by Jerry
A month later, he was so sure of success, he called Meyer in. The older man hesitated about coming. His Z-bomb project was taking all his time.
“All right, Carver, if you really have something important,” he grumbled. Carver smiled as he hung up, wondering what Meyer would say when he saw the system materialize, and looked at the Earth on the microscope screen. It would make the Z-bomb work look like Middle Ages stuff!
Meyer came, scowling, and Carver seated him before the chamber. “What the dev—” Meyer exploded, but Carver cut him off with an upraised hand.
He flipped the switch and pointed as the system emerged from the sterile vacuum behind the inspection glass. Meyer hunched forward, peering at the whirling specks. Carver indicated the microscope screen and adjusted it quickly. The older man frowned as he watched, eyes moving from the chamber itself to the screen that enlarged the model of the Earth. Carver grinned happily. This time it would work and keep working.
“Recognize North America?” he asked Meyer. The man whistled sibilantly in the darkness. “How in creation do you—” His words cut off as the chamber suddenly went dark again. Carver slammed down a notepad in disgust and turned up the lights.
“I thought I had it this time,” he said angrily.
Meyer’s eyes still narrowed unbelievingly, then suddenly he pressed his lips together and got to his feet. “Wait a minute, Carver,” he snapped. “Is this part of your gag about reproducing the solar system with a scanner?”
“It’s no gag,” Carver retorted, working futilely with his control board. “I’ve reproduced the system. You saw it, you saw the accuracy.” He paused, before he went on cautiously. “I want you to back me up when I ask for an appropriation.” He looked up at Meyer.
THE physicist snorted and got to his feet. “Back you up!” He laughed out loud. “If this is your idea of a joke, Carver, don’t include me in any more of them. It’s a clever trick, but I’m not having any. You better forget the magic effects and get to work, or I’ll be forced to report you to the Board.” He picked up his briefcase and strode to the door of the lab.
“That’s an hour wasted,” he said coldly. “An hour I can’t spare, with the Z-bomb to be tried out on the—” His eyes widened as he caught himself. “That’s a secret I can’t tell even you,” he snapped. He stalked off.
“Meyer!” Carver started after him, then gave it up. Back in the lab he sank into a chair at his desk, staring at the chamber. All that money, all that time. He glanced at the stopwatch. Less than three minutes! His mind raged. So near, and so damnably far.
Each trial had gotten worse. Twenty-three, thirteen, and three. He frowned and picked up a pencil. That was a coincidence. He plotted the numbers roughly on a piece of scratch paper, noting the spacing. There was ten minutes between each of the first two attempts. And suddenly he stiffened. There had been about a month between each test. Fingers stiff, he drew a base line and marked it off. Then he plotted the three times vertically and drew in the curve. A straight line, nearly, intersecting his base line about—
Carver swore and ripped through his stack of notes on the trials. He had kept accurate track of the times and now he plotted them carefully on graph paper. When he had finished, he went grimly to the computer in the building and fed in his problem.
He converted the answer to a date and time and his body was cold now as he went to the phone.
“Meyer? This is Carver. Wait—this will only take a minute.” He looked at his paper. “The Z-bomb goes off on the twenty-seventh of this month, right? At twelve noon.”
There was a pause, with only the carrier hum in his ear. Then Meyer’s explosive roar. “Who told you, Carver?” he shouted. “That is secret information, you shouldn’t have. Besides,” he went on, “We don’t know for certain that it will explode.”
“It will,” Carver said. “Don’t worry, Meyer, your bomb will go off.” He hung up slowly, hearing Meyer’s protests screeching from the receiver until it clicked in the cradle.
Carver stood up and walked to the chamber. He had duplicated the solar system all right. To a degree that was past belief. The bomb would go off, he knew. Because it had gone off three times in the model, and time was running out, down the straightline graph that interested the base at noon on the twenty-seventh. It wasn’t a warning, it was a promise.
WHAT HAVE I DONE?
Mark Clifton
When you’ve finished this bitter little piece, you might decide for yourself whether Clifton’s point is valid. But you won t like it!
It had to be I. It would be stupid to say that the burden should have fallen to a great statesman, a world leader, a renowned scientist. With all modesty, I think I am one of the few who could have caught the problem early enough to avert disaster. I have a peculiar skill. The whole thing hinged on that. I have learned to know human beings.
The first time I saw the fellow, I was at the drugstore counter buying cigarettes. He w-as standing at the magazine rack. One might have thought from the expression on his face that he had never seen magazines before. Still, quite a number of people get that rapt and vacant look when they can’t make up their minds to a choice.
The thing which bothered me in that casual glance was that I couldn’t recognize him.
There are others who can match my record in taking case histories. I happened to be the one who came in contact with this fellow. For thirty years I have been listening to, talking with, counseling people—over two hundred thousand of them. They have not been routine interviews. I have brought intelligence, sensitivity and concern to each of them.
Mine has been a driving, burning desire to know people. Not from the western scientific point of view of devising tools and rules to measure animated robots and ignoring the man beneath. Nor from the eastern metaphysical approach to painting a picture of the soul by blowing one’s breath upon a fog to be blurred and dispersed by the next breath.
Mine was the aim to know the man by making use of both. And there was some success.
A competent geographer can look at a crude sketch of a map and instantly orient himself to it anywhere in the world—the bend of a river, the angle of a lake, the twist of a mountain range. And he can mystify by telling in finest detail what is to be found there.
After about fifty thousand studies where I could predict and then observe and check, with me it became the lift of a brow, the curve of a mouth, the gesture of a hand, the slope of a shoulder. One of the universities became interested, and over a long controlled period they rated me 92 percent accurate. That was fifteen years ago. I may have improved some since.
Yet standing there at the cigarette counter and glancing at the young fellow at the magazine rack, I could read nothing. Nothing at all.
If this had been an ordinary face, I would have catalogued it and forgotten it automatically. I see them by the thousands. But this face would not be catalogued nor forgotten, because there was nothing in it.
I started to write that it wasn’t even a face, but of course it was. Every human being has a face—of one sort or another.
In build he was short, muscular, rather well proportioned. The hair was crew cut and blond, the eyes were blue, the skin fair. All nice and standard Teutonic—only it wasn’t.
I finished paying for my cigarettes and gave him one more glance, hoping to surprise an expression which had some meaning. There was none. I left him standing there and walked out on the street and around the corner. The street, the store fronts, the traffic cop on the comer, the warm sunshine were all so familiar I didn’t see them. I climbed the stairs to my office in the building over the drugstore. My employment agency waiting room was empty. I don’t cater to much of a crowd because it cuts down my opportunity to talk with people and further my study.
Margie, my receptionist, was busy making out some kind of a report and merely nodded as I passed her desk to my own office. She is a good conscientious girl who can’t understand why I spend so much time working with bums and drunks and other psyc
hos who obviously won’t bring fees into the sometimes too small bank account.
I sat down at my desk and said aloud to myself. “The guy is a fake! As obvious as a high school boy’s drafting of a dollar bill.”
I heard myself say that and wondered if I was going nuts, myself. What did I mean by fake? I shrugged. So I happened to see a bird I couldn’t read, that was all.
Then it struck me. But that would be unique. I hadn’t had that experience for twenty years. Imagine the delight, after all these years, of exploring an unreadable!
I rushed out of my office and back down the stairs to the street. Hallahan, the traffic cop, saw me running up the street and looked at me curiously. I signaled to him with a wave of a hand that everything was all right. He lifted his cap and scratched his head. He shook his head slowly and settled his cap back down. He blew a whistle at a woman driver and went back to directing traffic.
I ran into the drugstore. Of course the guy wasn’t there. I looked all around, hoping he was hiding behind the pots and pans counter, or something. No guy.
I walked quickly back out on the street and down to the next corner. I looked up and down the side streets. No guy.
I dragged my feet reluctantly back toward the office. I called up the face again to study it. It did no good. The first mental glimpse of it told me there was nothing to find. Logic told me there was nothing to find. If there had been, I wouldn’t be in such a stew. The face was empty—completely void of human feelings or character.
No, those weren’t the right words. Completely void of human—being!
I walked on past the drugstore again and looked in curiously, hoping I would see him. Hallahan was facing my direction again, and he grinned crookedly at me. I expect around the neighborhood I am known as a character. I ask the queerest questions of people, from a layman’s point of view. Still, applicants sometimes tell me that when they asked a cop where w-as an employment agent they could trust they were sent to me.
I climbed the stairs again, and walked into my waiting room. Margie looked at me curiously, but she only said, “There’s an applicant. I had him wait in your office.” She looked like she wanted to say more, and then shrugged. Or maybe she shivered. I knew there was something wrong with the bird, or she would have kept him in the waiting room.
I opened the door to my office, and experienced an overwhelming sense of relief, fulfillment. It was he. Still, it was logical that he should be there. I run an employment agency. People come to me to get help in finding work. If others, why not he?
My skill includes the control of my outward reactions. That fellow could have no idea of the delight I felt at the opportunity to get a full history. If I had found him on the street, the best I might have done was a stock question about what time is it, or have you got a match, or where is the city hall. Here I could question him to my heart’s content.
I took his history without comment, and stuck to routine questions. It was all exactly right.
He was ex-G.I., just completed college, major in astronomy, no experience, no skills, no faintest idea of what he wanted to do, nothing to offer an employer—all perfectly normal for a young grad.
No feeling or expression either. Not so normal. Usually they’re petulantly resentful that business doesn’t swoon at the chance of hiring them. I resigned myself to the old one-two of attempting to steer him toward something practical.
“Astronomy?” I asked. “That means you’re heavy in math. Frequently we can place a strong math skill in statistical work.” I was hopeful I could get a spark of something.
It turned out he wasn’t very good at math. “I haven’t yet reconciled my math to—” he stopped. For the first time he showed a reaction—hesitancy. Prior to that he had been a statue from Greece—the rounded expressionless eyes, the too perfect features undisturbed by thought.
He caught his remark and finished, “I’m just not very good at math, that’s all.”
I sighed to myself. I’m used to that, too. They give degrees nowadays to get rid of the guys, I suppose. Sometimes I’ll go for days without uncovering any usable knowledge. So in a way, that was normal.
The only abnormal part of it was he seemed to think it didn’t sound right. Usually the lads don’t even realize they should know something. He seemed to think he’d pulled a boner by admitting that a man can take a degree in astronomy without learning math. Well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them take their degree without knowing how many planets there are.
He began to fidget a bit. That was strange, also. I thought I knew even possible combination of muscular contractions and expansions. This fidget had all the reality of a puppet activated by an amateur. And the eyes—still completely blank.
I led him up one mental street and down the next. And of all the false-fronted stores and cardboard houses and paper lawns, I never saw the like. I get something of that once in a while from a fellow who has spent a long term in prison and comes in with a manufactured past—but never anything as phony as this one was.
Interesting aspect to it. Most guys, when they realize you’ve spotted them for a phony, get out as soon as they can. He didn’t. It was almost as though he were—well, testing; to see if his answers would stand up.
I tried talking astronomy, of which I thought I knew a little. I found I didn’t know anything, or he didn’t. This bird’s astronomy and mine had no point of reconciliation.
And then he had a slip of the tongue—yes he did. He was talking, and said, “The ten planets—”
He caught himself, “Oh that’s right. There’s only nine.”
Could be ignorance, but I didn’t think so. Could be he knew of the existence of a planet we hadn’t yet discovered.
I smiled. I opened a desk drawer and pulled out a couple science fiction magazines. “Ever read any of these?” I asked.
“I looked through several of them at the newsstand a while ago,” he answered.
“They’ve enlarged my vision,” I said. “Even to the point where I could believe that some other star system might hold intelligence.” I lit a cigarette and waited. If I was wrong, he would merely think I was talking at random.
His blank eyes changed. They were no longer Greek statue eyes. They were no longer blue. They were black, deep bottomless black, as deep and cold as space itself.
“Where did I fail in my test?” he asked. His lips formed a smile which was not a smile—a carefully painted-on-canvas sort of smile.
Well, I’d had my answer. I’d explored something unique, all right. Sitting there before me, I had no way of determining whether he was benign or evil. No way of knowing his motive. No way of judging—anything. When it takes a lifetime of learning how to judge even our own kind, what standards have we forjudging an entity from another star system?
At that moment I would like to have been one of those space opera heroes who, in similar circumstances, laugh casually and say, “What ho! So you’re from Arcturus. Well, well. It’s a small universe after all, isn’t it?” And then with linked arms they head for the nearest bar, bosom pals.
I had the almost hysterical thought, but carefully suppressed, that I didn’t know if this fellow would like beer or not. I will not go through the intermuscular and visceral reactions I experienced. I kept my seat and maintained a polite expression. Even with humans, I know when to walk carefully.
“I couldn’t feel anything about you,” I answered his question. “I couldn’t feel anything but blankness.”
He looked blank. His eyes were nice blue marble again. I liked them better that way.
There should be a million questions to be asked, but I must have been bothered by the feeling that I held a loaded bomb in my hands. And not knowing what might set it off, or how, or when. I could think of only the most trivial.
“How long have you been on Earth?” I asked. Sort of a when did you get back in town, Joe, kind of triviality.
“For several of your weeks,” he w-as answering. “But this is my first time out among
humans.”
“Where have you been in the meantime?” I asked.
“Training.” His answers were getting short and his muscles began to fidget again.
“And where do you train?” I kept boring in.
As an answer he stood up and held out his hand, all quite correctly. “I must go now,” he said. “Naturally you can cancel my application for employment. Obviously we have more to learn.”
I raised an eyebrow. “And I’m supposed to just pass over the whole thing? A thing like this?”
He smiled again. The contrived smile which was a symbol to indicate courtesy. “I believe your custom on this planet is to turn your problems over to your police. You might try that.” I could not tell whether it was irony or logic.
At that moment I could think of nothing else to say. He walked out of my door while I stood beside my desk and watched him go.
Well, what was I supposed to do? Follow him?
I followed him.
Now I’m no private eye, but I’ve read my share of mystery stories. I knew enough to keep out of sight. I followed him about a dozen blocks into a quiet residential section of small homes. I was standing behind a palm tree, lighting a cigarette, when he went up the walk of one of these small houses. I saw him twiddle with the door, open it, and walk in. The door closed.
I hung around a while and then went up to the door. I punched the doorbell. A motherly gray-haired woman came to the door, drying her hands on her apron. As she opened the door she said, “I’m not buying anything today.”
Just the same, her eyes looked curious as to what I might have.
I grinned my best grin for elderly ladies. “I’m not selling anything, either,” I answered. I handed her my agency card. She looked at it curiously and then looked a question at me.
“I’d like to see Joseph Hoffman,” I said politely.
She looked puzzled. “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong address, sir,” she answered.
I got prepared to stick my foot in the door, but it wasn’t necessary. “He was in my office just a few minutes ago,” I said. “He gave that name and this address. A job came in right after he left the office, and since I was going to be in this neighborhood anyway, I thought I’d drop by and tell him in person. It’s sort of rush,” I finished. It had happened many times before, but this time it sounded lame.
