Far Out

by Damon Knight

  Holding the front of the machine, Fish touched another shallow depression and, without really meaning to, he pushed upward. The whole front of the machine fell off, and the other side with it.

  He sprawled backward frantically to get out of the way, but the top of the machine didn’t fall. It stayed there, rock-steady, although there was nothing holding it up but the back panel.

  And underneath, nothing. No framework, just the thick darkness, with the little stars going slowly around as the machine drew.

  Fish hastily picked up the front and side panels and put them back. They slid easily and perfectly into place, and fitted so closely that he couldn’t see any line between them.

  After that, he put the crate back together and never tried to look inside the machine again.

  Dave hurried around the end of the counter to him. “Doc! Where have you been?” He was drying his hands on his apron and grinning nervously, with a sort of pole-axed expression around his eyes. A customer around the other side of the counter looked up, then went on chewing with his mouth open.

  “Well, I had quite a lot of things to do,” Fish began automatically. Then he began to feel excited. “Say! You don’t mean—”

  Dave fished a long white envelope out of his back pocket. “Came yesterday! Look here!” The envelope crackled in his nervous fingers. He pulled out a folded letter, and Fish seized it. Dave looked over his shoulder, breathing heavily, as he read.

  DEAR MR. WILMINGTON:

  It is my very great pleasure to inform you that your design has been awarded the First Prize in the San Gabriel Civic Centre Mural Competition. In the opinion of the judges, the classic simplicity of your entry, together with its technical mastery, made it far superior to anything else submitted.

  Enclosed please find our check for three thousand dollars ($3,000.00)…

  “Where?” cried Fish, looking up.

  “Right here,” said Dave, with a grin that looked painful.

  He held up a salmon-coloured strip of paper. The red-printed lettering read: “EXACTLY 3,000.00 DOLLARS*****.”

  Fish hugged Dave, who hugged him back, and then looked at the letter again…

  … the remainder to be paid when the design is executed to the satisfaction of the Committee…

  “Executed?” said Fish, with a sinking feeling. “What’s that mean? Dave, what’s he mean here, where he says—”

  “When he paints the mural on the wall. Gee, Doc, I just can’t tell you—” “

  “Who?”

  “Your nephew. George Wilmington. See, when he paints the mural—”

  “Oh,” said Fish. “Oh. Well, you see, Dave, the fact is—”

  Dave’s long face grew solemn. “Oh, gosh, I never thought. You mean he’s not well enough to draw yet?”

  Fish shook his head mournfully. “No,sir. It’s a terrible shame, Dave, but—” He folded the cheque absently and slipped it into his pocket.

  “I thought you sald, I mean, it wasn’t serious or anything…”

  Fish continued to shake his head. “Turned out, there was more to it than they thought. It looks like now, they just don’t know when he’ll ever be able to draw again.”

  “Oh, Doc,” said Dave, stricken.

  “That’s the way it is. These things—the doctors don’t know as much about ’em as they’d like you to think, Dave.” Fish went on staring fiercely at the letter, barely listening to the sound of his own voice. To be paid when the design is executed…

  “Look here,” he said, interrupting Dave’s murmurs of commiseration. “It don’t say who has to execute it, now does it? Notice right there? Says ‘when the design is executed’.”

  “How about a glassa water over here?” called the customer.

  “Coming right up, sir. Look, Doc, I think you got an idea.”

  He retired sidewise toward the counter, still talking. “You know, anybody could scale that up and do the actual painting—any competent artist, I mean. Gee, I’d do it myself, I mean if George didn’t care. And if it was all right with the committee, why, you know, it would be an opportunity for me.” He save the customer his water, mopped the counter blindly and came back.

  Fish leaned over the counter, beard in hand, frowning. “Wilmington” was just a name. Dave could take the part, just as well as not, and it would be a lot better in one way, because then Fish himself could stay out of sight. But, whoops, if they did that, then Dave would be Wilmington, and he might want to take off on his own…

  “Well, Dave,” he said, “are you a good artist?”

  Dave looked embarrassed. “Gee, Doc, you put me on the spot, but, well, anyway, they liked how I rendered the design, didn’t they? See, I used a colour scheme of deep aqua and a kind of buff, with accents of rose, you know, to make it cheerful? And, gee, if I did it on the paper, I could do it on a wall.”

  “Sold!” said Fish heartily, and clapped Dave on the shoulder. “George don’t know it yet, but he just got himself an assistant!”

  A slim female figure popped up at him suddenly from beside a potted palm. “Mr. Wilmington? If I could just have a moment…”

  Fish paused, one hand going to his chin in the old gesture, although he had shaved off the beard over a year ago. He felt exposed without it, and his features tended to twitch when he was startled like this. “Why, yes, uh, miss…”

  “My name is Norma Johnson. You don’t know me, but I have some drawings here…”

  She was carrying a big black portfolio fastened with tapes.

  Fish sat down beside her and looked at the drawings. They looked all right to him, but skimpy, like the kind of thing he turned out mostly himself. What he liked was pictures with some meat to them, like Norman Rockwell, but the one time he had set the machine to draw something like that, his agent—the first one, Connolly, that crook!—had told him there was no market for “genre stuff”.

  The girl’s fingers were trembling. She was very neat and pale, with black hair and big expressive eyes. She turned over the last drawing. “Are they any good?” she asked.

  “Well, now, there’s a good deal of spirit there,” said Fish comfortably. ” And a very fine sense of design.”

  “Could I ever be successful at it?”

  “Well…”

  “See, the thing is,” she said rapidly, “my Aunt Marie wants me to stay here in Santa Monica and come out next season. But I don’t want to. So she agreed, if you said I had real talent, that she would send me abroad to study. But if you didn’t, I’d give up.”

  Fish looked at her intently. Her fingernails were short but looked cared for. She was wearing a simple white blouse and a little blue jacket and skirt; there was a whiff of woodsy perfume. Fish smelled money.

  He said, “Well, my dear, let me put it this way. Now you could go to Europe and spend a lot of money—ten thousand, twenty thousand dollars.” She watched him without blinking. “Fifty thousand,” said Fish delicately. “But what would be the point of it? Those fellows over there don’t know as much as they’d like you to think.”

  She fumbled blindly for her purse and gloves. “I see.” She started to getup.

  Fish put a pudgy hand on her arm. “Now what I would suggest,” he said, “why don’t you come and study with me for a year instead?”

  Her pale face lengthened. “Oh, Mr. Wilmington, would you?”

  “Well, anybody with as much talent as these drawings—” Fish patted the portfolio on her knee—“why, we have to do something, because—”

  She stood up excitedly. “Will you come tell that to Aunt Marie?”

  Fish smoothed down the front of his pink shirt. “Why, gladly, my dear, gladly.”

  “She’s right here in the lounge.”

  Fish followed her and met Aunt Marie, who was a handsome woman of about fifty, plump but beautifully tailored in brown linen. They agreed that Norma would take a studio near Mr. Wilmington’s home in Santa Monica, and that Mr.

  Wilmington would look in several times a week and give her of
his great experience, in return for ten thousand dollars per annum. It was, as Fish pointed out to them, less than half the amount he usually got now for major commissions; but, never mind, every little bit helped. Murals, institutional advertising, textile designs, private sales to collectors—my God, how it was rolling in!

  The only thing that really worried him was the machine itself. He kept it now in a locked inner room of the house he was renting—twenty rooms, furnished, terrific view of the Pacific Ocean, lots of room for parties—and up to a point he could work it like a kiddy car. One time or another, he had figured out and memorized every one of the dozens of labelled buttons on the “Bank” machines, and just by combining the right ones, he could get any kind of a drawing he wanted. For instance, that commission for stained glass for a church—“Religion”, “People”, “Palestine”, “Ancient”, and there you were.

  The trouble was, the machine wouldn’t draw the same thing twice in a row. On that church window job, he got one picture of Christ and then couldn’t get another, no matter how long he tried, so he had to fill out with saints and martyrs. The church put up a beef, too. Then sometimes at night, for his own amusement, he used to put the machine through its p,aces—for instance, set it for “Historical figures” and “Romantisk” , which seemed to be the machine’s name for the present era, and then push the button marked “Overdriva”, and watch the famous faces come out with big cartoony noses, and teeth like picket fences.

  Or he would set it for “Love”, and then various interesting times and places—ancient Rome gave him some spicy ones, and Samoa was even better.

  But every time he did this, the machine turned out fewer drawings; and finally it wouldn’t do any more like that at all.

  Was there some kind of a censor built into the thing? Did it disapprove of him?

  He kept thinking of the funny way those men in purple uniforms had delivered the thing. They had the right address, but the wrong… time? Whatever it was, he knew the machine wasn’t intended for him. But who was it meant for? What was a “dvich”?

  There were eight pieces—six banks, the master machine, and one which he had discovered would enlarge any detail of a drawing to almost full size. He could handle all that. He could manage the controls that governed the complexity or simplicity of a drawing, gave it more or less depth, changed its style and mood. The only buttons he wasn’t sure of were the three red ones marked “Utplåna”, “Torka”, and” Avslå”. None of them seemed to do anything. He had tried all three both ways, and they didn’t seem to make any difference. In the end he left them the way they had been: “Torka” down, the other two up, for lack of any better idea. But big and red like that, they must be important.

  He found them mentioned in the booklet, too: “Utplåna en teckning, press knappen ‘Utplåna’. Avlägsna ett mänster från en bank efter användning, press knappen ‘Torka’. Avslå en teckning innan slutsatsen, press knappen ‘Avslå’.”

  Press knappen, press knappen, that must be “push button”. But when? And that business about “monster”, that made him a little nervous. He had been pretty lucky so far, figuring out how to work the whole machine without any accidents. Suppose there was still something that could go wrong—suppose—the booklet was a warning?

  He prowled restlessly around the empty house—empty, and untidy, because he wouldn’t have any servants in the place. You never knew who was going to spy on you. A woman came in two days a week to clean the place up—all but the locked room—and once in a while he’d bring a couple of girls up for a party, but he always threw them out the next morning. He was busy, all right, seeing a lot of people, travelling around, but he’d had to drop all his old friends when he decided to become Wilmington, and he didn’t dare make any new ones for fear of giving himself away. Besides, everybody was out for something. The fact was, dammit, he wasn’t happy. What the hell good was all the money he was making, all the things he’d bought, if they didn’t make him happy? Anyhow, pretty soon now that oil stock would start paying off—the salesman had assured him that the drillers were down within a few hundred feet of oil right now—and then he’d be a millionaire; he could retire—move to Florida or some place.

  He paused in front of his desk in the library. The booklet was still there, lying open. The thing was, even suppose that 48 was some language anybody had ever heard of, who would he dare show it to? Who could he trust?

  An idea occurred to him, and he leaned over, staring at the yellow pages with their incomprehensible text. After all, he could already figure out some of the words; he didn’t have to show anybody the whole book, or even a whole sentence… Then there was that information business that came with his de luxe set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—he ought to have it right here somewhere. Fish hunted in the file drawers and finally came up with a folder and a sheet of gummed yellow stamps.

  Grunting, he sat down at the desk, and after much cigar-chewing, scribbling and crossing out, he typed the following:

  DEAR SIRS

  Kindly inform me as to what language the enclosed words are, and also what they mean. Kindly give this matter your best attention, as I am in a hurry.

  On a separate sheet he wrote all the doubtful words from the paragraph about the red buttons, cannily mixing them up so no one could guess what order they came in. Feeling a little foolish, he carefully drew in all the tiny circles and dots. Then he addressed an envelope, stuck one of the yellow stamps to his letter, and mailed the thing off before he could regret it.

  “My rhetorical question is,” said Fish craftily to the young physicist, shouting over the hum of cocktail-party conversation, “purely in interest of science, could you make a machine that would draw?” He beamed over his glasses at the horn-rimmed blur of the young man’s face. He had had three martinis, and whew! he was floating. But fully in command of his senses, of course.

  “Well, draw what? If you mean charts and graphs, sure, or something like a pantograph, to enlarge—”

  “No, no. Draw beau’ful pictures.” The last word sprayed a little. Fish rocked forward and back again. “Purely rhetorical question.” He put his glass down with precision on a passing tray and took another one, which spilled icy liquid down his wrist. He gulped to save it.

  “Oh. Well, in that case, no. I would say not. I assume you mean it would originate the drawings, not just put out what was programmed into it. Well, that would mean, in the first place, you’d have to have an incredibly big memory bank. Say if you wanted the machine to draw a horse, it would have to know what a horse looks like from every angle and in every position. Then it would have to select the best one out of say ten or twenty billion—and then draw it in proportion with whatever else is in the drawing, and so on. Then, for God’s sake, if you wanted beauty, too, I suppose it would have to consider the relation of every part to every other part, on some kind of aesthetic principle. I wouldn’t know how to go about it.”

  Fish, thick-fingered, probed for his olive. “Say it’s impossible, hey?” he asked.

  “Well, with present techniques, anyhow. I guess we’ll be staying out of the art business for another century or two.” The blur smiled and lifted its highball glass.

  “Ah,” said Fish, putting a hand on the young man’s lapel to support himself and keep the other from moving out of the corner. “Now, suppose you had a machine like that. Now, suppose that machine kept forgetting things. What would be the reason for that?”

  “Forgetting things?”

  “What I said.” With a disastrous sense that he was talking too much. Fish was about to go on, but a sudden hand on his arm forestalled him. It was one of the bright young men—beautiful suit, beautiful teeth, beautiful handkerchief in pocket. “Mr. Wilmington, I just wanted to say, what an absolutely marvellous piece of work that new mural is. One enormous foot. I don’t know what the significance is, but the draftsmanship is marvellous. We must get you on Five Seven some afternoon and have you explain it.”

  “Never go on television,�
� said Fish, frowning. He had been fending off invitations like this one for almost a year.

  “Oh, too bad. Nice to have met you. Oh, by the way, somebody asked me to tell you there’s a phone call for you over there.” He waved his arm and drifted away.

  Fish excused himself and set an adventurous course across the room. The phone was lying on one of the side tables giving him a black look. He picked it up jauntily. “Hello-o.”

  “Dr. Fish?”

  Fish’s heart began to knock. He put the martini glass down.

  “Who’s that?” he demanded blankly.

  “This is Dave Kinney, Doc.”

  Fish felt a wave of relief. “Oh, Dave. I thought you were in Boston. Or, I suppose you are, but the connection—”

  “I’m right here in Santa Monica. Look, Doc, something’s come up that—”

  “What? what’re you doing here? Now I hope you haven’t quit school, because—”

  “This is summer vacation, Doc. Look, the fact is, I’m here in Norma Johnson’s studio.”

  Fish stood with the sweaty black phone in his hand and said nothing. Silence hummed in the wires.

  “Doc? Mrs. Prentice is here too. We’ve been kind of talking things over, and we think you ought to come over and explain a few things.”

  Fish swallowed, with difficulty.

  “Doc, you hear me? I think you ought to come over. They’re talking about calling the police, but I wanted to give you a chance first, so—”

  “I’ll be right over,” said Fish hoarsely. He hung up the phone and stood bemused, with his hands to his flushed forehead. Oh, Lord, three—no, four—martinis and this had to happen! He felt dizzy. Everybody seemed to be standing at a slight angle on the Kelly-green carpet, all the bright young men in glossy summer jackets and the pastel women m cocktail dresses with bright, phony smiles on their faces. What did they care if all he could get out of the machine any more was parts of bodies? His last one a big clenched fist, and now a foot, and don’t you think the committee didn’t beef. They beefed plenty but they had to take it, because they had already announced the commission. Now this morning his agent had called up. Some church group in Indiana, they wanted sample sketches. So it was all going down the drain while he watched, and now this. Dave, good God, you’d think at least he would stay stuck off in Boston, and how the hell did he ever run into Norma?