The Collected Stories

by Earl

  Riker’s mind thought of something. As nearly as he could judge, he turned his eyes in the direction of the car speeding away. He watched, with unseeing eyes, but with eyes that would see.

  In the midst of the confusion of sound over the accident, the traffic cop’s voice arose: “Did anyone catch his license number?” Several eye-witnesses gave contradictory numbers. “Always the same!” snarled the cop. “People never keep their heads when seconds count. He’ll get away with it!”

  Riker tensed himself. Suddenly the accident reenacted itself to his delayed vision. He saw the big car’s fender knock a child down, saw it leap away. But he also saw the license numbers, because he had thought to fasten his unseeing eyes on the fleeing car.

  The numbers were off-focus a little, but prepared as he was to concentrate on them, he swiftly read them off.

  It was quite a struggle for the near-blind Riker to get through the crowd to the traffic cop, who had just placed the unconscious victim in another car, but finally he clutched the officer’s arm.

  “I saw the accident,” he said eagerly. “And the license number. It was 318-445.”

  “Good! I’ll put that down,” returned the policeman. His voice changed. “Say, aren’t you the nearsighted fellow who nearly got clipped a while back—”

  But Riker had slipped back into the crowd. He felt a small glow of pride at what he had done, as he continued down the avenue. At least he wasn’t as badly off as a blind man, in his present condition. He had put his affliction to some small use, and it made him feel good.

  But only for a second. Then the nagging thought of the five men marooned down in icy desolation cropped to the fore again. Good God, must it plague him every inch of the way? It wasn’t his fault that they faced doom. He hadn’t failed them, in any sense. But he realized he was trying to run away from that grinding implication. Trying to cram his mind with other impressions, so he wouldn’t feel it was his fault. Detachedly, he reflected that the mind could be an instrument of diabolical torture.

  A clock again, in a store window. “Nineteen hours!” came the parenthetical thought.

  RIKER continued walking in his strange doubleworld. It was like being in two different dimensions, one a silent unreal image superimposed over the other of sound and touch. Coming to a movie theatre, he decided on impulse to go in. His nerves felt in need of quieting.

  The theatre was not crowded so that Riker had little trouble seating himself. It was not till then that he realized what a ridiculous thing the talking picture would be to him. What he saw and what he heard failed to mesh—by three minutes. The handsome leading man, trying to win the lovely lady, was saying: “Drive faster! We’ve got to get there in time!” Three minutes later a tense face over a driving wheel was cooing: “You’re beautiful!”

  Entire sequences, where there was little pantomime and the plot movement depended on dialogue, were lost to Riker. With his mind’s eye, he was viewing a silent movie too subtle for comprehension. With his ears, he was hearing a radio-sketch with blank holes in its continuity. He contented himself with matching up snatches of previous conversation with visible events in the picture. At a comedy sequence, wherein a dour-faced comedian was trying to throw a lariat, Riker snickered a little. But he stopped in embarrassment, to realize the rest of the audience was silent, almost tearful. Three minutes later he saw the reason—a death scene.

  Leaving the theatre when he had had his fill of this garbled entertainment, Riker headed for home. A hated clock loomed out of the meanderings of his delayed vision—eighteen hours!

  It had darkened considerably while he had been in the theatre. A storm was brewing. Jagged flashes of lightning lanced in the sky; the rumble of thunder sounded. One particularly loud roll of thunder came unawares, to Riker. Its flash came something less than three minutes later, in a complete reversal of natural laws. Riker reflected that he was the only one in the world who could say he had heard thunder before seeing the lightning flash that caused it!

  On the last half-block to his rooms, Riker tried to hurry his slow, careful pace a little. Rain was beginning to patter down. Suddenly, he collided violently with a figure, but recovered his balance. The other person had apparently fallen down, by the sound. There was only a little warning—an angrily muttered “Wise guy!”—and then something cracked on Riker’s chin. He reeled against the fence. The other’s footsteps receded.

  Riker straightened a little dazedly and maneuvered for the haven of his home. When he reached the front door, he witnessed the collision. The other man had been hurrying too, hat pulled low against the rain, and he was a big chap. As a climax, a ballooning fist hurtled into Riker’s face. Though prepared, he could not keep from wincing and ducking. He remembered the man’s face. If he ever met him again, when circumstances were normal, the debt would be repaid!

  Safely in his room at last, his Angora cat welcomed him with a human-sounding meow, rubbing against his ankles. Feeling as though he had returned from an insane asylum, Riker sank thankfully into his easy chair.

  “Believe me, Pete,” he sighed, as he stroked his chin and the cat’s soft fur alternately, “this delayed vision is hell on wheels.”

  AND then, from directly before him, beside the radio set, came the sound of breathing. Riker started violently, not realizing anyone had been in the room.

  “Drinking!” came the accusing voice of Rita Caldwell. “You didn’t even see me! And you haven’t done a bit of work on your radio.”

  “How—” choked Riker.

  “I got in easily enough,” explained the girl shortly, divining his question. “You didn’t lock the door. I came back a few minutes ago, to see if you were doing any repairs. Instead, you’ve been out all this time, while Admiral Gregg and his men—”

  “You don’t understand—” protested Riker.

  The girl’s voice became sharply scornful, with a hysterical edge to it. “I understand that you’re selfish, inhuman, without a shred of feeling—” She broke off, panting in her emotion.

  Riker saw her now, her hands clenched before her, eyes angry. He thought privately that she looked very attractive, even in her excited state.

  “If you’ll let me explain, I’ll tell you why I haven’t done any repairs,” Riker spoke firmly. He went on, telling of his delayed vision. When he had finished, he saw the first look of amazement on her face, of three minutes before.

  “I’m sorry!” she said in a low, sympathetic voice. “I didn’t understand.”

  Riker felt her hand on his suddenly, urging him to his feet. “I’m taking you to an eye specialist,” she said.

  In a taxi on the way, the girl told how alarm had grown for the safety of the Gregg expedition. No slightest message had been received, though two British cruisers and a dozen aircraft in southern waters were within a thousand miles, with their radio set constantly open. The powerful Australian short-wave station had broadcast an appeal to the expedition to reply immediately, without result. This meant that either the stranded party’s return signals were too weak for reception, or that ether conditions were temporarily bad, or that the men had succumbed.

  “My brother,” murmured the girl. “I may never see him again!”

  “Don’t think of that,” put in Riker hurriedly. “They’ll be found. My radio, when it’s repaired, will pick up their message, no matter how weak.”

  He found himself patting her hand, comforting her. She didn’t draw her hand away, and Riker saw the smile on her face, a trifle wan, three minutes later.

  Several hours later, three specialists gave the results of their examinations. Pat Riker and Rita Caldwell waited expectantly.

  “It is a peculiar case,” said one of the doctors, clearing his throat. “The rods and cones of your retinas are all right, and are still able to receive light impulses. But the optic nerve, leading to the occipital lobe of the brain, is damaged.

  “We surmise that strong ultra-violet radiation was given off by the tubes when they blew out. Your sight was sav
ed by a slim margin. If the rays had been a little stronger, you would have been completely blinded, just as one would be blinded by looking into the sun, and its ultra-violet radiation,[*] too long.”

  Riker felt heartened that they had been able to diagnose it so thoroughly. “What about a cure?” he asked eagerly.

  The specialists looked at one another. “We believe it a kindness to tell you at once. There is no cure! Those damaged nerve-cells will remain as they are; and the symptoms of delayed vision. You will go through life that way!”

  Riker felt as though the sky had fallen. He was as good as blind for the rest of his life! He knew Rita Caldwell was looking at him pityingly, though he would not see it for three minutes. But he felt sympathy for her, thinking of her brother, as the voice in his brain droned out: “Fifteen hours!”

  “Glasses, of course, wouldn’t help?” said Riker dully.

  “Glasses only concentrate light-images for weak eyes. They can’t help your damaged optic-nerve. Nor would any operation. There is nothing we can do.”

  RITA CALDWELL led Riker to the door of his room. They hadn’t spoken much, returning from the hospital.

  “I’ll try to repair the radio,” he promised firmly. “I’ll work at it all night. Maybe as I go along, I’ll find a way to work faster.” She squeezed his arm and left. Three minutes later, when he was inside, he saw the look on her face and told Pete she must love her brother very much.

  Riker tried to keep his promise. He spent the evening stubbornly improving the technique of using his hands, with visual check-ups three minutes later. If only the web of wires weren’t so infernally intricate!

  It was to Riker’s credit that he thought more of the stranded explorers than himself. But somewhere in his subconscious the phrase “Go through life that way” had stuck, and began to repeat like a dirge, along with the voice that kept counting off the hours of doom for the expedition.

  He called up the restaurant after a while and had them bring over sandwiches and coffee. He didn’t feel like venturing out again. The adventurous thrill of that had worn off. He poured milk into a bowl for Pete and watched the puzzled, hungry creature half drown itself first till it had gained experience in judging where the milk level was.

  Riker went back to work, nervous, harried. The repairs were hardly begun. Working straight through, at this rate, he could not finish in less than 48 hours. And how much time was there left to pick up the weakening signals?—no more than twelve hours!

  Riker gave up at midnight: He could do nothing, he groaned aloud. But the men still had a chance. A vast program of organized search had already been launched. Aircraft must be now cruising over Antarctica itself. They might yet pick up Gregg’s weak signals and learn their position. Then it would be simple.

  But all the time Riker had an insistent inner conviction that the signals were too weak to be intercepted by any other radio on Earth except his own supersensitive set! And that, by the mischance of fate, lay useless.

  He went to bed in mental confusion. He was hardly aware that he had undressed. After he turned off the lights, he had to wait three minutes before darkness surrounded him. He reflected humorlessly that he gained three minutes of light over the normal person. But then in the morning, he would lose three minutes. It was like Daylight Saving Time—you never came out ahead.

  And then, in the quiet darkness, he had a chance to think over the depressing day. It was beginning to strike home, more and more deeply each minute, what a change had come into his life this day. Today, the delayed vision had been novelty. Tomorrow and the next day and the next, it would be—horror. Go through life that way! He would have that helpless, dependent feeling that blind people must have. He would be a nuisance, and be pitied. His life was ruined! Well, not as bad as that, but it was closer to tragedy than anything else.

  He struggled against the stifling incubus of his thoughts. He wouldn’t take it lying down. He’d improve his reading technique. He’d never let people read to him, or use Braille like the true blind. How would he live? Oh yes; he had nearly forgotten—he would patent his radio and sell it. He would probably make a tidy little fortune. But he felt no slightest thrill at the thought.

  His thought switched away from the personal. Like a spectre, the bleak picture of five men facing doom haunted him. It wasn’t his fault, but he felt as thought it was. All his life, if they weren’t rescued by a miracle, he’d have that feeling. The disconcerting thought crawled into bed with him. He hated the soft, warm feel of the bed. Those five men weren’t in soft, warm beds. . . .

  Rita Caldwell’s face hovered among the phantoms, sometimes accusing, sometimes sympathetic. More than anything, this tortured him.

  RIKER started from a half-doze not long after, aware that he had been tortured by bad dreams. But something else had awakened him. A gnawing sound. When vision burst into his brain three minutes after he had opened his eyes, he looked in the sound’s direction. A bright shaft of moonlight streamed through one window, outlining a square patch of the floor. And there crouched Pete, gnawing at a mouse!

  Riker watched in amazement. Pete had caught a mouse, with the handicap of delayed vision! It was unbelievable. Had the mouse run right into him? Or—was Pete’s sight back to normal? Riker’s pulses throbbed with hope. This might be significant. Was there any clue? Yes, the moonlight!

  Holding his hands to the sides of his temples, Riker shielded his eyes from the street glow of the opposing window. Looking now at the busily engaged cat, Riker instantly saw its superimposed image, over that of his sight-delayed vision of the room.

  Riker jumped out of bed with a wild cry, startling the cat so that it leaped into the shadows with its prey. “Pete, you little rascal!” yelled Riker. “I think you’ve done it—”

  He kneeled in the patch of moonlight and looked up at the moon with a gaze more rapt than any a lover had ever bestowed upon it. But he did not kneel long, in his silent worship. He grabbed his watch from the pocket of his vest, hanging over a chair, and looked at the time, in the moonlight. He saw it immediately—one o’clock. Eight hours to go before the last faint signals came from the lost expedition. Eight hours! Could he make it, repair the radio?

  His thoughts fluttered. He needed polaroid-lensed goggles. No shops were open at this time of night. Then he remembered and dove for a supply box under the bench, dragging it out into the square patch of moonlight. He tossed out miscellaneous junk, praying silently, and finally found them—two round circles of polaroid glass. He couldn’t remember now what he had ever used them for, but there they were, thank Heaven.

  Feverishly now, he grabbed wire and pliers, sat on the floor cross-legged in his pajamas, and worked in moonlight. Fifteen minutes later he arose with the two polaroid lenses clamped before his eyes, in a makeshift framework of wire. The device pinched his skin sharply, but he was past feeling.

  He snapped on the electric lights, heart pumping. Vision leaped into his eyes, through the lenses. Instant vision! Riker let out a single screech of triumph that startled Pete into running under the bed. Fully half the normal lighting was cut off by the lenses, but it was far more important that the curse of delayed vision was gone.

  Five hours later, at six o’clock, the phone rang. Riker ignored it for three minutes of persistent ringing, but finally leaped to it and growled a “hello!”

  “This is Rita Caldwell, Pat. I had to call you. I’ve been awake all night, at the studio, hoping they’d pick up a call. They haven’t. I guess there’s no hope for them anymore.” Her voice was shaky, with a peculiar note in it as she went on. “I had to call on you, Pat, I don’t know why. I—” Her tones took on a concealing politeness. “Are you all right? I mean, are you—well, all right?”

  Riker permitted himself, for the space of a second, to feel a thrill that shot from his head to his toes. She had called to find out about him, not his radio! Then he barked into the phone: “Rita, listen! Come right over. Don’t ask any questions. Just come!”

  RITA C
ALDWELL came in, a while later, hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, staring wonderingly at Riker. He had the look of a man whose soul had been saved. Riker gave brief snatches of explanation, of which the girl didn’t understand a word, and then commanded her to cut lengths of spider-wire, hold the soldering iron, hold the solder, hand him the iron, hand him the solder, now a wire. . . . At some time or other he excused himself for his pajamas.

  The girl settled down into his machinelike system. She dimly comprehended that she had a right to hope the radio would be repaired in time. Three hours to go!

  At nine o’clock, 24 hours since Riker had first caught the SOS, and fallen into the toils of delayed vision, he shoved the girl back. He made her sit, with her face averted, in the opposite corner of the room from the radio.

  “The tubes might blow again,” he explained. “Though I’ve put in a fuse that should prevent it.

  Now—”

  He snapped on the switch. As he slowly turned up the power, the hum of the superradio hissed through the room. Bit by bit he snaked up the numbers of the volume dial, giving the tubes a chance to take up the peak load gradually. Their two haggard faces strained to hear a human voice underneath the hum.

  The volume dial clocked to the end of its stay. The tubes held. Riker let out his breath and tuned with the vernier for the expedition’s assigned frequency. A minute passed.

  “Hurry! Hurry!” moaned Rita Caldwell, running forward, leaning over his shoulder.

  Riker pushed her back roughly with one hand. “Get back!” he snapped, nerves cracking. “The tubes might blow yet. Get back, I tell you. I don’t want you getting delayed vision, because—” He broke off, wondering what irrelevant thing he had been about to say, in that tense moment.

  The girl clutched his arm suddenly, squeezing with surprising strength. A voice, a tiny thread of voice, came from the radio speaker!

  “—batteries nearly dead. This will probably be our last call. Position, latitude 78° 4′ 30″. Longitude, east, 137° 21′ 15″.” A pause, then wildly: “For God’s sake, can’t anyone hear me—”