A Sense of Infinity

by Howard L. Myers

  Alversen nodded and smiled at Hoffmann. "I'll be most happy to tell you anything I know, Mr. Hoffmann," he said, "but frankly, I don't see how I can be of much help in this deplorable matter."

  "Thanks," Hoffmann said ungraciously. "Suppose you start by telling me how you came by the diamonds in the first place."

  Alversen looked briefly startled, then said, "Very well, though I doubt if I can recall, after all these years, anything more than you will find in the published reports. But here goes: I was conducting a sampling-survey in the asteroid belt, time-space coordinates T24F13 somethingor-other, QQ700651 dash 445K, when I spotted a planetoid roughly two hundred meters long by—

  "Hold it!" Hoffmann snapped peevishly, waving his arms. "I know that bilboesque yarn as well as you do. It's time to come clean, Alversen. Let's have the real poop!"

  "Bilboesque?" hissed the scandalized Attorney General. "Come clean? Really, Hoffmann! We didn't bring you out here to insult Mr. Alversen! Hank, I must apologize, but perhaps you know something of Hoffmann by repute.

  He's. . .he's. . . " The Attorney General stopped, unequal to the task of finding words to define the obnoxiousness of Otto Hoffmann.

  "He's a realist!" Hoffmann himself supplied. "That's what I am, Alversen, a realist! I'm a man with damn few illusions—about the universe or my stinking fellow-man. I was a realist even as a child, the first time I ever heard your fairy tale about finding those diamonds. Let's have the facts this time!"

  Alversen was displaying the shocked puzzlement with which the innocent often react to absurd accusations. "I don't. . . " he began, "I . . . I really don't know what to say to you, Mr. Hoffmann. I can only tell you what happened. I can't invent a different story for you!"

  "Sure you could," sneered Hoffmann. "You're a good inventor of stories. Listen to me, Alversen! The human race acts foolishly enough when it has accurate knowledge for a guide. When its knowledge is wrong, it acts like a damned idiot. And you've handed the world a hunk of nonsense that could make us behave stupidly enough to get ourselves killed!" He stared disgustedly at the old spaceman and added, "If you don't tell your story straight, I will. It'll sound better coming from you." Alversen glanced helplessly at the others and shrugged, "What do I say to this? Is this some kind of joke?"

  "Not one we're in on, I assure you!" huffed Larkle.

  "Hoffmann, if this is the best you can do—"

  "Keep your cool, mouthpiece," growled Hoffmann.

  "I know what I'm doing! Maybe you guys don't know about bowerbirds."

  "Bowerbirds?"

  "Yeah. They live in Australia and New Guinea. Very amusing animals, and instructive to observe. They get their name from the male bird's habit of building a grass bower in mating season. Then he decorates his bower with bright flowers, leaves, pebbles, pieces of glass-anything that might catch the females' fancy. A lot of ornament stealing goes on, and the sharpest cock winds up with the pick of the decorations in his bower. That gives him the pick of the hens, which makes the system practical."

  The FBI Director was glaring fiercely, at him. "Hoffmann," he stormed, "if you're trying to tell us a bowerbird stole the Alversen Diamonds, I swear I'll have you committed!"

  "You're close, fuzz, close!" leered Hoffmann with mock approval. "I'm telling you that a creature which frequently displays bowerbird-like behavior stole the diamonds. Of course an ordinary bowerbird couldn't have done it, but this creature could."

  "What creature?"

  Hoffmann flicked a thumb toward Alversen. "That one."

  "This is ridiculous!" protested Alversen. "I haven't been near the Space Museum in five years!"

  "Who said you had?" demanded Hoffmann. "You didn't steal the diamonds from the museum. Nobody did."

  " What?" yelped the Attorney General. "That's nonsense! They're gone, aren't they?"

  Hoffmann shrugged and looked sourer than usual. Finally he said, "Gents, I'm going to kick some of your most cherished beliefs to death, so steel yourselves to bear up under the grief.

  "First, Heroic Hank here is no incorruptible paragon. The bowerbird in his soul was too much for him! But don't think too unkindly of him. Each of us contains a touch of bowerbird, along with touches of mouse, skunk, snake, peacock, and so on. Sometimes I wonder if the difference between man and the lower animals is merely that man can choose, from one moment to the next, which other animal's instinctive behavior would best suit his needs." Hoffmann grinned crookedly and added, "For example, I am now copying the hawk, or maybe the buzzard.

  "Second, we don't have this neck of the universe to ourselves, as everybody likes to think—though Alversen knows better! In reality we're a minor lifeform around here."

  "Our ships have explored the planets of dozens of stars," the Attorney General observed ponderously, "and have found no trace of past or present intelligent life."

  "Naturally not!" snapped Hoffmann impatiently.

  "Why should superior life hang around something as undependable as a star? They wouldn't be living on planets at all. Look. You know there are more dwarf stars than giant stars. Right? And it follows there are more sub-dwarfs than dwarfs. The smaller stellar bodies are, the more numerous they're likely to be. Within five lightyears of the sun is only one other bright-star system, Alpha Centauri, but there has to be dozens of small stars closer than that—stars too small to radiate noticeable light, but big enough to have slow nuclear fission processes in their interiors to provide them with warm surfaces and atmospheres.

  "I'm not making all this up! Sub-dwarfs are in astronomy textbooks—not mentioned often, I admit, but that's because man isn't much interested in little dark stars that have enough gravity and atmosphere to crush him. But life could evolve on such a world and find it quite satisfactory . . . plenty of surface on a world that size to let a society spread itself out! And plenty of similar worlds just light-weeks away, to colonize or to trade with. And a very stable energy situation, because a world like that could outlast two or three suns.

  "That's where The People live in this neck of the universe, gents. The People! We, a particular breed of animals, live in what The People must consider barren waste, on a cold little clinker near a scorching ball of gas that throws all sorts of deadly radiation at us. A fit place for bowerbirds, maybe, but not for The People." Alversen smiled. "What you say about the existence of sub-dwarfs is accurate enough, Mr. Hoffmann. But when you speak of these so-called People, I'm afraid you're fantasizing."

  "No, I'm real-izing," countered Hoffmann. "I don't miss on telling reality from non-reality, Alversen. Do you think the FBI hired me for my personal charm? You're licked, Heroic Hank! Why don't you give up and confess?"

  Alversen chuckled uncomfortably. "It's your story," he shrugged. "Go on with it."

  "Okay. The People would be curious enough to explore some of our planets, and naturally, they would be most interested in planets that came closest to offering them a livable environment. If they sent a research team to the sun's system, the team would probably go to Jupiter, our biggest planet. The weather would be chilly for them, but the gravity and air pressure would be almost enough for comfort.

  "But one thing would be the same for them and us—the economics of spaceflight. They wouldn't land their spaceship on Jupiter. They would leave it in orbit, and go down to the surface in small shuttle-ships."

  He eyed Alversen coldly. "That's where you found the diamonds, Alversen-in a ship they left in orbit around Jupiter! Aside from fooling around in the asteroids, you're also the man who made the closest fly-by of the Jovian surface. Close enough to find their parked spaceship. You went aboard, found the diamonds, stole them, and came home with that innocent tale of a relic on an asteroid.

  "That tale had to be nonsense! Maybe a diamond would survive a billion years in an asteroid, practically exposed to open space, but it wouldn't wind up looking like it had been cut yesterday, with all its facets smooth and shiny. Nobody should have believed your story for a minute, but it was your story, and you were the u
nblemished hero! Besides, your tale put this frightening supercivilization a comforting billion years in the past. So everybody politely pushed reality aside to make way for your fantasy."

  "This is the wildest thing I've ever heard!" laughed Alversen, getting to his feet. "Who would like a drink?" Larkle and Caude declined numbly, but Hoffmann said, "If that invitation extends to me, I could do with a shot."

  "Certainly," smiled Alversen, going to his bar. "I'm not the thin-skinned sort who would take this personally, Mr. Hoffmann. You were hired to do an important and difficult job for our country, and I sympathize with the vigor and, I'm sure, the sincerity, with which you're trying to do it." He downed a stiff jolt of bourbon, then refilled his glass and brought it, along with Hoffmann's drink, over from the bar. "But there are one or two points in your version that don't jibe with what I would call reality. You say I boarded an alien spaceship, swiped some diamonds, and scurried home. Mr. Hoffmann, surely you realize that the knowledge I could have gained aboard such a ship would be worth far more than all the diamonds I could carry."

  Hoffmann nodded and slurped his drink. "That's true, but I'm not criticizing you for taking the diamonds instead. I probably couldn't have done much better myself. That ship must have been incomprehensible, and terrifying. The diamonds were probably the only things you saw that had any meaning to you. In your fright, you couldn't have done much thinking, anyway. You could only react, and with the diamonds staring you in the face, you reacted like a bowerbird."

  "I see," grinned Alversen. "Then why didn't these aliens come after me to get their diamonds back?"

  "They did. That's why I said the diamonds weren't stolen from the museum. They were reclaimed by their rightful owners!"

  "If that's true, why did they do it so sneakily?"

  "Not sneakily, but gently, when nobody was in the museum to get hurt," said Hoffmann. "Suppose an Australian rancher is out in his yard, looking at something through a magnifying glass. He leaves the glass there, and the next time he needs it he looks in the yard for it and it's gone. He's seen bowerbirds around, and reasons that one of them took it. This doesn't make him mad at the birds. He understands their instincts. So he goes to the area where the local birds have their bowers, and since his glass was a top prize that would have found its way into the top cock's bower, he gently pulls back the wall of that bower, takes his glass, and goes his way.

  "That's what happened to the diamonds. When The People were ready to use their ship again, they saw the diamonds were gone (and I would guess the diamonds weren't there for looks but were parts of the ship's working gear). The People would have noticed us, of course, and watched us as we do bowerbirds, with amusement and mild curiosity. So they would have known the NSA was a sort of pluralized top cock in our society, and would have gone straight to NSA's bower, the Space Museum, to retrieve the diamonds."

  Hoffmann finished his drink and looked around at Larkle and Caude, as if studying the effect of his words on them. He sneered at what he saw in their faces.

  The Attorney General said in a tight voice, "I'll be a long time apologizing satisfactorily for exposing you to this arrogant nonsense, Hank. I'm truly sorry! May I use your phone for an urgent call?"

  "Of course," smiled Alversen, looking a bit saddened. Larkle went to the phone and punched a number. The screen lighted to display the face of the president of the bank in which Hoffmann had deposited his check. The banker smiled in recognition.

  "Hi, Pete," he said.

  "Hello, Tony," said the Attorney General. "Tony, you have an account for one Otto Hoffmann. I'm hereby impounding that account, on the grounds that Hoffmann defrauded the government out of the five hundred thousand he deposited earlier today."

  "All right, Pete. Put through the official notice within six hours, won't you?"

  "Okay. But do you mind checking to make sure you have the account?"

  "Just a second." The face disappeared briefly, then came back to say, "Yes, we have it. Name of Otto Hoffmann, with a federal check that size deposited today."

  "That's the one! Impound it!"

  "Right . . . But Pete . . . One thing . . . "

  "What's that?" asked Larkle.

  "There's only two thousand in the account. Hoffmann made the deposit, and then wrote checks to cover almost the whole amount. Three hundred thousand to Internal Revenue Service, one hundred and twenty thousand to a prepayment trust for a Mrs. Stella Ebert Hoffmann (sounds like he's paying alimony, doesn't it?), and there's one check marked 'one year's rent,' and another for a twelve-month triple-A dining card, and several marked 'payment of account in full.' Only two thousand left. But I'll impound that."

  "Forget the whole thing!" bawled the Attorney General, slapping the phone off with a furious gesture. Hoffmann grinned with gloating triumph. "Let's see you start, big shyster," he snickered, "by conning IRS out of three hundred thousand!"

  "Go to hell!" grated the Attorney General.

  "Hadn't we better leave?" Caude murmured to him.

  "Yeah, let's get this S.O.B. outta here!" Larkle barked.

  "Again, Hank, my deepest apologies."

  Alversen nodded and smiled forgivingly.

  "Just one more thing," said Hoffmann. "Alversen, I want to remind you of something I said a while ago. You've got the world believing a dangerous lie, one that could get the whole human race smeared but good! Let's get back to that Australian rancher. When he went to recover his property the first time, he was good-humored about it. But suppose the next time it happened he was badly inconvenienced and got angry. The bowerbirds would no longer be a bunch of amusing goofs; they would suddenly be a damned nuisance. He would go after them with his gun."

  Hoffmann rose and lumbered toward the door. "Well, so long, Heroic Hank! Sleep well tonight. One of the billions of lives you're endangering is mine, if you want a cheerful thought to sleep on."

  "Wait," said Alversen quietly. They turned to look at him.

  "The damned S.O.B.'s right," he gritted. "He's mixed up on some of the details—but he's right. I did lie about the diamonds, and I suppose the rightful owners took them from the museum. It's hard to explain any other way. '

  Larkle and Caude sat down again, looking stunned.

  "My God!" said Caude at last. "We can't let this get out. It would ruin Hank completely!"

  Alversen lowered his head. "Thanks for considering me, but at my age it doesn't matter so much. I made the mistake, and I'm ready to pay for it."

  Hoffmann snorted caustically but didn't speak.

  "But this could play hell with morale, Hank!" protested Larkle. "The public needs heroes, and it needs them untarnished. I think we'd better hush the whole thing. Hoffmann's talking malarky about the danger, anyway, so there's no need to issue a warning about the aliens. If Hoffmann's summary is true, as you say it is, Hank, then the aliens have shown themselves to be highly civilized and, um, forebearing. If a human should offend them again, surely they will merely get in touch with us, to warn us."

  Alversen shook his head. "We can't be sure of that, and the risk is too great to take."

  "Some slight risk perhaps," argued the Attorney General. "But isn't it far more likely that they would prefer to talk it out with us?"

  Hoffmann sneered and helped himself to some more of Alversen's liquor. "Tell me, big shyster," he demanded. "How likely are you to start a conversation with a bowerbird?"

  The silence that followed was long and uncomfortable.

  Man Off A White Horse

  This was the real thing. Barfield was gloriously sure of that. Not just a dream, like it had been a thousand times before. This time he was really astride a powerful white stallion, drawing looks of admiration, fear, and respect from hundreds of upturned faces as he rode through Central Park.

  It couldn't be a dream, because he never thought to wonder about that when he was dreaming. And a dream wasn't this real.

  Just to make sure, he studied the reins gripped lightly in his right hand. Genuine leather, all r
ight, with bloodred rubies attached in little square silver mountings that were pointy at the corners. Certainly no dream contained detailed stuff like that.

  Was he going to fall off? Not in a hundred years! The dream intensifier had finally worked, and simply by dreaming of riding, he had learned to ride.

  A family of picnickers scattered in all directions as he galloped his horse over their spread cloth. He roared with laughter to see them jump, their faces pale with terror. He towered over them for a moment, then rode on . . .

  . . . Into a swarm of high-society chicks having a lawn party. He picked a choice one and swept her up in front of him.

  "Barfield!" she exclaimed, recognizing him.

  "Yeah." He knew who she was, too—Jacqueline Onassis' granddaughter—but he wasn't going to give her the pleasure of letting her know he knew.

  He stood in the stirrups and quickly had his satisfaction with her. Then he let her slide from the horse to sprawl panting and indecent on the grass.

  His horse was now climbing a hill, going up fast in powerful lunges. All the world lay below him, below the magnificent Barfield.

  They topped the hill crest. The down slope on the other side was dizzyingly steep. Barfield gasped and cringed back. His left foot lost the stirrup and . . .

  . . . He was falling!

  "Ugh!" he grunted as his body gave a jerk. He opened his eyes and gazed dully at the captive across the room for a moment.

  "Something wrong?" the man asked in that annoyingly confident voice of his.

  "I must've dozed off," said Barfield.

  He stood up, feeling as short, dumpy, and ineffectual as he knew he looked, and walked over to check the captive's cuffs and blindfold.

  "We haven't been properly introduced," the man said pleasantly. "My name's Paxton . . . G. Donald Paxton."