“I don’t care if you were raised in a barrel!”
“Temper, temper.” McLeod said imperturbably. “I’m telling you this so you will understand what happened. But you aren’t going to like it.”
“I don’t like it now.”
“You’ll like it less. I climbed down out of the cab and took a look around. We were about five miles from my hometown—too far for me to want to walk it. But I thought I recognized a clump of trees on the brow of a little rise maybe a quarter of a mile off the road, so I walked over to see. I was right; just over the rise was the cabin where Gramps Schneider used to live.”
“Gramps Snyder?”
“Not Snyder—Schneider. Old boy we kids used to be friendly with. Ninety years older than anybody. I figured he was dead, but it wouldn’t hurt any to walk down and see. He wasn’t. ‘Hello, Gramps,’ I said. ‘Come in, Hugh Donald,’ he said. ‘Wipe the feet on the mat.’
“I came in and sat down. He was fussing with something simmering in a stew pan on his base-burner. I asked him what it was. ‘For morning aches,’ he said. Gramps isn’t exactly a hex doctor.”
“Huh?”
“I mean he doesn’t make a living by it. He raises a few chickens and garden truck, and some of the Plain People—House Amish, mostly—give him pies and things. But he knows a lot about herbs and such.
“Presently he stopped and cut me a slice of shoo-fly pie. I told him danke. He said, ‘You’ve been up-growing, Hugh Donald,’ and asked me how I was doing in school. I told him I was doing pretty well. He looked at me again and said, ‘But you have trouble fretting you.’ It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. While I finished the pie I found myself trying to tell him what kind of troubles I had.
“It wasn’t easy. I don’t suppose Gramps has ever been off the ground in his life. And modern radiation theory isn’t something you can explain in words of one syllable. I was getting more and more tangled up when he stood up, put on his hat and said, ‘We will see this car you speak about.’
“We walked over to the highway. The repair gang had arrived, but the crawler wasn’t ready yet. I helped Gramps up onto the platform and we got into my bus. I showed him the deKalbs and tried to explain what they did—or rather what they were supposed to do. Mind you, I was just killing time.
“He pointed to the sheaf of antennae and asked, ‘These fingers—they reach out for the power?’ It was as good an explanation as any, so I let it ride. He said, ‘I understand,’ and pulled a piece of chalk out of his trousers, and began drawing lines on each antenna, from front to back. I walked up front to see how the repair crew were doing. After a bit Gramps joined me. ‘Hugh Donald,’ he says, ‘the fingers—now they will make.’
“I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I thanked him plenty. The crawler was ready to go; we said good-by, and he walked back toward his shack. I went back to my car, and took a look in, just in case. I didn’t think he could hurt anything, but I wanted to be sure. Just for the ducks of it. I tried out the receptors. They worked!”
“What!” put in Stevens. “You don’t mean to stand there and tell me an old witch doctor fixed your deKalbs?”
“Not witch doctor—hex doctor. But you get the idea.”
Stevens shook his head. “It’s simply a coincidence. Sometimes they come back into order as spontaneously as they go out.”
“That’s what you think. Not this one. I’ve just been preparing you for the shock you’re going to get. Come take a look.”
“What do you mean? Where?”
“In the inner hangar.” While they walked to where McLeod had left his broomstick, he continued, “I wrote out a credit for the crawler pilot and flew back. I haven’t spoken to anyone else about it. I’ve been biting my nails down to my elbows waiting for you to show up.”
The skycar seemed quite ordinary. Stevens examined the deKalbs and saw some faint chalk marks on their metal sides—nothing else unusual. “Watch while I cut in reception,” McLeod told him.
Stevens waited, heard the faint hum as the circuits became activated, and looked.
The antennae of the deKalbs, each a rigid pencil of metal, were bending, flexing, writhing like a cluster of worms. They were reaching out, like fingers.
Stevens remained squatting down by the deKalbs, watching their outrageous motion.
McLeod left the control saddle, came back, and joined him. “Well, chief,” he demanded, “tell me about it. Whaduh yuh make of it?”
“Got a cigarette?”
“What are those things sticking out of your pocket?”
“Oh! Yeah—sure.” Stevens took one out, lighted it, and burned it halfway down, unevenly, with two long drags.
“Go on,” McLeod urged. “Give us a tell. What makes it do that?”
“Well,” Stevens said slowly, “I can think of three things to do next—”
“Yeah?”
“The first is to fire Dr. Rambeau and give his job to Gramps Schneider.”
“That’s a good idea in any case.”
“The second is to just wait here quietly until the boys with the straitjackets show up to take us home.”
“And what’s the third?”
“The third,” Stevens said savagely, “is to take this damned heap out and sink it in the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean and pretend like it never happened!”
A mechanic stuck his head in the door of the car. “Oh, Dr. Stevens—”
“Get out of here!”
The head hastily withdrew; the voice picked up in aggrieved tones. “Message from the head office.”
Stevens got up, went to the operator’s saddle, cleared the board, then assured himself that the antennae had ceased their disturbing movements. They had; in fact, they appeared so beautifully straight and rigid that he was again tempted to doubt the correctness of his own senses. He climbed out to the floor of the hangar, McLeod behind him. “Sorry to have blasted at you, Whitey,” he said to the workman in placating tones. “What is the message?”
“Mr. Gleason would like for you to come into his office as soon as you can.”
“I will at once. And, Whitey, I’ve a job for you.”
“Yeah?”
“This heap here—seal up its doors and don’t let anybody monkey with it. Then have it dragged, dragged, mind you; don’t try to start it—have it dragged over into the main lab.”
“O.K.”
Stevens started away; McLeod stopped him. “What do I go home in?”
“Oh yes, it’s your personal property, isn’t it? Tell you what, Mac—the company needs it. Make out a purchase order and I’ll sign it.”
“Weeeell, now—I don’t rightly know as I want to sell it. It might be the only job in the country working properly before long.”
“Don’t be silly. If the others play out, it won’t do you any good to have the only one in working order. Power will be shut down.”
“I suppose there’s that,” McLeod conceded. “Still,” he said, brightening visibly, “a crate like that, with its special talents, ought to be worth a good deal more than list. You couldn’t just go out and buy one.”
“Mac,” said Stevens, “you’ve got avarice in your heart and thievery in your fingertips. How much do you want for it?”
“Suppose we say twice the list price, new. That’s letting you off easy.”
“I happen to know you bought that job at a discount. But go ahead. Either the company can stand it, or it won’t make much difference in the bankruptcy.”
Gleason looked up as Stevens came in. “Oh, there you are, Jim. You seemed to have pulled a miracle with our friend Waldo the Great. Nice work.”
“How much did he stick us for?”
“Just his usual contract. Of course his usual contract is a bit like robbery with violence. But it will be worth it if he is successful. And it’s on a straight contingent basis. He must feel pretty sure of himself. They say he’s never lost a contingent fee in his life. Tell me—what is he like? Did you really get into
his house?”
“I did. And I’ll tell you about it—sometime. Right now another matter has come up which has me talking to myself. You ought to hear about it at once.”
“So? Go ahead.”
Stevens opened his mouth, closed it again, and realized that it had to be seen to be believed. “Say, could you come with me to the main lab? I’ve got something to show you.”
“Certainly.”
Gleason was not as perturbed by the squirming metal rods as Stevens had been. He was surprised, but not upset. The truth of the matter is that he lacked the necessary technical background to receive the full emotional impact of the inescapable implications of the phenomenon. “That’s pretty unusual, isn’t it?” he said quietly.
“Unusual! Look, chief, if the sun rose in the west, what would you think?”
“I think I would call the observatory and ask them why.”
“Well, all I can say is that I would a whole lot rather that the sun rose in the west than to have this happen.”
“I admit it is pretty disconcerting,” Gleason agreed. “I can’t say that I’ve ever seen anything like it. What is Dr. Rambeau’s opinion?”
“He hasn’t seen it.”
“Then perhaps we had better send for him. He may not have gone home for the night as yet.”
“Why not show it to Waldo instead?”
“We will. But Dr. Rambeau is entitled to see it first. After all, it’s his bailiwick, and I’m afraid the poor fellow’s nose is pretty well out of joint as it is. I don’t want to go over his head.”
Stevens felt a sudden flood of intuition. “Just a second, chief. You’re right, but if it’s all the same to you, I would rather that you showed it to him than for me to do it.”
“Why so, Jimmie? You can explain it to him.”
“I can’t explain a damn thing to him I haven’t already told you. And for the next few hours I’m going to be very, very busy indeed.”
Gleason looked him over, shrugged his shoulders, and said mildly, “Very well, Jim, if you prefer it that way.”
Waldo was quite busy, and therefore happy. He would never have admitted—he did not admit even to himself, that there were certain drawbacks to his self-imposed withdrawal from the world and that chief among these was boredom. He had never had much opportunity to enjoy the time-consuming delights of social intercourse; he honestly believed that the smooth apes had nothing to offer him in the way of companionship. Nevertheless, the pleasure of the solitary intellectual life can pall.
He repeatedly urged Uncle Gus to make his permanent home in Freehold, but he told himself that it was a desire to take care of the old man which motivated him. True—he enjoyed arguing with Grimes, but he was not aware how much those arguments meant to him. The truth of the matter was that Grimes was the only one of the human race who treated him entirely as another human and an equal—and Waldo wallowed in it, completely unconscious that the pleasure he felt in the old man’s company was the commonest and most precious of all human pleasures.
But at present he was happy in the only way he knew how to be happy—working.
There were two problems: that of Stevens and that of Grimes. Required: a single solution which would satisfy each of them. There were three stages to each problem; first, to satisfy himself that the problems really did exist, that the situations were in fact as they had been reported to him verbally; second, to undertake such research as the preliminary data suggested; and third, when he felt that his data was complete, to invent a solution.
“Invent,” not “find.” Dr. Rambeau might have said “find,” or “search for.” To Rambeau the universe was an inexorably ordered cosmos, ruled by unvarying law. To Waldo the universe was the enemy, which he strove to force to submit to his will. They might have been speaking of the same thing, but their approaches were different.
There was much to be done. Stevens had supplied him with a mass of data, both on the theoretical nature of the radiated power system and the deKalb receptors which were the keystone of the system, and also on the various cases of erratic performance of which they had lately been guilty. Waldo had not given serious attention to power radiation up to this time, simply because he had not needed to. He found it interesting but comparatively simple. Several improvements suggested themselves to his mind. That standing wave, for example, which was the main factor in the coaxial beam—the efficiency of reception could be increased considerably by sending a message back over it which would automatically correct the aiming of the beam. Power delivery to moving vehicles could be made nearly as efficient as the power reception to stationary receivers.
Not that such an idea was important at present. Later, when he had solved the problem at hand, he intended to make NAPA pay through the nose for the idea; or perhaps it would be more amusing to compete with them. He wondered when their basic patents ran out—must look it up.
Despite inefficiencies the deKalb receptors should work every time, all the time, without failure. He went happily about finding out why they did not.
He had suspected some obvious—obvious to him—defect in manufacture. But the inoperative deKalbs which Stevens had delivered to him refused to give up their secret. He X-rayed them, measured them with micrometer and interferometer, subjected them to all the usual tests and some that were quite unusual and peculiarly Waldoish. They would not perform.
He built a deKalb in his shop, using one of the inoperative ones as a model and using the reworked metal of another of the same design, also inoperative, as the raw material. He used his finest scanners to see with and his smallest waldoes—tiny pixy hands, an inch across—for manipulation in the final stages. He created a deKalb which was as nearly identical with its model as technology and incredible skill could produce.
It worked beautifully.
Its elder twin still refused to work. He was not discouraged by this. On the contrary, he was elated.
He had proved, proved with certainty, that the failure of the deKalbs was not a failure of workmanship, but a basic failure in theory. The problem was real.
Stevens had reported to him the scandalous performance of the deKalbs in McLeod’s skycar, but he had not yet given his attention to the matter. Presently, in proper order, when he got around to it, he would look into the matter. In the meantime he tabled the matter. The smooth apes were a hysterical lot; there was probably nothing to the story. Writhing like Medusa’s locks, indeed!
He gave fully half his time to Grimes’ problem.
He was forced to admit that the biological sciences—if you could call them science!—were more fascinating than he had thought. He had shunned them, more or less; the failure of expensive “experts” to do anything for his condition when he was a child had made him contemptuous of such studies. Old wives’ nostrums dressed up in fancy terminology! Grimes he liked and even respected, but Grimes was a special case.
Grimes’ data had convinced Waldo that the old man had a case. Why, this was serious! The figures were incomplete, but nevertheless convincing. The curve of the third decrement, extrapolated not too unreasonably, indicated that in twenty years there would not be a man left with strength enough to work in heavy industries. Button pushing would be all they would be good for.
It did not occur to him that all he was good for was button pushing; he regarded weakness in the smooth apes as an old-style farmer might regard weakness in a draft animal. The farmer did not expect to pull the plow—that was the horse’s job.
Grimes’ medical colleagues must be utter fools.
Nevertheless, he sent for the best physiologists, neurologists, brain surgeons, and anatomists he could locate, ordering them as one might order goods from a catalogue. He must understand this matter.
He was considerably annoyed when he found that he could not make arrangements, by any means, to perform vivisection on human beings. He was convinced by this time that the damage done by ultra shortwave radiation was damage to the neurological system, and that the whole matter should be
treated from the standpoint of electromagnetic theory. He wanted to perform certain delicate manipulations in which human beings would be hooked up directly to apparatus of his own design to find out in what manner nerve impulses differed from electrical current. He felt that if he could disconnect portions of a man’s nervous circuit, replace it in part with electrical hookups, and examine the whole matter in situ, he might make illuminating discoveries. True, the man might not be much use to himself afterward.
But the authorities were stuffy about it; he was forced to content himself with cadavers and with animals.
Nevertheless, he made progress. Extreme shortwave radiation had a definite effect on the nervous system—a double effect: it produced “ghost” pulsations in the neurons, insufficient to accomplish muscular motor response, but, he suspected, strong enough to keep the body in a continual state of inhibited nervous excitation; and, secondly, a living specimen which had been subjected to this process for any length of time showed a definite, small but measurable, lowering in the efficiency of its neural impulses. If it had been an electrical circuit, he would have described the second effect as a decrease in insulating efficiency.
The sum of these two effects on the subject individual was a condition of mild tiredness, somewhat similar to the malaise of the early stages of pulmonary tuberculosis. The victim did not feel sick; he simply lacked pep. Strenuous bodily activity was not impossible; it was simply distasteful; it required too much effort, too much will power.
But an orthodox pathologist would have been forced to report that the victim was in perfect health—a little run down, perhaps, but nothing wrong with him. Too sedentary a life, probably. What he needed was fresh air, sunshine, and healthy exercise.
Doc Grimes alone had guessed that the present, general, marked preference for a sedentary life was the effect and not the cause of the prevailing lack of vigor. The change had been slow, at least as slow as the increase in radiation in the air. The individuals concerned had noticed it, if at all, simply as an indication that they were growing a little bit older, “slowing down, not so young as I used to be.” And they were content to slow down; it was more comfortable than exertion.
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