS WHILE ON A FISHING TRIP TO THE LITTLE VILLAGE OF RUSH CITY. TERRIFIED NATIVES OF RUSLI CITY BLAMED THE TRAGEDY ON WHAT THEY CALLED ‘SHINING DOMES.’ THEY SAID THE SO-CALLED DOMES APPEARED IN A CLEARING LAST WEEK ONE MILE SOUTH OF TOWN. THERE ARE SEVEN OF THE MYSTERIOUS OBJECTS—EACH ONE THE SIZE OF A HOUSE. THE INHABITANTS OF RUSH CITY DID NOT DARE APPROACH THEM. THEY WARNED THE VISITING MARSHAL CRAWLES—BUT HE DID NOT HEED THEIR WARNING. RUSH CITY’S CONSTABLE P.C. ALLENBY WAS A WITNESS TO THE TRAGEDY. SAID HE:—‘THERE ISN’T MUCH TO TELL. MARSHAL CRAWLES JUST WALKED UP TO ONE OF THE DOMES AND PUT HIS HAND ON IT. THERE WAS A BIG FLASH, AND WHEN I COULD SEE AGAIN, HE WAS BURNED TO DEATH.’ CONSTABLE ALLENBY IS RETURNING THE BODY OF MARSHAL CRAWLES TO FORT HICKS. 602P22OM”
That, I thought, should hold them for a while. I remembered Benson’s “note desk” and put through a long distance call to Fort Hicks, person to person. The Omaha operator asked for Fort Hicks information, but there wasn’t any. The Fort Hicks operator asked whom she wanted. Omaha finally admitted that we wanted to talk to Mr. Edwin C. Benson. Fort Hicks figured out loud and then decided that Ed was probably at the police station if he hadn’t gone home for supper yet. She connected us with the police station, and I got Benson. He had a pleasant voice, not particularly backwoods Arkansas. I gave him some of the old oil about a fine dispatch, and a good, conscientious job, and so on. He took it with plenty of dry reserve, which was odd. Our rural stringers always ate that kind of stuff up. Where, I asked him, was he from?
“Fort Hicks,” he told me, “but I’ve moved around. I did the courthouse beat in Little Rock—” I nearly laughed out loud at that, but the laugh died out as he went on—“rewrite for the A.P. in New Orleans, got to be bureau chief there but I didn’t like wire service work. Got an opening on the Chicago Trib desk. That didn’t last—they sent me to head up their Washington bureau. There I switched to the New York Times. They made me a war correspondent and I got hurt—back to Fort Hicks. I do some magazine writing now. Did you want a follow-up on the Rush City story?”
“Sure,” I told him weakly. “Give it a real ride—use your own judgment. Do you think it’s a fake?”
“I saw Pink’s body a little while ago at the undertaker’s parlor, and I had a talk with Allenby, from Rush City. Pink got burned, all right, and Allenby didn’t make his story up. Maybe somebody else did—he’s pretty dumb—but as far as I can tell, this is the real thing. I’ll keep the copy coming. Don’t forget about that dollar eighty-five phone call, will you?”
I told him I wouldn’t, and hung up. Mr. Edwin C. Benson had handed me quite a jolt. I wondered how badly he had been hurt, that he had been forced to abandon a brilliant news career and bury himself in the Ozarks.
Then there came a call from God, the board chairman of World Wireless. Fie was fishing in Canada, as all good board chairmen do during the silly season, but he had caught a news broadcast which used my Rush City story. He had a mobile phone in his trailer, and it was but the work of a moment to ring Omaha and louse up my carefully-planned vacation schedules and rotation of night shifts. He wanted me to go down to Rush City and cover the story personally. I said yes and began trying to round up the rest of the staff. My night editor was sobered up by his wife and delivered to the bureau in fair shape. A telegrapher on vacation was reached at his summer resort and talked into checking out. I got a taxi company on the phone and told them to have a cross-country cab on the roof in an hour. I specified their best driver, and told them to give him maps of Arkansas.
Meanwhile, two “with domes” dispatches arrived from Benson and got moved on the wire. I monitored a couple of newscasts; the second one carried a story by another wire service on the domes—a pickup of our stuff, but they’d have their own men on the scene fast enough. I filled in the night editor, and went up to the roof for the cab.
The driver took off in the teeth of a gathering thunderstorm. We had to rise above it, and by the time we could get down to sight-pilotage altitude, we were lost. We circled most of the night until the driver picked up a beacon he had on his charts at about 3:30 a.m. We landed at Fort Flicks as day was breaking, not on speaking terms.
Fort Hicks’ field clerk told me where Benson lived, and I walked there. It was a white, frame house. A quiet, middle-aged woman let me in. She was his widowed sister, Mrs. McHenry. She got me some coffee and told me she had been up all night waiting for Edwin to come back from Rush City. He had started out about 8:00 p.m., and it was only a two-hour trip by car. She was worried. I tried to pump her about her brother, but she’d only say that he was the bright one of the family. She didn’t want to talk about his work as war correspondent. She did show me some of his magazine stuff—boy-and-girl stories in national weeklies. He seemed to sell one every couple of months.
We had arrived at a conversational stalemate when her brother walked in, and I discovered why his news career had been interrupted. He was blind. Aside from a long, puckered brown scar that ran from his left temple back over his ear and onto the nape of his neck, he was a pleasant-looking fellow in his mid-forties.
“Who is it, Vera?” he asked.
“It’s Mr. Williams, the gentleman who called you from Omaha today—I mean yesterday.”
“Flow do you do, Williams. Don’t get up,” he added—hearing, I suppose, the chair squeak as I leaned forward to rise.
“You were so long, Edwin,” his sister said with relief and reproach.
“That young jackass Howie—my chauffeur for the night—” he added an aside to me—“got lost going there and coming back. But I did spend more time than I’d planned at Rush City.” He sat down, facing me.
“Williams, there is some difference of opinion about the shining image. The Rush City people say that they exist, and I say they don’t.”
His sister brought him a cup of coffee.
“What happened, exactly?” I asked.
“That Allenby took me and a few other hardy citizens to see them. They told me just what they looked like. Seven hemispheres in a big clearing, glassy, looming up like houses, reflecting the gleam of the headlights. But they weren’t there. Not to me, and not to any blind man. I know when I’m standing in front of a house or anything else that big. I can feel a little tension on the skin of my face. It works unconsciously, but the mechanism is thoroughly understood.
“The blind get—because they have to—an aural picture of the world. We hear a little hiss of air that means we’re at the corner of a building, we hear and feel big, turbulent air currents that mean we’re coming to a busy street. Some of the boys can thread their way through an obstacle course and never touch a single obstruction. I’m not that good, maybe because I haven’t been blind as long as they have, but by hell, I know when there are seven objects the size of houses in front of me, and there just were no such things in the clearing at Rush City.”
“Well,” I shrugged, “there goes a fine piece of silly-season journalism. What kind of a gag are the Rush City people trying to pull, and why?”
“No kind of gag. My driver saw the domes, too—and don’t forget the late marshal. Pink not only saw them but touched them. All I know is that people see them and I don’t. If they exist, they have a kind of existence like nothing else I’ve ever met.”
“I’ll go up there myself,” I decided.
“Best thing,” said Benson. “I don’t know what to make of it. You can take our car.” He gave me directions and I gave him a schedule of deadlines. We wanted the coroner’s verdict, due today, an eye-witnes
s story—his driver would do for that—some background stuff on the area and a few statements from local officials.
I took his car and got to Rush City in two hours. It was an unpainted collection of dog-trot homes, set down in the big pine forest that covers all that rolling Ozark country. There was a general store that had the place’s only phone. I suspected it had been kept busy by the wire services and a few enterprising newspapers. A state trooper in a flashy uniform was lounging against a fly-specked tobacco counter when I got there.
“I’m Sam Williams, from World Wireless,” I said. “You come to have a look at the domes?”
“World Wireless broke that story, didn’t they?” he asked me, with a look I couldn’t figure out.
“We did. Our Fort Hicks stringer wired it to us.”
The phone rang, and the trooper answered it. It seemed to have been a call to the Governor’s office he had placed.
“No, sir,” he said over the phone. “No, sir. They’re all sticking to the story, but I didn’t see anything. I mean, they don’t see them any more, but they say they were there, and now they aren’t any more.” A couple more “No, sirs” and he hung up.
“When did that happen?” I asked.
“About a half-hour ago. I just came from there on my bike to report.”
The phone rang again, and I grabbed it. It was Benson, asking for me. I told him to phone a flash and bulletin to Omaha on the disappearance and then took off to find Constable Allenby. He was a stage reuben with a nickel-plated badge and a six-shooter. He cheerfully climbed into the car and guided me to the clearing.
There was a definite little path worn between Rush City and the clearing by now, but there was a disappointment at the end of it. The clearing was empty. A few small boys sticking carefully to its fringes told wildly contradictory stories about the disappearance of the domes, and I jotted down some kind of dispatch out of the most spectacular versions. I remember it involved flashes of blue fire and a smell like sulphur candles. That was all there was to it.
Collected Short Fiction Page 99
