The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology

by John W. Campbell Jr.

  The Mexican was looking at me with the queerest expression I’ve ever seen, like he’d baited a mousetrap and caught a frog. Me? I suppose I looked like I’d seen the devil himself. Maybe I had. The beer was all over the floor and I barely made it to the nearest chair.

  “What,” I managed to get out, “what was that?”

  The lid of the radio went down. “I felt like that too, the first time. I’d forgotten.”

  My fingers were too shaky to get out a cigarette, and I ripped off the top of the package. “I said, what was that?”

  He sat down. “That was you, in the Motor Bar, at eight last night.” I must have looked blank as he handed me another paper cup. Automatically I held it out to be refilled.

  “Look here—” I started.

  “I suppose it is a shock. I’d forgotten what I felt like the first time. I… I don’t care much any more. Tomorrow I’m going out to Phillips Radio.” That made no sense to me, and I said so. He went on.

  “I’m licked. I’m flat broke. I don’t give a care any more. I’ll settle for cash and live off the royalties.” The story came out, slowly at first, then faster until he was pacing the floor. I guess he was tired of having no one to talk to.

  His name was Miguel Jose Zapata Laviada. I told him mine; Lefko. Ed Lefko. He was the son of sugar beet workers who had emigrated from Mexico somewhere in the Twenties. They were sensible enough not to quibble when their oldest son left the back-breaking Michigan fields to seize the chance provided by a NYA scholarship. When the scholarship ran out, he’d worked in garages, driven trucks, clerked in stores, and sold brushes door-to-door to exist and learn. The Army cut short his education with the First Draft to make him a radar technician, the Army had given him an honorable discharge and an idea so nebulous as to be almost merely a hunch. Jobs were plentiful then, and it wasn’t too hard to end up with enough money to rent a trailer and fill it with Army surplus radio and radar equipment. One year ago he’d finished what he’d started, finished underfed, underweight, and overexcited. But successful, because he had it.

  “It” he installed in a radio cabinet, both for ease in handling and for camouflage. For reasons that will become apparent, he didn’t dare apply for a patent. I looked “it” over pretty carefully. Where the phonograph turntable and radio controls had been were vernier dials galore. One big one was numbered 1 to 24, a couple were numbered 1 to 60, and there were a dozen or so numbered 1 to 25, plus two or three with no numbers at all. Closest of all it resembled one of these fancy radio or motor testers found in a super super-service station. That was all, except that there was a sheet of heavy plywood hiding whatever was installed in place of the radio chassis and speaker. A perfectly innocent cache for—

  Daydreams are swell. I suppose we’ve all had our share of mental wealth or fame or travel or fantasy. But to sit in a chair and drink warm beer and realize that the dream of ages isn’t a dream any more, to feel like a god, to know that just by turning a few dials you can see and watch anything, anybody, anywhere, that has ever happened—it still bothers me once in a while.

  I know this much, that it’s high frequency stuff. And there’s a lot of mercury and copper and wiring of metals cheap and easy to find, but what goes where, or how, least of all, why, is out of my line. Light has mass and energy, and that mass always loses part of itself and can be translated back to electricity, or something. Mike Laviada himself says that what he stumbled on and developed was nothing new, that long before the war it had been observed many times by men like Compton and Michelson and Pfeiffer, who discarded it as a useless laboratory effect. And, of course, that was before atomic research took precedence over everything.

  When the first shock wore off—and Mike had to give me another demonstration—I must have made quite a sight. Mike tells me I couldn’t sit down. I’d pop up and gallop up and down the floor of that ancient store kicking chairs out of my way or stumbling over them, all the time gobbling out words and disconnected sentences faster than my tongue could trip. Finally it filtered through that he was laughing at me. I didn’t see where it was any laughing matter, and I prodded him. He began to get angry.

  “I know what I have,” he snapped. “I’m not the biggest fool in the world, as you seem to think. Here, watch this,” and he went back to the radio. “Turn out the light.” I did, and there I was watching myself at the Motor Bar again, a lot happier this time. “Watch this.”

  The bar backed away. Out in the street, two blocks down to the City Hall. Up the steps to the Council Room. No one there. Then Council was in session, then they were gone again. Not a picture, not a projection of a lantern slide, but a slice of life about twelve feet square. If we were close, the field of view was narrow. If we were further away, the background was just as much in focus as the foreground. The images, if you want to call them images, were just as real, just as lifelike as looking in the doorway of a room. Real they were, three-dimensional, stopped by only the back wall or the distance in the background. Mike was talking as he spun the dials, but I was too engrossed to pay much attention.

  I yelped and grabbed and closed my eyes as you would if you were looking straight down with nothing between you and the ground except a lot of smoke and a few clouds. I winked my eyes open almost at the ends of what must have been a long racing vertical dive, and there I was, looking at the street again.

  “Go any place up to the Heaviside Layer, go down as deep as any hole, anywhere, any time.” A blur, and the street changed into a glade of sparse pines. “Buried treasure. Sure. Find it, with what?” The trees disappeared and I reached back for the light switch as he dropped the lid of the radio and sat down.

  “How are you going to make any money when you haven’t got it to start?” No answer to that from me. “I ran an ad in the paper offering to recover lost articles; my first customer was the Law wanting to see my private detective’s license. I’ve seen every big speculator in the country sit in his office buying and selling and making plans; what do you think would happen if I tried to peddle advance market information? I’ve watched the stock market get shoved up and down while I had barely the money to buy the paper that told me about it. I watched a bunch of Peruvian Indians bury the second ransom of Atuahalpa; I haven’t the fare to get to Peru, or the money to buy the tools to dig.” He got up and brought two more bottles. He went on. By that time I was getting a few ideas.

  “I’ve watched scribes indite the books that burnt at Alexandria; who would buy, or who would believe me, if I copied one? What would happen if I went over to the Library and told them to rewrite their histories? How many would fight to tie a rope around my neck if they knew I’d watched them steal and murder and take a bath? What sort of a padded cell would I get if I showed up with a photograph of Washington, or Caesar? Or Christ?”

  I agreed that it was all probably true, but—

  “Why do you think I’m here now? You saw the picture I showed for a dime. A dime’s worth, and that’s all, because I didn’t have the money to buy film or to make the picture as I knew I should.” His tongue began to get tangled. He was excited. “I’m doing this because I haven’t the money to get the things I need to get the money I’ll need—” He was so disgusted he booted a chair halfway across the room. It was easy to see that if I had been around a little later, Phillips Radio would have profited. Maybe I’d have been better off, too.

  Now, although always I’ve been told that I’d never be worth a hoot, no one has ever accused me of being slow for a dollar. Especially an easy one. I saw money in front of me, easy money, the easiest and the quickest in the world. I saw, for a minute, so far in the future with me on top of the heap, that my head reeled and it was hard to breathe.

  “Mike,” I said, “let’s finish that beer and go where we can get some more, and maybe something to eat. We’ve got a lot of talking to do.” So we did.

  Beer is a mighty fine lubricant; I have always been a pretty smooth talker, and by the time we left the gin mill I had a pretty good idea of j
ust what Mike had on his mind. By the time we’d shacked up for the night behind that beaverboard screen in the store, we were full-fledged partners. I don’t recall our even shaking hands on the deal, but that partnership still holds good. Mike is ace high with me, and I guess it’s the other way around, too. That was six years ago; it only took me a year or so to discard some of the corners I used to cut.

  Seven days after that, on a Tuesday, I was riding a bus to Grosse Pointe with a full briefcase. Two days after that I was riding back from Grosse Pointe in a shiny taxi, with an empty briefcase and a pocketful of folding money. It was easy.

  “Mr. Jones—or Smith—or Brown—I’m with Aristocrat Studios, Personal and Candid Portraits. We thought you might like this picture of you and… no, this is just a test proof. The negative is in our files.… Now, if you’re really interested, I’ll be back the day after tomorrow with our files.… I’m sure you will, Mr. Jones. Thank you, Mr. Jones…”

  Dirty? Sure. Blackmail is always dirty. But if I had a wife and family and a good reputation, I’d stick to the roast beef and forget the Roquefort. Very smelly Roquefort, at that. Mike liked it less than I did. It took some talking, and I had to drag out the old one about the ends justifying the means, and they could well afford it, anyway. Besides, if there was a squawk, they’d get the negatives free. Some of them were pretty bad.

  So we had the cash; not too much, but enough to start. Before we took the next step there was plenty to decide. There are a lot who earn a living by convincing millions that Sticko soap is better. We had a harder problem than that: we had, first, to make a salable and profitable product, and second, we had to convince many, many millions that our “Product” was absolutely honest and absolutely accurate. We all know that if you repeat something long enough and loud enough many—or most—will accept it as gospel truth. That called for publicity on an international scale. For the skeptics who know better than to accept advertising, no matter how blatant, we had to use another technique. And since we were going to get certainly only one chance, we had to be right the first time. Without Mike’s machine the job would have been impossible; without it the job would have been unnecessary.

  A lot of sweat ran under the bridge before we found what we thought—and we still do!—the only workable scheme. We picked the only possible way to enter every mind in the world without a fight; the field of entertainment. Absolute secrecy was imperative, and it was only when we reached the last decimal point that we made a move. We started like this.

  First we looked for a suitable building, or Mike did, while I flew east, to Rochester, for a month. The building he rented was an old bank. We had the windows sealed, a flossy office installed in the front—the bulletproof glass was my idea—air conditioning, a portable bar, electrical wiring of whatever type Mike’s little heart desired, and a blond secretary who thought she was working for M-E Experimental Laboratories. When I got back from Rochester I took over the job of keeping happy the stone masons and electricians, while Mike fooled around in our suite in the Book where he could look out the window at his old store. The last I heard, they were selling snake oil there. When the Studio, as we came to call it, was finished, Mike moved in and the blonde settled down to a routine of reading love stories and saying no to all the salesmen that wandered by. I left for Hollywood.

  I spent a week digging through the files of Central Casting before I was satisfied, but it took a month of snooping and some under-the-table cash to lease a camera that would handle Trucolor film. That took the biggest load from my mind. When I got back to Detroit the big view camera had arrived from Rochester, with a truckload of glass color plates. Ready to go.

  We made quite a ceremony of it. We closed the Venetian blinds and I popped the cork on one of the bottles of champagne I’d bought. The blond secretary was impressed; all she’d been doing for her salary was to accept delivery of packages and crates and boxes. We had no wine glasses, but we made no fuss about that. Too nervous and excited to drink any more than one bottle, we gave the rest to the blonde and told her to take the rest of the afternoon off. After she left—and I think she was disappointed at breaking up what could have been a good party—we locked up after her, went into the studio itself, locked up again and went to work.

  I’ve mentioned that the windows were sealed. All the inside wall had been painted dull black, and with the high ceiling that went with that old bank lobby, it was impressive. But not gloomy. Midway in the studio was planted the big Trucolor camera, loaded and ready. Not much could we see of Mike’s machine, but I knew it was off to the side, set to throw on the back wall. Not on the wall, understand, because the images produced are projected into the air, like the meeting of the rays of two searchlights. Mike lifted the lid and I could see him silhouetted against the tiny lights that lit the dials.

  “Well?” he said expectantly.

  I felt pretty good just then, right down to my billfold.

  “It’s all yours, Mike,” and a switch ticked over. There he was. There was a youngster, dead twenty-five hundred years, real enough, almost, to touch. Alexander. Alexander of Macedon.

  Let’s take that first picture in detail. I don’t think I can ever forget what happened in the next year or so. First we followed Alexander through his life, from beginning to end. We skipped, of course, the little things he did, jumping ahead days and weeks and years at a time. Then we’d miss him, or find that he’d moved in space. That would mean we’d have to jump back and forth, like the artillery firing bracket or ranging shots, until we found him again. Helped only occasionally by his published lives, we were astounded to realize how much distortion has crept into his life. I often wonder why legends arise about the famous. Certainly their lives are as startling or appalling as fiction. And unfortunately we had to hold closely to the accepted histories. If we hadn’t, every professor would have gone into his corner for a hearty sneer. We couldn’t take that chance. Not at first.

  After we knew approximately what had happened and where, we used our notes to go back to what had seemed a particularly photogenic section and work on that awhile. Eventually we had a fair idea of what we were actually going to film. Then we sat down and wrote an actual script to follow, making allowance for whatever shots we’d have to double in later. Mike used his machine as the projector, and I operated the Trucolor camera at a fixed focus, like taking moving pictures of a movie. As fast as we finished a reel it would go to Rochester for processing, instead of one of the Hollywood outfits that might have done it cheaper. Rochester is so used to horrible amateur stuff that I doubt if anyone ever looks at anything. When the reel was returned we’d run it ourselves to check our choice of scenes and color sense and so on.

  For example, we had to show the traditional quarrels with his father, Philip. Most of that we figured on doing with doubles, later. Olympias, his mother, and the fangless snakes she affected, didn’t need any doubling, as we used an angle and amount of distance that didn’t call for actual conversation. The scene where Alexander rode the bucking horse no one else could ride came out of some biographer’s head, but we thought it was so famous we couldn’t leave it out. We dubbed the closeups later, and the actual horseman was a young Scythian that hung around the royal stables for his keep. Roxanne was real enough, like the rest of the Persians’ wives that Alexander took over. Luckily most of them had enough poundage to look luscious. Philip and Parmenio and the rest of the characters were heavily bearded, which made easy the necessary doubling and dubbing-in the necessary speech. (If you ever saw them shave in those days, you’d know why whiskers were popular.)

  The most trouble we had with the interior shots. Smoky wicks in a bowl of lard, no matter how plentiful, are too dim even for fast film. Mike got around that by running the Trucolor camera at a single frame a second, with his machine paced accordingly. That accounts for the startling clarity and depth of focus we got from a lens well stopped down. We had all the time in the world to choose the best possible scenes and camera angles; the best actors
in the world, expensive camera booms, or repeated retakes under the most exacting director can’t compete with us. We had a lifetime from which to choose.

  Eventually we had on film about eighty per cent of what you saw in the finished picture. Roughly we spliced the reels together and sat there entranced at what we had actually done. Even more exciting, even more spectacular than we’d dared to hope, the lack of continuity and sound didn’t stop us from realizing that we’d done a beautiful job. We’d done all we could, and the worst was yet to come. So we sent for more champagne and told the blonde we had cause for celebration. She giggled.

  “What are you doing in there, anyway?” she asked. “Every salesman who comes to the door wants to know what you’re making.”

  I opened the first bottle. “Just tell them you don’t know.”

  “That’s just what I’ve been telling them. They think I’m awfully dumb.” We all laughed at the salesmen.

  Mike was thoughtful. “If we’re going to do this sort of thing very often, we ought to have some of these fancy hollow-stemmed glasses.”

  The blonde was pleased with that. “And we could keep them in my bottom drawer.” Her nose wrinkled prettily. “These bubbles—You know, this is the only time I’ve ever had champagne, except at a wedding, and then it was only one glass.”

  “Pour her another,” Mike suggested. “Mine’s empty, too.” I did. “What did you do with those bottles you took home last time?”

  A blush and a giggle. “My father wanted to open them, but I told him you said to save it for a special occasion.”

  By that time I had my feet on her desk. “This is the special occasion, then,” I invited. “Have another, Miss… what’s your first name, anyway? I hate being formal after working hours.”