Collected fiction, p.390
Collected Fiction, page 390
But that was unnecessary. The Space Commission was big. It had the government behind it, and local officials were, by comparison, small potatoes. The officers hastily released Gallegher and tried to look as though they’d never touched him.
Hopper seemed ready to explode. “By what right do you interfere with justice, commander?” he demanded.
“Right of priority. The government needs a device Mr. Gallegher has made for us. He deserved a hearing, at least.”
“He does not!”
Wall eyed Hopper coldly. “I think he said, a few moments ago, that he had fulfilled your commission also.”
“With that?” The big shot pointed to the machine. “Does that look like a stereoscopic screen?”
Gallegher said, “Get me an ultraviolet, Narcissus. Fluorescent.” He went to the device, praying that his guess was right. But it had to be. There was no other possible answer. Extract nitrogen from dirt or rock, extract all gaseous content, and you have inert matter.
Gallegher touched the switch. The machine started to sing “St. James Infirmary.” Commander Wall looked startled and slightly less sympathetic. Hopper snorted. Smeith ran to the window and ecstatically watched the long tentacles eat dirt, swirling madly in the moonlit pit below.
“The lamp, Narcissus.”
It was already hooked up on an extension cord. Gallegher moved it slowly about the machine. Presently he had reached the grooved wheel at the extreme end, farthest from the window.
Something fluoresced.
It fluoresced blue—emerging from the little valve in the metal cylinder, winding about the grooved wheel, and piling in coils on the laboratory floor. Gallegher touched the switch; as the machine stopped, the valve snapped shut, cutting off the blue, cryptic thing that emerged from the cylinder. Gallegher picked up the coil. As he moved the light away, it vanished. He brought the lamp closer—it reappeared.
“Here you are, commander,” he said. “Try it.”
Wall squinted at the fluorescence. “Tensile strength?”
“Plenty,” Gallegher said. “It has to be. Nonorganic, mineral content of solid earth, compacted and compressed into wire. Sure, it’s got tensile strength. Only you couldn’t support a ton weight with it.” Wall nodded. “Of course not. It would cut through steel like a thread through butter. Fine, Mr.
Gallegher. We’ll have to make tests—”
“Go ahead. It’ll stand up. You can run this wire around corners all you want, from one end of a spaceship to another, and it’ll never snap under stress. It’s too thin. It won’t—it can’t—be strained unevenly, because it’s too thin. A wire cable couldn’t do it. You needed flexibility that wouldn’t cancel tensile strength. The only possible answer was a thin, tough wire.”
The commander grinned. That was enough.
“We’ll have the routine tests,” he said. “Need any money now, though? We’ll advance anything you need, within reason—say up to ten thousand.”
Hopper pushed forward. “I never ordered wire, Gallegher. So you haven’t fulfilled my commission.”
Gallegher didn’t answer. He was adjusting his lamp. The wire changed from blue to yellow fluorescence, and then to red.
“This is your screen, wise guy,” Gallegher said. “See the pretty colors?”
“Naturally I see them! I’m not blind. But—”
“Different colors, depending on how many angstroms I use. Thus. Red. Blue. Red again. Yellow. And when I turn off the lamp—”
The wire Wall still held became invisible.
Hopper closed his mouth with a snap. He leaned forward, cocking his head to one side.
Gallegher said, “The wire’s got the same refractive index as air. I made it that way, on purpose.” He had the grace to blush slightly. Oh, well—he could buy Gallegher Plus a drink later.
“On purpose?”
“You wanted a stereoscopic screen which could be viewed from any angle without optical distortion. And in color—that goes without saying, these days. Well, here it is.” Hopper breathed hard.
Gallegher beamed at him, “Take a box frame and string each square with this wire. Make a mesh screen. Do that on all four sides. String enough wires inside of the box. You have, in effect, an invisible cube, made of wire. All right. Use ultraviolet to project your film or your television, and you have patterns of fluorescence, depending on the angstrom strength patterns. In other words—a picture. A colored picture. A three-dimensional picture, because it’s projected onto an invisible cube. And, finally, one that can be viewed from any angle without distortion, because it does more than give an optical illusion of stereoscopic vision—it’s actually a three-dimensional picture. Catch?” Hopper said feebly, “Yes. I understand. “You . . . why didn’t you tell me this before?”
Gallegher changed the subject in haste. “I’d like some police protection, Commander Wall. A crook named Max Cuff has been trying to get his hooks on this machine.
His thugs kidnaped me this afternoon, and—”
“Interfering with government business, eh?” Wall said grimly. “I know these jackpot politicians. Max Cuff won’t trouble you any more—if I may use the visor?” Smeith beamed at the prospect of Cuff getting it in the neck. Gallegher caught his eye. There was a pleasant, jovial gleam in it, and, somehow, it reminded Gallegher to offer his guests drinks. Even the commander accepted this time, turning from his finished visor call to take the glass Narcissus handed him.
“Your laboratory will be under guard,” he told Gallegher. “So you’ll have no further trouble.”
He drank, stood up, and shook Gallegher’s hand. “I must make my report. Good luck, and many thanks. We’ll call you tomorrow.” He went out, after the two officers. Hopper, gulping his cocktail, said, “I ought to apologize. But it’s all water under the bridge, eh, old man?”
“Yeah,” Gallegher said. “You owe men some money.”
“Trench will mail you the check. And . . . uh . . . and—” His voice died away.
“Something?”
“N-nothing,” Hopper said, putting down his glass and turning green. “A little fresh air . . . urp!” The door slammed behind him. Gallegher and Smeith eyed each other curiously.
“Odd,” Smeith said.
“A visitation from heaven.
“Maybe,” Gallegher surmised. “The mills of the gods—”
“I see Hopper’s gone,” Narcissus said, appearing with fresh drinks.
“Yeah. Why?”
“I thought he would. I gave him a Mickey Finn,” the robot explained. “He never looked at me once. I’m not exactly vain, but a man so insensitive to beauty deserves a lesson. Now don’t disturb me. I’m going into the kitchen and practice dancing, and you can get your own liquor out of the organ. You may come and watch if you like.”
Narcissus spun out of the lab, his innards racing. Gallegher sighed.
“That’s the way it goes,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh, I dunno. Everything. I get, for example, orders for three entirely different things, and I get drunk and make a gadget that answers all three problems. My subconscious does things the easy way. Unfortunately, it’s the hard way for me—after I sober up.”
“Then why sober up?” Smeith asked cogently. “How does that liquor organ work?”
Gallegher demonstrated. “I feel lousy,” he confided. “What I need is either a week’s sleep, or else—”
“What?”
“A drink. Here’s how. You know—one item still worries me.”
“What, again?”
“The question of why that machine sings ‘St. James Infirmary’ when it’s operating.”
“It’s a good song,” Smeith said.
“Sure, but my subconscious works logically. Crazy logic, I’ll admit. Nevertheless—”
“Here’s how,” Smeith said. Gallegher relaxed. He was beginning to feel like himself again. A warm, rosy glow. There was money in the bank. The police had been called off. Max Cuff was, no doubt, suffering for his sins. And a heavy thumping announced that Narcissus was dancing in the kitchen.
It was past midnight when Gallegher choked on a drink and said, “Now I remember!”
“Swmpmf,” Smeith said, startled. “Whatzat?”
“I feel like singing.”
“So what?”
“Well, I feel like singing ‘St. James Infirmary.’ ”
“Go right ahead,” Smeith invited. “But not alone,” Gallegher amplified. “I always like to sing that when I get tight, but I figure it sounds best as a duet. Only I was alone when I was working on that machine.”
“Ah?”
“I must have built in a recording play-back,” Gallegher said, lost in a vast wonder at the mad resources and curious deviations of Gallegher Plus. “My goodness. A machine that performs four operations at once. It eats dirt, turns out a spaceship manual control, makes a stereoscopic nondistorting projection screen, and sings a duet with me. How strange it all seems.”
Smeith considered. “You’re a genius.”
“That, of course. Hm-m-m.”
Gallegher got up, turned on the machine, and returned to perch atop Bubbles. Smeith, fascinated by the spectacle, went to hang on the window sill and watch the flashing tentacles eat dirt. Invisible wire spun out along the grooved wheel. The calm of the night was shattered by the more or less melodious tones of the “St. James Infirmary.” Above the lugubrious voice of the machine rose a deeper bass, passionately exhorting someone unnamed to search the wild world over.
“But you’ll never find
Another sweet ma-a-ahn like me.”
Gallegher Phis was singing, too.
THE END.
MUSIC HATH CHARMS
Detective Dill, Crime-Buster of the Twenty-Second Century, Turns Up a Murderer in Sky City, the Planet of Pleasure!
IT STARTED unobtrusively, as many calamities do. Tex Dill, chief of detectives at Sky City—“The Riviera of Space!”—almost decided to ignore the message. It would be safer—both for his job and for himself, if he did. Then he thought better of it.
One never knew. A crime-buster, in the twenty-second century, had to be on his toes. The most trivial incident might mean—almost anything!
It was Dill’s job to make certain that blackmail, theft and homicide were never allowed to tarnish Sky City’s reputation. So he cocked a keen eye again over the message an attendant had brought up to him, and scratched his gray ruff of bristling hair.
“Trouble in the zoo, eh?” he asked the uniformed boy.
“Yes, sir. I dunno about trouble, though.” The lad grinned. “Some kid heaved a brick through the Dracula cage, and the little blood-suckers got out.”
Dill’s sour, leathery face got sourer. He was in the Maze—the crystal-roofed garden that looked out on space from the dark side of the asteroid—and he had been talking to a pretty red-head who had seemed duly impressed by Dill’s position.
Soft music filtered out from the sound-box under the bench. The redhead thoughtfully stared at her toes. Dill chewed his bluish Venusian cigar and said:
“Sorry, lady. Important call. I’ll be back pronto.”
There was no response. Dill sighed and left the Maze by way of the immense Solar Room, here Red Venable, the latest orchestra leader, was conducting from the dais to an audience drawn from all over the System. Dill scowled at Venable, and got an amused glance in return. Then he was in an elevator, dropping swiftly into the heart of the hollowed-out asteroid.
Sky City, the Riviera of space! Telaudios blurbed its attractions from Venus to Callisto—its artificial gravity and atmosphere, its special accommodations for the inhabitants of every planet, its cuisine by its famous chef, Bertram, its manifold attractions but never a word about Tex Dill, the guy who kept the petty crooks and gamblers out of Sky City. Bah! They worked him like a dog.
Dill mangled his cigar bitterly.
True, he didn’t have to work as hard as he did. But the sour-pussed little detective liked to keep things running smoothly. He really took pride in his job, and preferred to handle everything himself. For one thing, it gave him more reason for grousing.
Now he passed through a corridor, pausing to nod at a uniformed attendant.
“Well?”
“We got the guests out of the zoo, Mr. Dill.”
“Sure, sure. But did any of the Draculas get out?”
“No—nothing smaller than a dwarf Martian’s registered on the photoelectric detector plates.” He gestured toward the walls. “And we’ve rounded up most of the Draculas with salt, anyway.”
“Fair enough,” Dill grunted. “Who threw the brick?”
“We don’t know. Nobody saw it done. Some kid, probably—there were a lot of them around.”
“Mph,” said the detective, and went on into the zoo, a big cavern, filled with cages and glassite domes.
It was empty now save for attendants—and, of course, the captive creatures, ranging from tiny marmosets to a Venusian seal-fish in its tank. Here and there were set up gravity-poles—tall rods with discs like dinner plates atop them.
“We salted the discs, Mr. Dill. And there’s ten gravities turned on.”
FROM nowhere darted a thready, snake-like creature on membranous bat wings. It dived at one of the discs, came down with a thud, and remained unmoving. An attendant reached up with a clasping-rod, hooked the creature, and pulled it free of the induced gravity-field that had held it motionless.
Dill reached for the Dracula, which had curled into a cool, pulsating ball. It had no face—just a mouth. It was rather like the Amazon vampire bat, except that it was reptilian. Indigenous to Venus, it would attack only a sleeping victim. However, while a Dracula could draw off plenty of blood, it would take a dozen of them to kill a human.
“How many still out?” Dill asked. “Six or seven. We’ll catch ’em with the salt.”
“Yeah. Keep the zoo closed till they show.”
A burly man with a florid, meaty face appeared.
“What the devil are you doing here?” he demanded, glaring at Dill.
It was the curator, Simon Morgansen.
“Just checking up. Got any objection?” Dill’s sour face looked sadder than ever.
“Yes,” Morgansen said, “I have. Why the devil don’t you attend to your own business? You’ve got your long nose into everything.”
Dill grunted.
“Maybe this is my business. I like to see what’s going on.”
Morgansen turned purple.
“Mr. Fargo!” he howled. “Mr. Fargo! Will you come here a minute, please?”
A neat, dapper man strung on jittery steel wires appeared from behind a cage. Puffing nervously on a cigarette, he approached his gaze darting from one to the other of the two men.
“Here I am. What is it?”
Fargo was director-general of Sky City.
“Him!” Morgansen said, pointing. “I knew he’d come snooping into my business. That’s why I wanted you down here! Now-look. Some harmless Draculas escape. I’m the curator; that’s my affair. But this busybody sticks his oar in. He does it everywhere!”
Fargo rubbed his forehead as though it ached.
“Sure . . . let’s go, Dill.”
He turned to the door, and the detective. followed, with a malevolent glance for Morgansen, who grinned.
In the elevator, Fargo blew out a smoke-wreath. “I’ve warned you before about these complaints,” he said. “Morgansen isn’t the only one. You’re exceeding your duties, Dill.”
“I know my job.”
“If you’d only stick to it! Now look! If Bertram finds a spoiled peach in the kitchens, you’re down there to analyze it for poison. If a few Draculas escape, you’re in the zoo. I can’t help feeling that you’re being rather a busybody.”
“I’ve gotta keep my eye on things—”
“I can’t have you disrupting Sky City,” Fargo said irritably. “I’ve warned you before, Dill. This is final. If I get another complaint, it’ll mean demotion.”
Dill’s face showed no expression, but his eyes flickered betrayingly.
“Understand?” Fargo insisted.
“Yeah,” Dill said tonelessly.
As the elevator stopped, Fargo got out, but the detective stayed where he was, chewing his cigar, trying to fight down the tight, choking sensation in his stomach. Demotion . . .
THE elevator halted automatically at the Maize, and Dill emerged. He was looking oddly old at that moment, his usually straight shoulders slumped, his carriage no longer that of a bantam rooster.
Maybe Fargo was right. Maybe he was a busybody. But—blast it all! He’d always taken pride in his job, always tried to do it right. Possibly he was getting old . . .
A heavy hand fell on Dill’s shoulder, and Red Venable’s voice boomed in his ear.
“How’s the great dick tonight? Feeling low?”
Dill’s gray ruff of hair bristled furiously.
“Heck, no. I’m just sick of Sky City. I dunno why I stay on here. I could get me a job at the Marspole Riviera like that.”
Venable’s boyishly handsome face twisted into a grin.
“Not you. Sky City’s got in your blood. I can understand that, too. I’ve been here only a few weeks, and I hate to think of leaving.”
They moved toward one of the benches.
Venable sank down with a grunt and exclaimed:
“Whew, I’m tired.”
“Tired? You’ve got a soft berth here. If I could wiggle a baton and blow a Callistan pifah, I wouldn’t have to—”
Dill stopped suddenly.
The orchestra leader flicked dust from his immaculate cuff.
“Rockets to you, flatfoot. I’ve been up since four. a.m., Earth time. This is the first chance I’ve had all day to relax. And in ten minutes I’ve got to go back and take over the baton from Joe. Joe’s good, though. Listen to that arpeggio!”
He tilted his head, nodding in time to the music that came from one of the concealed amplifiers that were scattered all over the Maze.
“If you call that work, you’re space-dizzy,” Dill growled.
