Collected Short Fiction, page 586
“A neat little sophistry.” I shrugged. “If I say that the spectra of the distant galaxies prove that the thermonuclear processes have been going on, exactly as we observe them now, for at least half a billion years, you can always answer that my belief has created my proof. But what follows?”
“The end of the world.” He looked as grave as if he meant it. “Unless you stop your reckless playing with this hydro-lithium reaction.”
“Is that propaganda still eating on you?” I laughed at him. “A hundred facts prove there is no possible danger—”
“Perhaps they did,” he broke in. “But you have changed the facts.”
“How?”
“What you don’t realize is that you had to twist the whole universe just slightly out of shape, to create the conditions you need for this reaction.” His voice lifted, as I started to protest. “I know what you’ve done, because I’ve been following the scientific news from the small nations where knowledge is still free. The good scientists aren’t all Americans—and what they report isn’t all propaganda! These new reports on the factors involved in the hydro-lithium reaction contradict all the older results. I don’t know your mumbo-jumbo, but it’s something about phenomenally higher values for the nuclear cross sections, under certain critical conditions—if that means anything.”
What that could have meant was something I didn’t want to think about. I winced, in spite of myself, from a stab of cold apprehension. But Eon was certainly the world’s worst judge of scientific possibilities.
“Plenty of foreign scientists are honestly—and desperately—concerned about the danger that your experiments will start a thermonuclear reaction in the oceans or the crust of the Earth,” he rushed on. “You would be, Guilborn, if you weren’t shut away here behind your Chinese wall of military security.”
His lean face tightened bleakly.
“But I’ve said my piece,” he finished. “The survival of the world depends on what you do about it.”
“Ill pass your warning along to Dr. Zerlinger,” I said. “You understand that I must report this meeting to the project security officer, too.”
He turned white.
“So you still think I’m a spy?”
His bony fists clenched as if he meant to hit me, and Carol ran to grab his arm.
“No, Charley!” She looked at me with tears in her eyes. “You can’t mean that!”
I squirmed uneasily in my chair.
“Eon, I don’t know what you are.” I looked up at his furious, bloodless face, and still I didn’t know. “Just a harmless crank, I hope. I still suspect that you ought to see a good psychiatrist. If you were entirely sane, you wouldn’t expect me to take any serious stock in this sort of nonsense.”
“Then you won’t stop that research?”
“Anybody who accepted your ideas would be laughed off the project.”
“You poor deluded fool!” Anger grated in his voice. “And I’ve been just as stupid, wasting my time on you. I see I’ll have to do it alone.”
He stumbled blindly to the entry closet and came back with my hat. When he saw it wasn’t his, he flung it savagely to the floor. Carol caught anxiously at his elbow.
“Darling, please sit down,” she begged. “The food is getting cold—”
“Food?” He pushed her roughly away. “When your idiot friend is busy blowing up the planet! I’ve got a plane to catch.”
He slammed out.
“I’m so terribly sorry for him.” Carol watched him through the window until he was out of sight, and then turned slowly back to me. Her eyes were wet, but she managed not to sob. “Charley,” she whispered, “are you really sure he’s wrong?”
“Crazy, I’m afraid.”
I was picking up my hat, but she made me stay. I thought at first that she was only trying to delay my report to Colonel Fearing, but I liked her too well to care. Perhaps she really wanted me. We ate the Mexican dinner, and drank a fifth of whisky I had brought, and for a little while, with Carol in my arms, I forgot all about Eon.
Next day I had a throbbing head, however, and a nagging sense of worry. Eon’s metaphysical law still looked like a childish fantasy, but I couldn’t forget the way he had somehow sabotaged that high school experiment. At our regular morning conference in the headquarters building, I reported his warning.
“Pure nonsense, of course. But he’s so serious about it himself that he almost frightens me. He came all the way out here from New York to warn us. When I failed to take any stock in his weird theory, he threatened to do something on his own—he didn’t say what.”
“A crank.” Zerlinger shrugged.
“Another victim of that propaganda barrage.” Colonel Fearing nodded. “It’s beginning to crack the civilian morale.”
“Softening us up for the bombers.” General Barlow cleared his throat explosively. “Intelligence says we’re running out of time. Nothing but the Lightyear can bail us out now. The Pentagon says we’ve got to have her ready for a test flight, by May first.”
“She will be,” Zerlinger promised.
“About this Hunter.” Barlow swung to Fearing. “Probably just a, harmless crackpot. But have an eye on him. Just in case.”
The federal agents kept an eye on Eon, and Fearing was soon passing on some pretty strange reports. Eon had not returned to his New York advertising job. He had gone on to Los Angeles instead, and launched a new cult.
“Something he calls the Fellowship of Free Mutationists,” Fearing told me. “A weird new religion, I gather, mixed up with a lot of silly hocus-pocus he calls White Magic. He’s preaching that people can turn this battered old world into a shining paradise, by faith alone.”
“More or less what he was telling me.” I nodded. “No doubt he’s crazy.”
“Crazy like a fox!” The colonel smiled. “He used to be an advertising wizard, and he knows how to use every trick in the book to trap the saps. Belief can stop the hell bombs, he keeps preaching, and they’re all afraid of hell bombs. They’re mobbing him, to stake out their claims in his rosy heaven. Plenty of them have got money to pay for TV time and hook more suckers. Your old friend must be skimming off the millions.”
“You’re wrong about him,” I protested. “Not that I’m defending him. I don’t like him. But I’m sure he’s more than just a crook. Though I’ve never felt that I really understood him, I believe he’s sincere about this thing. In his own twisted way. That’s what worries me. I’m afraid he’s crazy enough to do something pretty desperate to keep the Lightyear on the ground.”
“We’ll watch him,” Fearing promised. “The federal men are already infiltrating his setup, to look for ties with the Kremlin or anything subversive.”
The agents found no foreign ties. The sole inspiration of the Mutationists, they reported, had been Eon Hunter himself. And they said that he was advocating no violent action of any kind. The world was to be rebuilt by faith alone. The only disturbing report was that the investigating agents themselves had begun resigning from the FBI.
“It’s got me!” the colonel grumbled uneasily. “They are all trained men, and loyal Americans. They know the desperate crisis we’re up against. And still they’re quitting. To take up White Magic—whatever that is!”
At the project, all our security precautions were tightened. More barbed wire was strung around the restricted areas, the radar net was spread wider; guided interceptor missiles stood ready for instant flight.
Inside the security screen, we pressed desperately ahead. The space-frame, as the engineers called the Lightyear’s long hull, was towed out to the testing apron and hauled erect in a tall gantry crane. We installed the big sodium vapor power plant, that was to start on chemical fuels and then run on waste energy from the reactor itself. By the middle of April, we were assembling the paramagnetic components and the superconductor coils.
Busy as we were, however, Dr. Zerlinger gave me a night off, a few days before the date we had set for the test. Eon’s new followers were gathering in Albuquerque, and Carol wanted me to drive her there to hear him speak.
The meeting was held in the open air, on the lava-scattered slopes of an extinct volcano west of the city. The size of the crowd amazed me. Though we had arrived two hours before Eon was to appear, we had to park several miles from the hill. We climbed into a murmuring forest of expectant humanity.
It seemed to me at first that Eon’s new cult had been rather crudely blended from a mixture of outworn superstitions and the cynical devices of the advertising hucksters. A circle of large stones had been pried upright on the hilltop, like the megaliths of some prehistoric sacred place, and the plume of smoke above them might have come from some neolithic altar. But the sound trucks cruising about the hillside were new and sleek as the Lightyear; they were splashed with bright-lettered slogans, BELIEVE AND LIVE!, and bawling out recorded music.
The day was windy and raw. We stood shivering on the sharp volcanic rocks, among an odd assortment of neat business men, blanketed Indians, ranchers and miners and farmers, chattering housewives, staring children, uniformed servicemen from the nearby defense installations. A thin Mexican youth came toiling past us on crutches.
“Help me, help me!” he was whining. “Help me touch El Brujo!”
“They say he can work miracles.” A tall cattleman beside us removed his ten-gallon hat. “Like Christ in the old days!”
The young paralytic stumbled and fell. He lay for a moment whimpering on the rocks, until a plump little man with a white armband came bustling to help him rise.
“Gracias!” he sobbed. “Help me touch El Brujo! I wish to walk again!”
“You don’t have to touch him,” the plump man said. “A true belief is all you need. Wait here, brother, and listen to his message.”
The disciple rushed away and the cripple stood leaning on his crutches, waiting with the rest of us in the chilly dusk.
“Believe and live!” a faded old woman was whispering piously. “Believe and live forever!”
“Hogwash!” a small boy jeered at her. “My Dad says Hunter’s nothing but a big-mouthed crook—”
“Shut up!” she hissed. “Or he might turn you into a pig.”
He gulped and shut up.
“If he can only stop the bombs,” a young girl murmured. “That’s enough for me.”
A breathless silence ran suddenly across the crowd. Another sound truck came lurching toward us down the hill from that circle of standing stones. When it stopped, a man clambered awkwardly into the spotlights on a little platform built over the cab, still so far away that I didn’t recognize him.
“Eon!” Carol gasped. “It’s Eon!”
The wind had died, and the quiet night seemed suddenly warmer. Eon lifted up his hands in the stillness, and the sound trucks bellowed with his voice. He preached the same fantastic doctrine that I had laughed at that night in Carol’s apartment, and the multitudes murmured in awed approval. At the end, he called for a sign in the sky.
“Believe!” The booming of the sound trucks had become almost hypnotic. “Believe that all the evil machines of death must vanish from the Earth, and they will be gone. Believe that better things must come, and your belief will mold them into being. For a sign of the truth, let us create a star!”
He paused dramatically, pointing up into the night. A hundred thousand eyes were lifted to the sky. Carol caught my arm, her fingers quivering with emotion. But for a moment nothing happened.
“A sign!” the sound trucks thundered. “Let us make a shooting star!”
A meteor burned high across the dark.
Somehow, I wasn’t much surprised. For one strange moment, as the great gasp of awed adoration swept across the hillside, I even felt a wild elation, as if the faith and will of all those exalted thousands had become a miraculous power in which I could share. A sharp pain caught my throat, and my own tears blurred that fleeting track of light.
I stamped my aching feet and lighted a cigarette, trying to get hold of myself. Canned organ music was rolling out of the sound trucks now, and Eon’s tiny-seeming figure stood silent in the spotlights until the eyes of the crowd had come back to him.
“That star is the sign of our new universe!” the sound trucks brayed again. “And all the stars are in our reach! If you want them, follow me. Come now and pledge your faith. We can stop the death machines, and put out the atomic fire that is burning up the Earth, if you will only follow me!”
Carol kissed me suddenly, and tried to slip away.
“Wait!” I stumbled after her.
“Don’t let him fool you. That meteor was probably just a mass hallucination. Maybe just an accident. It couldn’t have been—created!”
She paused, and I caught her trembling arm.
“I’m sorry, Charley. Really terribly sorry.” For a moment she clung to me. “It doesn’t seem quite fair to you—even if you won’t believe. Because you’ve always been so good to me. But don’t you see I must go to him?”
I didn’t see, but I had to let her go.
The Mexican boy was struggling up the lava slope again, wailing in the dark because no miracle had healed him. She ran after him, and took his arm to help him. I watched them numbly until they were lost in the mob, and then wandered back unhappily to look for my car.
I drove back to Valdes that night, troubled and alone. Men were still at work around the Lightyear, when I went by the testing field. In the floodlights, beyond the fences and the guards and the miles of dark mesa, the ship was a white graceful finger pointing toward the stars.
Her shining promise cheered me. She would fly above all interceptors. She would ferry men out to claim and fortify the moon. Even though she carried nucleonic bombs, her cargo would be the Pax Americana. When she had brought peace to all the Earth, she could go on to explore the universe.
And I would be aboard.
Two nights later, we got the last magnet mounted and the last circuit tested and the last gallon of lithium solution pumped into the fuel tanks. Dr. Zerlinger and I came back out from town before three next morning, to recheck everything for the first test flight.
As we turned into the parking area, the headlights of our jeep caught a man crouching against a fin of the ship. I shouted a warning, and the guards were on him in a moment. He stood waiting for them quietly, holding out his empty hands.
“A saboteur?” Zerlinger panted, as we came tumbling out of the jeep. “Or what’s he up to?”
“Dunno, sir.” A guard clicked handcuffs on the prisoner. “He’s got no weapons or explosives, far as I can see. Just a piece of blue chalk.”
“That was enough.” The prisoner straightened defiantly. “I’ve grounded your ship.”
I recognized his voice.
“Eon!” I gasped. “How’d you get in here?”
“Why, hullo, Guilborn.” He looked up at me with an unfrightened insolence. “No use trying to tell you how I got inside your stupid barriers. You wouldn’t understand.”
Zerlinger picked up the piece of blue chalk.
“Huh?” He bent to peer at a ragged star that Eon had scrawled on the bright metal fin. “What’s this?”
“A hex mark,” Eon said. “I’ve hexed your ship and everything in it. It will never fly.”
“Just a little chalk—” I tried to laugh.
“The chalk itself is nothing,” he said. “The pentacle is only an incidental symbol in the rite that I have performed to induce a belief that your wonderful new hydro-lithium drive can’t function. Because of that belief, it won’t function. And so you won’t set the world on fire!”
“We’ll soon see what happens,” I muttered.
The reactor had to work, because theory was now adequately proven and all our preliminary tests had ultimately been successful—but some vague unease made me turn to scrub the chalk marks off the ship.
Eon laughed behind me.
General Barlow and Colonel Fearing came skidding up in the general’s car. The colonel and his men took Eon away to the guardhouse, and the general went aboard the Lightyear with Zerlinger and me, to oversee the test.
In half an hour, everything was rechecked and ready for the takeoff. The general climbed into the nose compartment with the pilot. Zerlinger and I strapped ourselves into acceleration seats, down beside the reactor.
A kind of numbness had crept over me, in those last long minutes. All my senses were somehow deadened, and my fingers were clumsy with the straps. Yet I wasn’t consciously afraid. There was certainly no reason for fear, I reminded myself—if anything went wrong, if the reaction went out of control, none of us would ever know it. I wondered where Eon had left Carol, and hoped that she would not be involved too painfully when he came to trial. I felt relieved when the general’s iron voice began counting off the seconds to takeoff.
“Minus thirty . . . minus twenty-five . . .”
At a grunt from Zerlinger, I opened up the idling turbines. They wailed like sirens, gaining speed. The generators whined. The magnetometer needles quivered and shot across their dials, measuring the growing intensity of the reaction field.
“. . . minus five . . . minus four . . .”
Zerlinger pulled a lever, and the fuel pumps began to throb.
“. . . minus one . . . take off!” I opened the lithium valve and dropped back into the acceleration seat, opening my mouth wide to save my ears from the atomic thunder of the jet. But there was no thunder. I lay there, too numb to breathe, waiting for the atomic drive to hammer us off the Earth, but I felt no thrust.
There was only the purr of the racing generators, and the muffled thrumming of the pumps, and then the sudden harsh rasp of General Barlow’s voice on the intercom phone, asking what the hell had happened.
“Nothing.” Zerlinger sat up dazedly, mopping at his pale face. “Not even the end of the world!”
