Waldo, and Magic, Inc

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Gleason followed his departure with worried eyes. “Why does he take it so hard, Jimmie? You would think he hated Waldo personally.”

  “Probably he does, in a way. But it’s more than that; his whole universe is toppling. For the last twenty years, ever since Pryor’s reformulation of the General Field Theory did away with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, physics has been considered an exact science. The power failures and transmission failures we have been suffering are a terrific nuisance to you and to me, but to Dr. Rambeau they amount to an attack on his faith. Better keep an eye on him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he might come unstuck entirely. It’s a pretty serious matter for a man’s religion to fail him.”

  “Hm-m-m. How about yourself? Doesn’t it hit you just as hard?”

  “Not quite. I’m an engineer—from Rambeau’s point of view just a high-priced tinker. Difference in orientation. Not but what I’m pretty upset.”

  The audio circuit of the communicator on Gleason’s desk came to life. “Calling Chief Engineer Stevens—calling Chief Engineer Stevens.” Gleason flipped the tab.

  “He’s here. Go ahead.”

  “Company code, translated. Message follows: ‘Cracked up four miles north of Cincinnati. Shall I go on to Nebraska, or bring in the you-know-what from my own crate?’ Message ends. Signed ‘Mac.’ ”

  “Tell him to walk back!” Stevens said savagely.

  “Very well, sir.” The instrument cut off.

  “Your assistant?” asked Gleason.

  “Yes. That’s about the last straw, chief. Shall I wait and try to analyze this failure, or shall I try to see Waldo?”

  “Try to see Waldo.”

  “O.K. If you don’t hear from me, just send my severance pay care of Palmdale Inn, Miami. I’ll be the fourth beachcomber from the right.”

  Gleason permitted himself an unhappy smile. “If you don’t get results, I’ll be the fifth. Good luck.”

  “So long.”

  When Stevens had gone, Chief Stationary Engineer Striebel spoke up for the first time. “If the power to the cities fails,” he said softly, “you know where I’ll be, don’t you?”

  “Where? Beachcomber number six?”

  “Not likely. I’ll be number one in my spot—first man to be lynched.”

  “But the power to the cities can’t fail. You’ve got too many cross-connects and safety devices.”

  “Neither can the deKalbs fail, supposedly. Just the same—think about Sublevel 7 in Pittsburgh, with the lights out. Or, rather, don’t think about it!”

  Doc Grimes let himself into the aboveground access which led into his home, glanced at the announcer, and noted with mild, warm interest that someone close enough to him to possess his house combination was inside. He moved ponderously downstairs, favoring his game leg, and entered the lounging room.

  “Hi, Doc!” James Stevens got up when the door snapped open and came forward to greet him.

  “H’lo, James. Pour yourself a drink. I see you have. Pour me one.”

  “Right.”

  While his friend complied, Grimes shucked himself out of the outlandish anachronistic greatcoat he was wearing and threw it more or less in the direction of the robing alcove. It hit the floor heavily, much more heavily than its appearance justified, despite its unwieldy bulk. It clunked.

  Stooping, he peeled off thick overtrousers as massive as the coat. He was dressed underneath in conventional business tights in blue and sable. It was not a style that suited him. To an eye unsophisticated in matters of civilized dress—let us say the mythical man-from-Antares—he might have seemed uncouth, even unsightly. He looked a good bit like an elderly fat beetle.

  James Stevens’ eye made no note of the tights, but he looked with disapproval on the garments which had just been discarded. “Still wearing that fool armor,” he commented.

  “Certainly.”

  “Damn it, Doc—you’ll make yourself sick, carrying that junk around. It’s unhealthy.”

  “Danged sight sicker if I don’t.”

  “Rats! I don’t get sick, and I don’t wear armor—outside the lab.”

  “You should.” Grimes walked over to where Stevens had reseated himself. “Cross your knees.” Stevens complied; Grimes struck him smartly below the kneecap with the edge of his palm. The reflex jerk was barely perceptible. “Lousy,” he remarked, then peeled back his friend’s right eyelid.

  “You’re in poor shape,” he added after a moment.

  Stevens drew away impatiently. “I’m all right. It’s you we’re talking about.”

  “What about me?”

  “Well—damnation, Doc, you’re throwing away your reputation. They talk about you.”

  Grimes nodded. “I know. ‘Poor old Gus Grimes—a slight touch of cerebral termites.’ Don’t worry about my reputation; I’ve always been out of step. What’s your fatigue index?”

  “I don’t know. It’s all right.”

  “It is, eh? I’ll wrestle you, two falls out of three.”

  Stevens rubbed his eyes. “Don’t needle me, Doc. I’m run down. I know that, but it isn’t anything but overwork.”

  “Humph! James, you are a fair-to-middlin’ radiation physicist—”

  “Engineer.”

  “—engineer. But you’re no medical man. You can’t expect to pour every sort of radiant energy through the human system year after year and not pay for it. It wasn’t designed to stand it.”

  “But I wear armor in the lab. You know that.”

  “Surely. But how about outside the lab?”

  “But—Look, Doc—I hate to say it, but your whole thesis is ridiculous. Sure there is radiant energy in the air these days, but nothing harmful. All the colloidal chemists agree—”

  “Colloidal, fiddlesticks!”

  “But you’ve got to admit that biological economy is a matter of colloidal chemistry.”

  “I’ve got to admit nothing. I’m not contending that colloids are not the fabric of living tissue—they are. But I’ve maintained for forty years that it was dangerous to expose living tissue to assorted radiation without being sure of the effect. From an evolutionary standpoint the human animal is habituated to and adapted to only the natural radiation of the sun—and he can’t stand that any too well, even under a thick blanket of ionization. Without that blanket—did you ever see a solar-X type cancer?”

  “Of course not.”

  “No, you’re too young. I have. Assisted at the autopsy of one, when I was an intern. Chap was on the Second Venus Expedition. Four hundred and thirty-eight cancers we counted in him, then gave up.”

  “Solar-X is whipped.”

  “Sure it is. But it ought to be a warning. You bright young squirts can cook up things in your labs that we medicos can’t begin to cope with. We’re behind—bound to be. We usually don’t know what’s happened until the damage is done. This time you’ve torn it.” He sat down heavily and suddenly looked as tired and whipped as did his younger friend.

  Stevens felt the sort of tongue-tied embarrassment a man may feel when a dearly beloved friend falls in love with an utterly worthless person. He wondered what he could say that would not seem rude.

  He changed the subject. “Doc, I came over because I had a couple of things on my mind—”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, a vacation for one. I know I’m run down. I’ve been overworked, and a vacation seems in order. The other is your pal, Waldo.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah. Waldo Farthingwaite-Jones, bless his stiff-necked, bad-tempered heart.”

  “Why Waldo? You haven’t suddenly acquired an interest in myasthenia gravis, have you?”

  “Well, no. I don’t care what’s wrong with him physically. He can have hives, dandruff, or the galloping never-get-overs for all I care. I hope he has. What I want is to pick his brains.”

  “So?”

  “I can’t do it alone. Waldo doesn’t help people; he uses them. You’re his only n
ormal contact with people.”

  “That is not entirely true—”

  “Who else?”

  “You misunderstand me. He has no normal contacts. I am simply the only person who dares to be rude to him.”

  “But I thought—never mind. D’you know, this is an inconvenient setup? Waldo is the man we’ve got to have. Why should it come about that a genius of his caliber should be so unapproachable, so immune to ordinary social demands? Oh, I know his disease has a lot to do with it, but why should this man have this disease? It’s an improbable coincidence.”

  “It’s not a matter of his infirmity,” Grimes told him. “Or, rather, not in the way you put it. His weakness is his genius, in a way—”

  “Huh?”

  “Well . . .” Grimes turned his sight inward, let his mind roam back over his long association—lifelong, for Waldo—with this particular patient. He remembered his subliminal misgivings when he delivered the child. The infant had been sound enough, superficially, except for a slight blueness. But then lots of babies were somewhat cyanotic in the delivery room. Nevertheless, he had felt a slight reluctance to give it the thunk on the bottom, the slap which would shock it into taking its first lungful of air.

  But he had squelched his own feelings, performed the necessary “laying on of hands,” and the freshly born human had declared its independence with a satisfactory squall. There was nothing else he could have done; he was a young G.P. then, who took his Hippocratic Oath seriously. He still took it seriously, he supposed, even though he sometimes referred to it as the “hypocritical” oath. Still, he had been right in his feelings; there had been something rotten about that child—something that was not entirely myasthenia gravis.

  He had felt sorry for the child at first, as well as having an irrational feeling of responsibility for its condition. Pathological muscular weakness is an almost totally crippling condition, since the patient has no unaffected limbs to retrain into substitutes. There the victim must lie, all organs, limbs, and functions present, yet so pitifully, completely weak as to be unable to perform any normal function. He must spend his life in a condition of exhausted collapse, such as you or I might reach at the finish line of a grueling cross-country run. No help for him, and no relief.

  During Waldo’s childhood he had hoped constantly that the child would die, since he was so obviously destined for tragic uselessness, while simultaneously, as a physician, doing everything within his own skill and the skill of numberless consulting specialists to keep the child alive and cure it.

  Naturally, Waldo could not attend school; Grimes ferreted out sympathetic tutors. He could indulge in no normal play; Grimes invented sickbed games which would not only stimulate Waldo’s imagination but encourage him to use his flabby muscles to the full, weak extent of which he was capable.

  Grimes had been afraid that the handicapped child, since it was not subjected to the usual maturing stresses of growing up, would remain infantile. He knew now—had known for a long time—that he need not have worried. Young Waldo grasped at what little life was offered him, learned thirstily, tried with a sweating tenseness of will to force his undisciplined muscles to serve him.

  He was clever in thinking of dodges whereby to circumvent his muscular weakness. At seven he devised a method of controlling a spoon with two hands, which permitted him—painfully—to feed himself. His first mechanical invention was made at ten.

  It was a gadget which held a book for him, at any angle, controlled lighting for the book, and turned its pages. The gadget responded to fingertip pressure on a simple control panel. Naturally, Waldo could not build it himself, but he could conceive it, and explain it; the Farthingwaite-Joneses could well afford the services of a designing engineer to build the child’s conception.

  Grimes was inclined to consider this incident, in which the child Waldo acted in a role of intellectual domination over a trained mature adult neither blood relation nor servant, as a landmark in the psychological process whereby Waldo eventually came to regard the entire human race as his servants, his hands, present or potential.

  “What’s eating you, Doc?”

  “Eh? Sorry, I was daydreaming. See here, son—you mustn’t be too harsh on Waldo. I don’t like him myself. But you must take him as a whole.”

  “You take him.”

  “Shush. You spoke of needing his genius. He wouldn’t have a genius if he had not been crippled. You didn’t know his parents. They were good stock—fine, intelligent people—but nothing spectacular. Waldo’s potentialities weren’t any greater than theirs, but he had to do more with them to accomplish anything. He had to do everything the hard way. He had to be clever.”

  “Sure. Sure, but why should he be so utterly poisonous? Most big men aren’t.”

  “Use your head. To get anywhere in his condition he had to develop a will, a driving one-track mind, with a total disregard for any other considerations. What would you expect him to be but stinking selfish?”

  “I’d—well, never mind. We need him and that’s that.”

  “Why?”

  Stevens explained.

  It may plausibly be urged that the shape of a culture—its mores, evaluations, family organizations, eating habits, living patterns, pedagogical methods, institutions, forms of government, and so forth—arise from the economic necessities of its technology. Even though the thesis may be too broad and much oversimplified, it is nonetheless true that much which characterized the long peace which followed the constitutional establishment of the United Nations grew out of the technologies which were hothouse-forced by the needs of the belligerents in the war of the forties. Up to that time broadcast and beamcast were used only for commercial radio, with rare exceptions. Even telephony was done almost entirely by actual metallic connection from one instrument to another. If a man in Monterey wished to speak to his wife or partner in Boston, a physical, copper neuron stretched bodily across the continent from one to the other.

  Radiant power was then a hop dream, found in Sunday supplements and comic books.

  A concatenation—no, a meshwork—of new developments was necessary before the web of copper covering the continent could be dispensed with. Power could not be broadcast economically; it was necessary to wait for the co-axial beam—a direct result of the imperative military shortages of the Great War. Radio telephony could not replace wired telephony until ultra microwave techniques made room in the ether, so to speak, for the traffic load. Even then it was necessary to invent a tuning device which could be used by a nontechnical person—a ten-year-old child, let us say—as easily as the dial selector which was characteristic of the commercial wired telephone of the era then terminating.

  Bell Laboratories cracked that problem; the solution led directly to the radiant power receptor, domestic type, keyed, sealed, and metered. The way was open for commercial radio power transmission—except in one respect: efficiency. Aviation waited on the development of the Otto-cycle engine; the Industrial Revolution waited on the steam engine; radiant power waited on a really cheap, plentiful power source. Since radiation of power is inherently wasteful, it was necessary to have power cheap and plentiful enough to waste.

  The same year brought atomic energy. The physicists working for the United States Army—the United States of North America had its own army then—produced a super-explosive; the notebooks recording their tests contained, when properly correlated, everything necessary to produce almost any other sort of nuclear reaction, even the so-called Solar Phoenix, the hydrogen-helium cycle, which is the source of the sun’s power.

  Radiant power became economically feasible—and inevitable.

  The reaction whereby copper is broken down into phosphorus, silicon29 and helium3, plus degenerating chain reactions, was one of the several cheap and convenient means developed for producing unlimited and practically free power.

  Of course Stevens included none of this in his explanation to Grimes. Grimes was absent-mindedly aware of the whole dynamic process; he had
seen radiant power grow up, just as his grandfather had seen the development of aviation. He had seen the great transmission lines removed from the sky—“mined” for their copper; he had seen the heavy cables being torn from the dug-up streets of Manhattan. He might even recall his first independent-unit radiotelephone with its somewhat disconcerting double dial—he had gotten a lawyer in Buenos Aires on it when attempting to reach his neighborhood delicatessen. For two weeks he made all his local calls by having them relayed back from South America before he discovered that it made a difference which dial he used first.

  At that time Grimes had not yet succumbed to the new style in architecture. The London Plan did not appeal to him; he liked a house aboveground, where he could see it. When it became necessary to increase the floor space in his offices, he finally gave in and went subsurface, not so much for the cheapness, convenience, and general all-around practicability of living in a tri-conditioned cave, but because he had already become a little worried about the possible consequences of radiation pouring through the human body. The fused-earth walls of his new residence were covered with lead; the roof of the cave had a double thickness. His hole in the ground was as near radiation-proof as he could make it.

  “—the meat of the matter,” Stevens was saying, “is that the delivery of power to transportation units has become erratic as the devil. Not enough yet to tie up traffic, but enough to be very disconcerting. There have been some nasty accidents; we can’t keep hushing them up forever. I’ve got to do something about it.”

  “Why?”

  “ ‘Why?’ Don’t be silly. In the first place as traffic engineer for NAPA my bread and butter depends on it. In the second place the problem is upsetting in itself. A properly designed piece of mechanism ought to work—all the time, every time. These don’t, and we can’t find out why not. Our staff mathematical physicists have about reached the babbling stage.”

  Grimes shrugged. Stevens felt annoyed by the gesture. “I don’t think you appreciate the importance of this problem, Doc. Have you any idea of the amount of horsepower involved in transportation? Counting both private and commercial vehicles and common carriers, North American Power-Air supplies more than half the energy used in this continent. We have to be right. You can add to that our city-power affiliate. No trouble there—yet. But we don’t dare think what a city-power breakdown would mean.”