The Ultimate Egoist

by Theodore Sturgeon

  I got up and dusted myself off and swore I’d never bother the irascible old heel again. And then I hunted a drugstore to call him up. That’s the way it was. Berbelot was a peculiar duck. His respect for me meant more than anger against him could make up for. He was the only man I ever met that ever made me sorry for anything.

  I went into the visiphone booth and pressed my identification tab against the resilient panel on the phone. That made a record of the call so I could be billed for it. Then I dialed Berbelot. I got his bun-faced valet.

  “I want to speak to Mr. Berbelot, Cogan.”

  “Mr. Berbelot is out, Mr. Hamilton.”

  “So!” I snapped, my voice rising. “You’re the one who tossed me out just now with that salesman mangler on your doorstep! I’ll macerate you, you subatomic idiot!”

  “Oh … I … I didn’t, Mr. Hamilton, really. I—”

  “Then if you didn’t Berbelot did. If he did, he’s home. Incidentally, I saw him in the viewplate. Enough of the chitchat, doughface. Tell him I want to speak to him.”

  “B-but he won’t speak to you, Mr. Hamilton. He gave strict orders a year ago.”

  “Tell him I’ve thought of a way to get in touch with the Ether Breather again. Go on. He won’t fire you, you crumb from the breadline. He’ll kiss you on both cheeks. Snap into it!”

  The screen went vacant as he moved away, and I heard Berbelot’s voice—“I thought I told you”—and then the bumble of Cogan’s, and then “WHAT!” from the old man, and another short bumble that was interrupted by Berbelot’s sliding to a stop in front of the transmitter. “Hamilton,” he said sternly into the visiplate, “if this is a joke of yours … if you think you can worm your way into my confidence with … if you dare to lead me on some wild-goose cha … if you—”

  “If you’ll give me a chance, King of Stink,” I said, knowing that if I got him really mad he’d listen to me, being the type that got speechless with rage, “I’ll give you the dope. I have an idea that I think will bring the Breather back, but it’s up to you to carry it out. You have the apparatus.”

  “Come up,” he whispered, his wattles quivering. “But I warn you, if you dare to take this liberty on a bluff, I shall most certainly have you pried loose from your esophagus.”

  “Comin’ up!” I said. “By the way, when I get into that foyer again, please be sure which button you push.”

  “Don’t worry,” he growled, “I have a dingus up here that is quite as efficient. It throws people from the sixtieth floor. Do come up.” The screen darkened. I sighed and started for the “House that Perfume Built.”

  The elevator glided to a stop that made my stomach feel puffy, and I stepped out. Berbelot was standing in front of it looking suspicious as a pawnbroker. I held out my hand with some remark about how swell it was to see him again, and he just stared at it. When I thought he was going to forego the honor of shaking it, he put his hand into mine, withdrew it quickly, looked at it, and wiped it carefully on his jacket. Without his saying a word I gathered that he wasn’t glad to see me, that he thought I was an undesirable and unsanitary character, and that he didn’t trust me.

  “Did I ever tell you,” I said as calmly as I could, “that I am terribly sorry about what happened?”

  Berbelot said, “I knew a man who said that after he murdered somebody. They burned him anyway.”

  I thought that was very nice. “Do you want to find out about my idea or not?” I gritted. “I don’t have to stay here to be insulted.”

  “I realize that. You’re insulted everywhere, I imagine. Well, what’s your idea?”

  I saw Cogan hovering over the old man’s shoulder and threw my hat at him. Since Berbelot apparently found it difficult to be hospitable, I saved him the trouble of inviting me to sit down by sitting down.

  “Berbelot,” I said, when I had one of his best cigarettes fuming as nicely as he was, “you’re being unreasonable. But I have you interested, and as long as that lasts you’ll be sociable. Sit down. I am about to be Socratic. It may take a little while.”

  “I suffer.” He sat down. “I suffer exceedingly.” He paused, and then added pensively, “I never thought I could be so irritated by anyone who bored me. Go ahead, Hamilton.”

  I closed my eyes and counted ten. Berbelot could manufacture more printable invective than anyone I ever met.

  “Question one,” I said. “What is the nature of the creature you dubbed Ether Breather?”

  “Why, it’s a … well, apparently a combination of etheric forces, living in and around us. It’s as if the air in this room were a thinking animal. What are you—”

  “I’ll ask questions. Now, will you grant it intelligence?”

  “Of course. A peculiar kind, though. It seems to be motivated by a childish desire to have fun—mostly at some poor human’s expense.”

  “But its reactions were reasonable, weren’t they?”

  “Yes, although exaggerated. It reached us through color television; that was its only medium of expression. And it raised particular hell with the programs—a cosmic practical joker, quite uninhibited, altogether unafraid of any consequences to itself. And then when you, you blockhead, told it that it had hurt someone’s feelings and that it ought to get off the air, it apologized and was never heard from again. Again an exaggerated reaction. But what has that got to do with—”

  “Everything. Look; you made it laugh easily. You made it ashamed of itself easily. It cried easily. If you really want to get in touch with it again, you just have to go on from there.”

  Berbelot pressed a concealed button and the lights took on a greenish cast. He always claimed a man thought more clearly under a green light. “I’ll admit that that particular thought sequence has escaped me,” he nodded, “since I do not have a mind which is led astray by illogical obscurities. But in all justice to you—not that you deserve anything approaching a compliment—I think you have something there. I suppose that is as far as you have gone, though. I’ve spent hours on the problem. I’ve called that creature for days on end on a directional polychrome wave. I’ve apologized to it and pleaded with it and begged it and told it funny stories and practically asked it to put its invisible feet out of my television receiver so I could kiss them. And never a whisper have I had. No, Hamilton; the Ether Breather is definitely miffed, peeved, and not at home. And it’s all your fault.”

  “Once,” I said dreamily, “I knew a woman whose husband went astray. She knew where he was, and sent him message after message. She begged and she pleaded and she wept into visiphones. It didn’t get her anywhere. Then she got a bright idea. She sent him a telefacsimile letter, written on her very best stationery. It described in great detail the nineteen different kinds of heel she thought he was.”

  “I don’t know what this has to do with the Breather, but what happened?” asked Berbelot.

  “Why, he got sore. He got so sore he dropped everything and ran home to take a poke at her!”

  “Ah,” said Berbelot. “And the Breather laughs easily, and you think it would—”

  “It would,” I nodded, “get angry easily, if we could find the right way to do it.”

  Berbelot rubbed his long hands together and beamed. “You’re a hot-headed fool, Hamilton, and I’m convinced that your genius is a happy accident quite unattached to your hypothetical mind. But I must congratulate you for the idea. In other words, you think if we get the Breather sore enough, it will try to get even, and contact us some way or other? I’ll be darned!”

  “Thought you’d like it,” I said.

  “Well, come on,” he said testily. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go down to the laboratory!” Suddenly he stopped. “Er … Hamilton … this story of yours. Did that man poke his wife after he got home?”

  “I dunno,” I said blankly. “I just made up the story to illustrate my point. Could be.”

  “Hm-m-m. If the Breather decided to … I mean, it’s a big creature, you know, and we have no idea—”

 
“Oh, never mind that,” I laughed, “the Breather can’t get past a television screen!”

  Which only goes to show you how little I knew about the Ether Breather.

  I was amazed by Berbelot’s laboratory museum. Did you know that in the old days more than two hundred years ago, they used electrically powered sets with a ground glass, fluorescent screen built right into the end of huge cathode tubes? Imagine. And before that, they used a revolving disk with holes punctured spirally, as a scanning mechanism! They had the beginnings of frequency modulation, though. But their sets were so crude, incredible as it may seem, that atmospheric disturbances caused interference in reception! Berbelot had copies of all these old and laughable attempts at broadcasting and receiving devices.

  “All right, all right,” he snapped, elbow-deep in one of the first polychrome transmitters, “you’ve been here before. Come over here and give me a hand. You’re gawking like a castor bean farmer.”

  I went over and followed his directions as he spot-welded, relayed, and wound a coil or two of hair-fine wire. “My gosh,” I marveled, “how did you ever learn so much about television, Berbelot? I imagine it must have used up a little of your spare time to make a fortune in the perfume business.”

  He laughed. “I’ll tell you, Hamilton,” he said. “Television and perfumery are very much alike. You know yourself that no such lovely women ever walk the Earth as you see every day in the news broadcasts. For the last eighty years, since the Duval shade selector was introduced, television has given flawless complexions to all the ladies that come over the air, and bull-shoulders to all the men. It’s all very phony, but it’s nice to look at. Perfumery is the same proposition. A woman who smelled like a rose petal naturally would undoubtedly have something the matter with her. But science gets to work on what has been termed, through the ages, as ‘B.O.’ My interest in aesthetically deluding the masses led me to both sciences.”

  “Very ingenious,” I said, “but it isn’t going to help you to make the Breather sore.”

  “My dear boy,” he said, “don’t be obtuse. Oh, turn down the nitrogen jets a trifle—that’s it.” He skillfully spotted seven leads into the video-circuit of the polychrome wave generator. “You see,” he went on, running the leads over to a box control with five push buttons and a rheostat set into it, “the Breather requires very special handling. It knows us and how our minds work, or it could never have thought, for instance, of having our secretary of state recite risqué verse over the air, the first time that official used color television. Now, you are noteworthy for your spontaneity. How would you go about angering this puff of etheric wind?”

  “Well, I’d … I’d tell it it was a dirty so-and-so. I’d insult it. I’d say it was a sissy and dare it to fight. I … I’d—”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Berbelot unkindly. “You’d cuss it out in your own foul idiom, forgetting that it has no pride to take down, and, as far as we know, no colleagues, community, inamoratae, or fellows to gossip to. No, Hamilton, we can’t insult it. It can insult us because it knows what we are and how we think, but we know nothing of it.”

  “How else can you get a being sore, then, when you can’t hold it up to ridicule or censure before itself or its fellow creatures?”

  “By doing something to it personally that it won’t like.”

  “Yeah—take a poke at it. Kick it in its vibrations. Stick a knife into its multiple personality.”

  Berbelot laughed. “To change the subject, for no apparent reason,” he said, “have you ever run across my Vierge Folle?”

  “A new perfume? Why, no.”

  Berbelot crossed the room and came back with a handful of tiny vials. “Here.”

  I sniffed. It was a marvelously delicate scent. It was subtle, smooth, calling up a mental picture of the veins in fine ivory. “Mmm. Nice.”

  “Try this one,” he said. I did. It was fainter than the other; I had to draw in a lot of it before I detected the sweet, faint odor. “It’s called Casuiste,” said Berbelot. “Now try this one. It’s much fainter, you’ll have to really stretch to get it at all.”

  “Nice business,” I grinned. “Making the poor unsuspecting male get inside the circle of the vixen’s arms before he’s under her spell.” I’d been reading some of his ad proofs. He chuckled. “That’s about the idea. Here.”

  Berbelot handed me the vial and I expelled all the air in my lungs, hung my nose over the lip of the tube and let the air in with a roar. Next thing I knew I was strangling, staggering, swearing and letting go murderous rights and lefts at empty air. I thought I was going to die and I wished I could. When I blinked the tears out of my eyes, Berbelot was nowhere to be seen. I raged around the laboratory and finally saw him whisk around behind a massive old photoelectric transmitter. With a shriek I rushed him. He got practically inside the machine and I began taking it apart, with the firm conviction that I would keep on taking things apart long after I reached him. Luckily for him there were four thick busbars between us. He crouched behind them giggling until I reached a red-eyed state of wheezing impotence.

  “Come out!” I gasped. “You ape-faced arthritic, come out of there and I’ll hit you so hard you’ll throttle on your shoelaces!”

  “That,” he said instructively, “was a quadruple quintessence of musk.” He grinned. “Skunk.” He looked at me and laughed outright. “Super-skunk.”

  I wrenched ineffectually at the bars. “A poor thing, but your very own, I’ll bet,” I said. “I am going to stick your arm so far down your neck you’ll digest your fingernails.”

  “Mad, aren’t you?”

  “Huh?”

  “I said, you’re sore. I didn’t cuss you out, or hold you up to ridicule, or anything, and look how mad you are!”

  I began to see the light. Make the Breather angry by—“What are you gibbering about?”

  He took out a white handkerchief and waved it as he unwrapped his own body from the viscera of the old-fashioned transmitter. I had to grin. What can you do with a man like that?

  “O.K.,” I said. “Peace, brother. But I’d suggest you treat the Breather better than you just treated me. And how in blazes you expect to get a smell like that through a polychrome transmitter is a little beyond me.”

  “It isn’t simple,” he said, “but I think it can be done. Do you know anything about the wave theory of perception?”

  “Not a helluva lot,” I said. “Something about a sort of spectrum arrangement of the vibrations of sensory perception, isn’t it?”

  “Mmm … yes. Thought waves are of high-frequency, and although ether-borne, not of an electromagnetic character. So also are the allied vibrations, taste and smell. Sound, too.”

  “Wait a minute! Sound is a purely physical vibration of air particles against our auditory apparatus.”

  “Of course—from the source of the sound to that apparatus. But from the inner ear to the hearing center in the brain, it is translated into a wave of the spectrum group I’m talking about. So with touch and sight.”

  “I begin to see what you’re driving at. But how can you reach the Breather with these waves—providing you can produce and transmit them?”

  “Oh, I can do that. Simply a matter of stepping up high-frequency emanations.”

  “You seem pretty confident that the Breather will be affected by the same waves that influence our senses.”

  “I wouldn’t use the same waves. That’s why I brought up the spectrum theory. Now look; we’ll take thought waves of the purely internal psyche … the messages that relay brain impulses to different brain centers. Pure thought, with no action; pure imagery. These are of a certain wave length. We’ll call it 1,000. Now, take the frequencies of smell, touch and sight waves. They’re 780, 850, and 960 respectively. Now, how did we contact the Ether Breather?”

  “By the polychrome wave.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you mean that the ratio—”

  Berbelot nodded. “The ratio between t
he Breather’s thought waves and its sensory vibrations must be the same as that between ours.”

  “Why must it be?”

  “Because its mental reactions are the same, as I told you before—only exaggerated. It reasons as we do, more or less. Its mental setup corresponds with ours.”

  “Doggone,” I said admiringly, “it’s all so simple when you’re told how to do it. You mean, then, to discover the ratio between what is to me a pain in the neck, and what it would be to the Breather.”

  “That’s it. But it won’t be a pain in the neck.”

  “Where will it be, then?”

  “You’re tuning in the wrong frequency,” he chuckled. “I’m going to make him suffer the best way I know how, and—my business is perfumery.”

  “Ah,” I breathed.

  “Now, I’m going to cook up something really pretty. I’m going to turn out a stench that will make the Breather’s illimitable edges curl!”

  “From the smell of that essence of ancient egg you just gassed me with,” I said, “it ought to be pretty.”

  “It will be. Let’s see; for a base we’ll use butyl mercaptan. Something sweet, and something sour—”

  “—something borrowed and something blue.”

  “Don’t be a silly romanticist.” He was busy at his chemical bench. “I’ll scorch a little pork fat and … ah. Attar of roses.”

  For a moment he was quiet, carefully measuring drops of liquid into a sealed exciter. Then he flipped the switch and came over to me. “It’ll be ready in a jiffy. Let’s rig up the transmitter.”

  We did as we had done before, a year ago. We maneuvered the transmitting cells of the polychrome transmitter over and above a receiver. It would send to Berbelot’s country place eight hundred miles away by a directional beam, and return the signal by wire. If the Breather interfered, it would show up on the receiver. When we had done it before, we had had the odd experience of holding a conversation with our own images on the screen.