Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  * * * * *

  He went to investigate a second memo. It was a restaurant, and he edged the police car gingerly into a lane beside the building. In the rear, the odor of spilled beer filled the air. It would have been attractive but for an admixture of gasoline fumes and the fact that it was mud. Mud whose moisture-content is spilled beer has a peculiar smell all its own.

  He got out of his car and gloomily asked the questions the memo called for. He didn't need to. He could have written down all the answers in advance. The restaurant now reporting vandalism had found big Jake's brand of beer unpopular. It had twenty cases of a superior brew brought in by motor-truck. It was stacked in a small building behind the café. For one happy evening, the customers chose their own beer.

  Now, next day, there were eighteen cases of smashed beer bottles. The crime had been committed in the small hours. There were no clues. The restaurant proprietor unconvincingly declared that he had no idea who'd caused it. But he'd only notified the police so he could collect insurance--not from Big Jake.

  With a sort of morbid, frustrated gloom, Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald made the necessary notes. He put his notebook in his pocket and backed his car out of the alley. Oddly enough, he thought of a beautifully carved meerschaum pipe he'd found with the milk that morning. He'd presented it to an orphanage mainly because, irrationally, he'd have liked to keep it. There had been other expensive gifts he'd have liked to keep. Bourbon. A set of expensive dry-flies. An eight-millimeter movie camera. Scotch. Shiny, smooth silk socks that would have soothed his weary feet. He'd denied himself these gifts because he believed--he knew--that they came from Big Jake, who tactfully won friends and influenced people by making presents and denying it. In business matters he was stern, because that was the way to collect protection-money. But he was subtle with cops. He had their wives on his side.

  Sergeant Fitzgerald growled in his throat. He'd always wanted a really fine meerschaum pipe. He'd had one this morning, and he'd had to get rid of it because it came from Big Jake. He felt that Big Jake had robbed him of it.

  He turned the police car and drove back toward the Elite Cleaners and Dyers establishment. As he drove, he growled. His eyelid had twitched twice, and each time he'd been heading into danger or trouble. The fact was dauntingly coincidental with Brink's comment after giving him a scrap of plastic from the bottom of that crazy machine. These things were on his mind. He couldn't bring himself to plan to mention them, but he needed to talk to Brink again. Brink could testify to threats. He could justify arrests. Sergeant Fitzgerald had a fine conviction that with a chance to apply pressure, he could make some of Big Jake's hoods and collectors talk, and so bust things wide open. He only needed Brink's co-operation. He drove toward the Elite Cleaners and Dyers to put pressure on Brink toward that happy end. But he brooded over his own eyebrow-twitchings.

  When the cleaning establishment came into view, there was a car parked before it. Two men from that car were in the act of entering the Elite plant through the same door the detective had used earlier. He parked his car behind the other. Fuming, he crossed the sidewalk and entered the building. As he entered, he heard a scream from the back. He heard a crashing sound and more screams.

  He bolted ahead, through the outer office and into the working area he had not visited before. He burst through swinging doors into a two-story, machinery-filled cleaning-and-dyeing plant. Tables and garment racks and five separate people appeared as proper occupants of the place. But something had happened. There was a flood of liquid--detergent solution--flowing toward the open back doors of the big room. It obviously came from a large carboy which had been smashed as if to draw attention to some urgent matter.

  The people in the room seemed to have frozen at their work, except that Brink had apparently been interrupted in some supervisory task. He was not working at any machine to clean, dye, dry, or press clothing. He looked at the two individuals whom Fitzgerald had seen enter only fractions of a minute earlier. His jaw clenched, and Fitzgerald was close enough behind the bottle-breakers to see him take an angry, purposeful step toward them. Then he checked himself very deliberately, and put his hands in his pockets, and watched. After an instant he even grinned at the two figures who had preceded the detective.

  They were an impressive pair. They were dressed in well-pressed garments of extravagantly fashionable cut. They wore expensive soft hats, tilted to jaunty angles. Even from the rear, Fitzgerald knew that handkerchiefs would show tastefully in the breast pockets of their coats. Their shoes had been polished until they not only shone, but glittered. But by professional instinct Fitzgerald noted one cauliflower ear, and the barest fraction of a second later he saw a squat revolver being waved negligently at the screaming women.

  He reached for his service revolver. And things happened.

  * * * * *

  The situation was crystal-clear. Big Jake Connors was displeased with Brink. In all the city whose rackets he was developing and consolidating, Brink was the only man who resisted Big Jake's civic enterprise--and got away with it! And nobody who runs rackets can permit resistance. It is contagious. So Big Jake had ordered that Brink be brought into line or else. The or else alternative had run into snags, before, but it was being given a big new try.

  There was the shrill high clamor of two women screaming at the tops of their voices because revolvers were waved at them. One Elite employee, at the pressing machine, took his foot off the treadle and steam billowed wildly. Another man, at a giant sheet-iron box which rumbled, stared with his mouth open and blood draining from his cheeks. Brink, alone, looked--quite impossibly--amused and satisfied.

  "Get outside!" snarled a voice as Fitzgerald's revolver came out ready for action. "This joint is finished!"

  The companion of the snarling man rubbed suddenly at his eye. He rubbed again, as if it twitched violently. But it was, after all, only a twitching eyelid. He reached negligently down and picked up a wooden box. By its markings, it was a dozen-bottle box of spot-remover--the stuff used to get out spots the standard cleaning fluid in the dry-cleaning machine did not remove.

  The man heaved the box, with the hand with which he had rubbed his twitching eye. The other man raised a hand--the one not holding a revolver--to rub at his own eye, which also seemed to twitch agitatedly.

  Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald had his revolver out. He drew in his breath for a stentorian command for them to drop their weapons. But he didn't have time to shout. The hurtling small box of spot-remover struck the large sheet-iron case from which loud rumblings came. It was a dryer; a device for spinning clothes which were wet with liquid from the dry-cleaning washer. A perforated drum revolved at high speed within it. The box of spot-remover hit the door. The door dented in, hit the high-speed drum inside, and flew frantically out again, free from its hinges and turning end-for-end as it flew. It slammed into the thrower's companion, spraining three fingers as it knocked his revolver to the floor. The weapon slid merrily away to the outer office between Detective Fitzgerald's feet.

  But this was not all. The dryer-door, having disposed of one threatening revolver, slammed violently against the wall. The wall was merely a thin partition, neatly paneled on the office side, but with shelves containing cleaning-and-dyeing supplies on the other. The impact shook the partition. Dust fell from the shelves and supplies. The hood who hadn't lost his gun sneezed so violently that his hat came off. He bent nearly double, and in the act he jarred the partition again.

  Things fell from it. Many things. A two-gallon jar of extra-special detergent, used only for laces, conked him and smashed on the floor before him. It added to the stream of fluid already flowing with singular directness for the open, double, back-door of the workroom. The hood staggered, sneezed again, and convulsively pulled the trigger of his gun. The bullet hit something which was solid heavy metal, ricocheted, ricocheted again and the second hood howled and leaped wildly into the air. He came down in the flowing flood of spilled detergent, flat on his stomach, and with
marked forward momentum. He slid. The floor of the plant had recently been oiled to keep down dust. The coefficient of friction of a really good detergent on top of floor-oil is remarkably low,--somewhere around point oh-oh-nine. Hood number two slid magnificently on his belly on the superb lubrication afforded by detergent on top of floor-oil.

  The first hood staggered. Something else fell from the shelf. It was a carton of electric-light bulbs. Despite the protecting carton, they went off with crackings like gunfire. Technically, they did not explode but implode, but the hood with the revolver did not notice the difference. He leaped--and also landed in the middle of the wide streak of detergent-over-oil which might have been arranged to receive him.

  He remained erect, but he slid slowly along that shining path. His relatively low speed was not his fault, because he went through all the motions of frenzied flight. His legs twinkled as he ran. But his feet slid backward. He moved with a sort of dignified celerity, running fast enough for ten times the speed, upon a surface which had a frictional coefficient far below that of the smoothest possible ice.

  Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald gaped, his mouth dropped open and his gun held laxly in a practically nerveless hand.

  The thing developed splendidly. The prone gunman slid out of the wide double door, pushing a bow-wave of detergent before him. He slid across the cement just outside, into the open garage whose delivery-truck was absent, and slammed with a sort of deliberate violence into a stack of four cardboard drums of that bone-black which is used to filter cleaning-fluid so it can be used over again in the dry-cleaning machine. The garage was used for storage as well as shelter for the establishment's truck.

  The four drums were not accurately piled. They were three and a half feet high and two feet in diameter. They toppled sedately, falling with a fine precision upon the now hatless, running, sliding hood. One of them burst upon him. A second burst upon the prone man--who had butted through the cardboard of the bottom one on his arrival. There was a dense black cloud which filled all the interior of the garage. It was bone-black, which cannot be told from lamp-black or soot by the uninitiated.

  From the cloud came a despairing revolver shot. It was pure reflex action by a man who had been whammed over the head by a hundred-and-fifty-pound drum of yielding--in fact bursting--material. There was a metallic clang. Then silence.

  In a very little while the dust-cloud cleared. One figure struggled insanely. Upon him descended--from an oil drum of cylinder-oil stored above the rafters--a tranquil, glistening rod of opalescent cylinder-oil. His last bullet had punctured the drum. Oil turned the bone-black upon him into a thick, sticky goo which instantly gathered more bone-black to become thicker, stickier, and gooier. He fought it, while his unconscious companion lay with his head in a crumpled cardboard container of more black stuff.

  The despairing, struggling hood managed to get off one more shot, as if defying even fate and chance. This bullet likewise found a target. It burst a container of powdered dye-stuff, also stored overhead. The container practically exploded and its contents descended in a widespread shower which coated all the interior of the garage with a lovely layer of bright heliotrope.

  Maybe the struggling hood saw it. If so, it broke him utterly. What had happened was starkly impossible. The only sane explanation was that he had died and was in hell. He accepted that explanation and broke into sobs.

  * * * * *

  Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald had witnessed every instant of the happening, but he did not believe it. Nevertheless, he said in a strange voice: "I'll phone for the paddy-wagon. It'll do for a ambulance, in case of need."

  He put away his unused service revolver. Thinking strange, dizzy thoughts of twitching eyelids and plastic scraps and starkly incredible happenings, he managed to call for the police patrol. When he hung up, he gazed blankly at the wall. He gazed, in fact, at a spot where a peculiar small machine with no visible function reposed--somewhat dusty--on a shelf.

  Brink stepped over briskly and closed the door between the scene of catastrophe and the immaculate shop. Somehow, none of the mess had spilled back through the doorway. Then he came in, frowning a little.

  "The fight's out of them," he said cheerfully. "One's got a bad cut on his head. The other's completely unnerved. Tsk! Tsk! I hate to have such things happen!"

  Sergeant Fitzgerald shook himself, as if trying to come back to a normal and a reasonable world.

  "Look!" he said in a hoarse voice. "I saw it, an' I still don't believe it! Things like this don't happen! I thought you might be lucky. It ain't that. I thought I might be crazy. It ain't that! What has been goin' on?"

  Brink sat down. His air was one of wry contemplation.

  "I told you I had a special kind of luck you couldn't believe. Did your eyelids twitch any time today?"

  Fitzgerald swallowed.

  "They did. And I stopped short an' something that should've knocked my cranium down my windpipe missed me by inches. An' again--But no matter. Yes."

  "Maybe you can believe it, then," said Brink. "Did you ever hear of a man named Hieronymus?"

  "No," said Fitzgerald in a numbed voice. "Who's he?"

  "He got a patent once," said Brink, matter-of-factly, "on a machine he believed detected something he called eloptic radiation. He thought it was a kind of radiation nobody had noticed before. He was wrong. It worked by something called psi."

  Sergeant Fitzgerald shook his head. It still needed clearing.

  "Psi still isn't fully understood," explained Brink, "but it will do a lot of things. For instance, it can change probability as magnetism can change temperature. You can establish a psi field in a suitable material, just as you can establish a magnetic field in steel or alnico. Now, if you spin a copper disk in a magnetic field, you get eddy currents. Keep it up, and the disk gets hot. If you're obstinate about it, you can melt the copper. It isn't the magnet, as such, that does the melting. It's the energy of the spinning disk that is changed into heat. The magnetic field simply sets up the conditions for the change of motion into heat. In the same way ... am I boring you?"

  "Confusing me," said Fitzgerald, "maybe. But keep on. Maybe I'll catch a glimmer presently."

  "In the same way," said Brink, "you can try to perform violent actions in a strong psi field--a field made especially to act on violence. When you first try it you get something like eddy currents. Warnings. It can be arranged that such psi eddy currents make your eyelids twitch. Keep it up, and probability changes to shift the most-likely consequences of the violence. This is like a spinning copper disk getting hot. Then, if you're obstinate about it, you get the equivalent of the copper disk melting. Probability gets so drastically changed that the violent thing you're trying to do becomes something that can't happen. Hm-m-m. ... You can't spin a copper disk in a magnetic field when it melts. You can't commit a murder in a certain kind of psi field when probability goes hog-wild. Any other thing can happen to anybody else--to you, for example--but no violence can happen to the thing or person you're trying to do something violent to. The psi field has melted down ordinary probabilities. The violence you intend has become the most improbable of all conceivable things. You see?"

  "I'm beginnin'," said Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald dizzily, "I'm beginnin' to get a toehold on what you mean. I'd hate to have to testify about it in court, but I'm receptive."

  "So my special kind of luck," said Brink, "comes from antiviolence psi fields, set up in psi units of suitable material. They don't use up energy any more than a magnet does. But they transfer it, like a magnet does. My brother-in-law thought he had to lose his business because Big Jake threatened violent things. I offered to take it over and protect it--with psi units. So far, I have. When four hoods intended to shoot up the place and moved to do it, they were warned. Psi 'eddy currents' made their eyelids twitch. They went ahead. Probability changed. Quite unlikely things became more likely than not. They were obstinate about it, and what they intended became perhaps the only thing in the world that sim
ply couldn't happen. So they crashed into a telephone pole. That wasn't violence. That was accident."

  The detective blinked, and then nodded, somehow painfully.

  "I see," he said uncertainly.

  * * * * *

  "Somebody set a bomb in my delivery truck," added Brink. "I'm sure his eyelids twitched, but he didn't stop. So probability changed. The explosion of that bomb in my truck became the most unlikely of all possible things. In fact, it became impossible. So some electric connection went bad, and it didn't go off. Again, when Jacaro intended to plant a time fire-bomb to set the plant on fire--why--his eyelids must have twitched but he didn't give up the intention. So the psi unit naturally made the burning of the plant impossible. For it to be impossible, the fire-bomb had to go off where it would do next to no harm. Jacaro lost his pants."

  He stopped. Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald swallowed carefully.

  "I don't question it," he said dizzily, "even if I don't believe it. Will you now tell me that what just happened was a psi something keepin' violent things from happening?"

  "That's it," agreed Brink. "The psi unit made the dryer-door fly off and knock a pistol out of a man's hand. If they'd dropped the idea of violence, that would have ended the matter. They didn't."

  "I accept it," said Fitzgerald. He gulped. "Because I saw it. A court wouldn't believe it, though, Mr. Brink!"

  "Well?"

  "I've been tryin' for months," said Fitzgerald in sudden desperation, "to find a way to stop what Big Jake's doin'. But he's tricky. He's organized. He's got smart lawyers. Mr. Brink, if the cops could use what you've got--" Then he stopped. "It'd never be authorized," he said bitterly. "They'd never let a cop try it."

  "No," agreed Brink. "Until it's believed in it can only be used privately, for private purposes. Like I've used it. Or Hm-m-m. Do you fish, or bowl, or play golf, sergeant? I could give you a psi unit that'd help you quite a bit in such a private purpose."

  Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald shook his head.