The Expert Dreamers (1962) Anthology

by Frederik Pohl (ed. )

  Well, it was gratifying, in a way—they died of old age. But die they did. It took three days to show an effect, but when it came, it was dramatic. These were young adult mice, in the full flush of their mousehood, but when these new demons got to work on them, they suddenly developed a frowsy, decrepit appearance that made them look like Bowery bums over whom Cinderella’s good fairy had waved her wand in reverse. And two days later they were dead.

  “I think we’ve got something,” said Greco thoughtfully; but I didn’t think so, and I was right. Dead was dead. We could kill the animals by making them too young. We could kill the animals by making them too old. But keep them alive, once the demons were in them, we could not.

  Greco evolved a plan: Mix the two breeds of demons! Take an animal with the young-age demons already in it, then add a batch that worked in the other direction!

  For a while, it seemed to work—but only for a while. After a couple of weeks, one breed or the other would gain the upper hand. And the animals died.

  It was fast in mice, slow in humans. Minnie stayed alive. But the nose grew longer and facial hair reappeared; simultaneously her complexion cleared, her posture straightened. And then, for the first time, we began to read the papers.

  STRANGE PLAGUE

  STRIKES ELGIN

  bawled the Chicago Tribune, and went on to tell how the suburbs around Elgin, Illinois, were heavily infested with a curious new malady, the symptoms of which were—youth.

  OAKLAND “BABY-SKIN”

  TOLL PASSES 10,000

  blared the San Francisco Examiner. The New York News found thousands of cases in Brooklyn. A whole hospital in Dallas was evacuated to make room for victims of the new plague.

  And more.

  We looked at each other.

  “They’re out in force,” said Theobald Greco soberly. “And we don’t have the cure.”

  IV

  The world was topsy-turvy, and in the middle of it Minnie disappeared, talking hysterically about reporting us to the authorities. I don’t mind admitting that I was worried. And the experiments were not progressing. The trouble

  seemed to be that the two varieties of demons—the aging and the youthing—were not compatible; if one took up residence in a given section of an organism, the other moved out. The more numerous destroyed the weaker; there was no balance. We tested it again and again in the mice and there was no doubt of it.

  So far, only the youthing demons were free. But when Minnie left us, it was only a matter of time. Our carriers— from Grand Rapids and from the hotel—had spread to California and the East Coast, to the North and to the South, throughout the country, perhaps by now through the world. It would be slower with the aging demons—there was only one of Minnie—but it would be equally sure.

  Greco began drinking heavily.

  “It’s the end,” he brooded. “We’re licked.”

  “No, Greek! We can’t give up!”

  “We have to give up. The demons are loose in the Earth, Virgie! Those people in the headlines—they’ll die of young age. So will others—even plants and animals, and bacteria, as the demons adapt to them. And then—why not? The air. The rocks, the ocean, even the Earth itself. Remember, the entropy of the Universe is supposed to tend to a maximum not only as a whole, but in each of its parts taken in isolation. The Earth’s evolution—reversed. Spottily, and maybe that’s worse, because some parts will evolve forward and others reverse, as is happening in my own body. Heaven help the world, Old Virgie! And not just the Earth, because what can stop them from spreading? To the Moon, the other planets— out of the Solar System, for that matter; to the other galaxies, even. Why not? And then—”

  “GRECO”

  An enormous tinny voice, more than human, filled the air. It came from outside.

  I jumped a foot. It sounded like the voice of a demon; then I got a grip on myself and understood. It was a loudspeaker, and it came from outside.

  “GRECO. WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE. COME ON OUT!”

  I had a stabbing sensation of familiarity. “The police!” I cried. “Greco, it’s the police!”

  He looked at me wearily and shook his head.

  “No. More likely the F.B.I.”

  Well, that was it. I got out—I didn’t wait for permission from the Greek.

  I stopped at the door, and three searchlight beams hit me right in the eye. There were cars all around the laboratory, but I couldn’t see them, not after those lights went on.

  I froze, stiff; wanting to make sure they understood (a) that I wasn’t Greco and (b) that I didn’t have a gun.

  They understood, all right.

  But they let me out.

  They put me in one of the cars, with a slim gray-eyed young man in a snap-brimmed hat sitting politely and alertly beside me, and they let me watch; and what happened after that wasn’t funny at all.

  Greco didn’t come out. They shouted at him over the loudspeaker and eventually he answered—his voice little and calm, coming out of nowhere, and all he said was, “Go away. I won’t come out. I warn you, don’t try to force your way in.”

  But he knew they wouldn’t listen, of course.

  They didn’t.

  They tried force.

  And he met it in novel ways with force of his own. The door had locked itself behind me; they got a fence post for a battering ram, and the post burst into flame. They found an L-beam from an old bed frame and tried that, and they were sorry they had done it; the thing melted in the middle, splattering them with hot drops of steel.

  The polite, alert young man beside me said, not so polite any more,“What’s he doing, you? What sort of fancy tricks has he got in there?”

  “Demons,” I said crazily, and that was a mistake, but what else was I to do? Try to explain Maxwell’s equations to a Fed?

  They were trying again—there were fifteen or twenty of them, at least. They went for the windows, and the windows dissolved and rained cherry-red wet glass on them. They tried again through the open frames when the glass was gone, and the frames burst into fire around them, the blue smoke bleached white in the yellow of the flame and the white of the searchlights. They tried singly, by stealth; and they tried in clusters of a dozen, yelling.

  It was hopeless—hopeless for everybody, because they couldn’t get in and the Greek could never, never get out; for go away they wouldn’t. Not even when, with poof and a yellow flare, the gas tank of one of the cars exploded. All that happened was that the man in the snap-brimmed hat and I leaped out, real quick; and then all the cars went up. But the men didn’t leave. And then the guns began to go off without waiting for anyone to pull the trigger; and the barrels softened and slumped and spattered to the ground. But the men still had bare hands, and they stayed.

  The Greek got wild—or lost control, it was hard to tell which. There was a sudden catastrophic whooshing roar and, wham, a tree took flame for roots. A giant old oak, fifty feet tall, I guess it had been there a couple of centuries, but Greco’s demons changed all that; it took flame and shot whistling into the air, spouting flame and spark like a Roman candle. Maybe he thought it would scare them. Maybe it did. But it also made them mad. And they ran, all at once, every one of them but my personal friend, for the biggest, openest of the windows—

  And leaped back, cursing and yelling, beating out flames on their clothes.

  Jets of flame leaped out of every window and door. The old building seemed to bulge outward and go voom. In half a second, it was a single leaping tulip of fire.

  The firemen got there then, but it was a little late. Oh, they got Greco out—alive, even. But they didn’t save a bit of the laboratory. It was the third fire in Greco’s career, and the most dangerous—for where previously only a few of the youthing demons had escaped, now there were vast quantities of both sorts.

  It was the end of the world.

  I knew it.

  You know, I wish I had been right. I spent yesterday with Greco. He’s married now and has a fine young
son. They made an attractive family picture, the two healthy-looking adults, strong-featured, in the prime of life, and the wee toddler between them.

  The only thing is—Greco’s the toddler.

  He doesn’t call himself Greco any more. Would you, the way the world is now? He has plenty of money stashed away —I do too, of course—not that money means very much these days. His brain hasn’t been affected, just his body. He was lucky, I guess. Some of the demons hit the brain in some of their victims and—

  Well, it’s pretty bad.

  Greco got the answer after a while. Both types of demons were loose in the world, and both, by and by, were in every individual.

  But they didn’t kill each other off.

  One simply grew more rapidly, took over control, until it ran out of the kind of molecules it needed. Then the other took over.

  Then the first.

  Then the other again …

  Mice are short-lived. It’s like balancing a needle on the

  end of your nose; there isn’t enough space in a mouse’s short span for balance, any more than there is in a needle’s.

  But in a human life—

  Things are going to have to be worked out, though.

  It’s bad enough that a family gets all mixed up the way Greco’s is—he’s on a descending curve, his kid is on an aging curve, and Minnie—did I tell you that it was Minnie he married?—has completed her second rejuvenation and is on the way back up again.

  But there are worse problems than that.

  For one thing, it isn’t going to be too long, before we run out of space. I don’t mean time, I mean space. Living space.

  Because it’s all very well that the human animal should now mature to grow alternately younger and older, over and over—

  But, damn it, how I wish that somebody once in a while would die!

  THE HEART ON THE OTHER SIDE

  GEORGE GAMOW

  The friends and colleagues of Niels Bohr (yes, the man who first pictured the “Bohr atom”) had the happy habit of celebrating his birthday by contributing papers to a sort of star-studded birthday book printed for his private enjoyment Many of the papers are downright earnest and perhaps more technical than we laymen might enjoy; but there are exceptions.

  One was O. R. Frisch’s On the Feasibility of Coal-Driven Power Stations, elsewhere in this volume. Another is the present story by George Gamow who, if any scientist ever qualified, surely can be presented as “a man who needs no introduction” His deadpan topological romance, The Heart on the Other Side, was first written to celebrate Bohr s seventieth birthday, and is here published for a general audience for the first time.

  “But Father will never give his consent/’ said Vera Sapognikoff in a tone of despair.

  “But he must!” said Stan Situs. He was very much in love.

  Vera shook her head. “What my father is looking for in the way of a son-in-law is someone who can help him in his shoe business, and eventually take it over. You’re a mathematician. You can’t possibly qualify as a shoe manufacturer, can you?”

  “I guess I can’t,” Stan agreed sadly, after some thought. “Perhaps if I were in some other branch of mathematics— But I am a topologist. I don’t see what topology has to contribute to the production and selling of shoes.”

  Then he added stubbornly: “But I can’t give you up, Vera! I can’t lose the girl I love just because there’s no cash value in a Mobius twist!”

  “A what?”

  Stan said patiently: “A Mobius twist. Haven’t I ever shown you one?” He scrabbed in his desk drawer. They were in his university office, and it took him only a moment to find a piece of paper, a pair of scissors and a small bottle of glue.

  “Look,” he said, and cut a strip of paper an inch or so wide. He twisted one end of it a half turn and glued it together, forming a twisted paper ring.

  Vera looked at the paper and then at the man she loved. “Is this what you do for a living?” she asked.

  “Here.” Stan handed her the scissors. “Cut it all the way around, along the middle line of the strip. See what you get.”

  Vera shook her head. “That’s silly. I know what I’ll get. It will cut into two rings, and so what?”

  “Cut,” urged Stan.

  Vera shrugged and did what Stan told her. And, curiously, it didn’t work out at all the way she had expected. When the scissors had gone all the way around the strip, and closed on the starting point, Vera cried out. For there weren’t two rings at all—there was still only one, but a ring that was half its former width and twice its former length.

  Vera stared at her beloved mathematician. “What is this, magic? And who is this man Mobius?”

  “He was a Swedish mathematician of the nineteenth century, who contributed a great deal to the science of topology. I’m afraid his other contributions, though, aren’t quite as easy to demonstrate.

  “But there’s more to be said about this strip.” Quickly Stan cut out and pasted a new one. “See here. Suppose I sketch a few cartoon figures on the strip. Now you have to use your imagination a little. Make believe the strip is cellophane, so that you can see figures drawn on both sides of it at once. Then imagine that the little drawings can slide freely along the surface.”

  “All right,” said Vera, frowning.

  “Do you see?” Stan demanded triumphantly. “You find that they turn into their mirror images each time they make a complete trip around the strip!”

  “Is that right?” murmured Vera glassily. She was getting visibly discouraged with so much mathematics.

  “Pay attention!” Stan commanded, forgetting for the moment that he was talking to a lovely girl he wanted to marry, and not to one of his classes of graduate students. “This is a very important property of a Mobius strip—which, as I am going to show in my next article, can be generalized for three-dimensional, or even for n-dimensional, space.”

  “That’s nice,” muttered Vera.

  But Stan was hardly listening; he was carried away. “This is not merely a matter of academic interest,” he said proudly. “According to my calculations, there is such a three-dimensional Mobius effect somewhere on the surface of the earth. You see the consequences, of course?”

  “Of course.”

  “Suppose, for example,” said Stan, sketching hastily, “I draw on this strip a man and an animal facing each other. You have to imagine, still, that this is cellophane—which corresponds to the fact that mathematical surfaces are not supposed to have any thickness, and therefore both figures should be visible from either side of the paper. I draw, then, this gallant matador and brave bull in mortal conflict.”

  “Oh, how cute!” exclaimed Vera, delighted to find something she could recognize.

  “Now,” continued Stan, filled with lecturer’s enthusiasm, “imagine that the matador runs all the way around the strip and comes back to the bull from the other direction. Then he will look either in flight from the bull, or confronting him—upside down.

  “Since neither position is very suitable for fighting the bull, he will have to make another run around Mobius strip to straighten himself out again.”

  Vera began to gather her pocketbook and gloves in a businesslike way.

  “That’s very nice,” she said politely. “But, Stan, what has it got to do with us? I can see how you amuse yourself with these Mobius comic strips. But you can’t give a Mobius twist to a shoe to make Father agree to our marriage.”

  Stan came back to his present surroundings with a start.

  “Oh,” he said. “No, I suppose not. But—”

  Then he frowned in concentration, and remained that way for several moments, until Vera became alarmed. “Stan?” she asked tentatively. “Stan?”

  “But I can!” he cried. “Sure I can! Give a Mobius twist to a shoe, eh? Why, that’s a brilliant idea—and, believe me, it will revolutionize the shoe industry!”

  Not more than an hour later, Vera’s father had a caller.

  “Dr.
Situs is here to see you,” said the receptionist’s voice through the intercom. “He says that he has a very important proposal to make.”

  “All right, let him in,” Mr. Sapognikoff growled. He leaned back behind his giant desk, scowling. “I doubt, though,” he said aloud, “that this young fellow has anything to propose but marriage.” Then, still grumbling, he got up reluctantly as Stan came in and shook his hand.

  Stan Situs said briskly: “Sir, I suppose you are aware that each man, as well as each woman, has two feet. One is right. The other is left.”

  Mr. Sapognikoff looked suddenly alarmed. “What?” he asked.

  “It is a well known fact,” Stan assured him. “Now, doesn’t it make the production of shoes more expensive? Don’t you need two separate sets of machinery—one for right shoes and one for left—and wouldn’t it be simple if one needed to produce only, let us say, rightfoot shoes?” Mr. Sapognikoff, now quite persuaded that the boy was really out of his mind, though probably not dangerous, said with heavy humor: “Sure. And I guess we make everybody hop around on one foot after that, right?”

  “No, sir,” Stan assured him seriously. “That would not be practical.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  Stan settled himself. “The point is that for the past few years I have been working on the mathematical possibility of a Mobius twist in a three-dimensional space. I will not trouble you by trying to explain it, since you wouldn’t understand. For that matter, even your daughter didn’t.” Mr. Sapognikoff scowled but said nothing. “The fact is that, according to my recent calculations pertaining to the gravitational anomalies observed in certain regions of the earth’s surface, such a three-dimensional Mobius twist of space must exist somewhere in the unexplored regions of the upper Amazon River. In fact, my conclusions are strongly supported by recent findings of South American biological expeditions which discovered in that locality two different kinds of snails with left-screw and right-screw shells.” Mr. Sapognikoff said ominously: “I’m a busy man, Situs. And I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying. What does it have to do with shoes?”