And I’m younger than either one!
He sighed. What was the matter with him? Thoughts kept boiling up out of nowhere, forgotten things, linking themselves into new chains that rattled in his skull. And just when he had the answer to his problem, too.
That reflection drove all others out. Again, it was unusual: ordinarily he was slow to change any train of thought. He stepped forward with a renewed briskness.
The Rossman Institute was a bulk of stone and glass, filling half a block and looking almost shiny among its older neighbors. It was known as a scientist’s heaven. Able men from all places and all disciplines were drawn there, less by the good pay than by the chance to do unhampered research of their own choosing, with first-rate equipment and none of the projectitis which was strangling pure science in government, in industry, and in too many universities. It had the inevitable politicking and backbiting, but in lesser degree than the average college; it was the Institute for Advanced Study—less abstruse and more energetic, perhaps, and certainly with much more room. Lewis had once cited it to Mandelbaum as proof of the cultural necessity for a privileged class. “D’you think any government would ever endow such a thing and then, what’s more, have the sense to leave it to itself?”
“Brookhaven does all right,” Mandelbaum had said, but for him it was a feeble answer.
Corinth nodded to the girl at the newsstand in the lobby, hailed a couple of acquaintances, and fumed at the slowness of the elevator. “Seventh,” he said automatically when it arrived.
“I should know that, Dr. Corinth,” grinned the operator. “You’ve been here—let’s see—almost six years now, isn’t it?”
The physicist blinked. The attendant had always been part of the machinery to him; they had exchanged the usual pleasantries, but it hadn’t meant a thing. Suddenly Corinth saw him as a human being, a living and unique organism, part of an enormous impersonal web which ultimately became the entire universe, and yet bearing his own heart within him. Now why, he asked himself amazedly, should I think that?
“You know, sir,” said the attendant, “I been wondering. I woke up this morning and wondered what I was doing this for and if I really wanted more out of it than just my job and my pension and—” He paused awkwardly as they stopped to let off a third-floor passenger. “I envy you. You’re going somewhere.”
The elevator reached the seventh floor. “You could—well, you could take a night course if you wanted,” said Corinth.
“I think maybe I will, sir. If you’d be so kind as to recommend—Well, later. I got to go now.” The doors slid smoothly across the cage, and Corinth went down hard marble ways to his laboratory.
He had a permanent staff of two, Johansson and Grunewald, intense young men who probably dreamed of having labs of their own someday. They were already there when he entered and took off his coat.
“Good morning … ’Morning … ’Morning.”
“I’ve been thinking, Pete,” said Grunewald suddenly, as the chief went over to his desk. “I’ve got an idea for a circuit that may work—”
“Et tu, Brute,” murmured Corinth. He sat down on a stool, doubling his long legs under him. “Let’s have it.”
Grunewald’s gimmick seemed remarkably parallel to his own. Johansson, usually silent and competent and no more, chimed in eagerly as thoughts occurred to him. Corinth took over leadership in the discussion, and within half an hour they were covering paper with the esoteric symbols of electronics.
Rossman might not have been entirely disinterested in establishing the Institute, though a man with his bank account could afford altruism. Pure research helped industry. He had made his fortune in light metals, all the way from raw ores to finished products, with cross-connections to a dozen other businesses; officially semi-retired, he kept his fine thin hands on the strings. Even bacteriology could turn out to be useful—not very long ago, work had been done on bacterial extraction of oil from shales—and Corinth’s study of crystal bonds could mean a good deal to metallurgy. Grunewald fairly gloated over the prospect of what success would do to their professional reputations. Before noon, they had set up a series of partial differential equations which would go to the computer at their regular scheduled time to use it, and were drawing up elements of the circuit they wanted.
The phone rang. It was Lewis, suggesting lunch together. “I’m on a hot trail today,” said Corinth. “I thought maybe I’d just have some sandwiches sent up.”
“Well, either I am too, or else I’m up you know what creek with no paddle,” said Lewis. “I’m not sure which, and it might help me straighten out my ideas if I could bounce them off you.”
“Oh, all right. Commissary do?”
“If you merely want to fill your belly, I suppose so.” Lewis went in for three-hour lunches complete with wine and violins, a habit he had picked up during his years in pre-Anschluss Vienna. “One o’clock suit you? The peasantry will have gorged by then.”
“Okay.” Corinth hung up and lost himself again in the cool ecstasy of his work. It was one-thirty before he noticed the time, and he hurried off swearing.
Lewis was just seating himself at a table when Corinth brought his tray over. “I figured from your way of talk you’d be late,” he said. “What’d you get? The usual cafeteria menu, I suppose: mice drowned in skim milk, fillet of sea urchin, baked chef’s special, baked chef—well, no matter.” He sipped his coffee and winced.
He didn’t look delicate: a short square man of forty-eight, getting a little plump and bald, sharp eyes behind thick, rimless glasses. He was, indeed, a hearty soul at table or saloon. But eight years in Europe did change tastes, and he insisted that his postwar visits had been purely gastronomical.
“What you need,” said Corinth with the smugness of a convert, “is to get married.”
“I used to think so, when I began leaving my libertine days behind. But, well, never mind. Too late now.” Lewis attacked a minute steak, which he always pronounced as if the adjective were synonymous with “tiny,” and scowled through a mouthful. “I’m more interested in the histological aspect of biology just now.”
“You said you were having trouble—”
“That’s mostly with my assistants. Everybody seems jumpy today, and young Roberts is coming up with even wilder ideas than usual. But it’s my work. I’ve told you, haven’t I? I’m studying nerve cells—neurones. Trying to keep them alive in different artificial media, and seeing how their electrical properties vary with conditions. I have them in excised sections of tissue—Lindbergh-Carrel technique, with modifications. It was coming along pretty good—and then today, when we ran a routine check, the results came out different. So I tested them all—Every one is changed!”
“Hm?” Corinth raised his eyebrows and chewed quietly for a minute. “Something wrong with your apparatus?”
“Not that I can find. Nothing different—except the cells themselves. A small but significant shift.” Lewis’ tones came faster, with a hint of rising excitement. “You know how a neurone works? Like a digital computer. It’s stimulated by a—a stimulus, fires a signal, and is thereafter inactive for a short time. The next neurone in the nerve gets the signal, fires, and is also briefly inactivated. Well, it turns out that everything is screwy today. The inactivation time is a good many microseconds less, the—well, let’s just say the whole system reacts significantly faster than normally. And the signals are also more intense.”
Corinth digested the information briefly, then, slowly: “Looks like you may have stumbled onto something big.”
“Well, where’s the cause? The medium, the apparatus, it’s all the same as yesterday, I tell you. I’m going nuts trying to find out if I’ve got a potential Nobel Prize or just sloppy technique!”
Very slowly, as if his mind were shying away from a dimly seen realization, Corinth said: “It’s odd this should have happened today.”
“Hm?” Lewis glanced sharply up, and Corinth related his own encounters.
“Very
odd,” agreed the biologist. “And no big thunderstorms lately—ozone stimulates the mind—but my cultures are sealed in glass anyway—” Something flashed in his eyes.
Corinth looked around. “Hullo, there’s Helga. Wonder what made her so late? Hi, there!” He stood up, waving across the room, and Helga Arnulfsen bore her tray over to their table and sat down.
She was a tall, rangy, handsome woman, her long blonde hair drawn tightly around the poised head, but something in her manner—an impersonal energy, an aloofness, perhaps only the unfeminine crispness of speech and dress—made her less attractive than she could have been. She’d changed since the old days, right after the war, thought Corinth. He’d been taking his doctorate at Minnesota, where she was studying journalism, and they’d had fun together; though he’d been too much and too hopelessly in love with his work and another girl to think seriously about her. Afterward they had corresponded, and he had gotten her a secretarial post at the Institute, two years before. She was chief administrative assistant now, and did a good job of it.
“Whew! What a day!” She ran a strong slim hand across her hair, sleeking it down, and smiled wearily at them. “Everybody and his Uncle Oscar is having trouble, and all of them are wishing it on me. Gertie threw a tantrum—”
“Huh?” Corinth regarded her in some dismay. He’d been counting on the big computer to solve his equations that day. “What’s wrong?”
“Only God and Gertie know, and neither one is telling. Allanbee ran a routine test this morning, and it came out wrong. Not much, but enough to throw off anybody that needed precise answers. He’s been digging into her ever since, trying to find the trouble, so far without luck. And I have to reschedule everybody!”
“Very strange,” murmured Lewis.
“Then different instruments, especially in the physics and chemistry sections, are a little crazy. Murchison’s polarimeter has an error of—oh, something horrible like one tenth of one per cent, I don’t know.”
“Izzat so?” Lewis leaned forward, thrusting his jaw out above the dishes. “Maybe it’s not my neurones but my instruments that’re off whack—No, can’t be. Not that much. It must be something in the cells themselves—but how can I measure that if the gadgets are all awry?” He broke into vigorous German profanity, though his eyes remained alight.
“Lots of the boys have come up with brave new projects all at once, too,” went on Helga. “They want immediate use of things like the big centrifuge, and blow their tops when I tell them to wait their turn.”
“All today, eh?” Corinth pushed his dessert aside and took out a cigarette. “ ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Alice.” His eyes widened, and the hand that struck a match shook ever so faintly. “Nat, I wonder—”
“A general phenomenon?” Lewis nodded, holding excitement in check with an effort. “Could be, could be. We’d certainly better find out.”
“What’re you talking about?” asked Helga.
“Things.” Corinth explained while she finished eating. Lewis sat quietly back, blowing cigar fumes and withdrawn into himself.
“Hm.” Helga tapped the table with a long, unpainted fingernail. “Sounds—interesting. Are all nerve cells, including those in our own brains, suddenly being speeded up?”
“It’s more basic than that,” said Corinth. “Something may have happened to—what? Electrochemical phenomena? How should I know? Let’s not go off the deep end till we’ve investigated this.”
“Yeah. I’ll leave it to you.” Helga took out a cigarette for herself and inhaled deeply. “I can think of a few obvious things to check up on—but it’s your child.” She turned again to smile at Corinth, the gentle smile she saved for a very few. “Apropos, how’s Sheila?”
“Oh, fine, fine. How’s yourself?”
“I’m okay.” There was a listlessness in her answer.
“You must come over to our place sometime for dinner.” It was a small strain to carry on polite conversation, when his mind was yelling to be at this new problem. “We haven’t seen you in quite a while. Bring the new boy friend if you want, whoever he is.”
“Jim? Oh, him. I gave him the sack last week. But I’ll come over, sure.” She got up. “Back to the oars, mates. See you.”
Corinth regarded her as she strode toward the cashier’s desk. Almost in spite of himself—his thoughts were shooting off in all directions today—he murmured: “I wonder why she can’t keep a man. She’s good-looking and intelligent enough.”
“She doesn’t want to,” said Lewis shortly.
“No, I suppose not. She’s turned cold since I knew her in Minneapolis. Why?”
Lewis shrugged.
“I think you know,” said Corinth. “You’ve always understood women better than you had any right to. And she likes you better than anyone else around here, I think.”
“We both go for music,” said Lewis. It was his opinion that none had been written since 1900. “And we both know how to keep our mouths shut.”
“Okay, okay,” laughed Corinth. He got up. “I’m for the lab again. Hate to scrap the phase analyzer, but this new business—” Pausing: “Look, let’s get hold of the others and divide up the labor, huh? Everybody check something. It won’t take long then.”
Lewis nodded curtly and followed him out.
By evening the results were in. As Corinth looked at the figures, his interest lost way to a coldness rising within him. He felt suddenly how small and helpless a thing he was.
Electromagnetic phenomena were changed.
It wasn’t much, but the very fact that the supposedly eternal constants of nature had shifted was enough to crash a hundred philosophies into dust. The subtlety of the problem held something elemental. How do you remeasure the basic factors when your measuring devices have themselves changed?
Well, there were ways. There are no absolutes in this universe, everything exists in relation to everything else, and it was the fact that certain data had altered relatively to others which was significant.
Corinth had been working on the determination of electrical constants. For the metals they were the same, or nearly the same, as before, but the resistivity and permittivity of insulators had changed measurably—they had become slightly better conductors.
Except in the precision apparatus, such as Gertie the computer, the change in electromagnetic characteristics was not enough to make any noticeable difference. But the most complex and delicately balanced mechanism known to man is the living cell; and the neurone is the most highly evolved and specialized of all cells—particularly that variety of neurones found in the human cerebral cortex. And here the change was felt. The minute electrical impulses which represented neural functioning—sense awareness, motor reaction, thought itself—were flowing more rapidly, more intensely.
And the change might just have begun.
Helga shivered. “I need a drink,” she said. “Bad.”
“I know a bar,” said Lewis. “I’ll join you in one before coming back to work some more. How about you, Pete?”
“I’m going home,” said the physicist. “Have fun.” His words were flat.
He walked out, hardly aware of the darkened lobby and the late hour. To the others, this was still something bright and new and wonderful; but he couldn’t keep from thinking that perhaps, in one huge careless swipe, the universe was about to snuff out all the race of man. What would the effect be on a living body—?
Well, they’d done about all they could for now. They’d checked as much as possible. Helga had gotten in touch with the Bureau of Standards in Washington and notified them. She gathered, from what the man there said, that a few other laboratories, spotted throughout the country, had also reported anomalies. Tomorrow, thought Corinth, they’ll really start hearing about it.
Outside—the scene was still New York at evening—hardly changed, perhaps just a little quieter than it should be. He bought a newspaper at the corner and glanced at it as he stood there. Was he wrong, or had a subtle difference cre
pt in, a more literate phrasing, something individual that broke through the copyrcader’s barriers because the copyreader himself had changed without knowing it? But there was no mention of the great cause, that was too big and too new yet, nor had the old story altered—war, unrest, suspicion, fear and hate and greed, a sick world crumbling.
He was suddenly aware that he had read through the Times’ crowded front page in about ten minutes. He shoved the newspaper into a pocket and hastened toward the subway.
CHAPTER 3
THERE was trouble everywhere. An indignant yell in the morning brought Archie Brock running to the chicken house, where Stan Wilmer had set down a bucket of feed to shake his fist at the world.
“Look a’ that!” he cried. “Just look!”
Brock craned his neck through the door and whistled. The place was a mess. A couple of bloody-feathered corpses were sprawled on the straw, a few other hens cackled nervously on the roosts, and that was all. The rest were gone.
“Looks like foxes got in when somebody left the door open,” said Brock.
“Yeah.” Wilmer swallowed his rage in a noisy gulp. “Some stinking son of a—”
Brock remembered that Wilmer was in charge of the hen house, but decided not to mention it. The other man recalled it himself and paused, scowling.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I checked the place last night as usual, before going to bed, and I’ll swear the door was closed and hooked like it always is. Five years I been here and never had any trouble.”
“So maybe somebody opened the door later on, after dark, huh?”
“Yeah. A chicken thief. Though it’s funny the dogs didn’t bark—I never heard of any human being coming here without them yapping.” Wilmer shrugged bitterly. “Well, anyway, somebody did open the door.”
“And then later on foxes got in.” Brock turned one of the dead hens over with his toe. “And maybe had to run for it when one of the dogs came sniffing around, and left these.”
“And most of the birds wandered out into the woods. It’ll take a week to catch ’em—all that live. Oh, Judas!” Wilmer stormed out of the chicken house, forgetting to close the door. Brock did it for him, vaguely surprised that he had remembered to do so.
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