“I might make some suggestions, but in a way they’re even more fantastic, so I won’t bother with ‘em just for the moment. The fact is, and I insist it is a fact, that whenever we have switched on our ten centimeter transmitter there has always been a sharp rise of atmospheric ionization, and whenever we switched off there has been a decline of ionization. Does anyone deny that?”
“I don’t deny that what has happened so far agrees with what you say,” Weichart argued. “I agree that no denial is possible there. It’s when it comes to inferring a causal connection between our transmissions and the fluctuations of ionization that I dig my toes in.”
“You mean, Dave, that what we found this afternoon and this evening was coincidence?” asked Marlowe.
“That’s what I mean. I grant you that the odds against such a series of coincidences are pretty big, but Kingsley’s causal connection seems to me an out and out impossibility. What I feel is that the improbable can happen but the impossible cannot.”
“Impossible is too strong,” insisted Kingsley. “And I’m sure that Weichart couldn’t really defend his use of the word. What we’re faced with is a choice between two improbabilities—I said that my hypothesis seemed improbable when I first trotted it out. Moreover I agree with what Alexis said earlier on, that the only way to test a hypothesis is by its predictions. It’s about three-quarters of an hour since Harry Leicester did his last transmission. I’m going to suggest that he goes right now and does another ten centimeter transmission.”
Leicester groaned. ‘“Not again!”
“I predict,” went on Kingsley, “that my pattern A will be repeated. What Fd like to know is what Weichart predicts.”
Weichart didn’t quite like the turn of the argument, and he attempted to hedge. Marlowe laughed.
“He’s pinching you, Dave! You’ve got to stand up and take it. If you’re right about it being coincidence before, you’ve got to agree that Kingsley’s present prediction is very unlikely to be right.”
“Of course it’s unlikely, but it might happen that way all the same.”
“Come off it, Dave! What do you predict? Where d’you put your money?”
And Weichart was forced to admit that he put his money on Kingsley’s prediction being wrong.
“All right. Let’s go and see,” said Leicester.
While the company were filing out, Ann Halsey said to Parkinson:
“Will you help me to make some more coffee, Mr. Parkinson? They’ll be wanting some when they get back.”
As they busied themselves, she went on:
“Did you ever hear such a lot of talk? I used to think that scientists were of the strong silent type, but never did I hear such a gibble-gabble. What is it that Omar Khayyam says about the doctors and saints?”
“I believe it goes something like this,” answered Parkinson:
“Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about, but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.”
“It isn’t so much the volume of talk that surprises me,” he laughed. “We get plenty of that in politics. It’s the number of mistakes they’ve made, how often things have turned out differently from what they’ve expected.”
When the party reassembled it was obvious at a glance how things had gone. Marlowe took a cup of coffee from Parkinson.
“Thanks. Well, that’s that. Chris was right and Dave was wrong. Now I suppose we must get down to trying to decide what it means.”
“Your move, Chris,” said Leicester.
“Let’s suppose then that my hypothesis is right, that our own transmissions are producing a marked effect on the atmospheric ionization.”
Ann Halsey handed Kingsley a mug of coffee.
“I’d be a lot happier if I knew what ionization meant. Here, drink this.”
“Oh, it means that the outer parts of the atoms are stripped away from the inner parts.”
“And how does this happen?”
“It can happen in many ways, by an electrical discharge, as in a flash of lightning, or in a neon tube—the sort of strip lighting we’ve got here. The gas in these tubes is being partially ionized.”
“I suppose energy is the real difficulty? That your transmissions have far too little power to produce this rise of ionization?” said McNeil.
“That’s right,” answered Marlowe. “It’s completely impossible that our transmissions should be the primary cause of the fluctuations in the atmosphere. My God, they’d need a fantastic amount of power.”
“Then how can Kingsley’s hypothesis be right?”
“Our transmissions are not the primary cause, as Geoff says. That’s wholly impossible. I agree with Weichart there. My hypothesis is that our transmissions are acting as a trigger, whereby some very large source of power is released.”
“And where, Chris, do you suppose this source of power is to be located?”
“In the Cloud, of course.”
“But surely it’s quite fantastic to imagine that we can cause the Cloud to react in such a fashion, and to do it with such reproducibility? You’d have to suppose that the Cloud was equipped with a sort of feedback mechanism,” argued Leicester.
“On the basis of my hypothesis that’s certainly a correct inference.”
“But don’t you see, Kingsley, that it’s utterly mad?” Weichart exclaimed.
Kingsley looked at his watch.
“It’s almost time to go and try again, if anyone wants to. Does anyone want to?”
“In heaven’s name, no!” said Leicester.
“Either we go or we stay. And if we stay it means that we accept Kingsley’s hypothesis. Well, boys, do we go or do we stay?” remarked Marlowe.
“We stay,” said Barnett. “And we see how the argument goes. We’ve got as far as some sort of a feedback mechanism in the Cloud, a mechanism set to chum out an enormous amount of power as soon as it receives a trickle of radio emission from outside itself. The next step, I suppose, is to speculate on how the feedback mechanism works, and why it works as it does. Anybody got any ideas?”
Alexandrov cleared his throat. Everybody waited to catch one of the Russian’s rare remarks.
“Bastard in Cloud. Said so before.”
There were wide grins and a giggle from Yvette Hedelfort. Kingsley, however, remarked quite seriously:
“I remember you did. Were you serious about it, Alexis?”
“Always serious, damn it,” said the Russian.
“Without frills, what exactly do you mean, Chris?” someone asked.
“I mean that the Cloud contains an intelligence. Before anybody starts criticizing, let me say that I know it’s a preposterous idea and I wouldn’t suggest it for a moment if the alternative weren’t even more outrageously preposterous. Doesn’t it strike you how often we’ve been wrong about the behavior of the Cloud?”
Parkinson and Ann Halsey exchanged an amused glance.
“All our mistakes have a certain hallmark about them. They’re just the sort of mistake that it’d be natural to make if instead of the Cloud being inanimate, it were alive.”
CHAIN REACTION
BOYD ELLANBY
(Lyle and William C Boyd)
As a husband and wife team, the Doctors Boyd collaborate equally well on writing—both scientific and science fiction works—and on scientific projects which have taken them all over the world, on such errands as blood-typing the 3,ooo-year-old tissues of mummies in Egypt and studying hereditary factors in various parts of Asia. The results have appeared not only in scientific journals but in such books as William Boyd’s Genetics and the Races of Man, probably the first and certainly the best-known popularly written book to point out that such visible features as skin color and hair are only a part of the story of “racial characteristics”—and that the relationships demonstrated by inheritance of blood-typing factors point to some strange and unexpected joinings at the
roots of Man’s family tree.
As science fiction writers the Boyds employed the phonetic pseudonym of “Boyd Ellanby”; one of the best liked of their stories is this one, called Chain Reaction.
MacPherson shuffled the cards over and over again. His hands were almost steady.
“Want to place a limit on the bets?” he asked.
His two colleagues who had made the night drive with him from the University said nothing, but Rothman laughed.
“Today?” he said. “Today, the sky’s the limit.” MacPherson rested the deck on the table and watched as Rothman stood up to look through the barred window at the glittering Arizona desert. Rothman had got thinner during his months of confinement; his shoulders were bony beneath the gray hospital robe and his balding head looked like a skull.
“Are you going to play?” asked MacPherson. “Or is poker too childish an amusement for a mathematician?”
Rothman turned his back to the window. “Oh, IT1 play. When three old friends from the Project suddenly turn up for a visit, even a madman will string along.”
Shuffling the cards again, MacPherson wished the other men would say something; it wasn’t fair of them to make him carry the conversation. Professor Avery, who had cut his physics classes in order to join the morning’s party, sat in glum silence. His plump face was pale, and behind thick-lensed spectacles which enlarged his eyes grotesquely, he blinked as he watched the flickering cards. Dr. Neill, from Physical Chemistry, was tapping his toe against the table leg, watching Rothman, who stood at the window, waiting.
“But we can’t have much of a game with only four people,” said Rothman. “We ought to have a fifth.”
“Maybe we can find someone.” MacPherson walked to the locked steel door and rattled the rectangular lattice set in at shoulder height, put his mouth to the metal bars and called out.
“Hey, Joe!”
An attendant in white uniform shuffled into the corridor of closed doors, carrying a tray with one hand and scratching his head with the other.
“How about joining us for a game of poker?”
Joe shook his head and grinned. “Not me, Professor! I start buddying around with the loonies, I lose my job.” “But we’re not inmates!”
“Maybe not, but Dr. Rothman is.”
“Doesn’t prove I’m crazy, Joe,” said Rothman. “Conversely, not being inmates doesn’t prove these men are sane.” “It’s a fact you don’t look any crazier to me than a lot of professors,” confessed Joe. “I don’t know. All I know is, I’m not crazy enough to break the rules and lose my job. Besides, you longhairs wouldn’t stand a chance at poker with me.”
Still grinning, he shuffled out of sight down the hall. MacPherson sighed and went back to the table. “Well, we’ll have to get along with just the four of us.”
“There’s always the unseen guest,” said Rothman, “but you won’t need to deal him a hand. He already holds all the cards.”
Neill looked up. “Stop hamming and sit down. Quit making like a maniac. It’s not even a good act.”
“Okay.” Rothman drew up a chair. “Now what was said about limiting the bets?”
“Why bother setting a limit?” said Neill. “We’re not likely to mistake each other for millionaires and we all got exactly the same pay when we were on the Project. Unless your sick pay has had two or three zeros tacked onto it, you’re not going to be making any wild bets, and as for the rest of us—”
“University professors are still being paid less than nightclub dancers,” said Avery. “You’re lucky to be out of the rat race, Rothman. While we worry about how to pay the grocery bill, you can relax, eating and sleeping at government expense. You never had it so good.”
“Maybe you’d like to get yourselves committed and keep me company?”
MacPherson rapped the deck on the table. “Stop that kind of talk. We came here to play poker.”
“Did you?” asked Rothman, grinning. “Then why don’t you deal?”
“Cut, Neill?” said MacPherson. As he shot the slippery cards over the table top, each flick of his thumb watched by Rothman’s intent eyes, he regretted this impulsive visit; it now seemed a gesture without meaning. He wondered whether the others were as nervous as he was.
On the drive over from Los Angeles during the night, Neill had seemed calm enough and even Avery, who had changed a lot during work on the Project, had chatted with them unconstrainedly. It was hard to be certain what other men were feeling, even when you had known them a long time, but it could not be pleasant for any of them to be visiting a former colleague who had been removed from the Project directly to a sanitarium.
“Tell me something,” said Rothman as he picked up his cards. “Do you still think I’m crazy?”
“Don’t be an idiot,” MacPherson snapped. “Do you think we’d cut our classes and drive nearly five hundred miles just to play poker with a lunatic?”
“No,” said Rothman. “That’s how I know. But why aren’t you frank about it? Why keep on pretending there wasn’t a special reason for your visit?”
Neill was beating his foot against the table leg again and Avery’s eyes were hard and staring as he examined his cards. “Who’ll open?” MacPherson asked. “I can’t.”
“I can,” said Rothman. “I’m betting one blue chip. Listen, Avery, why won’t you look at me? If you think I’m hamming, what do you call your own act? How long are we going to go on kidding each other? They’ve shut me up here, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped me from logical thinking. My three old friends from the Project don’t turn up in the middle of a Friday morning just to calm my fevered brain with a card game.”
“What’s wrong with poker?” demanded MacPherson.
“Poker? Nothing. I know—It must be the test. Total conversion of matter to energy. Not just a minute percentage any more—total conversion. They’ve finished the set, haven’t they? They’re ready to test. They’re going to disintegrate Waaku, aren’t they? It must be today. Then this is the day the world ends. Tell me, when is zero hour?”
Neill’s cards had slipped from his fingers and he stooped to the floor, fumbling for them. Avery was bending one corner of a card, creasing it, smoothing it out, and creasing it again. Nobody was going to answer, MacPherson realized. They were leaving it up to him.
He spoke sharply. “You’re getting onto forbidden ground, Rothman. You know we’re not allowed to discuss the Project with you. We’re allowed to visit you only under the strictest promise not to speak of it at all. You’re certainly rational enough to understand what the therapists have told you, that you’d get well easily enough if you’d stop worrying. Forget about zero hour. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Rothman turned to look out the window. “Is it today?”
“How should we know? We’re only innocent bystanders now, like you. Remember, we all left the Project over six months ago, except Avery, and last month they let him go.”
Neill had rearranged his cards now and he looked at them instead of Rothman as he spoke. “There’s nothing to worry about. Your calculations were wrong. The test is not going to get out of control—if and when they make it. But they don’t tell us things any more.”
“Since they fired you,” said Rothman.
“That’s right, since they fired us,” Neill said. The creased corner of a card suddenly broke off in his fingers.
“If you didn’t believe in my calculations, why did you back me up? I didn’t ask you to. If you didn’t believe in the danger, why didn’t you stay out of the argument and keep your jobs? It wasn’t your fight. You could have kept out of it—or attacked me, like Avery.”
“All we did was insist that even if you had made a mistake in your calculations, that didn’t necessarily prove you were crazy.” said Neill. “We didn’t know whether you were right or not. We couldn’t argue about the math. Avery tore that to pieces and the boys at Columbia and Harvard backed him up. MacPherson and I aren’t competent to check your math. To us, y
ou didn’t seem any crazier than the people who sent you here. But after you’d scared them silly, they had to do something to stop your scaring other people.”
He turned to pick up his cards again, but stopped at the sight of Avery. Avery was standing and crumpling a card spasmodically, his lips were moving without sound, and he was breathing rapidly.
“Look here,” said MacPherson. “You’d better change the subject. If little Joe passes by the door and hears us talking about the Project, he’ll have our visiting privileges revoked before you can say nuclear fission, and they’ll stay revoked forever.”
“How long is forever?” asked Rothman.
Avery threw down his cards and walked to the window. Through the bars, there was nothing to be seen but the expanse of sand, glinting in the morning sun, and a cactus plant casting a stubby shadow. He whirled to face the others.
“Look, MacPherson,” he burst out. “I’m fed up with this game. Snookums Rothman mustn’t think about the Project any more, so we mustn’t say the naughty word. But we were all in it together at the beginning and there was a while when we were all every bit as scared as he was. Why not tell him we came this morning in case—just in case—he’d heard about the test and was worrying? What’s the harm in telling him what the whole university knows? That zero hour is today, this morning, now!”
“Shut up, you fool!” said MacPherson.
But Rothman glanced at his cards again, then looked up. “When does it begin? What time is it now?”
“Don’t answer!” shouted MacPherson. “Are you trying to knock him off balance again?”
“I will answer!” said Avery. “I’m going to tell him. He scared us silly with his calculations; now let us scare him with some cold facts. It’ll do him good. Maybe when the test is over, if he finds—I mean when he finds—he was wrong, he’ll be cured.”
“Yes, and maybe he’ll really be crazy.”
The Expert Dreamers (1962) Anthology Page 17
