by Don Wilcox
But tears often came to June’s eyes as she thought of Jo-jo-kak’s widow and the curious friendship that had grown up between them.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t have saved her life,” said Allison.
“But she wouldn’t have been happy living on, after her civilization was gone,” June replied. “It is just as well.”
Allison smiled at her curiously. Somehow she had reconciled her feelings to the insane violence the women had committed.
“But I understand how they felt,” said June, reading his thoughts. “It wouldn’t be much fun to live after you’ve lost all faith in your own civilization.”
There was something deep and serious in her dark eyes that Allison appreciated.
“You have some pretty big thoughts for such a young girl,” he said. “Were you thinking things like this when you ran away from home? Perhaps you had lost faith in your own civilization, too.”
“And if I had,” she answered, “what would you suggest?”
“Come,” said Allison, taking her hand. “I’ll answer that one when we reach the top of this stairs.”
They climbed the winding steps to the balcony where, not so many weeks ago, they had first kissed. They looked across to other torch-lighted mansions of the silent, uninhabited city. They saw Smitt and Mary strolling along the street below them.
Elsewhere, they knew, three other couples who had lingered to take the last boat back to earth were also enjoying the quiet romantic atmosphere of this lost world.
“You were going to suggest—” said June.
“That if we don’t feel the call of our old civilization too strongly,” said Allison, “we might all stay here and build a new civilization of our own.”
“Make our homes here?” June crept closer into Allison’s arms and there was a bewitching eagerness in her dark eyes—an eagerness for new adventures concerned with life, not death.
Allison kissed her. For a time no word was spoken.
“We five men have been studying the machines,” Allison said presently. “Kilhide has left us the foundation for marvelous developments. In time we’ll come to appreciate him more—after we’ve forgotten what kind of person he was.”
The girl in Allison’s arms shuddered slightly.
“But Kilhide’s science isn’t civilization,” Allison went on. “At least, it isn’t everything. There have to be people that want to live together—honest, genuine people—like you—and Smitt—and Mary—”
“I can name the other seven by heart,” said June, smiling up at him as if to help him with his pretty speech.
“I saw to it that only these five couples would be left for the last load,” Allison said. “Right now the other four men are asking their sweethearts, just as I’m asking you, whether they would be willing to marry and stay right here.”
“The other four girls will say ‘yes’.” June answered with a faint twinkle in her eyes. “I know, because they’ve talked and dreamed and planned every hour while their men were out rebuilding the doors.”
“Then,” said Allison softly, drawing the girl tighter in his arms, “why not make it unanimous?”
[*] On Mercury the Dazzalox permitted themselves wives, a privilege denied the slaves.
MIRRORS OF MADNESS
First published in Amazing Stories, July 1940
It seemed a mad thing when Buffler had his offices transformed into a maze of mirrors. But he had a sinister motive . . .
CHAPTER I
The elevator reached the top floor of the Buffler Tower, my Uncle Jonathan Buffler’s skyscraper, and I stepped out. I had come at the urgent and mysterious request of my uncle’s doctor, Merrill Ramsell.
“What the devil—!” I gasped as my eyes swept the octagonal hallway.
I whirled to the elevator boy for an explanation, but he only shrugged his shoulders and went down. My eyes turned back to the walls that faced me. Each wall was a mirror, and each mirror turned gently from side to side on a vertical axis. In each mirror was a reflection of me, facing myself with a dizzy expression, swaying back and forth like a clown on a tight rope I glanced at my multiple self once more to make sure my several suits of new college-cut clothes were right for this momentous visit, and then struck off down the narrow avenue of mirrors. Dr. Ramsell had advised me to see him first.
In a cluttered office heaped with books and walled with medicines I met Dr. Ramsell. First I saw a pair of black slender shoes propped on a corner of the table; next, the thin grayish fingers that held a massive black book with bold white letters on the cover, “Schizophrenia.”[1]
Up from behind the book came a high bald head and a yellowish white face, with a sharp thin nose and spectacled eyes that shone black and lively.
“I’m Dr. Ramsell,” he said in a good voice that was much younger than his face.
“I’m Jim Olin, Buffler’s great-nephew,” I said. “You wired for me to come.”
“Yes.” He put the book down solidly and shook hands with me. “I sent for you on my own initiative. You needn’t tell your uncle. He’ll think you’ve just dropped in of your own accord. He may be glad to see you. I say may because I’ve found he’s never predictable.
“But you, as one of the few inheritors to his fortune, should have a personal interest in his welfare while he lives. Maybe you can do him some good—both mentally and physically. Frankly, I’m getting nowhere. He insists on keeping me, but he resents my efforts to probe into his case.”
“Is there something seriously wrong with him?” I asked.
“Has anything ever been right with him?” the doctor retorted, tapping his thin fingers nervously along the white letters of the word “Schizophrenia.”
I turned his question over in my mind and didn’t find any very positive answer. I had never had many contacts with Uncle Jonathan Buffler. Several years had passed since I had last seen him.
“He’s made his wad of money,” I answered. “I’ve heard that he imports the finest oriental rugs in the world, and that his own rug designs are tops. I always supposed he was a sort of genius.”
“There. That’s fine!” Doctor Ramsell exclaimed. “Run right in and give him the glad hand, and make him out to be as wonderful as you can. It won’t do any harm. Maybe you’ll get next to him if you’re willing to stay a few days.”
“He’ll be surprised. He doesn’t know I’m coming—”
“Never mind that. You’re his great-nephew and you’ve come to visit for a week or so. Mind you, not a word about me. I’ll talk with you later.”
I walked on down the hallway chuckling to myself. Likely as not Jonathan Buffler was up to something freakish, if harmless, that had set this doctor to worrying.
I recalled that Buffler used to dismay Aunt Mary by climbing up on a stepladder to throw pieces of colored cardboard down on the drawing room floor. Then he would study the effect, and if it pleased him he would have his artists copy the design for a rug.
But usually he would try for hours without getting any but the most terrible results, and his poor wife would be driven to a nervous frenzy.
Before I reached Uncle Jonathan’s office I was almost in a nervous frenzy myself. The wobbling mirrors all along the hallway were, to put it mildly, disconcerting. On each side of me were regiments of myself walking abreast—not steadily, but wavering and trembling and jumping and jittery.
“Mr. Buffler—er—Uncle Jonathan?” The large corner office was semidark. The mahogany Venetian blinds were nearly closed, admitting only a few hairline strips of reddish forenoon light that jumped capriciously from one swaying mirror to another.
The one person in the room sat behind the huge mahogany desk which angled across the corner. From his humpty-dumpty silhouette, I knew that person was Jonathan Buffler. His pear-shaped head and round shoulders gave a startled jerk at the sound of my voice, and his shadowed face glared at me.
“I’m Jim,” I said. “I’ve dropped in for a visit.”
Buffler’s thick lips twisted int
o a scowl, but before he had time to snarl aloud one of his telephones rang. To my surprise his voice, which was naturally guttural, sounded off creamily.
“Yes, Jewel, this is Johnny . . . “His head turned so that I couldn’t see his face. “I was just about to call you to say ‘good morning’ . . . Yes . . . Yes . . . But I did call you twice, only you hadn’t come yet, Jewel . . . Angry? Of course not, Jewel . . . I know you were out late last night, Jewel—but you were in good company . . . Ha-ha-ha! . . . But you’d better get to work now . . . Those orders, you know . . . But I’m still your boss, you know . . . No, Jewel, I really didn’t mean that—”
I should have walked out on this custardy talk if I hadn’t been so stunned by it. There was something arresting in witnessing this bulbous, heavy-jowled man, owner of a skyscraper and head of a wealthy importing business, talk in such a lovey-dovey manner—and obviously he was enjoying himself.
Once he interrupted himself to mutter, “Damn that light!” and jerked the Venetian blind cord to cut off the lines of red light that played over his telephone hand.
Jewel, whoever she was, evidently knew exactly what to say to put him in a cheerful mood. But the conversation struck an uneasy note before it ended.
“But Jewel, don’t you pay any attention to old Drizzlepuss. We’re not going to let her stand in the way of our happiness . . . Yeah, why don’t I fire her! We’ve been over all that before. But just you wait—”
Here he broke off abruptly, as if suddenly remembering that I was preseiat.
“I’ll talk with you later, Jewel. Don’t forget tonight.”
He hung up and turned his eyes on me glowingly.
“That was Jewel, my Number Two secretary,” he said. “Nice girl. Splendid girl . . . M-m-m-m—where were we? Oh, yes. You’re Jim Olin. How are you? Sit down over here and tell me all about yourself.”
I took him at his word. He lit a cigar and laid his head back in a listening attitude while I gave him a brief account of myself—how I had quit college and taken up a job that involved some foreign travel. He blew smoke so blissfully that I was sure his mind was still on Jewel.
I concluded my monologue with, “So I just thought I’d drop in for a few days’ visit with you and Aunt Mary.” He removed the cigar with startled suddenness and shot a cold glance at me. By this time my eyes were accustomed to the dim light. There was something chilling in the glare of his protruding white eyeballs. The glare also came from eight or ten different mirrors. These, like the mirrors in the hallways, were tilting back and forth, slowly but incessantly, as if the very breathing of Jonathan Buffler made them restless.
“Light ever bother you?” Buffler asked abruptly. In the walls of mirrors the white glaring eyeballs continued to swing through gentle arcs.
“Sometimes,” I said. “White light, especially.”
The answer pleased him. “Excessive light is very bad for the eyes,” he said authoritatively.
“Very,” I said, certain that I was on the track of his friendship.
“You’ve noticed it?”
“Often.”
“Many people suffer from too much light and don’t know what’s wrong. With me, the suffering amounts to illness. A tangle of light vibrations torments me. But that damned doctor of mine, you can’t tell him anything. No matter how I suffer, he just shrugs his shoulders.”
By this time I had settled back in the red leather chair—but not comfortably. The mirrors were too disturbing. Even the ceiling was alive with moving mirrors—four circular ones, each with inverted Jonathan Bufflers rocking back and forth over my head. I began to feel seasick.
Tightly stretched cords were visible here and there between the mirror frames, and silent little electric motors tucked around in obscure corners tugged at the cords to give the mirrors their tireless motion.
“A sort of interesting place you’ve got here,” I ventured noncommittally. “I like it.”
“Plenty of mirrors all around.”
“As far as they go. But I’m having more installed in some of the other offices. They’re a great scheme to reduce the tangle of light vibrations your eyes have to contend with.”
“Tangle?” I asked. He had used that term before.
“And what a tangle! What a helluva tangle!”
He moved his chair closer to me, as if to confide something dear to his heart.
“I’m telling you, Olin, when you stop to figure it out mathematically, it’s enough to drive you mad. The way light waves crisscross—”
He paused to answer a telephone. “New rugs to inspect?” His voice was all business. “Never mind, I’ll get to them later. I’m in conference . . . No, I’m not to be disturbed!”
Buffler hung up and resumed his confidential manner.
“See here, Olin, when you examine the facts, you suddenly wake up and realize the truth. Light is the most confusing thing in the world. It’s man’s deadly enemy. It stabs him from all directions. It’s merciless. Every second it bombards his most sensitive organs, the eyes. Undoubtedly it causes half the world’s fatigue. Maybe three-fourths. I’ve got some mathematicians at work on that. Look, I’ll show you!” His plump hand reached for a desk pen filled with white ink, and he made a tiny white dot on a scratch pad of brilliant purple.
“Now you take a simple point of light,” he said, “the finest point you can imagine. It’s shooting into your eye at the rate of one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is.”
“You know it is. Oh, they may dope out some variations, but that figure is close enough. In other words”—he tapped me on the knee—“for every full second you look at a tiny white point, how much light does it poke into your eyes? A hundred and eighty-six thousand miles of it! In one second!”
I grunted helplessly and decided this lecture had gone far enough. I was getting seasick or light-sick or Jonathan-Buffler-sick, I wasn’t sure which.
“Pardon me, Uncle—”
“Wait, here’s the point!” Buffler commanded, tapping white ink dots on the purple paper. “Every smidget of white light from a rough surface, like this paper, diffuses in a million directions. Look, I make rugs—”
Here he rose and tossed a colorful oriental rug sample onto the desk. The sample was a foot square, with hundreds of silky threads stringing out from every edge.
“I make big rugs.” He filled his humpty-dumpty frame with a proud breath. “Big rugs that contain thousands and millions of colored fibers woven together. But—the most intricate rug ever made is simple compared to the tangle of light waves that comes from these few white dots! Now, do you get it?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I’d better—”
“No, you don’t get it,” he said in a wise and patient manner. “The point is that these mirrors cut down the tangle to something simpler. They don’t diffuse. They reflect the light directly. Oh, it’s still complicated enough to drive the average person distracted, but at least it’s some simpler!”
“It’s the darned wobbling of those mirrors that drives me distracted,” I said.
Buffler drew back in horror, and I realized too late that I must have crushed his pet idea to the earth.
“I’m surprised, Olin,” he said in quiet injured tones. “You’re as bad as my office help. You’d rather have shafts of light burning into your eyes from a single direction. Not me! I learned my lesson from the rolling seas, from race tracks, from movies, from prize fights. Our eyes hate monotony. They love motion—action—rhythm! But how can you have it in an office? I have found the answer: moving mirrors!”
“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I didn’t realize—”
“You may not appreciate my discovery. The doctor doesn’t. Old Drizzlepuss Becker doesn’t, nor the rest of them. But Jewel—” His harsh voice softened.
“Pardon me, Uncle Jonathan,” I said, walking determinedly to the row of telephones, “but I must call Aunt Mary and tell her I’m here.”
Again th
e quick glare of those two protruding white eyeballs shot at me from a score of mirrors.
“Your Aunt Mary is dead,” Buffler snapped.
“Dead? Since when?”
“Nearly a year ago.” He tapped his puffy fingers nervously. “Heart failure. I supposed you knew.”
I apologized for not keeping in closer touch with family happenings and expressed my sympathies as best I could. But plainly he was impatient to get on with his discussion.
“About these light waves,” he resumed. “I’ve bought some new calculating machines and hired some mathematicians—”
An office boy interrupted with a message from a mirror salesman.
“He’s in the lobby waiting for the order you promised him for today.”
“Good,” said Buffler. “Tell him I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
The boy went, and Buffler picked up a telephone.
“Drizzlepuss?” he growled. “Come in and pick out your mirrors . . . I don’t give a damn what you want or don’t want. I’m putting tinted mirrors in your office. If you want to pick the tint, come in.”
The receiver clicked down and an instant later “Drizzlepuss” stormed in. She was tall and angular and thoroughly belligerent. Her black eyes snapped and her thin nostrils flared.
“Buffler, if you call me Drizzlepuss again—”
“You’ll what?” Buffler snarled.
“I’ll expose you! That’s what I’ll do!”
“Shut up, dammit!”
The high-pitched rage in Buffler’s voice must have made her realize that someone else was in the room. She caught me in the corner of her eye and for an instant she froze. Then she reached out and jerked the cord to a Venetian blind.
“Why don’t you get some light in here?”
She made the rounds of the windows and the noon light blazed in. Buffler’s eyes narrowed and I expected him to blow into an explosion of fury. But he didn’t. He turned to me calmly.
“This is Becker, my Number One secretary,” he said, and with rankling sarcasm added, “a pleasant little person. Becker, my great-nephew, Jim Olin. Now, Drizzlepuss, about these tinted mirrors for your office—”
