Collected Short Fiction, page 555
Maybe the feeling had somehow resulted from the senseless discussion into which Frank Ironsmith had drawn him yesterday, about precognition. He hadn’t meant to argue; the project left him no time to squander, and his mind was too practical, besides, to enjoy any such aimless mathematical fantasies. All he had done was to question Ironsmith’s astonishing simplification of one difficult calculation in rhodomagnetic ballistics. The offhand explanation that Ironsmith had casually scrawled on a paper napkin at their table in the cafeteria mounted to a complete repudiation of all the orthodox theories of space and time. The equations looked impressive, but Forester, mistrusting the younger man’s effortless cleverness, had sputtered an incredulous protest.
“Your own experience will tell you I’m right,” the mathematician had murmured easily. “Time really works both ways, and I’m sure you often perceive the future yourself. Not consciously, I know; not in detail. But unconsciously, emotionally, you do. Trouble is apt to depress you before it happens, and you’re likely to feel happy before any good reason appears.”
Trying to forget about precognition, he looked across at the other twin bed, to find it empty. Ruth must be already gone to work at the business office. He sat up heavily, feeling a dull annoyance at her absence. She certainly didn’t need the salary, although he had to admit that she was an efficient office manager, and it was true the project left him little time for her.
Lifting from the empty bed, his eyes found the huge aluminum observatory dome framed in the west window. Silvered with the sunlight, it shone with a clean, functional beauty. Once it had been his life, but the sight of it merely depressed him now. For he had no time for nonessentials; he didn’t even know what work the staff astronomers were doing now with the big reflector.
He had been just nineteen, still an eager graduate student of astrophysics, the summer he first saw this naked basalt butte pointing out of the desert like a broad finger at the unsolved riddles beyond the sky, and knew that here, where the clean dry air made perfect seeing, he must build his own telescope.
Starmont had cost him many years: all the invincible spirit of his youth spent in begging grants from wealthy men, rekindling the courage of disheartened associates, conquering all the difficulties of making and moving and mounting the enormous mirror. He was in his thirties before it was finally done, hardened and sobered, yet still strong with the drive of science.
The defeats had come later, striking treacherously out of the ultimate unknown he was trying to explore. He had striven for truth, and it somehow always eluded him. Once the great reflector had showed him what he thought was the final fact, but the gold had changed as he tried to grasp it—into confusion and contradiction and the leaden reality of the project itself.
A faint clatter from the kitchen told him now that Ruth was still at home. Glad she hadn’t gone to work, he looked at her dark-haired head smiling sedately from the photograph standing on his chest of drawers, the one she had given him not long before their marriage—five years ago, that must be, or nearly six.
Starmont had been new then, and his tremendous vision still unshattered. It was trouble in the computing section that first brought Ruth Cleveland to the observatory. He had secured a grant of military funds to pay for the battery of electronic calculators and hire a staff to run them. The section was planned to do all the routine math for the research staff as well as for the military projects to be set up later, but it began with a persistent series of expensive errors.
Ruth had been the remarkably enchanting expert sent by the instrument firm to repair the machines. Briskly efficient, she tested the equipment and interviewed the staff—the chief computer and his four assistants and the graduate astronomer in charge. She even talked with Frank Ironsmith, who was not quite twenty then, only the office boy and janitor.
“The machines are perfect,” she reported to Forester. “Your whole trouble has evidently been in the human equation. What you need is a mathematician. My recommendation is to transfer the rest of your staff, and put Mr. Ironsmith in charge.”
“Ironsmith?” Forester remembered staring at her, his incredulous protest slowly melting into a shy approval of the fine, straight line of her. nose and the clear intelligence behind her dark eyes. “That fresh kid?” he muttered weakly. “He hasn’t a single degree.”
“I know. He’s a prospector’s son, and he didn’t have much schooling. But he reads, and he has a mind for math.” A persuasive smile warmed her lean loveliness. “Even Einstein, the mathematician back on the mother planet who first discovered atomic energy, was once just a patent office clerk. Frank told me so today.”
Forester had never suspected any unusual ability behind Ironsmith’s cheerful indolence, but the unsolved problems were piling up. The math section was as essential to his purpose as the telescope itself. Reluctantly, because Ruth would admit no choice, he agreed to try Ironsmith.
And the errors somehow ceased. As casually unhurried as when his chief tool had been a broom, that slender youth never seemed too busy to drink coffee in the cafeteria and elaborate his idle paradoxes to anybody with time enough to listen, but that mountain of undone work somehow melted away. All the preliminary problems were solved. When the Crater Supernova blazed out at last, a star of incredible promise, Forester was ready.
FORESTER had forgotten the telephone, in his wistful introspections, and now the sudden burr of it startled him unpleasantly. That uneasy expectation of disaster at the project came back to shake his thin hand as he picked up the receiver.
“Chief?” The troubled voice was Armstrong’s, just as he had feared. “Sorry to bother you, but something has come up that Mr. Ironsmith says you ought to know.”
“Well?” He gulped uneasily. “What is it?”
“Were you expecting any message by special courier?” That competent technician seemed oddly hesitant. “From anybody named White?”
“No.” He could breathe again. “Why?”
“Mr. Ironsmith just called about a child asking for you at the main gate. The guard didn’t let her in, because she had no proper identification, but Mr. Ironsmith talked to her. She claimed to have a confidential message from some Mr. White.”
“I don’t know any Mr. White.” For a moment he was merely grateful that this had been no Red Alert against space raiders from the Triplanet Powers, and then he asked, “Where’s this child?”
“Nobody knows.” Armstrong seemed annoyed. “That’s the funny part. When the guard didn’t let her in, she somehow disappeared. That’s what Mr. Ironsmith says you ought to know.”
“I don’t see why.” It hadn’t been a Red Alert, and that was all that mattered. “Probably she just went somewhere else.”
“Okay, Chief.” Armstrong appeared relieved at his unconcern. “I didn’t want to bother you about it, but Ironsmith thought you ought to know.”
And they hung up.
III
FORESTER yawned and stretched, feeling better. The ringing of the telephone was certainly no proof of any psychic intuition, because it was always ringing, every time he tried to snatch any rest. An unknown child asking for him at the gate was nothing to become alarmed about, anyhow, before the occurrence or after.
He could still hear Ruth doing something in the kitchen. Baking a cake, perhaps, for she still had periodic fits of domesticity when she stayed away from the office to clean house or cook. He glanced again at the demure vivacity of her face in that old photograph, feeling a bleak regret for the emptiness of their marriage.
Nobody was to blame. Ruth had tried desperately, and he thought he had done his best. All the trouble came from that remote star in the Crater, which had already exploded, actually, long before either one of them was born. If the speed of light had been a trifle slower, it occurred to him, he might have been a doting father by now, and Ruth a contented wife and mother.
Nursing that wistful reflection, he reached absently for his slippers where Ruth had set them for him under the edge of the bed, and shuffled into the bathroom. He paused a moment before the mirror there, trying to recover some impression of himself on their wedding day. He couldn’t have been quite so skinny then, or so bald, not quite such a frowning, anxious little brown-eyed gnome. Surely he had looked happier and healthier and more human then, or Ruth would have chosen Ironsmith.
That lost self of his had been a different man, he knew, still eagerly absorbed in the quest for final truth, still confident that it existed. His place was already secure in the comfortable aristocracy of science, and the ascending path of his career looked smooth ahead. He had meant to share his life fairly with Ruth, until the project claimed him.
The first cold rays of the new star, arriving two centuries old, cut short their honeymoon and changed everything. Very young and completely serious about the rites of life, for all her brisk skill with electronic calculators, Ruth had planned the trip. They were staying at the small West Coast town where she was born, and that evening they had driven out to an abandoned lighthouse and carried their picnic basket down the cliffs to a narrow scrap of beach beneath.
“That’s the old Dragonrock Light.” They were sprawled on their blanket in the dusk, her dark head pillowed on his shoulder, and she was happily introducing him to her fondest childhood recollections. “Grandfather used to keep it, and sometimes I came down to visit—”
He saw a faint cold light on the cliffs, and turned his head and found the star. The hard violet splendor of it took his breath and brought him upright. His memory of that moment was always poignant with the cold sting and the salt taste of spray from the breakers, and the sharp smoke of damp driftwood smoldering, and Ruth’s perfume—a heavy scent called Sweet Delirium. He could still see the hard blue glitter of the star’s thin light, in her first tears.
Because she cried. She was no astronomer. She knew how to set up and operate an electronic integrator, but the Crater Supernova was just a point of light to her. She wanted to show Forester these places hallowed in her memories of childhood, and it hurt her that some silly star should interest him more than the depth of her young love.
“But look, darling!” Checking its position with a little pocket glass, he tried to tell her what a supernova meant. “I know that star from its position. Normally it’s of the eleventh magnitude—too faint to see without a powerful telescope. Now it must be about minus nine. Twenty magnitudes of change! Which means it’s a hundred million times brighter than it was a few days ago. That’s a supernova—right here in our home galaxy, just two hundred light-years away! A chance like this won’t come again, not in a thousand years!”
The red glow of their dying fire touched warm glints in Ruth’s hair, but the thin light of the star was cold on her hurt white face, and it made hard blue diamonds of her tears.
“Please, darling!” He gestured eagerly at that stabbing violet point, and saw the sharp black shadow of his arm across her face. Its stellar magnitude, he thought, must be still increasing. “I knew that star was ripe for this,” he told her breathlessly. “From its spectrum. I’ve been hoping this would happen in my lifetime. The computing section has finished the preliminary work, and I’ve special equipment ready to study it. It may tell us—everything! Please, darling—”
She yielded then, as gracefully as she could, to his more urgent passion. They left their basket and blanket forgotten on the beach, and drove hard to reach Starmont before the star had set.
Forester’s flash of intuition, when presently it came, was as dazzling to him as the supernova’s light. It illuminated the cause of that stellar engine’s wreck, and revealed a new geometry of the universe, and showed him a deeper meaning even in the familiar pattern of the periodic table of the elements.
In his first hot fever of perception, he thought he had seen even more. He thought he had found his own prima materia—the ultimate understanding of the fundamental stuff of nature that science had sought since science was born. All the laws of the universe, he believed at first, could be derived from his basic equation linking the rhodomagnetic and electromagnetic fields.
Wistfully, now, he recalled the trembling emotion which had swept him out of the observatory, coatless and hatless in the blue chill of a windy winter dawn, to hammer and shout outside the two rooms where Ironsmith lived at the computing section—the vacated offices of the discharged staff members. That sleepy youth appeared at last, and Forester thrust the hasty calculations at him.
Drunk with his imagined triumph, Forester thought the expansions and transformations of that equation would answer every question men could ask, about the beginning and the nature and the fate of all things, about the limits of space and the mechanics of time and the meaning of life. He thought he had found the long-hidden cornerstone of all the universe.
“A rush job,” he barked impatiently. “I want you to check all this work, right away—particularly this derivation for rho.” Then Ironsmith’s yawning astonishment made him aware of the time, and he muttered apologetically, “Sorry to wake you.”
“Never mind that,” the young man told him cheerfully. “I was running the machines until an hour ago, anyhow, playing around with a new tensor of my own. Things like this aren’t really work to me, sir.”
Burning with impatience, Forester watched him glance indolently through the pages of hurried symbols. Ironsmith’s pink face frowned suddenly. Clucking with his tongue, he shook his sandy head. Still saying nothing, he turned with an infuriating deliberation to his keyboards and began deftly punching out paper tapes, setting up the problems in patterns of perforations the machines could read.
Too restless to wait on the murmuring, unconcerned machines, Forester went outside again, to stalk the windy lawns of Starmont like a planet-bound god. Watching the dawn turn golden on the desert, he convinced himself that his groping mind had grasped a mightier power than abided in the rising sun. For an hour he was great. Then Ironsmith came pedaling after him down a gravel walk, blinking sleepily and lazily chewing gum, to shatter all the splendor of that vision.
“I found a little error, sir.” Grinning with a cheery friendliness, the clerk seemed unaware of the staggering blow his words inflicted. “Can’t you see it, right here? Your symbol rho is irrelevant. It has no obtainable value, though everything else is correct.”
Forester tried not to show how much that hurt him. Thanking the lean youth on the bicycle, he stumbled dazedly back to his desk and vainly rechecked his work. Ironsmith was right. Rho really canceled out—the ultimate treasure of the universe, slipping away through his clutching fingers. The elusive prima materia had evaded him again.
Like the alchemists of the first world, however, whose failures had founded chemistry and made a basis for the entire Science of electromagnetics, he had uncovered new knowledge. For all the finality of that crushing blunder, he had learned enough to change history and wreck his stomach and slowly blight his marriage.
He had discovered rhodomagnetics, a vast new field of physical knowledge, lying beside the old. He had failed, with the loss of that irrelevant symbol, to join it to electromagnetics, but his corrected equation still described an unsuspected energy-spectrum.
The balanced internal forces of every atom, as he since had proved, included components of both kinds of energy, even though any statement of their mutual equivalence still eluded him. And the elements of the second triad of the periodic table proved to be a key to the use of his new spectrum, a kind of imperfect philosophers’ stone, as iron and nickel and cobalt had always been to the sister energies of the electromagnetic spectrum. With rhodium and ruthenium and palladium, he unlocked the terrifying wonders of rhodomagnetics.
Forester was still in the bathroom, splashing cold water on his lean-drawn face to arouse himself from such moody introspections, when the telephone buzzed again behind him. Shuffling uneasily back to his bedside to answer, he heard the quiet voice of Frank Ironsmith, less casual than usual.
“Have you heard about Jane Carter—that little girl who came to see you?”
“Yes.” He was beginning to want his coffee, and he had no time for trivialities. “So what?”
“Do you know where she went?”
“How could I know?” He had heard enough about the child. “And what does it matter?”
“I imagine it might matter a good deal, sir.” The mild voice of Ironsmith sounded more than usually insistent. “Maybe it’s none of my business. Maybe your security measures are already adequate. But I really think you ought to find out where she went.”
“Where do you think she went?”
“I don’t know.” Ironsmith ignored his increasing annoyance. “She ran down around a turn of the road out of sight, and when I followed on my cycle she was gone. That’s why I thought you’d be interested.”
“Really, I don’t think you need to worry—” He checked himself, restraining his sarcastic intent. Ironsmith was intelligent, after all; the child’s disappearance might turn out to be really important, though he didn’t see how. “Thanks for calling,” he finished awkwardly. “I’ll see about it when I get to the office.”
IV
RUTH was standing in the hall door when he turned from the telephone. Not yet dressed for the office, she was slim and youthful in a long blue robe he hadn’t seen before. Her restless, gaunt face was already made up, her lips invitingly crimson and her dark hair brushed loosely back and shining. She was trying hard, he saw, to look attractive to him.
“Darling, aren’t you ever coming to breakfast?” She had studied business diction with her other profession courses, and her throaty voice still had a careful limpid perfection. “I put on your eggs the first time the phone rang, and now they’re getting cold.”
“I haven’t time to eat.” He kissed her lifted lips, scarcely interrupting himself. “All I want is a cup of coffee.” Seeing the protest on her face, he added defensively, “I’ll try to get something later at the cafeteria.”
