Collected Short Fiction, page 584
She stood silent for a moment, looking pale and miserable.
“Something horrible!” she went on with a rush. “Eon’s mother somehow got out of her wheel chair and up into his room. She found a painting of his, that I had posed for. It upset her terribly. She tore the canvas to shreds. And then she must have had some kind of stroke. She was lying moaning on the floor when Eon came in. She seems terribly jealous of me now, and Eon says we’ll just have to wait till she gets over it.”
“You’re crazy, if you wait for Eon.” I had forgotten Mr. Baxter’s commandment. “I do love you, Carol. I want you to be happy. But I don’t think you could be, with him. He’s too much like his parents. They aren’t—well, normal. They can’t take the world as it is. They’re all living back in the past. Or somewhere else—”
I broke off, wondering suddenly about that prehistoric landscape where Eon had painted Carol. If he refused so stubbornly to accept the hard facts of science, where had he got his dinosaurs?
“Eon is different from other people,” Carol agreed quietly. “Because he’s a genius. A real genius! He’ll do something tremendous, if he ever finds himself—though maybe not in painting or literature. But he hasn’t found himself yet. He’s terribly unhappy. He needs me, Charley. He says he needs me desperately. I’m sure I love him—though he sometimes seems so strange!”
Until then, I hadn’t realized how deeply I had let my emotions get involved with Carol and her peculiar genius. I didn’t sleep that night. By morning, I had decided to leave Picton and look for other interests.
I found them.
When school was out, I said good-by to Carol as casually as I could, and went back to the university to finish my graduate work. One of my professors was the great Dr. Zerlinger. He introduced me to the mystery and drama of research. He let me help with some of his own exciting work in atomic fusion, and the summer after I received my own doctorate, he took me with him to the hush-hush conference where Project Lightyear was launched.
The secret invitations had come from the White House, and our host was Dr. Milford Draven, the distinguished physicist who was then the President’s special assistant in matters involving science. We met at a resort hotel in Florida, behind a screen of plainclothes guards. General “Buster” Barlow and his staff; a team of State Department experts; a few picked industrial executives; two dozen of the top American scientists.
Nobody seemed to know why we were there, and the rumors seemed fantastic then. General Barlow was a restless little bundle of steel and dynamite. He rechecked our identifications, pinned badges on us, and indoctrinated us in the military security regulations, with a cold-eyed efficiency that quenched all nonsense. When we were all assembled in the hotel ballroom, Dr. Draven rose to speak.
“Perhaps you have been amused at this cloak-and-dagger atmosphere.”
He was a frail old man leaning on a cane, and it was hard where I was seated to catch his halting words, “You won’t be amused, when you see why it’s necessary. The facts are simple—and frightening. Our country is in danger. Your job is to save it.”
He paused to mop at his haggard face—the room was not air conditioned, and the summer heat was oppressive.
“The President regrets that he is unable to be here himself,” Draven went on. “His message to you is that he is placing the safety of the nation in your hands. Now we shall begin our consideration of this very grave crisis, with reports from the departments of State and Defense.”
A whole panel of experts briefed us. An intelligence officer told us that a long series of trans-oceanic rockets, carrying atomic war heads, had been tested in Siberia—upon inhabited towns. The puppets of the Kremlin were pushing forward everywhere. The cold war was thawing fast.
With a hot war in prospect, General Barlow informed us, our own weapons were sadly inadequate. We had nothing fast enough to intercept those atomic rockets. A strong offense was the only possible defense, but even there we were dangerously unguarded.
“We do have adequate stockpiles of nuclear weapons in all types,” the general said, “Unfortunately, as things stand now, we can’t deliver them. Our aircraft can be intercepted. Even our newest rocket missiles lack the necessary range. As things stand today, we are helpless in the face of the enemy.”
Buster Barlow and his officers sat down. Dr. Draven limped back to the platform and cleared his ancient throat.
“That’s our problem, gentlemen,” his old voice quavered. “As scientists, you must already see what answer we must find. We must have atomic power to deliver our own atomic missiles and to intercept the enemy’s—”
“We have atomic power,” somebody put in.
Draven shook his cadaverous head.
“Unfortunately, our crude atomic heat engines, designed to run aircraft and surface craft and submarines, have all turned out to be short steps in the wrong direction. They all waste atomic energy to heat air jets or to generate steam. It must be applied directly.”
He gestured feebly to silence a mutter of protest.
“You have been called together as a scientific team, working directly under the President in this grave national crisis, to design and develop a true nucleonic power plant.”
“Impossible!”
Half a dozen atomic scientists and rocket engineers were on their feet, clamoring to say why true atomic rockets could never be built. The best possible rocket motors burned out fast enough in the feeble heat of ordinary chemical fuels. No conceivable motor could contain and control nuclear fuels, reacting at a hundred million degrees.
“You might as well ask us to build a ship out of water or a gun out of gunpowder.” Dr. Zerlinger summed up the arguments, wryly. “The known principles of science state that it can’t be done.”
“It must be done,” General Barlow answered with a bleak authority, as if he were ordering us to storm some enemy hill. “If you can’t do it with any known principles of science, then you’ll have to invent some new ones.”
I suppose, in a way of speaking, that is precisely what we did. The conference had dragged on for days. Every hopeful suggestion had been promptly demolished, until one dreary morning, after another sleepless night, when I was sitting with Dr. Zerlinger in the guarded dining room. We were both groggy with fatigue and nicotine, and I was saying that we ought to give it up and turn in.
“Not yet, Charley. Zerlinger pushed the empty coffee cups and full ashtrays aside impatiently, as if he meant to design a space ship on the stained tablecloth. “You’ve got a brain. That’s why I brought you down here. Use it. Forget all our false starts. Look back at the basic problem. How can we make reacting nuclei push a vehicle?”
“Maybe we can do it with magnets.”
I claim no credit for that automatic response. I wasn’t really thinking, but only wondering vaguely how to get away from Zerlinger, and whether a shower would be worth the effort before I went to bed. But an unexpected interest flickered in his tired eyes.
“How?”
I turned the idea over to see what had caught his attention.
“Take the reaction of hydrogen and lithium.” I spoke almost at random. “The two nuclei fuse to make two high-speed alpha particles. Magnetic fields deflect alpha particles. With the right arrangement of strong enough magnets, we could channel them into an atomic jet that would propel a ship.”
“Good enough.” He leaned restlessly across the table. “Other people have thought of that. But how are you going to make the hydrogen and lithium react in the first place—without a uranium bomb to touch them off?”
“We might do it with the same magnetic field.” I was still too dull with weariness to think of all the inevitable objections to what I was proposing. “We’ll ionize the fuel atoms. Make ’em collide at reaction velocities.”
“Won’t work.” Zerlinger scowled across the cluttered table. “The cross sections are too small.”
“Then we’ll magnify the cross sections,” I said. “With a stronger magnetic field.”
“How is that possible?” His glazed eyes blinked uncertainly. “No relationship has been established, between nuclear cross section and magnetic field intensity.”
“Because nobody has tried a strong enough field.” I was suddenly wide awake, aroused by a flood of faith in my own idea. “That means the effect must be close to zero, with ordinary fields—but it ought to vary with the cube of the field intensity. Here, I can write the equations for that.”
I jotted the symbols on a paper napkin. Zerlinger peered at them owlishly. A spark of conviction lit and brightened in his hollowed eyes.
“You’ve got it, Charlie!” He stood up drunkenly, folding the napkin with quivering fingers. “I’ll take this to Draven. If you’re so worn out, you can go on to bed.”
I went to bed. Before I woke, that steamy afternoon, Zerlinger had converted the skeptics. Nuclear physicists had begun to recall laboratory effects that tended to prove the Guilborn equations. The conference was already planning the details of Project Lightyear.
Within a few weeks we were in New Mexico, staking out the sites for our shops and testing grounds on a high, bare table-mountain. Barbed wire went up to protect our secrets. Construction men and engineers swarmed into the astonished little town of Valdes, under the mesa.
Carol’s letter came to me there, addressed in care of General Engineering, the dummy corporation we had set up to conceal the project. I thought I had forgotten her, yet my breath caught when I recognized her delicate script. She wrote:
Dear Charley:
I have been pressing Mrs. Standefer, your old landlady here, for all bits of news she gets about you. She gave me your new address, and I hope you won’t be too much surprised to hear from me.
You may be interested to know that Eon Hunter and I never got married, after all. Since his father’s unexpected death last year—from a heart attack, as Mrs. Standefer may have written you—Eon is left to take care of his mother. With her feeling the way she does toward me, and her health so bad too, Eon decided that our marriage couldn’t possibly work out. We’ve broken off the engagement—this time, for keeps!
Now I want to get away from Picton. I’m just finishing a business course, and I’m wondering if you couldn’t recommend me for a secretarial position—anywhere but here! I can take dictation and type 80 words a minute.
Yours hopefully,
Carol
PS:
I often think of you, and I felt very happy when Mrs. Standefer told me about your new position with General Engineering. It sounds important!
Perhaps I should have recalled how unaccountably she and Eon had sabotaged that experiment in my general science class, because Project Lightyear was still nothing more than a billion-dollar experiment in a newer field of physics—and already giving us trouble enough.
But I didn’t think of that.
I couldn’t help wanting to see Carol again, and it was easy enough to get her a job on the project. My heart began to thump when I saw her getting off the plane—the mischievous schoolgirl had bloomed into something far more exciting. There was no Mr. Baxter to lift an eyebrow when he found us together on the dusty streets of Valdes. I saw her as often as I could escape my job, even though she warned me candidly that she still had a soft spot for Eon.
“I’m sorry, Charley.” We had parked on the rim of the mesa, outside the barbed wire, and she sat for a moment staring wistfully out across the brown desert at the ragged blue mountains eighty miles away. “I know Eon’s hopeless. A born misfit. But he’s hard to forget.”
“Is he worth remembering?”
“He is.” Tears filled her eyes. “He really is!”
When we got back to her apartment, she had me come in to see her scrapbook of Eon’s poems. I leafed through them while she was in the kitchenette mixing us a drink. Most of them were manuscript copies. A few had been clipped from minor magazines. I didn’t bother to head any of them—I don’t care for most verse, and I was prepared to dislike these efforts in particular. I saw that they were signed EON—all in capitals, an arty-seeming touch that annoyed me. I closed the book with relief when Carol brought the drink.
“Do read them,” she begged. “They’ll help you understand how I feel about him. He doesn’t fit into the world, but he never let it crush him—that’s the spirit you have to admire. In his own way, he has been creating his own new worlds. Worlds where beauty and splendor and courage really belong!”
Reluctantly I started reading something that turned out to be a love lyric addressed to Carol herself. It had a fire and feeling that stabbed me with a savage jealousy. I said as calmly as I could that it was very pretty, and gave the book to Carol. She opened it again, to read a few other passages aloud. Though I was not a very willing listener, her tender voice gave the words an unearthly beauty that somehow recalled Eon’s strange painting of her and that prehistoric reptile.
“Isn’t he magnificent?” she whispered eagerly. “Tragic of course. But still magnificent! He has taken the whole world for his enemy, but he never surrenders. Even when he feels trapped and imprisoned, he’s always in rebellion.”
“I guess he does have some ability,” I muttered grudgingly. “But. it’s pretty hard to make a living out of writing, I’m told. Most of these poems weren’t even published.”
“That’s the pity of it.” She closed the book, with a sigh, “Eon says the modern world isn’t geared for poetry. Only for mass production and mass destruction. He says poets and artists will soon be extinct, like the old dinosaurs. Unless things change.”
I wasn’t expecting any change, but Eon himself was far from extinct. I was fighting him for Carol, with all the time I could take from the project, but even in Picton he remained a formidable rival. When he came to Valdes, I thought that I had lost her again.
The project was consuming all my exertions. We were lagging behind schedule. Our specifications called for new magnetic alloys and new superconductors that always seemed impossible until the bad news in our secret intelligence reports forced us to invent them.
That autumn Sunday, however, Dr. Zerlinger had let me off. Carol and I drove to the mountains and ate our picnic lunch on a granite crag high above the slopes of golden aspens. For a few light-hearted hours, I forgot the danger of war and the shadow of Eon. But he was waiting for Carol when we got back, sitting asleep in the little patio outside her apartment.
His gaunt face was dark with an untidy stubble of beard, and his grimy clothing looked as if he had ridden the freight trains all the way from Picton. Probably he had. He awoke when he heard us and stood up stiffly, grinning at Carol.
“Eon!” She ran to meet him with a breathless joy that hurt me like a knife. “Darling! I’d no idea—Is anything wrong?”
“Mother died two weeks ago,” he told her. “I suppose I was pretty badly broken up at first. I had to get away from Picton.” He looked ruefully down at himself. “I know I shouldn’t have come out here in this shape. But I’m—well, broke. There was nowhere else.”
Though I wasn’t quite delighted to see him, I tried to be civil. I took him to my room for a drink and a bath, and outfitted him with clean underwear and an old suit of mine, while Carol cooked supper for him.
She called me later that night and asked me to get him a job. That took some doing. Our table of organization at the project didn’t call for poets—or even for common laborers, now that the construction work was done. Finally I got him on as a janitor in the spaceframe shop.
He had not been cleared for the guarded and restricted areas where we were at work on the experimental nucleonic motor, but the day he saw the half-finished hull of the Light-year lying in the cradle, he came up to me as I left the gate.
“Wait, Guilborn!” He was flushed and out of breath with an excitement that seemed somehow defiant. “I want to talk to you. Isn’t this a spaceship you’re building?”
“You’ve been told about security,” I warned him rather curtly. “If you start asking too many questions—or talking too much about anything you may happen to see—you’ll soon find yourself in serious trouble.”
“I’m not a spy!” His lean face darkened. “But any fool could see you’re working on an interplanetary ship.” He caught anxiously at my arm. “What I want is a place aboard.”
That startled me. “Why?”
“Because I despise this world we’re trapped in.” His low voice trembled with a stifled savagery. “This ugly world! It has always robbed me of everything I wanted. It’s fighting to crush me now. I’d risk anything to get away from it—even just to the moon or Mars!”
“I doubt that they’re looking for space jockeys, right now,” I told him noncommittally. “Anyhow, I’m afraid your notions are a little too poetic. The first spacemen will have to be scientists, and they won’t be running away from this world. Their survival will depend on how much of it they manage to take with them.” Then, unwisely, I tried to give him a piece of advice. “I guess things have been hard for you. But don’t forget that lots of people are moderately happy, even in this world you hate. I believe you’re still young enough to adjust yourself.”
He walked on beside me toward the parking lot without speaking, and I thought that he was listening.
“By the way, we have a man here on the staff I’d like for you to see.” I was trying to sound casual. “Even in this imperfect world, you’ll find that science can help solve some of the problems it creates. Dr. Fineman is a pretty good psychiatrist. If you’ll let me see about an appointment—”
“Certainly not,” he broke in harshly. “I’m not interested in cutting and trimming myself to fit whatever you and Dr. Fineman think I ought to be. Thanks, all the same. But if anything has to be adjusted, I prefer to adjust the world and not myself.” That sounded like nonsense, and I told him so.
“You’re the crazy one!” he flared at me. “Living in your own crazy dreamland! Just wait, and I’ll show you!”
He stalked angrily away to catch his bus.
