“Moh-mee?” she said with her eyes closed, the way she used to when she was half her age.
“Hello, Widge,” I said.
“Hi.” She knuckled her eyes.
“Have any dreams, sleepyhead?”
“Mmm-hm,” she said with a rising inflection. She looked at me with eyes suddenly wide-awake and cautious.
“Go on, kiddo. The lid is off,” I said. “You can talk about it now.”
“You know everything, don’t you, I bet. I dreamed about that ol’ doll.”
“Was it a dream?”
“Yes. It was a dream. But I’m going to pretend she was real. I wish she was real, that’s what I wish.”
Carole and I exchanged a startled glance.
“And I wish Mickey Mouse was real too. Mummy!”
“Yes, darling.”
“I din’t have enough breakfuss.”
The Widget was all right.
“What’s going on here!” roared a resonant baritone.
We all froze. “Wickersham,” Henry whispered.
“Who’s in there?” bellowed the voice.
“Your man Godfrey,” I called. “Come on in.”
He came striding in, tall and wide and black. The Widget scuttled close to her mother. Nobody else moved. Wickersham was halfway across the room when he saw Henry. The blood on Henry’s clothes diverted him a little; he broke stride. He seemed a little less tall, then, as he stopped and swung around, looking at Marie, and Carole, and at the Widget, who twitched, and then at me.
“Company,” I said. An idea crawled out of the back of my mind and out my mouth. “They’re cured,” I said quietly.
Wickersham’s mouth sagged. His eyes darted to the women and back to me. I saw Henry go white.
Henry said, “You knew, then. You did it to them.”
“Yes,” Wickersham said. He said it to me.
Henry stepped up to Wickersham, who towered over him. Henry had the most extraordinary ripple running on the side of his jaw. “Put your hands up,” he said, his voice half a plea, half a caress.
Marie said “Henry.” Carole took Marie’s arm and shook her head at her.
Wickersham glowered suddenly, reached out one long arm and put, rather than shoved, Henry behind him.
“The cure was his idea,” I said, indicating Henry.
Wickersham turned and looked at Henry as if he had never seen him before. “You? I couldn’t do it!” he rasped.
Then Henry hit him. Just once. Very fine.
After that, Wickersham was easy to talk to. He slumped on the edge of one of the sinks, with his chin sunk low, and he talked. I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t know him like this. It hurt, in a way. I think I felt, then, a thousandth part of the loss all the others had felt over their solidified dreams.
“I didn’t mean it to come out this way,” said Wickersham. “The wish-fulfillment synapses are what I was after, it’s true. I wanted the brain, under that beam, to become a perfectly efficient machine. I wanted to visualize a goal, and then under the beam, to see the whole thing completed, with all of the intermediate steps obvious. I didn’t know it would do what it did—and it only had to do that once. I didn’t know it would drag something up out of the subconscious, make it real, make it so desirable to return to and so difficult to get along without. I hated to permit myself to go back to it again, and I couldn’t bear to be away—I missed it so much.”
“What made you subject these women to it?”
“Because of you,” he said. “You two are the best team I have. I didn’t feel I could persuade or drive you to the cure I needed. I didn’t feel you would drive yourselves to the needed extent unless you had a personal reason for doing it.”
“That may be true, Henry,” I said.
“It isn’t,” said Henry clearly. “He couldn’t bring himself to admit to us that he was under the influence of a hellish thing like this. Isn’t that more like it, Wickersham?”
Wickersham didn’t answer.
“What about that fantastically childish business with the burglar alarm and all the U.V.?”
“It had to be difficult for you all the way, or you wouldn’t have had the push to go all the way.”
“Nonsense,” said Henry. I looked at him in amazement. I’d never seen Henry like this. He said, his voice challenging, “You tried to do it and failed. You like to think of us as lesser men than yourself. If you couldn’t do it at all, you didn’t want us to do it easily. Right?”
“I—didn’t think it out that way.”
Henry nodded. “And you want the cure.”
“Yes,” Wickersham whispered. “Yes—please.”
I felt ill. “Do you own this place?”
“I bought it when I saw your wives going there.”
Henry’s jaw twitched again. “The secret,” he said evenly, “is to feed your beam signal back a hundred and eighty degrees out of phase. About fifteen percent reverse feedback. For about fifteen minutes. Le’s go, chillun.”
They moved away from him, all but huddled in a group, toward the door. I stood where I was. Wickersham didn’t move. I looked and saw Carole lingering at the door. When I turned back, Wickersham was looking out the door—not after anybody; not at anything. He was just looking. His great stony face was full of hollows in the wrong places and the shadows were no longer impressive, and distinguished, and strong. The eyes were red-rimmed, pale and yellowed.
“What was your dream, Wickersham, that you couldn’t control?”
He made a movement with his head, a very slight one; but it pointed at Carole and answered my question. I took a step forward, furious, but he said, “No. Not her. Just—what you have.”
And I couldn’t pity him—he was so broken.
So I left him there, looking as if there were nothing alive but his eyes, and they were tied to the dead rest of him. I caught up with Carole at the path, and we walked quickly until we joined Henry and Marie. She was walking in a new way for her, not looking ahead, but holding her husband and watching his face, because she had seen her dream come true and was permitted to believe it. I put my hand on his shoulder. He stopped as if he had been waiting. Carole took Marie’s arm, for she always understood these things without being told about them, and walked ahead.
“Henry,” I said, “You just killed a man.”
“He won’t die.”
“You know what that out-of-phase will do to him.”
“You told me what a microfraction did to me.”
“And he’ll get fifteen minutes. There won’t be anything left.”
“What’s he got now?” asked Henry.
“Very little,” I admitted.
“He’ll be better off after the treatment,” he said steadily.
“Henry, I—”
“You could have told him the other treatment,” he lashed out. “What would he have then?”
I thought of the Wickersham we worked for; silent, morose, efficient, and certainly not much use to himself. “I don’t know why you did it, Henry, or why I let you. I think it’s right, though.” I also thought that for Henry, this was fighting; it was reprisal, and he would have to fight for everything after this. I could tell by the way he walked, by the way Marie walked with him.
We got in the car and took Henry and Marie home; and then at last we were alone—with the exception, of course, of the Widget, who was doing nip-ups in the back seat.
“Godfrey—what was the matter with me?”
I grinned. “Nothing.”
“Nothing? Darling, you needn’t try to hide anything.”
“I’m not, Carole. Really I’m not. There’s only one answer to the way you reacted to the opportunity to know your innermost desire.”
“Well?”
“You just didn’t react. You had everything you wanted. You were completely happy with what you had. You are a very rare creature, m’love.”
“But I don’t see why that should have made me so sickeningly sad—and frightened.”
“The sadness wasn’t much of it. You had your happiness brought to perfection, which is an unnatural state. But your memory of that perfection was so close to reality that you couldn’t tell the difference. It was a very slight difference. It was every wall in the house without a fingermark on it. It was being able to close the oven door without the danger of getting your skirt caught in it, ever. In your particular fugue, only the little, unnoticeable details changed. It was perfection itself you thought you had known, and the lack of it that gave you the sense of loss. And when you felt you had lost something, and couldn’t identify it, you were afraid.”
“Oh—I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Why couldn’t you tell me before?”
“Didn’t want to rub Henry’s nose in it. You see, like the Widget, who wanted a doll, Marie wanted an aggressive husband. Marie and the Widget were both mourning the loss of the thing they wanted. You didn’t lose anything; you were just afraid. Your not losing anything is the compliment I mentioned a while back. But darling, compliment me in a less roundabout way next time!”
“I love you,” she said, with her eyes too.
“That’s what I meant,” I said, and began to drive with one arm.
There was a snort from the back seat. “What—again?” said the Widget.
Memorial
The Pit, in AD 5000, had changed little over the centuries. Still it was an angry memorial to the misuse of great power; and because of it, organized warfare was a forgotten thing. Because of it, the world was free of the wasteful smoke and dirt of industry. The scream and crash of bombs and the soporific beat of marching feet were never heard, and at long last the earth was at peace.
To go near The Pit was slow, certain death, and it was respected and feared, and would be for centuries more. It winked and blinked redly at night, and was surrounded by a bald and broken tract stretching out and away over the horizon; and around it flickered a ghostly blue glow. Nothing lived there. Nothing could.
With such a war memorial, there could only be peace. The earth could never forget the horror that could be loosed by war.
That was Grenfell’s dream.
GRENFELL HANDED THE typewritten sheet back. “That’s it, Jack. My idea, and—I wish I could express it like that.” He leaned back against the littered workbench, his strangely asymmetrical face quizzical. “Why is it that it takes a useless person adequately to express an abstract?”
Jack Roway grinned as he took back the paper and tucked it into his breast pocket. “Interestin’ question, Grenfell, because this is your expression, the words are yours. Practically verbatim. I left out the ‘er’s’ and ‘Ah’s’ that you play conversational hopscotch with, and strung together all the effects you mentioned without mentioning any of the technological causes. Net result: you think I did it, when you did. You think it’s good writing, and I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
Jack spread his bony length out on the hard little cot. His relaxation was a noticeable act, like the unbuttoning of a shirt collar. He laughed.
“Of course I don’t. Much too emotional for my taste. I’m just a fumbling aesthete—useless, did you say? Mm-m-m yeah. I suppose so.” He paused reflectively. “You see, you cold-blooded characters, you scientists, are the true visionaries. Seems to me the essential difference between a scientist and an artist is that the scientist mixes his hopes with patience.
“The scientist visualizes his ultimate goal, but pays little attention to it. He is all caught up with the achievement of the next step upward. The artist looks so far ahead that more often than not he can’t see what’s under his feet; so he falls flat on his face and gets called useless by scientists. But if you strip all of the intermediate steps away from the scientist’s thinking, you have an artistic concept to which the scientist responds distantly and with surprise, giving some artist credit for deep perspicacity purely because the artist repeated something the scientist said.”
“You amaze me,” Grenfell said candidly. “You wouldn’t be what you are if you weren’t lazy and superficial. And yet you come out with things like that. I don’t know that I understand what you just said. I’ll have to think—but I do believe that you show all the signs of clear thinking. With a mind like yours, I can’t understand why you don’t use it to build something instead of wasting it in these casual interpretations of yours.”
Jack Roway stretched luxuriously. “What’s the use? There’s more waste involved in the destruction of something which is already built than in dispersing the energy it would take to help build something. Anyway, the world is filled with builders—and destroyers. I’d just as soon sit by and watch, and feel things. I like my environment, Grenfell. I want to feel all I can of it, while it lasts. It won’t last much longer. I want to touch all of it I can reach, taste of it, hear it, while there’s time. What is around me, here and now, is what is important to me. The acceleration of human progress, and the increase of its mass—to use your own terms—are taking humanity straight to Limbo. You, with your work, think you are fighting humanity’s inertia. Well, you are. But it’s the kind of inertia called momentum. You command no force great enough to stop it, or even to change its course appreciably.”
“I have atomic power.”
Roway shook his head, smiling. “That’s not enough. No power is enough. It’s just too late.”
“That kind of pessimism does not affect me,” said Grenfell. “You can gnaw all you like at my foundations, Jack, and achieve nothing more than the loss of your front teeth. I think you know that.”
“Certainly I know that. I’m not trying to. I have nothing to sell, no one to change. I am even more impotent than you and your atomic power; and you are completely helpless. Uh—I quarrel with your use of the term ‘pessimist’, though. I am nothing of the kind. Since I have resolved for myself the fact that humanity, as we know it, is finished, I’m quite resigned to it. Pessimism from me, under the circumstances, would be the pessimism of a photophobiac predicting that the sun would rise tomorrow.”
Grenfell grinned. ‘I’ll have to think about that, too. You’re such a mass of paradoxes that turn out to be chains of reasoning. Apparently you live in a world in which scientists are poets and the grasshopper has it all over the ant.”
“I always did think that ant was a stinker.”
“Why do you keep coming here, Jack? What do you get out of it? Don’t you realize I’m a criminal?”
Roway’s eyes narrowed. “Sometimes I think you wish you were a criminal. The law says you are, and the chances are very strong that you’ll be caught and treated accordingly. Ethically, you know you’re not. It sort of takes the spice out of being one of the hunted.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Grenfell said thoughtfully. He sighed. “It’s so completely silly. During the war years, the skills I had were snatched up and the government flogged me into the Manhattan Project, expecting, and getting, miracles. I have never stopped working along the same lines. And now the government has changed the laws, and pulled legality from under me.”
“Hardly surprising. The government deals rather severely with soldiers who go on killing other soldiers after the war is over.” He held up a hand to quell Grenfell’s interruption. “I know you’re not killing anyone, and are working for the opposite result. I was only pointing out that it’s the same switcheroo. We the people,” he said didactically, “have, in our sovereign might, determined that no atomic research be done except in government laboratories. We have then permitted our politicians to allow so little for maintenance of those laboratories—unlike our overseas friends—that no really exhaustive research can be done in them. We have further made it a major offense to operate such a bootleg lab as yours.” He shrugged. “Comes the end of mankind. We’ll get walloped first. If we put more money and effort into nuclear research than any other country, some other country would get walloped first. If we last another hundred years—which seems doubtful—some poor, spavined, underpaid government researcher will stumble on the alu
minum-isotope space-heating system you have already perfected.”
“That was a little rough,” said Grenfell bitterly. “Driving me underground just in time to make it impossible for me to announce it. What a waste of time and energy it is to heat homes and buildings the way they do now! Space heating—the biggest single use for heat-energy—and I have the answer to it over there.” He nodded toward a compact cube of lead-alloys in the corner of the shop. “Build it into a foundation, and you have controllable heat for the life of the building, with not a cent for additional fuel and practically nothing for maintenance.” His jaw knotted. “Well, I’m glad it happened that way.”
“Because it got you started on your war memorial—The Pit? Yeah. Well, all I can say is, I hope you’re right. It hasn’t been possible to scare humanity yet. The invention of gunpowder was going to stop war, and didn’t. Likewise the submarine, the torpedo, the airplane, and that two-by-four bomb they pitched at Hiroshima.”
“None of that applies to The Pit,” said Grenfell. “You’re right; humanity hasn’t been scared off war yet; but the Hiroshima bomb rocked ’em back on their heels. My little memorial is the real stuff. I’m not depending on a fission effect, you know, with a release of one-tenth of one percent of the energy of the atom. I’m going to disrupt it completely, and get all the energy there is in it. And it’ll be more than a thousand times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, because I’m going to use twelve times as much explosive; and it’s going off on the ground, not fifteen hundred feet above it.” Grenfell’s brow, over suddenly hot eyes, began to shine with sweat. “And then—The Pit,” he said softly. “The war memorial to end war, and all other war memorials. A vast pit, alive with bubbling lava, radiating death for ten thousand years. A living reminder of the devastation mankind has prepared for itself. Out here on the desert, where there are no cities, where the land has always been useless, will be the scene of the most useful thing in the history of the race—a never-ending sermon, a warning, an example of the dreadful antithesis of peace.” His voice shook to a whisper, and faded.
“Sometimes,” said Roway, “You frighten me, Grenfell. It occurs to me that I am such a studied sensualist, tasting everything I can, because I am afraid to feel any one thing that much.” He shook himself, or shuddered. “You’re a fanatic, Grenfell. Hyperemotional. A monomaniac. I hope you can do it.”
Killdozer! Page 33
