The chromium helmet.
I looked at the pieces of it, scattered over the floor and then at the chair. A perfectly ordinary airplane-tubing chair, bolted to the floor—why?
“I’m going home,” said Henry sullenly.
“Henry old horse, stick around a little. I’m sorry, boy; really, I was talking nonsense; you’re right and I’m wrong. Please stay and give me a hand. There’s something I’ve just got to find out. Will you, kiddo?”
“Well—” he said, a little mollified. “Gosh, Godfrey, you never disbelieved me before. What got into you?”
“Oh, I guess I’m excited, that’s all. I am sorry, Jackson. Will you stick around?”
“You know I will. I guess I got a little hot, too.”
“Good boy.” Inside me, growing every microsecond, was a hot, ugly hatred of Wickersham. I didn’t know the “whys” of all this, but I grimly determined to go on learning the “hows” until I could figure the man’s motives. And it better be an accident that our women-folks were affected.
I looked at the chair again. There wasn’t a single electrical connection to it that I could see. I was tempted to run out the bolts, but the super-caution that was growing almost as fast as the hatred, made me stop and think. I turned to my little inductance-bridge instead. I’d rigged it up to spot pipes and wiring in the wall between my house and the garage, where my workshop was, for I sometimes did some rather delicate electronic work there, and didn’t care much for stray AC and magnetic fields that I couldn’t get rid of or locate exactly so I could compensate for them. It was a dual-purpose rig—the bridge itself, for detecting metallic masses, and a matched-choke circuit for finding wild AC.
I asked Henry to find me a broomstick, and fitted together the T-shaped probe, setting it on the stick. I plugged in earphones and the leads to an illuminated meter which I had fixed to strap on my wrist. I hooked the whole Rube Goldberg up to the battery pack and switched it on.
“Henry,” I said, “that power line is shielded. Rip the receptacle out of the wall, bearing in mind that it’s hot. You’ll probably find a conduit in the wall that’s grounded to one side of the power line. Cast it adrift for me.”
I went over the chair carefully, looking for any induced AC. There were a few strays—not enough to amount to anything.
Why was that chair bolted down?
To stay in one place, of course. Why?
I switched on the blower, and went over it again. Nothing, until I had the probe over the headrest on the back of the chair. And the hum in my earphones suddenly faded. I moved the probe; it got louder. Which was just silly. The gadget was built so that when AC was encountered, the sound would intensify. I moved it toward the chair, and found a spot six inches over the headrest where my signal utterly disappeared!
“There’s something here, Henry,” I called. “Just what I don’t quite know. It acts like a very intense multi-phase AC; but I mean multi-phase. Some high harmonic of the sixty-cycle, phasing away like mad. It kills my detector signal completely.
“Your department, son,” said Henry. “Don’t double-talk me back to sleep. Tell it to Wickersham’s ghost. You were right about this grounding here. What on earth’s that for?”
I didn’t bother to try to answer. I was puzzling myself by moving the probe in and out of that dead spot. It didn’t make any sense at all. The chair gave no sign of carrying a thing. I gave it up, put the probe over my shoulder to get it out of the way, and went around the chair toward Henry.
The phones faded and came in again as I moved.
I stopped dead and flashed my light up, moving backward until it happened again. The probe was eight feet in the air this time, and what I found was a weak place in the signal. I waved it around, walking back and forth, repeating the process I had used with the fluorescent wire when we were working on the window. I found the field—for apparently that’s what it was—tightest at the spot over the chair, diffusing outward and upward toward the corner of the ceiling.
“What are you doing—catching butterflies?”
“Catching something. Henry, the chair, which isn’t connected to anything, has a field hanging over it which is beaming up into the air!”
“Wouldn’t it be the other way around?”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose the field over the chair is a focal spot?”
“It diffuses outward … oh: I see what you mean. Hyperbolic reflector.” I went around to the other side of the chair, and put the probe low. “You amaze me, my child! You’re right! It diffuses downward on this side!”
I beamed my light upward to the corner of the room. It was no more remarkable than the other corners. The ceiling was decorated in bright gold stripes on dark cream paint. The moldings had been quarter-round plastered to get rid of the 90° angle of the walls to the ceiling, which gave the corners the inner surface of a quarter of a sphere. These were decorated with a series of close, fine gold lines—all that is, except the one that seemed to be radiating the haywire AC.
It was made of fine copper mesh.
“By all that’s putrid,” Henry gasped. “A focusing radiator!”
“And unless I’m mistaken, the inductance bridge here’ll locate a pipe from that exclusive little receptacle in the wall, smack up to it,” I said excitedly. I went over there so fast I jerked the cable out of the battery pack and dropped my flashlight. Henry had left his on the floor over by the receptacle; we were plunged in total blackness, floundering and swearing. I heard Henry say “Here it is!” and the click-clicking of the hex head on the flashlight as he fumbled it and it rolled on the floor.
“Don’t light it!” I said. “I see something. Wait!”
Silence as thick as the darkness settled over us. Vaguely, then, as our eyes became accustomed to the dark, we saw a purple glow down low, near the floor.
“UV again,” Henry said, “with a cheap filter-lens.” He clicked on his light. The place where we had seen the glow was at the base of the dim outline of a walled-up door into the warehouse to which the beauty shop was semidetached.
“Now, that’s silly,” I said. I went over and confirmed my first glance; there was a small projector and an eye, the whole making a beam just long enough to cross the walled-up door. “Who’s going to be walking through walled-up doorways?”
“Skip it for now, Godfrey. Check that beam radiator.”
I went to the wall and began sweeping it with the inductance bridge. Sure enough; the volume-changes in my phones told me exactly the place where a conduit had been laid, from the receptacle to the ceiling, and along under the quarter-round fillet to the corner and the wire-mesh snivvy.
“I begin to get it,” Henry said. “The switch was in the drier. Start that up, and you activate the beam, which focuses on the head of whoever’s in the chair. Wickersham was a cute character.”
“He sure is … was, I mean.”
“Hey—was that thing on when I went to sleep in the chair?”
I thought fast. “Why no, Henry. Of course not.”
“A good thing. I thought maybe it was. I’d hate to get a postmortem kick from old granite-puss.”
I changed the subject quickly. “Now, where’s this rig powered from?” I got busy with the probe again, sweeping round and round the outlet. “The rectangular AC conduit is too near … no … I got it. Hm-m-m.” Slowly I traced the field-interruption of the conduit along the wall, where it suddenly disappeared. “It’s gone, right here,” I said, pointing to the wall.
“That’s right over the black-light ray—the walled-up door!”
I pulled off the phones and began to unstrap the wrist meter. “Henry, I’d say that if that electronic watchdog is there, that door opens. If that power line goes in there, we want to open it.”
He nodded, and went for my little black-light lamp. We set it up to fool the photocell the way we had on the window, and then went to work on the nearly invisible door. We felt over every inch of it. There was a floor board in the front
of the sill with a comparatively wide crack between it and its neighbor; ordinarily it would have been in the black light for its entire length. I rested one hand on this board as I felt the door; the plank shifted a little under my hand, and without a sound the door swung inward.
“Give me your gun,” I said clearly, and pounced on Henry and put my hand over his mouth before he could say “What gun?” “There could be someone in there,” I whispered.
He gave me the four-o with his fingers and thumb, and then aimed his light into the open door. Slowly we entered. I plucked Henry’s sleeve, held up a halting palm, and trotted back to get the pinch bar, with which I jammed the door so it could not swing closed. “I’ve seen too many Karloff pictures,” I muttered to him.
But the room was unoccupied. It was tiny—little more than a large closet. “Wheee—ooo!” Henry whistled. “Will you look at the stuff!”
It was a sight to gladden the heart of an electronics man. An oscilloscope with an eight-inch screen. A vacuum-tube voltmeter. The biggest, fanciest multimeter I have ever seen. An electronic power-supply control. Rolls and skeins of hook-up wire and shielding of all kinds, colors and sizes. Blank panel plates; knobs, dials; racks and racks of tubes ranging from peanuts to doorknobs. An elaborate transceiver. A bakelite-surfaced work table with power outlets spaced all around it, marked for every standard voltage, AC and DC, that I ever heard of anyone using and some I hadn’t thought about yet. A vast color-indexed file of resistors and capacitances. A big commercial tube-tester. Floor to ceiling, it was packed with electronic treasure.
“I love my wife,” said I archaically, “but oh you workshop!”
When we had gotten our breath back, Henry asked, “That drier rig still running?”
“Yep.”
“Then would that be the transmitter of that beam?” He pointed to a small chassis with a cluster of tubes which glowed, and a huge transformer that hummed softly. “Will you look at that spaghetti,” I breathed. “All spot-welded; not a soldered joint in sight!”
“This must be it,” said Henry, poking a device on the bench; a handle with two tiny gray electrodes, one detachable. “Oh, what I wouldn’t give for—”
“I know it’s tough,” I said, grinning, “but leave us keep our mind on our business. Let’s look this thing over.”
To go into detail the tests we made of that rig would not only be tedious; it might be dangerous. The principle, when we finally isolated it—and only with that splendid equipment could we have done it—was startlingly simple. I’d hate to have the job of making that hyperbolic web transmitting antenna, but like Columbus’ egg trick, it wouldn’t be too hard to duplicate once you got the idea. As for the beam itself, it was transmitted at such and such a fixed frequency, with harmonics, and with ninety and one hundred eighty degree beats to the fundamental and to certain of the harmonics, at such and such a wattage, with a so-and-so field tension at the focal point. The output stages had a wave-form like the first act of Disney’s Fantasia run off in forty seconds.
I tell you; I feel about this thing the way I did when I was in war work, and some of the bright boys came up with gizmos for mass production that had been regarded as impossibilities in all the best people’s books. Once in a while, in those days, you’d bump up against another electronics engineer whom you knew would be absolutely fascinated with the work you were doing. And because of military security, you had to keep your lips buttoned. But the pressure behind the button was something fantastic. That’s the way I feel now. But I ardently wish I didn’t know about it, or that I would quickly forget it; because that wave-form, at that power, at the point of focus, is the most utterly horrible thing I can conceive of.
After hours of concentrated work—and the effort it took to keep away from entrancing sidelines was no small part of the concentration—we got the final output wave-form on the ’scope. “That’s it,” I said.
“And it’s all yours, Ameche my boy,” said Henry, watching the complex thing writhe and shimmer on the screen. “All I want to do is put tomato sauce on it and eat it. Now we’ve got it—what do we do with it?”
I stared at the thing on screen. It was hypnotic, with that self-inverting three-dimensional effect that a cathode image has. “Only thing I can think of is to throw it around one hundred eighty degrees out of phase and re-radiate, focusing at the same point as the beam out there until it cancels out. Or until it overcompensates and undoes all the harm it has accomplished. But we’ve got to … to try it out on someone.”
Henry’s eyes glinted. “Maybe we could snatch a body?”
“We’ve got to do something.”
“Why bother? You’ve had your education. The girls are O.K. and the Wick is dead. And I’m hungry and sleepy and I got to work in the … work in the—” His voice faltered. “Godfrey, I must be tuckered out. I can’t seem to remember who we work for, now that Wickersham is—”
“Don’t worry about it, “I said gently. “We have a little more to do here. We’ve got to knock together an inverter.”
He spread his hands. “But why?”
“Please, Henry. For me. This once,” I pleaded with him. “Holy smoke; we’ve come so far on the thing. Let’s round it off.”
“Oh all right. Jee-hoshaphat; you’re worse than Wick used to be.” He pulled out his watch and gaped at it. “Quarter to—” His eyes bugged. “Godfrey! It’s quarter to six! In the morning! The girls—they’ll be half nuts!”
He scrambled to the bench. There was a dial phone there. He snatched it off the cradle and jammed it to his ear, waiting for a dial tone. I saw him go white, and suddenly his eyes rolled up and he slumped to the floor, the telephone falling on the bench on a tangle of rubber-insulated wire. I stooped and half-lifted him, looking wildly around to find somewhere to put him. There was nowhere, so I straightened him out on the floor, and picked up the phone.
“—and a gross of 6SJ7’s,” said the phone. “And have you made up my silvering solutions?”
“Yes, sir,” said another voice.
“All right. I expect that shipment before eleven o’clock.” The line clicked and went dead. Carefully I hung up the phone.
Wickersham’s voice! It was obviously a bridge phone to the office; and Henry, listening for a mere hum on the phone, had heard it—heard the voice of a man whom he thought dead. And it was infinitely important to Henry that he believe Wickersham dead. It was about the most important thing there was.
I knelt beside him, pitying him more than I can find words to describe. Poor little, cheerful, chubby Henry! The guy just didn’t deserve this kind of thing, wasn’t equipped to handle it.
I chafed his hands, and suddenly he tossed his head restlessly and batted his eyelids. “Go to sleep,” I said softly. “Go on.”
Perhaps he was tuckered out physically and emotionally, or perhaps he was hyper-subject to hypnosis because of what the beam had done to him; but he began to relax almost immediately. I put a roll of rubberfoam cushioning under his head and he sank into it. Once he opened his eyes very wide and said, “He’s just got to be dead!” I said quietly, “Sure. Sure. Sure.” And he went to sleep.
Then I went back to the bench and got to work.
My eyes had begun to blur, but I tried to ignore it. When it got too bad I went out into the beauty shop and walked up and down, fast, turning circuit diagrams over in my mind; and then I would rush back in and go on. My feet hurt and my back hurt, and I was hungry.
But I finished the rig, and hooked it up, and hung the ’scope on it, and it worked. The strange wave-form of the beam transmitter dwindled under the matched out-of-phase signal of the inverter; subsided, receded; and it looked as if I had it whipped. I had everything else I needed but a guinea pig.
I had begun, by then, to fully understand the function of the beam. It took the ego’s most heartfelt wish, and made it an accomplished fact; a thing which, to that ego, had actually happened. But because it was such a wanted—such a needed thing—the inevitable reaction wa
s a tearing sense of loss. When contradictory evidence piled up, when the same senses that had, subjectively, told that ego that the needed thing was true and then that it was not true, the struggle between then was more than a human mind could cope with. There was only one surcease—another treatment under the beam. And then another. And never in human history has a more torturous instrument been devised. It was worse than any drug; for the drugs killed logic, but this thing used it, in opposite directions at the same time in the same mind; and the stronger of the two was that which was refuted by the most evidence.
What could I do? Whom could I use the thing on, when I knew as a technician that I had the antidote, but did not know as a physician or psychiatrist what the result would be? There was Marie. And Carole—and what strange battle was she fighting? And the Widget. And Henry.
I looked down at him, curled up on the floor, confined and shrouded with the utter sleep of the exhausted. I could expose myself to the beam; but how did I know what my deepest desire was—what the direction would be of my wishful thinking? Did anybody really know that? Exposure to the beam had turned Henry against any further research; apparently he had wanted the reasons for that research removed more than anything else in the universe. There was only one alternative to doing the work, and that was to believe it done, which was the course his mind took. And as he lay there sleeping, he still believed it, and would if I woke him and asked him to handle the controls while I tested it on myself. He’d refuse. I might be able to argue him into it; and if I did, how could I tell what would happen to me? Would I forget my discoveries in this devilish field, and condemn us all to the madness of some concreted dream?
No; I held too much responsibility. I couldn’t try it on myself. Carole, then. A wave of sheer horror nearly stopped my heart at the thought. Marie—my sister.
Oh, you just don’t do those things! No human being should be faced with such a choice.
Killdozer! Page 31
