“Yes,” Joe said, “I can varish, all right. I can skren, too. Hm-m-m.”
Gallegher abruptly rose from the couch. “What a fool I am. ‘DRINK ME’. That’s the answer. Joe, shut up. Go off in a corner and varish.”
“I’m skrenning,” Joe said.
“Then skren. I’ve finally got an idea. When I woke up yesterday, I was thinking about a bottle labeled ‘DRINK ME’. When Alice took a drink, she changed size, didn’t she? Where’s that reference book? I wish I knew more about technology. Vasoconstrictor . . . hemostatic . . . here it is—demonstrates the metabolic regulation mechanisms of the vegetative nervous system. Metabolism. I wonder now—”
Gallegher rushed to the workbench and examined the bottles. “Vitalism. Life is the basic reality, of which everything else is a form or manifestation. Now, I had a problem to solve for Adrenals, Incorporated. Jonas Harding and Grandpa were here. Harding gave me an hour to fill the bill. The problem . . . a dangerous and harmless animal. Paradox. That isn’t it. Harding’s clients wanted thrills and safety at the same time. I’ve got no lab animals on tap at the moment . . . Joe!”
“Well?”
“Watch,” Gallegher said. He poured a drink and watched the liquid vanish before he tasted it. “Now. What happened?”
“The little brown animal drank it.”
“Is that little brown animal, by any chance—Grandpa?”
“That’s right,” Joe said.
Gallegher blistered the robot’s transparent hide with sulphurous oaths. “Why didn’t you tell me? You—”
“I answered your question,” the robot said smugly. “Grandpa’s brown, isn’t he? And he’s an animal.”
“But—little! I thought it was a critter about as big as a rabbit.”
“The only standard of comparison is the majority of the species. That’s the yardstick. Compared to the average height of humans, Grandpa is little. A little brown animal.”
“So it’s Grandpa, is it?” Gallegher said, returning to the workbench. “And he’s simply speeded up. Accelerated metabolism. Adrenalin. Hm-m-m. Now I know what to look for, maybe—”
He fell to. But it was sundown before Gallegher emptied a small vial into a glass, siphoned whisky into it, and watched the mixture disappear.
A flickering began. Something flashed from corner to corner of the room. Gradually it became visible as a streaking brownness that resolved itself, finally, into Grandpa. He stood before Gallegher, jittering like mad as the last traces of the accelerative formula wore off.
“Hello, Grandpa,” Gallegher said placatingly.
Grandpa’s nutcracker face wore an expression of malevolent fury. For the first time in his life, the old gentleman was drunk. Gallegher stared in utter amazement.
“I’m going back to Maine,” Grandpa cried, and fell over backwards.
“Never seen such a lot of slow pokes in my life,” Grandpa said, devouring a steak. “My, I’m hungry. Next time I let you stick a needle in me I’ll know better. How many months have I been like this?”
“Two days,” Gallegher said, carefully mixing up a formula. “It was a metabolic accelerator, Grandpa. You just lived faster, that’s all.”
“All! Bah. Couldn’t eat nothing. Food was solid as a rock. Only thing I could get down my gullet was liquor.”
“Oh?”
“Hard chewing. Even with my store teeth. Even whisky tasted hotter. As for a steak like this, I couldn’t’ve managed it.”
“You were living faster.” Gallegher glanced at the robot, who was still quietly skrenning in a comer. “Let me see. The antithesis of an accelerator is a decelerator—Grandpa, where’s Jonas Harding?”
“In there,” Grandpa said, pointing to the blue-eyed dynamo and thus confirming Gallegher’s suspicion.
“Vitaplasm. So that was it. That’s why I had a lot of Vitaplasm sent over a couple of nights ago. Hm-m-m.” Gallegher examined the sleek, impermeable surface of the apparent dynamo. After a while he tried a hypodermic syringe. He couldn’t penetrate the hard shell.
Instead, using a new mixture he had concocted from the bottles on his workbench, he dripped a drop of the liquid on the substance. Presently it softened. At that spot Gallegher made an injection, and was delighted to see a color-change spread out from the locus till the entire mass was pallid and plastic.
“Vitaplasm,” he exulted. “Ordinary artificial protoplasm cells, that’s all. No wonder it looked hard. I’d given it a decelerative treatment. An approach to molecular stasis. Anything metabolizing that slowly would seem hard as iron.” He wadded up great bunches of the surrogate and dumped it into a convenient vat. Something began to form around the blue eyes—the shape of a cranium, broad shoulders, a torso—
Freed from the disguising mass of Vitaplasm, Jonas Harding was revealed crouching on the floor, silent as a statue.
His heart wasn’t beating. He didn’t breathe. The decelerator held him in an unbreakable grip of passivity.
Not quite unbreakable. Gallegher, about to apply the hypodermic, paused and looked from Joe to Grandpa. “Now why did I do that?” he demanded.
Then he answered his own question.
“The time limit. Harding gave me an hour to solve his problem. Time’s relative—especially when your metabolism is slowed down. I must have given Harding a shot of the decelerator so he wouldn’t realize how much time had passed. Let’s see.” Gallegher applied a drop to Harding’s impermeable skin and watched the spot soften and change hue. “Uh-huh. With Harding frozen like that, I could take weeks to work on the problem, and when he woke up, he’d figure only a short time had passed. But why did I use the Vitaplasm on him?”
Grandpa downed a beer. “When you’re drunk, you’re apt to do anything,” he contended, reaching for another steak.
“True, true. But Gallegher Plus is logical. A strange, eerie kind of logic, but logic nevertheless. Let me see. I shot the decelerator into Harding, and then—there he was. Rigid and stiff. I couldn’t leave him kicking around the lab, could I?
If anybody came in they’d think I had a corpse on my hands!”
“You mean he ain’t dead?” Grandpa demanded.
“Of course not. Merely decelerated. I know! I camouflaged Harding’s body. I sent out for Vitaplasm, molded the stuff around his body, and then applied the decelerator to the Vitaplasm. It works on living cellular substance—slows it down. And slowed down to that extent, it’s impermeable and immovable!”
“You’re crazy,” Grandpa said.
“I’m short-sighted,” Gallegher admitted. “At least, Gallegher Plus is. Imagine leaving Harding’s eyes visible, so I’d be reminded the guy was under that pile when I woke up from my binge! What did I construct that recorder for, anyhow? The logic Gallegher Plus uses is far more fantastic than Joe’s.”
“Don’t bother me,” Joe said. “I’m still skrenning.”
Gallegher put the hypodermic needle into the soft spot on Harding’s arm. He injected the accelerator, and within a moment or two Jonas Harding stirred, blinked his blue eyes, and got up from the floor. “Ouch!” he said, rubbing his arm. “Did you stick me with something?”
“An accident,” Gallegher said, watching the man warily. “Uh . . . this problem of yours—”
Harding found a chair and sat down, yawning. “Solved it?”
“You gave me an hour.”
“Oh. Yes, of course.” Harding looked at his watch. “It’s stopped. Well, what about it?”
“Just how long a time do you think has lapsed since you came into this laboratory?”
“Half an hour?” Harding hazarded.
“Two months,” Grandpa snapped.
“You’re both right,” Gallegher said. “I’d have another answer, but I’d be right, too.”
Harding obviously thought that Gallegher was still drunk. He stayed doggedly on the subject.
“What about that specialized animal we need? You still have half an hour—”
“I don’t need it,” Gallegher sai
d, a great white light dawning in his mind. “I’ve got your answer for you. But it isn’t quite what you think it is.” He relaxed on the couch and considered the liquor-organ. Now that he could drink again, he found he preferred to prolong the anticipation.
“I came upon no wine so wonderful as thirst,” he remarked.
“Claptrap,” Grandpa said.
Gallegher said: “The clients of Adrenals, Incorporated, want to hunt animals. They want a thrill, so they need dangerous animals. They have to be safe, so they can’t have dangerous animals. It seems paradoxical, but it isn’t. The answer doesn’t lie in the animal. It’s in the hunter.”
Harding blinked. “Come again?”
“Tigers. Ferocious man-eating tigers. Lions. Jaguars. Water buffalo. The most vicious, carnivorous animals you can get. That’s part of the answer.”
“Listen—” Harding said. “Maybe you’ve got the wrong idea. The tigers aren’t our customers. We don’t supply clients to the animals, it’s the other way round.”
“I must make a few more tests,” Gallegher said, “but the basic priciple’s right here in my hand. An accelerator. A latent metabolic accelerator with a strong concentration of adrenalin as the catalyst. Like this—” He sketched a vivid verbal picture.
Armed with a rifle the client wandered through the artificial jungle, seeking quarry. He had already paid his fee to Adrenals, Incorporated, and got his intravenous shot of the latent accelerator. That substance permeated his blood stream, doing nothing as yet, waiting for the catalyst.
The tiger launched itself from the underbrush. It shot toward the client like catapulted murder, fangs bared. As the claws neared the man’s back, the suprarenals shot adrenalin into the blood stream in strong concentration.
That was the catalyst. The latent accelerative factor became active.
The client speeded up—tremendously.
He stepped away from the body of the tiger, apparently frozen in midair, and did what seemed best to him before the effect of the accelerator wore off. When it did, he returned to normal—and by that time he could be in the supply station of Adrenals, Incorporated, getting another intravenous shot—unless he’d decided to bag his tiger the easy way.
It was as simple as that.
“Ten thousand credits,” Gallegher said, happily counting them. “The balance due as soon as I work out the catalytic angle. Which is a cinch. Any fourth-rate chemist could do it. What intrigues me is the forthcoming interview between Harding and Murdoch Mackenzie. When they compare the time element, it’s going to be funny.”
“I want a drink,” Grandpa said. “Where’s a bottle?”
“Even in court, I think I could prove I only took an hour or less to solve the problem. It was Harding’s hour, of course, but time is relative. Entropy—metabolism—what a legal battle that would be! Still, it won’t happen. I know the formula for the accelerator and Harding doesn’t. He’ll pay the other forty thousand—and Mackenzie won’t have any kicks. After all, I’m giving Adrenals, Incorporated, the success factor they needed.”
“Well, I’m still going back to Maine,” Grandpa contended. “Least you can do is give me a bottle.”
“Go out and buy one,” Gallegher said, tossing the old gentleman several credits. “Buy several. I often wonder what the vintners buy—”
“Eh?”
“—one-half so precious as the stuff they sell. No, I’m not tight. But I’m going to be.” Gallegher clutched the liquor-organ’s mouth-piece in a loving grip and began to play alcoholic arpeggios on the keyboard. Grandpa, with a parting sneer at such new-fangled contraptions, took his departure.
Silence fell over the laboratory. Bubbles and Monstro, the two dynamos, sat quiescent. Neither of them had bright blue eyes. Gallegher experimented with cocktails and felt a warm, pleasant glow seep through his soul.
Joe came out of his corner and stood before the mirror, admiring his gears.
“Finished skrenning?” Gallegher asked sardonically.
“Yes.”
“Rational being, forsooth. You and your philosophy. Well, my fine robot, it turned out I didn’t need your help after all. Pose away.”
“How ungrateful you are,” Joe said, “after I’ve given you the benefit of my superlogic.”
“Your . . . what? You’ve slipped a gear. What super-logic?”
“The third-stage, of course. What we were talking about a while back. That’s why I was skrenning. I hope you didn’t think all your problems were solved by your feeble brain, in that opaque cranium of yours.”
Gallegher sat up. “What are your talking about? Third-stage logic? You didn’t—”
“I don’t think I can describe it to you. It’s more abstruse than the noumenon of Kant, which can’t be perceived except by thought. You’ve got to be able to skren to understand it, but—well, it’s the third stage. It’s . . . let’s see . . . demonstrating the nature of things by making things happen by themselves.”
“Experiment?”
“No. By skrenning, I reduce all things from the material plane to the realm of pure thought, and figure out the logical concepts and solutions.”
“But . . . wait. Things have been happening! I figured out about Grandpa and Harding and worked out the accelerator—”
“You think you did,” Joe said. “I simply skrenned. Which is a purely super-intellectual process. After I’d done that, things couldn’t help happening. But I hope you don’t think they happened by themselves!”
Gallegher said: “What’s skrenning?”
“You’ll never know.”
“But . . . you’re contending you’re the First Cause . . . no, it’s voluntarism . . . third-stage logic? No—” Gallegher fell back on the couch, staring. “Who do you think you are? Deus ex machina?”
Joe glanced down at the conglomeration of gears in his torso.
“What else?” he asked smugly.
THE END.
PILE OF TROUBLE
The miraculous Hogbens have to move when their flying makes too much commotion, but the trouble they flee is nothing compared to what their atom pile soon stirs up!
WE CALLED LEMUEL “Gimpy,” on account of he had three legs. After he got his growth, about the time they fit the War Between the States, he was willing to keep his extra leg sort of tucked up behind him inside his britches, where it would be out of sight and people wouldn’t talk. Course it made him look a little like one of them camel critters, but then Lemuel never was vain. It was lucky he was doublejointed, though, or he might of got cramps from keeping his leg tucked up thataway.
We hadn’t seen Lemuel for some sixty years. He was living in the southern part of the mountains, and the rest of us was up in northern Kaintuck. And I guess we wouldn’t of got in that trouble if Lemuel hadn’t been so blame shiftless. It looked like big trouble for a while. We Hogbens had had plenty of that before we moved to Piperville, what with people peeping and prying and trying to find out why the dogs barked so much for miles around. It got so we couldn’t do no flying at all. Finally grandpaw said we’d just better pull up stakes and move down south where Lemuel was staying.
I hate moving. That trip to Plymouth Rock made me sick to my stummick. I’d ruther of flew. But Grandpaw’s the boss.
He made us hire a truck and load everything in it. We had trouble getting the baby in; he don’t weigh more’n three hundred pound, but that tank we got to keep him in is purty bulky. No trouble about Grandpaw, though; we just tied him up in an old gunny sack and shoved him under the seat. I had to do all the work. Paw had got at the corn likker and was plomb silly. He kept hopping around on the top of his haid and singing something called, “The World Turned Upside Down.”
Uncle wouldn’t come. He’d dug himself in under the corncrib and said he was gonna hibernate fer ten years or so. We just left him there. “Allus traveling around,” he kept complaining. “Cain’t stay put. Every five hundred years or so, bang! Traipsin’ off summers. Go on, git!”
So we got.
<
br /> Lemuel, the one we used to call Gimpy, was one of the family. Seems there was a dust-up when we first came to Kaintuck—the way I heard it. Everybody was supposed to pitch in and help build a house, but not Lemuel—he wouldn’t. Plomb shiftless. He flew off to the south. Every year or two he’d wake up a little and we’d hear him thinking, but mostly he just sot.
We figgered we’d live with him fer a while.
That’s what we did.
Seems like Lemuel lived in an old water mill in the mountains up over a town called Piperville. It was kind of ramshackle. Lemuel was on the porch. He’d been sitting in a chair, but it had fallen down some while before, and he hadn’t bothered to wake up to fix it. So he sat there in the middle of his whiskers, breathing a trifle. He was having a nice dream. We didn’t wake him up. We toted the baby in the house, and Grandpaw and Paw started carrying in the bottles of corn.
THAT was how we settled in. It warn’t exactly convenient at first. Lemuel was too remarkable shiftless to keep vittles in the house. He’d wake up enough to hypnotize a coon, back somewheres in the woods, and purty soon the coon would come wandering along looking dazed, ready to be et. Lemuel had to eat coons mostly because they’re clever with their paws, which are sort of like hands. You can call me a weasel if that shiftless Lem didn’t hypnotize the coons into building a fire and cooking themselves. I never figgered out how he got the critters skun. Maybe he spit out the fur. Some people are just too lazy for anything.
When he got thirsty, he made it rain a little over his haid and opened his mouth. It was shameful.
Nobody paid no attention to Lemuel, though. Maw got busy. Paw, natcherally, snuck off with a jug of corn, and I had to do all the work. ‘Twarn’t much. Main trouble was we needed some sort of power. Keeping the baby alive in his tank uses up a lot of current, and Grandpaw drinks electricity like a hawg sucks up swill. Ef’n Lemuel had kept the water running in the stream, we’d of had no trouble, but that was Lemuel! He just let it dry up. There was a trickle, no more.
Maw helped me build a gadget in the henhouse, and after that we got all the power we needed.
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