“Plenty,” said Inglehart.
Methuen was not acting at all drunk. He was full of sober remorse.
“I remember everything—those inventions that popped out of my mind, everything. But I didn’t care. How did you know alcohol would counteract the Methuen injection?”
“Johnny figured it out. He looked up its effects, and discovered that in massive doses it coagulates the proteins in the nerve cells. He guessed it would lower their conductivity to counteract the increased conductivity through the gaps between them that your treatment causes.”
“So,” said Methuen, “when I’m sober I’m drunk, and when I’m drunk I’m sober. But what’ll we do about the endowment—my new department and the laboratory and everything?”
“I don’t know. Dalrymple’s leaving tonight; he had to stay over a day on account of some trustee business. And they won’t let you out for a while yet, even when they know about the alcohol counter-treatment. Better think of something quick, because the visiting period is pretty near up.”
Methuen thought. He said: “I remember how all those inventions work, though I couldn’t possibly invent any more of them unless I went back to the other condition.” He shuddered. “There’s the soft-speaker, for instance—”
“What’s that?”
“It’s like a loud-speaker, only it doesn’t speak loudly. It throws a supersonic beam, modulated by the human voice to give the effect of audible sound-frequencies when it hits the human ear. Since you can throw a supersonic beam almost as accurately as you can throw a light beam, you can turn the soft-speaker on a person, who will then hear a still small voice in his ear apparently coming from nowhere. I tried it on Dugan one day. It worked. Could you do anything with that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I hope you can. This is terrible. I thought I was perfectly sane and rational. Maybe I was—Maybe nothing is important. But I don’t feel that way now, and I don’t want to feel that way again—”
The omnipresent ivy, of which Yale is so proud, affords splendid handholds for climbing. Bruce Inglehart, keeping an eye peeled for campus cops, swarmed up the big tower at the corner of Bingham Hall. Below, in the dark, Johnny waited.
Presently the end of a clothesline came dangling down. Johnny inserted the hook in the end of the rope ladder into the loop in the end of the line. Inglehart hauled the ladder up and secured it, wishing that he and Johnny could change bodies for a while. That climb up the ivy had scared him and winded him badly. But he could climb ivy and Johnny couldn’t.
The ladder creaked under Johnny’s five hundred pounds. A few minutes later it slid slowly, jerkily up the wall, like a giant centipede. Then Inglehart, Johnny, ladder, and all were on top of the tower.
Inglehart got out the soft-speaker and trained the telescopic sight on the window of Dalrymple’s room in the Taft, across the intersection of College and Chapel Streets. He found the yellow rectangle of light. He could see into about half the room. His heart skipped a few beats until a stocky figure moved into his field of vision. Dalrymple had not yet left. But he was packing a couple of suitcases.
Inglehart slipped the transmitter clip around his neck, so that the transmitter nestled against his larynx. The next time Dalrymple appeared, Inglehart focused the crosshairs on the steel man’s head. He spoke: “Hanscom Dalrymple!” He saw the man stop suddenly. He repeated: “Hanscom Dalrymple!”
“Huh?” said Dalrymple. “Who the hell are you? Where the hell are you?” Inglehart could not hear him, of course, but he could guess.
Inglehart said, in solemn tones: “I am your conscience.”
By now Dalrymple’s agitation was evident even at that distance. Inglehart continued: “Who squeezed out all the common stockholders of Hephaestus Steel in that phony reorganization?” Pause. “You did, Hanscom Dalrymple!
“Who bribed a United States senator to swing the vote for a higher steel tariff, with fifty thousand dollars and a promise of fifty thousand more, which was never paid?” Pause. “You did, Hanscom Dalrymple!
“Who promised Wendell Cook the money for a new biophysics building, and then let his greed get the better of him and backed out on the thin excuse that the man who was to have headed the new department had had a nervous breakdown?” Pause, while Inglehart reflected that “nervous breakdown” was merely a nice way of saying “gone nuts.” “You did, Hanscom Dalrymple!
“Do you know what’ll happen to you if you don’t atone, Dalrymple? You’ll be reincarnated as a spider, and probably caught by a wasp and used as live fodder for her larvæ. How will you like that, heh-heh?
“What can you do to atone? Don’t be a sap. Call up Cook. Tell him you’ve changed your mind, and are renewing your offer!” Pause. “Well, what are you waiting for? Tell him you’re not only renewing it, but doubling it!” Pause. “Tell him—”
But at this point Dalrymple moved swiftly to the telephone. Inglehart said, “Ah, that’s better, Dalrymple,” and shut off the machine.
Johnny asked: “How did you know awr zose sings about him?”
“I got his belief in reincarnation out of his obit down at the shop. And one of our rewrite men who used to work in Washington says everybody down there knows about the other things. Only you can’t print a thing like that unless you have evidence to back it up.”
They lowered the rope ladder and reversed the process by which they had come up. They gathered up their stuff and started for the Phelps mansion. But as they rounded the corner of Bingham they almost ran into a familiar storklike figure. Methuen was just setting up another contraption at the corner of Welch.
“Hello,” he said.
Man and bear gaped at him. Inglehart asked: “Did you escape again?”
“Uh-huh. When I sobered up and got my point of view back. It was easy, even though they’d taken my radio away. I invented a hypnotizer, using a light bulb and a rheostat made of wire from my mattress, and hypnotized the orderly into giving me his uniform and opening the doors for me. My, my, that was amusing.”
“What are you doing now?” Inglehart became aware that Johnny’s black pelt had melted off into the darkness.
“This? Oh, I dropped around home and knocked together an improved soft-speaker. This one’ll work through masonry walls. I’m going to put all the undergraduates to sleep and tell ‘em they’re monkeys. When they wake up, it will be most amusing to see them running around on all fours and scratching and climbing the chandeliers. They’re practically monkeys to begin with, so it shouldn’t be difficult.”
“But you can’t, professor! Johnny and I just went to a lot of trouble getting Dalrymple to renew his offer. You don’t want to let us down, do you?”
“What you and Johnny do doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. Nothing matters. I’m going to have my fun. And don’t try to interfere, Bruce.” Methuen pointed another glass rod at Inglehart’s middle. “You’re a nice young fellow, and it would be too bad if I had to let you have three hours’ accumulation of sun-ray energy all at once.”
“But this afternoon you said—”
“I know what I said this afternoon. I was drunk and back in my old state of mind, full of responsibility and conscientiousness and such bunk. I’ll never touch the stuff again if it has that effect on me. Only a man who has received the Methuen treatment can appreciate the futility of all human effort.”
Methuen shrank back into the shadows as a couple of undergraduates passed. Then he resumed work on his contraption, using one hand and keeping Inglehart covered with the other. Inglehart, not knowing what else to do, asked him questions about the machine. Methuen responded with a string of technical jargon. Inglehart wondered desperately what to do. He was not an outstandingly brave young man, especially in the face of a gun or its equivalent. Methuen’s bony hand never wavered. He made the adjustments on his machine mostly by feel.
“Now,” he said, “that ought to be about right. This contains a tonic metronome that will send them a note of frequency of 349 cycles
a second, with 68.4 pulses of sound a minute. This, for various technical reasons, has the maximum hypnotic effect. From here I can rake the colleges along College Street—” He made a final adjustment. “This will be the most amusing joke yet. And the cream of it is that, since Connecticut is determined to consider me insane, they can’t do anything to me for it! Here goes, Bruce—Phew, has somebody started a still here, or what? I’ve been smelling and tasting alcohol for the last five minutes—ouch!”
The glass rod gave one dazzling flash, and then Johnny’s hairy black body catapulted out of the darkness. Down went Ira Methuen, all the wind knocked out of him.
“Quick, Bruce!” barked Johnny. “Pick up zat needre sprayer I dropped. Unscrew ze container on ze bottom. Don’t spirr it. Zen come here and pour it down his sroat!”
This was done, with Johnny holding Methuen’s jaws apart with his claws, like Sampson slaying the lion, only conversely.
They waited a few minutes for the alcohol to take effect, listening for sounds that they had been discovered. But the colleges were silent save for the occasional tick of a typewriter.
Johnny explained: “I ran home and got ze needre sprayer from his room. Zen I got Webb, ze research assistant in biophysics, to ret me in ze raboratory for ze arcohor. Zen I try to sneak up and squirf a spray in his mouse whire he talks. I get some in, but I don’t get ze sprayer adjusted right, and ze spray hit him before it breaks up, and stings him. I don’t have fingers, you know. So we have to use what ze books cawr brute force.”
Methuen began to show signs of normalcy. As without his glass rod he was just a harmless old professor, Johnny let him up. His words tumbled out: “I’m so glad you did, Johnny—you saved my reputation, maybe my life. Those fatheads at the hospital wouldn’t believe I had to be kept full of alcohol, so, of course, I sobered up and went crazy again—maybe they’ll believe now. Come on; let’s get back there quickly. If they haven’t discovered my absence, they might be willing to keep this last escape quiet. When they let me out, I’ll work on a permanent cure for the Methuen treatment. I’ll find it, if I don’t die of stomach ulcers from all the alcohol I’ll have to drink.”
Johnny waddled up Temple Street to his home, feeling rather smug about his ability as a fixer. Maybe Methuen, sober, was right about the futility of it all. But if such a philosophy led to the upsetting of Johnny’s pleasant existence, Johnny preferred Methuen drunk.
He was glad Methuen would soon be well and coming home. Methuen was the only man he had any sentimental regard for. But as long as Methuen was shut up, Johnny was going to take advantage of that fact. When he reached the Phelps mansion, instead of going directly in, he thrust a foreleg around behind the hedge next to the wall. It came out with a huge slab of chewing tobacco. Johnny bit off about half the slab, thrust the rest back in its cache, and went in, drooling happily a little at each step. Why not?
NIGHTFALL
by Isaac Asimov
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!—Emerson
ATON 77, DIRECTOR OF SARD UNIVERSITY, THRUST OUT A BELLIGERENT lower lip and glared at the young newspaperman in a hot fury.
Theremon 762 took that fury in his stride. In his earlier days, when his now widely syndicated column was only a mad idea in a cub reporter’s mind, he had specialized in “impossible” interviews. It had cost him bruises, black eyes, and broken bones; but it had given him an ample supply of coolness and self-confidence.
So he lowered the outthrust hand that had been so pointedly ignored and calmly waited for the aged director to get over the worst. Astronomers were queer ducks, anyway, and if Aton’s actions of the last two months meant anything, this same Aton was the queer-duckiest of the lot.
Aton 77 found his voice, and though it trembled with restrained emotion, the careful, somewhat pedantic, phraseology, for which the famous astronomer was noted, did not abandon him.
“Sir,” he said, “you display an infernal gall in coming to me with that impudent proposition of yours.”
The husky telephotographer of the Observatory, Beenay 25, thrust a tongue’s tip across dry lips and interposed nervously, “Now, sir, after all—”
The director turned to him and lifted a white eyebrow. “Do not interfere, Beenay. I will credit you with good intentions in bringing this man here; but I will tolerate no insubordination now.”
Theremon decided it was time to take a part. “Director Aton, if you’ll let me finish what I started saying I think—”
“I don’t believe, young man,” retorted Aton, “that anything you could say now would count much as compared with your daily columns of these last two months. You have led a vast newspaper campaign against the efforts of myself and my colleagues to organize the world against the menace which it is now too late to avert. You have done your best with your highly personal attacks to make the staff of this Observatory objects of ridicule.”
The director lifted the copy of the Saro City Chronicle on the table and shook it at Theremon furiously. “Even a person of your well-known impudence should have hesitated before coming to me with a request that he be allowed to cover today’s events for his paper. Of all newsmen, you!”
Aton dashed the newspaper to the floor, strode to the window and clasped his arms behind his back.
“You may leave,” he snapped over his shoulder. He stared moodily out at the skyline where Gamma, the brightest of the planet’s six suns, was setting. It had already faded and yellowed into the horizon mists, and Aton knew he would never see it again as a sane man.
He whirled. “No, wait, come here!” He gestured peremptorily. “I’ll give you your story.”
The newsman had made no motion to leave, and now he approached the old man slowly. Aton gestured outward, “Of the six suns, only Beta is left in the sky. Do you see it?”
The question was rather unnecessary. Beta was almost at zenith; its ruddy light flooding the landscape to an unusual orange as the brilliant rays of setting Gamma died. Beta was at aphelion. It was small; smaller than Theremon had ever seen it before, and for the moment it was undisputed ruler of Lagash’s sky.
Lagash’s own sun, Alpha, the one about which it revolved, was at the antipodes; as were the two distant companion pairs. The red dwarf Beta—Alpha’s immediate companion—was alone, grimly alone.
Aton’s upturned face flushed redly in the sunlight. “In just under four hours,” he said, “civilization, as we know it, comes to an end. It will do so because, as you see, Beta is the only sun in the sky.” He smiled grimly. “Print that! There’ll be no one to read it.”
“But if it turns out that four hours pass—and another four—and nothing happens?” asked Theremon softly.
“Don’t let that worry you. Enough will happen.”
“Granted! And still—if nothing happens?”
For a second time, Beenay 25 spoke, “Sir, I think you ought to listen to him.”
Theremon said, “Put it to a vote, Director Aton.”
There was a stir among the remaining five members of the Observatory staff, who till now had maintained an attitude of wary neutrality.
“That,” stated Aton flatly, “is not necessary.” He drew out his pocket watch. “Since your good friend, Beenay, insists so urgently, I will give you five minutes. Talk away.”
“Good! Now, just what difference would it make if you allowed me to take down an eyewitness account of what’s to come? If your prediction comes true, my presence won’t hurt; for in that case my column would never be written. On the other hand, if nothing comes of it, you will just have to expect ridicule or worse. It would be wise to leave that ridicule to friendly hands.”
Aton snorted. “Do you mean yours when you speak of friendly hands?”
“Certainly!” Theremon sat down and crossed his legs. “My columns may have been a little rough at times, but I gave you people the benefit of the doubt every time. After all, thi
s is not the century to preach ‘the end of the world is at hand’ to Lagash. You have to understand that people don’t believe the ‘Book of Revelations’ any more, and it annoys them to have scientists turn about face and tell us the Cultists are right after all—”
“No such thing, young man,” interrupted Aton. “While a great deal of our data has been supplied us by the Cult, our results contain none of the Cult’s mysticism. Facts are facts, and the Cult’s so-called ‘mythology’ has certain facts behind it. We’ve exposed them and ripped away their mystery. I assure you that the Cult hates us now worse than you do.”
“I don’t hate you. I’m just trying to tell you that the public is in an ugly humor. They’re angry.”
Aton twisted his mouth in derision. “Let them be angry.”
“Yes, but what about tomorrow?”
“There’ll be no tomorrow!”
“But if there is. Say that there is—just to see what happens. That anger might take shape into something serious. After all, you know, business has taken a nose dive these last two months. Investors don’t really believe the world is coming to an end, but just the same they’re being cagy with their money until it’s all over. Johnny Public doesn’t believe you, either, but the new spring furniture might as well wait a few months—just to make sure.
“You see the point. Just as soon as this is all over, the business interests will be after your hide. They’ll say that if crackpots—begging your pardon—can upset the country’s prosperity any time they want simply by making some cockeyed prediction—it’s up to the planet to prevent them. The sparks will fly, sir.”
The director regarded the columnist sternly. “And just what were you proposing to do to help the situation?”
“Well,” grinned Theremon, “I was proposing to take charge of the publicity. I can handle things so that only the ridiculous side will show. It would be hard to stand, I admit, because I’d have to make you all out to be a bunch of gibbering idiots, but if I can get people laughing at you, they might forget to be angry. In return for that, all my publisher asks is an exclusive story.”
The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology Page 15
