The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

by Martin Greenberg

  Maybe it’s lucky that history was my major in school. Luck it must have been, certainly not cleverness, that made me pay a dime for a seat in an undertaker’s rickety folding chair imbedded solidly – although the only other customers were a half-dozen Sons of the Order of Tortilla – in a cast of secondhand garlic. I sat near the door. A couple of hundred-watt bulbs dangling naked from the ceiling gave enough light for me to look around. In front of me, in the rear of the store, was the screen, what looked like a white-painted sheet of beaverboard, and when over my shoulder I saw the battered sixteen millimeter projector I began to think that even at a dime it was no bargain. Still, I had forty minutes to wait.

  Everyone was smoking. I lit a cigarette and the discouraged Mexican who had taken my dime locked the door and turned off the lights, after giving me a long, questioning look. I’d paid my dime, so I looked right back. In a minute the old projector started clattering. No film credits, no producer’s name, no director, just a tentative flicker before a closeup of a bewhiskered mug labeled Cortez. Then a painted and feathered Indian with the title of Guatemotzin, successor to Moctezuma; an aerial shot of a beautiful job of model-building tagged Ciudad Méjico, 1521. Shots of old muzzle-loaded artillery banging away, great walls spurting stone splinters under direct fire, skinny Indians dying violently with the customary gyrations, smoke and haze and blood. The photography sat me right up straight. It had none of the scratches and erratic cuts that characterized an old print, none of the fuzziness, none of the usual mugging at the camera by the handsome hero. There wasn’t any handsome hero. Did you ever see one of those French pictures, or a Russian, and comment on the reality and depth brought out by working on a small budget that can’t afford famed actors? This, what there was of it, was as good, or better.

  It wasn’t until the picture ended with a pan shot of a dreary desolation that I began to add two and two. You can’t, for pennies, really have a cast of thousands, or sets big enough to fill Central Park. A mock-up, even, of a thirty-foot wall costs enough to irritate the auditors, and there had been a lot of wall. That didn’t fit with the bad editing and lack of sound track, not unless the picture had been made in the old silent days. And I knew it hadn’t by the color tones you get with pan film. It looked like a well-rehearsed and badly planned newsreel.

  The Mexicans were easing out and I followed them to where the discouraged one was rewinding the reel. I asked him where he got the print.

  “I haven’t heard of any epics from the press agents lately, and it looks like a fairly recent print.”

  He agreed that it was recent, and added that he’d made it himself. I was polite to that, but he saw that I didn’t believe him and straightened up from the projector.

  “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  I said that I certainly did, and I had to catch a bus.

  “Would you mind telling me why, exactly why?”

  I said that the bus—

  “I mean it. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me just what’s wrong with it.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” I told him. He waited for me to go on. “Well, for one thing, pictures like that aren’t made for the sixteen-millimeter trade. You’ve got a reduction from a thirty-five-millimeter master,” and I gave him a few of the other reasons that separate home movies from Hollywood. When I finished he smoked quietly for a minute.

  “I see.” He took the reel off the projector spindle and closed the case. “I have beer in the back.” I agreed beer sounded good, but the bus – well, just one. From in back of the beaverboard screen he brought paper cups and a Jumbo bottle. With a whimsical “Business suspended” he closed the open door and opened the bottle with an opener screwed on the wall. The store had likely been a grocery or restaurant. There were plenty of chairs. Two we shoved around and relaxed companionably. The beer was warm.

  “You know something about this line,” tentatively.

  I took it as a question and laughed. “Not too much. Here’s mud,” and we drank. “Used to drive a truck for the Film Exchange.” He was amused at that.

  “Stranger in town?”

  “Yes and no. Mostly yes. Sinus trouble chased me out and relatives bring me back. Not any more, though; my father’s funeral was last week.” He said that was too bad, and I said it wasn’t. “He had sinus, too.” That was a joke, and he refilled the cups. We talked awhile about the Detroit climate.

  Finally he said, rather speculatively, “Didn’t I see you around here last night? Just about eight.” He got up and went after more beer.

  I called after him. “No more beer for me.” He brought a bottle anyway, and I looked at my watch. “Well, just one.”

  “Was it you?”

  “Was it me what?” I held out my paper cup.

  “Weren’t you around here—”

  I wiped foam off my mustache. “Last night? No, but I wish I had. I’d have caught my bus. No, I was in the Motor Bar last night at eight. And I was still there at midnight.”

  He chewed his lip thoughtfully. “The Motor Bar. Just down the street?” And I nodded. “The Motor Bar. Hm-m-m.” I looked at him. “Would you like . . . sure, you would.” Before I could figure out what he was talking about he went to the back and from behind the beaverboard screen rolled out a big radio-phonograph and another Jumbo bottle. I held the bottle against the light. Still half full. I looked at my watch. He rolled the radio against the wall and lifted the lid to get at the dials.

  “Reach behind you, will you? The switch on the wall.” I could reach the switch without getting up, and I did. The lights went out. I hadn’t expected that, and I groped at arm’s length. Then the lights came on again, and I turned back, relieved. But the lights weren’t on; I was looking at the street!

  Now, all this happened while I was dripping beer and trying to keep my balance on a tottering chair – the street moved, I didn’t, and it was day and it was night and I was in front of the Book-Cadillac and I was going into the Motor Bar and I was watching myself order a beer and I knew I was wide awake and not dreaming. In a panic I scrabbled off the floor, shedding chairs and beer like an umbrella while I ripped my nails feeling frantically for that light switch. By the time I found it – and all the while I was watching myself pound the bar for the barkeep – I was really in a fine fettle, just about ready to collapse. Out of thin air right into a nightmare. At last I found the switch.

  The Mexican was looking at me with the queerest expression I’ve ever seen, like he’d baited a mousetrap and caught a frog. Me? I suppose I looked like I’d seen the devil himself. Maybe I had. The beer was all over the floor and I barely made it to the nearest chair.

  “What,” I managed to get out, “what was that?”

  The lid of the radio went down. “I felt like that too, the first time. I’d forgotten.”

  My fingers were too shaky to get out a cigarette, and I ripped off the top of the package. “I said, what was that?”

  He sat down. “That was you, in the Motor Bar, at eight last night.” I must have looked blank as he handed me another paper cup. Automatically I held it out to be refilled.

  “Look here—” I started.

  “I suppose it is a shock. I’d forgotten what I felt like the first time I . . . I don’t care much any more. Tomorrow I’m going out to Phillips Radio.” That made no sense to me, and I said so. He went on.

  “I’m licked. I’m flat broke. I don’t give a care any more. I’ll settle for cash and live off the royalties.” The story came out, slowly at first, then faster until he was pacing the floor. I guess he was tired of having no one to talk to.

  His name was Miguel Jose Zapata Laviada. I told him mine: Lefko. Ed Lefko. He was the son of sugar beet workers who had emigrated from Mexico somewhere in the Twenties. They were sensible enough not to quibble when their oldest son left the back-breaking Michigan fields to seize the chance provided by an NYA scholarship. When the scholarship ran out, he’d worked in garages, driven trucks, clerked in stores, and sold brushes d
oor-to-door to exist and to learn. The Army cut short his education with the First Draft to make him a radar technician; the Army had given him an honorable discharge and an idea so nebulous as to be almost merely a hunch. Jobs were plentiful then, and it wasn’t too hard to end up with enough money to rent a trailer and fill it with Army surplus radio and radar equipment. One year ago he’d finished what he’d started; finished underfed, underweight, and overexcited. But successful, because he had it.

  “It” he installed in a radio cabinet, both for ease in handling and for camouflage. For reasons that will become apparent, he didn’t dare apply for a patent. I looked “it” over pretty carefully. Where the phonograph turntable and radio controls had been were vernier dials galore. One big dial was numbered 1 to 24, a couple were numbered 1 to 60, and there were a dozen or so numbered I to 25, plus two or three with no numbers at all. Closest of all, it resembled one of these fancy radio or motor testers found in a super super-service station. That was all, except that there was a sheet of heavy plywood hiding whatever was installed in place of the radio chassis and speaker. A perfectly innocent cache for . . .

  Daydreams are swell. I suppose we’ve all had our share of mental wealth or fame or travel or fantasy. But to sit in a chair and drink warm beer and realize that the dream of ages isn’t a dream anymore, to feel like a god, to know that just by turning a few dials you can see and watch anything, anybody, anywhere, that has ever happened – it still bothers me once in a while.

  I know this much, that it’s high frequency stuff. And there’s a lot of mercury and copper and wiring of metals cheap and easy to find, but what goes where, or how – least of all, why – is out of my line. Light has mass and energy, and that mass always loses part of itself and can be translated back to electricity, or something. Mike Laviada himself says that what he stumbled on and developed was nothing new, that long before the war it had been observed many times by men like Compton and Michelson and Pfeiffer, who discarded it as a useless laboratory effect. And, of course, that was before atomic research took precedence over everything.

  When the first shock wore off – and Mike had to give me another demonstration – I must have made quite a sight. Mike tells me I couldn’t sit down. I’d pop up and gallop up and down the floor of that ancient store kicking chairs out of my way or stumbling over them, all the time gabbling out words and disconnected sentences faster than my tongue could trip. Finally it filtered through that he was laughing at me. I didn’t see where it was any laughing matter, and I prodded him. He began to get angry.

  “I know what I have,” he snapped. “I’m not the biggest fool in the world, as you seem to think. Here, watch this,” and he went back to the radio. “Turn out the light.” I did, and there I was watching myself at the Motor Bar again, a lot happier this time. “Watch this.”

  The bar backed away. Out in the street, two blocks down to City Hall. Up the steps to the Council Room. No one there. The Council was in session, then they were gone again. Not a picture, not a projection of a lantern slide, but a slice of life about twelve feet sqaure. If we were close, the field of view was narrow. If we were farther away, the background was just as much in focus as the foreground. The images, if you want to call them images, were just as real, just as lifelike as looking in the doorway of a room. Real they were, three-dimensional, stopped only by the back wall or the distance in the background. Mike was talking as he spun the dials, but I was too engrossed to pay much attention.

  I yelped and grabbed and closed my eyes as you would if you were looking straight down with nothing between you and the ground except a lot of smoke and a few clouds. I winked my eyes open almost at the end of what must have been a long racing vertical dive, and there I was, looking at the street again.

  “Go any place up the Heavyside Layer, go down as deep as any hole, anywhere, any time.” A blur, and the street changed into a glade of sparse pines. “Buried treasure. Sure. Find it, with what?” The trees disappeared and I reached back for the light switch as he dropped the lid of the radio and sat down.

  “How are you going to make any money when you haven’t got it to start with?” No answer to that from me. “I ran an ad in the paper offering to recover lost articles; my first customer was the Law wanting to see my private detective’s license. I’ve seen every big speculator in the country sit in his office buying and selling and making plans; what do you think would happen if I tried to peddle advance market information? I’ve watched the stock market get shoved up and down while I had barely the money to buy the paper that told me about it. I watched a bunch of Peruvian Indians bury the second ransom of Atuahalpa; I haven’t the fare to get to Peru, or the money to buy the tools to dig.” He got up and brought two more bottles. He went on. By that time I was getting a few ideas.

  “I’ve watched scribes indite the books that burnt at Alexandria; who would buy, or who would believe me, if I copied one? What would happen if I went over to the Library and told them to rewrite their histories? How many would fight to tie a rope around my neck if they knew I’d watched them steal and murder and take a bath? What sort of padded cell would I get if I showed up with a photograph of Washington, or Caesar? Or Christ?”

  I agreed that it was all probably true, but—

  “Why do you think I’m here now? You saw the picture I showed for a dime. A dime’s worth, and that’s all, because I didn’t have the money to buy film or to make the picture as I knew I should.” His tongue began to get tangled. He was excited. “I’m doing this because I haven’t the money to get the things I need to get the money I’ll need—” He was so disgusted he booted a chair halfway across the room. It was easy to see that if I had been around a little later, Phillips Radio would have profited. Maybe I’d have been better off, too.

  Now, although I’ve always been told that I’d never be worth a hoot, no one has ever accused me of being slow for a dollar. Especially an easy one. I saw money in front of me – easy money, the easiest and the quickest in the world. I saw, for a minute, so far in the future with me on top of the heap, that my head reeled and it was hard to breathe.

  “Mike,” I said, “let’s finish that beer and go where we can get some more and maybe something to eat. We’ve got a lot of talking to do.” So we did.

  Beer is a mighty fine lubricant; I have always been a pretty smooth talker, and by the time we left the Gin Mill I had a pretty good idea of just what Mike had on his mind. By the time we’d shacked up for the night behind that beaverboard screen in the store, we were full-fledged partners. I don’t recall our even shaking hands on the deal, but that partnership still holds good. Mike is ace high with me, and I guess it’s the other way around, too. That was six years ago; it took me only a year or so to discard some of the corners I used to cut.

  Seven days after that, on a Tuesday, I was riding a bus to Grosse Pointe with a full briefcase. Two days after that I was riding back from Grosse Pointe in a shiny taxi, with an empty briefcase and a pocketful of folding money. It was easy.

  “Mr. Jones – or Smith – or Brown – I’m with Aristocrat Studios, Personal and Candid Portraits. We thought you might like this picture of you and . . . no, this is just a test proof. The negative is in our files. . . . Now, if you’re really interested, I’ll be back the day after tomorrow with our files . . . I’m sure you will, Mr. Jones. Thank you, Mr. Jones. . . . ”

  Dirty? Sure. Blackmail is always dirty. But if I had a wife and family and a good reputation, I’d stick to the roast beef and forget the Roquefort. Very smelly Roquefort, at that. Mike liked it less than I did. It took some talking, and I had to drag out the old one about the ends justifying the means, and they could well afford it, anyway. Besides, if there was a squawk, they’d get the negatives free. Some of them were pretty bad.

  So we had the cash; not too much, but enough to start. Before we took the next step there was plenty to decide. There are a lot who earn a living by convincing millions that Sticko soap is better. We had a harder problem than that: we had,
first, to make a saleable and profitable product, and second, we had to convince many, many millions that our “product” was absolutely honest and absolutely accurate. We all know that if you repeat something long enough and loud enough many – or most – will accept it as gospel truth. That called for publicity on an international scale. For the skeptics who know better than to accept advertising, no matter how blatant, we had to use another technique. And since we would certainly get only one chance, we had to be right the first time. Without Mike’s machine the job would have been impossible; without it the job would have been unnecessary.

  A lot of sweat ran under the bridge before we found what we thought – and we still do! – the only workable scheme. We picked the only possible way to enter every mind in the world without a fight: the field of entertainment. Absolute secrecy was imperative, and it was only when we reached the last decimal point that we made a move. We started like this:

  First we looked for a suitable building – or rather, Mike did. I flew east, to Rochester, for a month. The building he rented was an old bank. We had the windows sealed, a flossy office installed in the front – the bulletproof glass was my idea – air conditioning, a portable bar, electrical wiring of whatever type Mike’s little heart desired, and a blond secretary who thought she was working for M-E Experimental Laboratories. When I got back from Rochester I took over the job of keeping happy the stonemasons and electricians, while Mike fooled around in our suite in the Book where he could look out the window at his old store. The last I heard, they were selling snake oil there. When the Studio, as we came to call it was finished, Mike moved in and the blond settled down to a routine of reading love stories and saying No to all the salesmen who wandered by. I left for Hollywood.