The Ultimate Egoist

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Now I’ll distill my odeur d’ordure,” he said, “and when it’s run through, you can be my guinea pig.”

  “Not on your life, Berbelot,” I said, backing away. He grinned and went about fixing his still. It was a beautiful little glass affair, and he worked entirely under a huge bell jar in transferring it from the exciter. Butyl and burned meat and attar of roses. My gosh.

  In half an hour it was ready—a dusty brown colloid, just a few drops in the retort. “Come on, Hamilton,” said Berbelot, “just a little sniff. I want to give you a preview.”

  “Uh-uh!” I snorted. “Here—wait.”

  I gave a buzz on the buzzer, and in a couple of seconds Cogan, Berbelot’s valet, popped in. Cogan’s face always reminded me, for some reason, of a smorgasbord tray.

  “Did you bring your nose?” I asked, leading him over to the chemical bench.

  “Yessir.”

  “Well”—I slid back the little panel in the neck of the retort, standing at arm’s length—“stick it in there.”

  “Oh, but I—” He looked plaintively toward Berbelot, who smiled.

  “Well … oh!” The “Well” was diffidence, and the “Oh” was when I grabbed him by the collar and stuck his face in the warm fumes.

  Cogan went limp and stiffened so fast that he didn’t move. He rose slowly, as if the power of that mighty stench was lifting him by the jawbone, turned around twice with his eyes streaming, and headed for the door. He walked lightly and slowly on the balls of his feet, with his arms bent and half raised, like a somnambulist. He walked smack into the doorpost, squeaked, said, “Oh … my … goodness—” faintly, and disappeared into the corridor.

  “Well,” said Berbelot pensively. “I really think that that stuff smells bad.”

  “Seems as though,” I grinned. “I … oh, boy!” I ran to the retort and closed the slide. “Good gosh! Did we give him a concentrated shot of that?”

  “You did.”

  It permeated the room, and of all malodorous effluvia, it was the most noisome. It was rotten celery, than which there is no more sickening smell in nature. It was rancid butter. It was bread-mold. It was garlic garnishing fermented Limburger. It was decay. It was things running around on six legs, mashed. It was awful.

  “Berbelot,” I gasped, “you don’t want to kill the Breather.”

  “It won’t kill him. He just won’t like it.”

  “Check. Whew!” I mopped my face. “Now how are you going to get it up to the Ether Breather?”

  “Well, we’ll use the olfactometer on it,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Trade gadget. I knocked it together years ago. Without it I wouldn’t have made a cent in this business.” He led me over to a stand on which was an enormously complicated machine, all glittering relays and electratomic bridges. “Good heavens!” I said. “What does it do—play music?”

  “Maybe you wondered why I could reel off so much about the wave theory of sensory perception,” he said. “Look—see these dials? And this sensitized knob?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That fist-sized, faceted knob has each of its twelve hundred and two sides coated with a different chemical reagent, very sensitive. I drop it into a smell—”

  “You what?”

  “You heard me. An odor is an emanation of gases from the smellable specimen, constituting a loss of mass of about one fifty-billionth in a year, more or less, depending on the strength of the odor and the consistency of the emanating body. Now, I expose this knob to our Cogan-crusher”—he walked over to the retort with the knob in his hand, trailing its cable, and slid the panel back a bit—“and the gas touches every surface. Each reacts if it can. The results are collected, returned to the olfactometer, translated into a number on the big dial.”

  “And that is—”

  “The ratio I spoke to you about. See … the dial reads just 786. With the frequency of abstract thought set arbitrarily, at 1,000, we have a ratio between this smell and thought.”

  “Take it easy, Berbelot. I’m a layman.”

  He smiled. “That gives us an equation to work with. 786 is to 1,000 as x is to our polychrome wave.”

  “Isn’t that a little like mixing liquor?” I said. “One set of figures is in thought vibrations, the other in radio waves.”

  “Ratios are like that,” he reminded me. “I can have one third as many apples as you have oranges, no matter how many or how few oranges you have.”

  “I consider myself stood in the corner,” I said. “By golly, with that gadget, no wonder your perfumes are practically a monopoly nowadays. Would it be giving away a trade secret to tell me what went into that Doux Rêves of yours? How on Earth did you figure out that odor? It’ll make a ninety-year-old woman put on lipstick and a centenarian buy spats.”

  He laughed. “Sure, I’ll tell you. Doux Rêves is 789.783 on that dial, which happens to be the smell of a rich juicy steak! But they don’t associate it with steak when they buy it—at three hundred an ounce. It just smells like something desirable.”

  “Berbelot, you’re chiseling the public.”

  “Mmmm-hm. That’s why I pay half a billion in income tax every year. Get over on that bench.”

  “In front of the receiver? What are you going to do?”

  “Oh, I’ll have to be over here by the transmitter. I’ve got to adjust a carrier wave that will have the right ratio to the polychrome wave. Don’t turn on the receiver yet.”

  I sat down. This amazing man was about to pull something unheard of. I didn’t feel comfortable about it, either. How could he be so confident? He didn’t know much about the Breather, any more than I did. He was acting like a man in perfect control of everything—which he was—who didn’t have to worry about taking a rap for what he was about to do. Well, he built that smell, didn’t he? I didn’t. I could always blame him for it, even if I was the instigator. I remember wondering if I’d be able to convince the Ether Breather of that, in case the Breather got tough. Oh, well.

  “O.K., Hamilton. Turn her on!”

  I did so, and a few seconds later the transmitting floods clicked on. From the suspended bank of cells came a hum as soft as their soft glow. The screen flickered and cleared, and I saw myself in it, almost as if I were looking into a mirror, except that my image was not reversed. “O.K., Berbelot.”

  “Right. Here goes a shot of Berbelot’s Essence of Evil!”

  I heard a switch click and then the faint grate of a rheostat. I stared at my image and my image stared back, and Berbelot came and stood where he could see me. It was only later that I remembered noticing that he was careful to stand out of range of the transmitter. The image didn’t change—each tiny movement was mine, each facial twist, each—

  “Look!” snapped Berbelot, and faded back to his switchboard again.

  For a moment I didn’t notice anything in particular, and then I saw it, too. The smallest possible twitching of the nostrils. A sudden little movement of the head. And then a just audible sniffing through the speaker. As suddenly the movement stopped.

  “You got something that time, Berbelot,” I yelped, “but it seems to have gone away again. The image is true.”

  “Splendid!” said the old man. He clicked off the transmitter and the receiving screen glowed blankly. “Now listen. I only gave it about as much as we got a few moments ago when you left the slide open. This time I’m going to give it what you gave poor Cogan!”

  “My gosh! What am I supposed to do?”

  “Sit tight! If and when the Breather starts kicking, give it right back to him. Don’t admit that we did it to coax him back, or, being what he … it … is, he’ll just get coy and disappear again.”

  “I think you’re right. Want me to get him real mad, then?”

  “For a while. Then we’ll sign off and go to work on him tomorrow. After a bit we’ll tell him the whole story; he’ll think it’s funny. Having fun seems to be his reason for living—if you can call that supercosmic existe
nce living. Then he’ll be appeased. Y’know, Hamilton, if we get him running errands for us he might make us a nice piece of change. We could buy up an advertising agency and have him blank out all competition with his typically wise-guy sort of interference, for instance.”

  “You think of everything! All right, let’s go!”

  The floods and cells lit up again, and in a few seconds I was staring at myself in the screen. It made me feel a little queasy. There I was looking at myself, looking at myself, looking at myself, as it were. It dizzied me.

  The rheostat twirled over, and an auxiliary somewhere deep in the complicated transmitter moaned quietly. For about five minutes I strained my eyes, but not by the slightest sign did my image show that it sensed anything off-color.

  “Are you sure your gadgets are working all right?” I asked Berbelot.

  “Absolutely. Nothing yet? I’ll be darned. Wait. A little more juice here, and I think I can build that smell up a—”

  “What goes on here?” roared the speaker.

  I stared. I was still seated, but my image was rising slowly. One odd thing about it—when it had been my true image, it showed me from the waist up. As it rose from the bench in the picture, it had no legs. Apparently the Breather could only distort just those waves that were transmitted. A weird sight.

  I’d never have known that as my face. It was twisted, and furious, and altogether unpleasant.

  “Are you doing that, punk?” it asked me.

  “Wh-what?”

  “Don’t be like that,” whispered Berbelot. He was off to one side, staring entranced and exultant into the receiver. “Give’m hell, Ham!”

  I drew a deep breath. “Am I doing what, and who’s a punk?” I asked the receiver pugnaciously.

  “That stink, and you are.”

  “Yeah, I’m doing it, and who are you to call me one?”

  “Well, cut it out, and who do I look like?”

  “I wish you boys would have one conversation at a time,” said Berbelot.

  “None of your lip, pantywaist,” I told the Breather, “or I’ll come out there and plaster your shadow with substance.”

  “Wise guy, huh? Why, you insignificant nematode!”

  “You etheric regurgitation!”

  “You little quadridimensional stinkpot!”

  “You faceless, formless, fightless phantasm!” I was beginning to enjoy this.

  “Listen, mug, if you don’t stop that business of smelling up my environment I’ll strain you through a sheet of plate glass.”

  “Try it and I’ll knock you so flat you’ll call a plane a convex hemisphere.”

  “If you had the guts that God gave a goose, you’d come up here and fight me.”

  “If you weren’t about as dangerous as a moth on a battle cruiser, you’d come down here and fight.”

  “Touché,” said Berbelot.

  “Oh, yeah?” said the Breather.

  “Yeah!”

  “Cliché,” said Berbelot.

  “I don’t like your face,” said the Breather.

  “Take it off then.”

  “Not as long as I can insult you by making you look at it.”

  “It’s more of a face to brag about than you got.”

  “Why, you hair-mantled, flint-hurling, aboriginal anthropophagus!”

  Berbelot clicked off both transmitter and receiver. It was only then that I realized that the Breather had made me see red. I was in the laboratory, on my feet, all set to take a swing at a thousand-dollar television set.

  “What’d you do that for?” I snapped, turning on Berbelot.

  “Easy, lad, easy!” he laughed. “The Breather’s had enough, in the first place. In the second place, he was quoting Carlyle, an ancient seventeenth or eighteenth century author. You ran him plumb out of originality. You did fine!”

  “Thanks,” I said, wiping my fevered brow. “Think he was sore?”

  “I gathered as much. We’ll work on him in the morning. I’m going to leave the smell on—just a suggestion of it, so he won’t forget us.”

  “Don’t you think he’ll start messing up commercial programs again?”

  “No. He knows where the trouble is coming from. He’s too sore just now to think of anything but that source. He might think of the commercials later on, but if there’s any danger of that we’ll wise him up and laugh the whole thing off.”

  “Darned if you don’t get me into the doggonedest things,” I said wonderingly.

  He chuckled, and slapped me on the back. “Go on upstairs and get Cogan to feed you. I’ll be along soon; I have some work to do. You’re spending the night here, my boy.”

  I thanked him and went upstairs. I should have gone home.

  I was dog tired, but before I thought of going to bed I had some figuring to do. It had been a delicious meal, though from the way Cogan acted I thought dark thoughts about arsenic in the coffee and/or a knife in the back. But the room he had shown me to was a beauty. Berbelot, as I should have expected, was as good at decorating as he was at anything else. The place was finished in chrome and gray and black, the whole thing centering around a huge mirror at one end. Building a room around a mirror is the most complimentary thing a host can do in a guest room.

  It was a fascinating mirror, too. It wasn’t exactly silvered—it was of a dull gray sheen, like rough-finished stainless steel. And whether it was metal or glass I couldn’t tell. It gave a beautiful image—deep and true, and accentuating natural color. Probably something he “knocked together” himself.

  I walked up and down absently, thinking about Berbelot and the Breather. They had a lot in common. No one could tell exactly what they were, or how great, or how powerful. Thinking about the Breather’s series of cracks at me, I realized that he, or it, had spoken exactly in my idiom. Berbelot did that, too. And yet I knew that both of them could have completely swamped me with dialectical trickery.

  My shadow caught my eye and I amused myself for a moment by making shadows on the wall opposite the mirror. A bird—a cat—a funny face. I’d done it ever since I was a kid and the thing fascinated me. I was pretty good at it. I wandered around the room making shadow pictures on the wall and thinking about the Breather and Berbelot, and then found myself looking into that deep mirror.

  “Hi!” I said to my reflection.

  It looked out at me placidly. Not a bad-looking guy, in a pair of Berbelot’s cellusilk pajamas and that cocky expression. That was quite a mirror. What was it that made a guy look different? The color trick? Not entirely. Let’s see. I stuck out my tongue and so did my reflection. I thumbed my nose, and turned cold inside. I knew now what it was.

  The image was—not reversed.

  I stood there with my right arm up, my right thumb to my nose. The reflection’s right arm—the one toward my left, since it was facing me—was raised, and it thumbed its nose. I was white as a sheet.

  Was I bats? Did I have a mental hangover from seeing that unreversed image in the television set downstairs?

  “This is awful,” I said.

  It couldn’t be a mirror. Not even Berbelot could build a—or was it a mirror? A—a television screen? Couldn’t be—not with the depth it had. It was almost as if I were standing in front of a glass cabinet, looking at me inside. The image was three-dimensional. I suddenly decided I had been thumbing my nose long enough. This must be some trick of that old devil’s, I thought. No wonder he didn’t have dinner with me. He was rigging up this gadget while I was eating. If it was a television screen—and I’d never heard of one like this—then that thing in there wasn’t me—it was the Ether Breather. I listened carefully, and sure enough, heard the hum of transmitting cells. What a gag! There were cells somewhere hidden in this room sending my image away and returning it by wire! But that screen—

  My reflection suddenly set its legs apart and put its hands on its hips. “What are you looking at?” it asked me.

  “N-nothing,” I said as sarcastically as I could while my teeth were chatt
ering. “The Breather again, huh?”

  “That’s right. My, but you’re ugly.”

  “Mind your tongue!” I said sharply. “I can switch you off, you know.”

  “Heh!” he jeered. “I don’t have to be afraid of that any more, thanks to a trick you just showed me.”

  “Yeah? You can’t kid me, bud. You’re just some amoral cosmic ray’s little accident.”

  “I warn you, don’t get tough with me.”

  “I’ll do what I please. You couldn’t pull your finger out of a tub of lard,” I euphemized.

  He sighed. “O.K. You asked for it.”

  And then I had to live through the worst thing that any poor mortal in the history of the world ever experienced. It’s one thing to have an argument with yourself in the mirror. It’s something entirely different to have your reflection reach out a leg, kick down the mirror with a shattering crash, walk up to you and belt you in the mouth a couple of times before it smears you on the carpet with a terrific right hook. That’s what happened to me. Just that, so help me, Hannah.

  I lay there on the rug looking up at me, which had just socked I, and I said “Whooie!” and went to sleep.

  I’ve no idea how long I lay there. When light glimmered into my jarred brain again, Berbelot was kneeling beside me chafing my wrists. The beautiful mirror—or whatever the devil it was—was in some thousand-odd pieces on the floor, and I had gone to about as many pieces psychically. I finally realized that Berbelot was saying something.

  “Hamilton! What happened? What happened? Do you realize you just busted thirty thousand dollars’ worth of apparatus? What’s the matter with you … are you sick?”

  I rolled over and sat up, then went hand over hand up Berbelot until I was standing beside him. My head felt like a fur-lined ball of fire and every time my heart beat it blinded me.

  “What did you wreck that receiver for?” Berbelot said irascibly.