“Myshkin, what the hell is the matter with you?” I said.
He started nodding and kept it up as be backed off until he came up against the nearest end of his work table. He sneaked a hand up behind him and kept it there as he came toward me again. All this time he was talking in a small, hurried voice. “It’s nothing, Henry, on my word. I’m a little jumpy these days, that’s all. Tired, that’s what it is, just as you said…” By then he was close enough to swing at me with the heavy flash-gun he’d hidden behind his back.
He started to swing. I swayed a little to one side and got a hand up to where it would catch his wrist, and his arm froze. We stood there like that for a couple of seconds with our eyes locked—Myshkin ready to brain me, one of my hands open and the other a fist. Maybe the first did it. He looked at it and his arm fell limply to his side. The flash-gun dropped out of his hand and banged to the floor.
“I’m tired, Henry,” he said. “Pooped…”
He was trembling. I led him to the bed, sat him down and threw a thin blanket over his shoulders. It hung on his shivering bones and shivered with him. Then his breathing began to calm, and after awhile his eyes closed and he fell back and slept.
“Welcome home,” I said.
* * * *
But Myshkin had to explain. What he really wanted was to hit me over the head and bury me in the yard, but he would have been satisfied to pack his stuff and disappear. He couldn’t connect with my head, and he had too much stuff to pack—not to mention certain things that couldn’t be packed anymore—and if he’d known where to disappear, he couldn’t afford it. That was why he had to explain.
It wasn’t just that he had all my savings. I’d had clothes, books, records, some of my own furniture, and half an apartment. It wasn’t easy coming home to find everything gone.
“Hocked, sold, gone,” Myshkin told me. Tears were running down his face. “Every goddam thing. That painting Eagle gave you—I got a hundred and ten bucks for it from Siegman. The French prints, forty each. Hock shops, art dealers, hot goods specialists. Anywhere I could raise a dime. Furniture, the works. I kept an account.” He wiped his nose and went on wringing his hands. “Call the cops,” he wept.
“What about my bank balance?”
“You think I would sell your things if there was any money in your account?” he asked. The thought added enthusiasm to his weeping.
“The whole three thousand?” I asked.
“Gone, gone. The bonds too. Call the cops.”
“But where did it all go?”
“Experiments. My experiments.”
“What experiments?”
At that he took hold of himself. He looked away from me and dried his eyes. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Haven’t eaten all day. What time is it?”
“Almost seven.”
“I’ll make eggs,” he said. He got off the bed and wrapped the blanket around him. He’d slept three hours and wakened with a nightmarish yell that made me jump a foot out of the chair I’d sat in.
He turned on the big unshaded bulb that hung from the ceiling by a black wire. It threw his shadow around on the walls in grotesque masses.
“Eggs.” he wailed, as he went to the gas range.
He opened the oven compartment and took out a massive loaf of black bread, some lard, coffee grinds, a can of chili, a frying pan and a misshapen percolator.
He began feeling inside some of the cartons and boxes on the shelves over the work table, and presently he found an egg in one, two in another, and came away empty-handed from the rest.
“Three lousy eggs,” he wept, dragging the blanket back to the gas range. “New hideouts, for what? Three eggs!”
“Why don’t we go out to eat?” I said. “Nice clams?”
He shook his head. “Don’t worry, they’re fresh.” The tears cascaded down his sunken cheeks and the head-shaking scattered moisture over the dust that lay half an inch deep around his socks. “That’s one thing about the goddam eggs around here.”
Finally I asked: “What’s all this talk about eggs?”
He was crying so bitterly, maybe he didn’t hear me.
* * * *
“I left my Washington job July 1st,” Myshkin told me while he smoked. “I couldn’t have gone on much longer anyway. Worked there all day and at home all night. You know what I was doing?”
“Aerial survey research, wasn’t it?”
“Close. We put together different shots and worked out three-dimensional layouts of terrain. Great stuff, but I was dead on my feet. Dizzy spells, nausea. And I had this thing on my mind all the time.”
“What thing? That’s the third time you said that.”
“Time and money, that was what it needed. What did it matter if I had to hock, sell or borrow? Of course, you realize you’re a partner?”
“How generous. A partner in what?”
“Is the coffee still warm? Pour me some.”
“When are you going to tell me?”
“At once. Where are my shoes? It’s absolutely filthy down there. Henry, I’m glad you’re back. I realize now what I’ve needed all along is someone to talk to. This way, it’s downstairs. Finding this place was a stroke of luck, on my word.”
He led the way down the sloping stairs, groped along an unlit narrow hall and unlocked a door that opened a single room of approximately the same dimensions as the one above. When he turned on a wall light, I saw that the place had indeed once been, as I’d guessed, a blacksmith’s shop. For that matter, it might still have been one. The recessed forge up front looked recently used, and there were two anvils and a bellows, some hammers and tongs in position near it. But that was a later impression. My first one was all color—green and yellow.
There were a great many things in the room: a lathe, a diemaker’s bench, innumerable small tools, a jeweler’s eye-piece, rolls of blueprints, sections of steel tubing, spindles of copper wire, and so on. All of these, and everything else in the room, including the walls, floor and ceiling—with a single exception—were covered with a thin layer of very fine, pale yellow powder that had an obviously adhesive property, as soft to the touch as cornstarch.
The exception was a large, mysterious object in the center of the room, completely draped with yards of green silk, like a strange monument. The green silk, even where it touched the floor, was the only thing free of the pale yellow powder.
Whatever it was, under the silk, it had a circular base perhaps ten feet in diameter, and tapered gradually to a height of about seven feet. Its apex was also a disc, a foot across. It looked, well, like an up-ended, blunt-nosed shell for some incredible mortar.
I let my breath out softly and caught Myshkin looking at me with the predatory expression he’d had five hours earlier, his eyes as luminous as a tiger’s.
“Now, Myshkin,” I said gently.
“I have suffered,” he said. “It leaves its mark on a man. I have never shown this to anyone. I keep thinking someone knows about it. It is possible someone knows.”
“I know someone who wants to know.” I said. “Me.”
“I keep forgetting,” Myshkin sighed. “Give me a cigarette.” He took a cigarette and a light. “You see this machine?”
“Is that what’s under the green silk?”
“The Myshkin Photosculpt. Of course, the fact that your name is not used does not affect your full partnership. Prepare yourself.”
Solemnly he walked the few steps to his creation. Gathering a fold of the green silk, in a voice of restrained emotion he announced: “The Myshkin Photosculpt,” and unveiled the machine.
I stared at it. It looked like nothing so much, all-in-all, as a large, queer bird cage. Its projectile-like form was given to it by its framework of steel ribs and tubing, but that was the least of it. I walked closer and began to see detail. Later on, when I had to answer questions ab
out it, and it was a little fresher in my mind, they wrote down what I said. I’ll quote from it:
“There was no bottom to the cage. It was mounted on three small wheels able to move in any direction. The vertical ribs were steel supports for the rest of the cage. The horizontal ribs were actually a continuous, slowly-ascending spiral made of steel tubing. The tubing had been cut open and parted, forming a rail. Three of these rails were side by side, spiraling up. They led to the apex of the cage, where the machine itself, you might say, hung suspended.
“This machine was more or less rectangular, a box-like affair about three feet long by two wide. It seemed to be made of sections of many metals besides steel, including aluminum, brass, lead, silver, and there were knobs of black hard rubber, and tiny cones that were gleaming gold spikes. On the long side that faced the inside of the cage, there were at least half a dozen lenses of different shapes and sizes, some with a great many minute facets. They were surrounded by jeweled dials, meters, gauges and silver switches.
“The back of the box had three sets of small flanged wheels to fit the spiral rails. The top of the box held a shallow steel funnel a foot in diameter. It emptied into a wide copper tube that plunged directly into the box, emerging from the two remaining long sides in a dozen or more intricate copper coils. The bottom of the box held a steel knob as wide as the upper funnel…”
There was probably a lot more I didn’t remember even then.
Anyway, after awhile Myshkin said, quietly: “Well, Henry?”
“Myshkin, what does it do?”
“What does the name sound like it does?”
“I don’t know. I’m overwhelmed.”
“You think this is something? You ought to see the works inside.” He shook his head dreamily from side to side, eyes half closed. “I consider this an absolute marvel,” he murmured. “In all modesty.” He dropped his butt and ground it out with a heel. A few grains of the yellow powder had caught briefly, giving off an acrid odor.
“Originally,” said Myshkin. “I began with a machine that was a camera capable of working in three dimensions.”
“Yes…”
“In its basic form, the machine will photograph a given subject from every angle, depending on the relative positions of the subject and the machine. For instance, I place a table inside the frame. On the table I put a box. The machine will now photograph the four sides of the box and its top—since this machine is, at the start, on a higher level than the box. If I suspend the box within the frame by a string, keeping it at the same height, the machine will now also photograph the under side. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing,” said Myshkin, scornfully. “A box is simple. Its sides and surfaces are flat. But suppose I stand a champagne bottle on the table. Now the machine will photograph around the bottle. If I suspend it, it will also photograph the bottom of the bottle. Depending on how I set the machine, it will do this merely by dividing the roundness into so many flat sections. You understand?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Think of it this way,” said Myshkin. “We have a label encircling the bottle. On it we print numbers running from one to fifty. An ordinary photograph will take perhaps from one to ten. Eleven will be distorted, twelve beyond view. But the machine will take a continuous, undistorted exposure of all the numbers from one to fifty. Actually, it is taking a series of ordinary photographs joined to make one. It does this by moving around the bottle—just as it photographed the box by moving around it. Look here…”
Myshkin flung the green silk drape to me and turned to his machine. Reaching up to the box within the cage, he unfastened a cable and stepped back.
The large rectangular box began to roll slowly down the gentle spiral of the rails. The lenses remained trained on the interior of the cage. By the time it had lowered itself a foot, it was halfway through its third circuit. Myshkin stopped and anchored it there.
“You see?” he asked, and when I nodded, he said with a little smile, “You look disappointed.”
“It’s a clever gadget,” I said.
Myshkin’s smile turned into a sneer. “A clever gadget! Bah! I am talking about a product of genius. What do you see here? A lousy machine that circles a subject and takes a lot of little exposures on a continuous film. What does this do that a movie camera doesn’t do a hell of a lot better, with less trouble?”
“I’ll bite.”
“Thanks,” said Myshkin. “Now listen to me. I’ve told you what this machine would do in its basic form, as a camera. But it is not a camera. It is a machine that makes three-dimensional reproductions of what it sees. I am not talking about views of three dimensions. I mean solid matter.”
“Huh?”
“Good,” said Myshkin. “Jump again. I like it.”
“What kind of solid matter?” I said.
“Any kind. Whatever you feed it, as long as it’s malleable.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Jump,” said Myshkin. “They’ll all jump.” He waved a hand at the machine. “What is it to photograph around a bottle? Is a photograph three-dimensional? No. A million photographs. Bah! What I wanted was a duplicate of the box or bottle. A small one, perhaps, but an actual representation. If the bottle had rough glass, I wanted to feel it. If the box had a dent in it, how could I see it unless the dent managed to pick up a shadow? Remember, originally I was thinking of something to eliminate the camera, and to hell with all that juxtaposing hundreds of flat shots. I wanted a machine—well, let’s say something you could take up in a plane, focus on the terrain, and get—you know what? Ask me!”
“What?”
“A relief map, that’s what! The size depending on the machine and its focus! With lenses that would focus so automatically that infinity would start at a hundredth of an inch from the machine. No worries about depth! And with infra-red, so even an absolute minimum of light would—”
“The machine actually works with solid matter?”
“Anything malleable. Anything that can turn solid. Even water, if I freeze it fast enough! Three-dimensional images of three-dimensional objects!”
“But how, Myshkin?”
“Give me a smoke,” said Myshkin. “Light it for me. You got me more excited than I’ve been since those early days, before…”
He broke off suddenly. His face, so flushed and animated a moment before, became the pallid, weary mask it had been when I’d watched him sleeping. His hands trembled so violently that he dropped the cigarette I gave him. Again there was a brief whiff of something sharp and choking before Myshkin stamped out the sparks burning in the yellow powder. I lit another cigarette for him and he smoked while he talked.
“I started with rags and paper.” His voice had lost its edge. “I learned how to compress the stuff, then I tried other materials—things like sawdust, then cheeses, gelatins, then plastics and plastic wood, then plaster of Paris, clay mixtures, and finally metals. Anything I could melt. I could put you in the cage and do a bronze bust of you up to thirty inches tall and fifteen deep. Or a full figure of the same size, depending on the focus. You begin to understand what I have here?”
I nodded, playing with the silk drape in my hands.
“You begin to see its commercial possibilities?” Myshkin went on, enthusiasm rekindling his eyes. “Not only maps in full, absolutely authentic relief; not only perfect duplicates of the greatest sculpture and statuary; not only three-dimensional portraits of heads, busts, the tape, fighters at the instant a punch is knocking down one of them; not only magnificent scale models of ships, buildings, whole cities… What’s the matter, Henry?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just trying to think.”
“Henry, you don’t have to kid me. You don’t believe what I’m saying, do you? Don’t be polite; skepticism is healthy. Tell me, I’m just standing here talking to myself
. Right?”
“Myshkin, if you were in my place—”
“Fine!” said Myshkin, clapping his hands together and rubbing them briskly. “We’ll try a little plaster of Paris. That always works quickly and I have some down here.”
He went to the die-maker’s bench and brought back a large can marked calcium sulphate. He blew off some of the yellow powder from its lid, opened it and gave it to me to hold.
“Put the drape down,” he said. “Anywhere. It won’t dirty.”
“This plaster of Paris is all solid,” I said.
“It could be concrete,” said Myshkin, turning to the machine. “Ever see those high-centigrade ovens mechanical dentists use to bake porcelain? Nothing, on my word.” From the back of the machine he began to uncoil a thin cable bound in green silk, until it reached a wall socket near the forge. “Sometimes it blows a fuse. Don’t be startled.” He slid apart a latch on one of the vertical ribs of the cage and one section swung open on hinges. “Get ready,” he said.
“For what?” I said.
Myshkin touched a switch on the machine. The light flickered, the machine hummed and began rolling up the rails to the top of the cage. On its way up, tiny bulbs in its dials and gauges began to come on in red and blue and amber and violet and the copper coils began to glow hot orange. When the machine reached the top, it stopped with a faint click. Myshkin took the silk drape I still held, threw it down on the die-maker’s bench and brought back a stool and a fruit box six inches high. He went into the cage, put the box down on the floor in its center, then came out and took the can from me. Using a pick and a sharp-edged chisel, he cracked and crumbled the solidified plaster of Paris, got up on the stool and shook the chunks into the steel funnel on top of the machine. It took him a few minutes to get as much as he wanted. Then he put the can down, got up on the stool again, turned to me and pointed to the cage.
“Step inside,” he said.
“Inside there?”
“On the box. We’ll have a pedestal for the figure.”
The Mad Scientist Megapack Page 3
