“But I thought—Never mind. D’you know, this is an inconvenient setup? Waldo is the man we’ve got to have. Why should it come about that a genius of his caliber should be so unapproachable, so immune to ordinary social demands? Oh, I know his disease has a lot to do with it, but why should this man have this disease? It’s an improbable coincidence.”
“It’s not a matter of his infirmity,” Grimes told him. “Or, rather, not in the way you put it. His weakness is his genius, in a way—”
“Huh?”
“Well—” Grimes turned his sight inward, let his mind roam back over his long association—lifelong, for Waldo—with this particular patient. He remembered his subliminal misgivings when he delivered the child. The infant had been sound enough, superficially, except for a slight blueness. But then lots of babies were somewhat cyanotic in the delivery room. Nevertheless, he had felt a slight reluctance to give it the tunk on the bottom, the slap which would shock it into taking its first lungful of air.
But he had squelched his own feelings, performed the necessary “laying on of hands,” and the freshly born human had declared its independence with a satisfactory squall. There was nothing else he could have done; he was a young G.P. then, who took his Hippocratic oath seriously. He still took it seriously, he supposed, even though he sometimes referred to it as the “hypocritical” oath. Still, he had been right in his feelings; there had been something rotten about that child—something that was not entirely myasthenia gravis.
He had felt sorry for the child at first, as well as having an irrational feeling of responsibility for its condition. Pathological muscular weakness is an almost totally crippling condition, since the patient has no unaffected limbs to retrain into substitutes. There the victim must lie, all organs, limbs, and functions present, yet so pitifully, completely weak as to be unable to perform any normal function. He must spend his life in a condition of exhausted collapse, such as you or I might reach at the finish line of a grueling cross-country run. No help for him, and no relief.
During Waldo’s childhood he had hoped constantly that the child would die, since he was so obviously destined for tragic uselessness, while simultaneously, as a physician, doing everything within his own skill and the skill of numberless consulting specialists to keep the child alive and cure it.
Naturally, Waldo could not attend school; Grimes ferreted out sympathetic tutors. He could indulge in no normal play; Grimes invented sickbed games which would not only stimulate Waldo’s imagination but encourage him to use his flabby muscles to the full, weak extent of which he was capable.
Grimes had been afraid that the handicapped child, since it was not subjected to the usual maturing stresses of growing up, would remain infantile. He knew now—had known for a long time—that he need not have worried. Young Waldo grasped at what little life was offered him, learned thirstily, tried with a sweating tenseness of will to force his undisciplined muscles to serve him.
He was clever in thinking of dodges whereby to circumvent his muscular weakness. At seven he devised a method of controlling a spoon with two hands, which permitted him—painfully—to feed himself. His first mechanical invention was made at ten.
It was a gadget which held a book for him, at any angle, controlled lighting for the book, and turned its pages. The gadget responded to finger tip pressure on a simple control panel. Naturally, Waldo could not build it himself, but he could conceive it, and explain it; Farthingwaite-Joneses could well afford the services of a designing engineer to build the child’s conception.
Grimes was inclined to consider this incident, in which the child Waldo acted in a role of intellectual domination over a trained mature adult neither blood relation nor servant, as a landmark in the psychological process whereby Waldo eventually came to regard the entire human race as his servants, his hands, present or potential.
“WHAT’S EATING YOU, DOC?”
“Eh? Sorry, I was daydreaming. See here, son—you mustn’t be too harsh on Waldo. I don’t like him myself. But you must take him as a whole.”
“You take him.”
“Shush. You spoke of needing his genius. He wouldn’t have a genius if he had not been crippled. You didn’t know his parents. They were good stock—fine, intelligent people—but nothing spectacular. Waldo’s potentialities weren’t any greater than theirs, but he had to do more with them to accomplish anything. He had to do everything the hard way. He had to be clever.”
“Sure. Sure, but why should he be so utterly poisonous? Most big men aren’t.”
“Use your head. To get anywhere in his condition he had to develop a will, a driving one-track mind, with a total disregard for any other considerations. What would you expect him to be but stinking selfish?”
“I’d—Well, never mind. We need him and that’s that.”
“Why?”
Stevens explained.
IT MAY PLAUSIBLY BE URGED that the shape of a culture—its mores, evaluations, family organizations, eating habits, living patterns, pedagogical methods, institutions, forms of government, and so forth—arise from the economic necessities of its technology. Even though the thesis be too broad and much oversimplified, it is nonetheless true that much which characterized the long peace which followed the constitutional establishment of the United Nations grew out of the technologies which were hothouse-forced by the needs of the belligerents in the war of the forties. Up to that time broadcast and beamcast were used only for commercial radio, with rare exceptions. Even telephony was done almost entirely by actual metallic connection from one instrument to another. If a man in Monterey wished to speak to his wife or partner in Boston, a physical, copper neuron stretched bodily across the continent from one to the other.
Radiant power was then a hop dream, found in Sunday supplements and comic books.
A concatenation—no, a meshwork—of new developments was necessary before the web of copper covering the continent could be dispensed with. Power could not broadcast economically; it was necessary to wait for the co-axial beam—a direct result of the imperative military shortages of the Great War. Radio telephony could not replace wired telephony until ultra micro-wave techniques made room in the ether, so to speak, for the traffic load. Even then it was necessary to invent a tuning device which could be used by a nontechnical person—a ten-year-old child, let us say—as easily as the dial selector which was characteristic of the commercial wired telephone of the era then terminating.
Bell Laboratories cracked that problem; the solution led directly to the radiant power receptor, domestic type, keyed, sealed, and metered. The way was open for commercial radio power transmission—except in on respect: efficiency. Aviation waited on the development of the Otto-cycle engine; the Industrial Revolution waited on the steam engine; radiant power waited on a really cheap, plentiful power source. Since radiation of power is inherently wasteful, it was necessary to have power cheap and plentiful enough to waste.
The same year brought atomic energy. The physicists working for the United States Army—the United States of North America had its own army then—produced a superexplosive; the notebooks recording their tests contained, when properly correlated, everything necessary to produce almost any other sort of nuclear reaction, even the so-called Solar Phoenix, the hydrogen-helium cycle, which is the source of the sun’s power.
Radiant power became economically feasible—and inevitable.
The reaction whereby copper is broken down into phosphorus, silicon29 and helium3, plus degenerating chain reactions, was one of the several cheap and convenient means developed for producing unlimited and practically free power.
Of course Stevens included none of this in his explanation to Grimes. Grimes was absentmindedly aware of the whole dynamic process; he had seen radiant power grow up, just as his grandfather had seen the development of aviation. He had seen the great transmission lines removed from the sky—“mined” for their copper; he had seen the heavy cables being torn from the dug-up streets of Manhattan. He
might even recall his first independent-unit radiotelephone with its somewhat disconcerting double dial—he had gotten a lawyer in Buenos Aires on it when attempting to reach his neighborhood delicatessen. For two weeks he made all his local calls by having them relayed back from South America before he discovered that it made a difference which dial he used first.
At that time Grimes had not yet succumbed to the new style in architecture. The London Plan did not appeal to him; he liked a house aboveground, where he could see it. When it became necessary to increase the floor space in his offices, he finally gave in and went sub-surface, not so much for the cheapness, convenience, and general all-around practicability of living in a tri-conditioned cave, but because he had already become a little worried about the possible consequences of radiation pouring through the human body. The fused-earth walls of his new residence were covered with lead; the roof of the cave had a double thickness. His hole in the ground was as near radiationproof as he could make it.
“—THE MEAT OF THE MATTER,” Stevens was saying, “is that the delivery of power to transportation units has become erratic as the devil. Not enough yet to tie up traffic, but enough to be very disconcerting. There have been some nasty accidents; we can’t keep hushing them up forever. I’ve got to do something about it.”
“Why?”
“‘Why?’ Don’t be silly. In the first place as traffic engineer for NAPA my bread and butter depends on it. In the second place the problem is upsetting in itself. A properly designed piece of mechanism ought to work—all the time, every time. These don’t, and we can’t find out why not. Our staff mathematical physicists have about reached the babbling stage.”
Grimes shrugged. Stevens felt annoyed by the gesture. “I don’t think you appreciate the importance of this problem, Doc. Have you any idea of the amount of horsepower involved in transportation? Counting both private and commercial vehicles and common carriers, North American Power-Air supplies more than half the energy used in this continent. We have to be right. You can add to that our city-power affiliate. No trouble there—yet. But we don’t dare think what a city-power breakdown would mean.”
“I’ll give you a solution.”
“Yeah? Well, give.”
“Junk it. Go back to oil-powered and steam-powered vehicles. Get rid of these damned radiant-powered deathtraps.”
“Utterly impossible. You don’t know what you’re saying. It took more than fifteen years to make the changeover. Now we’re geared to it. Gus, if NAPA closed up shop, half the population of the northwest seaboard would starve, to say nothing of the lake states and the Philly-Boston axis.”
“Hrrmph—Well, all I’ve got to say is that that might be better than the slow poisoning that is going on now.”
Stevens brushed it away impatiently. “Look, Doc, nurse a bee in your bonnet if you like, but don’t ask me to figure it into my calculations. Nobody else sees any danger in radiant power.”
Grimes answered mildly. “Point is, son, they aren’t looking in the right place. Do you know what the high jump record was last year?”
“I never listen to the sport news.”
“Might try it sometime. The record leveled off at seven foot two, ’bout twenty years back. Been dropping ever since. You might try graphing athletic records against radiation in the air—artificial radiation. Might find some results that would surprise you.”
“Shucks, everybody knows there has been a swing away from heavy sports. The sweat-and-muscles fad died out, that’s all. We’ve simply advanced into a more intellectual culture.”
“Intellectual, hogwash! People quite playing tennis and such because they are tired all the time. Look at you. You’re a mess.”
“Don’t needle me, Doc.”
“Sorry. But there has been a clear deterioration in the performance of the human animal. If we had decent records on such things I could prove it, but any physician who’s worth his salt can see it, if he’s got eyes in him and isn’t wedded to a lot of fancy instruments. I can’t prove what causes it, not yet, but I’ve a damned good hunch that it’s caused by the stuff you peddle.”
“Impossible. There isn’t a radiation put on the air that hasn’t been tested very carefully in the bio labs. We’re neither fools nor knaves.”
“Maybe you don’t test ’em long enough. I’m not talking about a few hours, or a few weeks; I’m talking about the cumulative effects of years of radiant frequencies pouring through the tissues. What does that do?”
“Why, nothing—I believe.”
“You believe, but you don’t know. Nobody has ever tried to find out. F’rinstance—what effect does sunlight have on silicate glass? Ordinarily you would say ‘none,’ but you’ve seen desert glass?”
“That bluish-lavender stuff? Of course.”
“Yes. A bottle turns colored in a few months in the Mojave Desert. But have you ever seen the windowpanes in the old houses on Beacon Hill?”
“I’ve never been on Beacon Hill.”
“O.K., then I’ll tell you. Same phenomena—only it takes a century or more, in Boston. Now tell me—you savvy physics—could you measure the change taking place in those Beacon Hill windows?”
“Mm-m-m—probably not.”
“But it’s going on just the same. Has anyone ever tried to measure the changes produced in human tissue by thirty years of exposure to ultra short-wave radiation?”
“No, but—”
“No ‘buts.’ I see an effect. I’ve made a wild guess at a cause. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’ve felt a bit more spry since I’ve taken to invariably wearing my lead overcoat whenever I go out.”
Stevens surrendered the argument. “Maybe you’re right, Doc. I won’t fuss with you. How about Waldo? Will you take me to him and help me handle him?”
“When do you want to go?”
“The sooner the better.”
“Now?”
“Suits.”
“Call your office.”
“Are you ready to leave right now? It would suit me. As far as the front office is concerned, I’m on vacation; nevertheless, I’ve got this on my mind so I want to get at it.”
“Quit talking and git.”
They went topside to where their cars were parked. Grimes headed toward his, a big-bodied old-fashioned Boeing family landau. Stevens checked him. “You aren’t planning to go in that? It ’u’d take us the rest of the day.”
“Why not? She’s got an auxiliary space drive and she’s tight. You could fly from here to the Moon and back.”
“Yes, but she’s so infernal slow. We’ll use my ‘broomstick.’”
Grimes let his eyes run over his friend’s fusi-formed little speedster. Its body was as nearly invisible as the plastic industry could achieve. A surface layer, two molecules thick, gave it a refractive index sensibly identical with that of air. When perfectly clean it was very difficult to see. At the moment it had picked up enough casual dust and water vapor to be faintly seen—a ghost of a soap bubble of a ship.
Running down the middle, clearly visible through the walls, was the only metal part of the ship—the shaft, or, more properly, the axis core, and the spreading sheaf of deKalb receptors at its terminus. The appearance was enough like a giant witch’s broom to justify the nickname. Since the saddles, of transparent plastic, were mounted tandem over the shaft so that the metal rod passed between the legs of the pilot and passengers, the nickname was doubly apt.
“Son,” Grimes remarked, “I know I ain’t pretty, nor am I graceful. Nevertheless, I retain a certain residuum of self-respect and some shred of dignity. I am not going to tuck that thing between my shanks and go scooting through the air on it.”
“Oh, rats! You’re old-fashioned.”
“I may be. Nevertheless, any peculiarities I have managed to retain to my present age I plan to hang onto. No.”
“Look—I’ll polarize the hull before we raise. How about it?”
“Opaque?”
“Opaque.”
Grime
s slid a regretful glance at his own frumpish boat, but assented by fumbling for the barely visible port of the speedster. Stevens assisted him; they climbed in and straddled the stick.
“Atta boy, Doc,” Stevens commended, “I’ll have you there in three shakes. That tub of yours probably won’t do over five hundred, and Wheelchair must be all of twenty-five thousand miles up.”
“I’m never in a hurry,” Grimes commented, “and don’t call Waldo’s house ‘Wheelchair’—not to his face.”
“I’ll remember,” Stevens promised. He fumbled, apparently in empty air; the hull suddenly became dead black, concealing them. It changed as suddenly to mirror bright; the car quivered, then shot up out of sight.
WALDO F. JONES SEEMED TO be floating in thin air at the center of a spherical room. The appearance was caused by the fact that he was indeed floating in air. His house lay in a free orbit, with a period of just over twenty-four hours. No spin had been impressed on his home; the pseudo gravity of centrifugal force was the thing he wanted least. He had left earth to get away from its gravitational field; he had not been down to the surface one in the seventeen years since his house was built and towed into her orbit; he never intended to do so for any purpose whatsoever.
Here, floating free in space in his own air-conditioned shell, he was almost free of the unbearable lifelong slavery to his impotent muscles. What little strength he had he could spend economically, in movement, rather than in fighting against the tearing, tiring weight of the Earth’s thick field.
Waldo had been acutely interested in space flight since early boyhood, not from any desire to explore the depths, but because his boyish, overtrained mind had seen the enormous advantage—to him—in weightlessness. While still in his teens he had helped the early experimenters in space flight over a hump by supplying them with a control system which a pilot could handle delicately while under the strain of two or three gravities.
Such an invention was no trouble at all to him; he had simply adapted manipulating devices which he himself used in combating the overpowering weight of one gravity. The first successful and safe rocket ship contained relays which had once aided Waldo in moving himself from bed to wheelchair.
The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein Page 17
