Collected fiction, p.471
Collected Fiction, page 471
So the last two great nations of the world had been locked for decades in a see-saw war, each with a knife against the other’s armored throat. The social economy of both countries had gradually adjusted to war conditions—which led to such developments as Pix!
Morale Service, backed by Psych, had sponsored Pix. And there were plenty of other quick-action surrogates that kept the war workers happy. Like the Creeps, as someone had irreverently clubbed the subjective movies, with their trigger-action emotional shocks. And Deep Sleep, and the Fairylands that could partially compensate for the lack of children or pets—or could even act as a psychological curative. Few men could keep an inferiority complex when he could be Jehovah to a fantastically convincing illusion of a little world of his own, peopled with critters he could design and create himself. They weren’t alive; they were simply gadgets; but so intricately constructed that many a man, watching a Fairyland come alive under his guiding hands on the controls, had found it difficult to come back to the real world. As an escape mechanism, the devices were plenty useful.
DuBrose watched Cameron. He wanted to make his point before the disorientation wore off.
“We’d better get ready.”
“We?”
DuBrose put surprise in his voice. “Changed your mind? Don’t you want me to go along, then?”
“Oh. Did I . . . I thought—”
“Better not keep the window open. We might get some fumes in while we’re gone.”
“No dangerous gases in Low Chicago,” Cameron said, taking it for granted that DuBrose was to accompany him. “Not even in the Spaces.”
“Well, there are some mighty strong stinks,” DuBrose said.
“An underground city—”
“I know. No matter how high-grade the technics are worked out, it’s still underground. But you’re the man who made the plans for the scanner windows in the first place. Why not use ’em?”
Cameron swung the pane back into place and stared at the green hillside, shadowed now under thickening rain-clouds. “Claustrophobia isn’t my weakness,” he said. “I can spend months underground without being bothered.”
“That’s more than I can do.” DuBrose noticed that Cameron held his ersatz liquor well. That was fine; he hadn’t hoped that the director would pass out. His plan was set for a longer range.
Probably the emissary from the Secretary of War wouldn’t even notice Cameron’s euphoria. He reminded himself to feed the chief a breath-purifier before—
He managed it just in time. A thin, sour-looking man with two weapons. strapped to his waist was ushered in, after the precautionary identifications.
“Name’s Locke,” he said. “Ready, Mr. Cameron?”
“Yes.” The director was reoriented again. “Where are we going?”
“Sanatorium.”
“Surface?”
“Surf ace.”
Cameron nodded and started toward the door. Then he paused, frowning a little.
“Well?” he said.
“Sorry;” Locke opened the door and let Cameron precede him. When DuBrose followed, the government man barred his path.
“You’re not—”
“It’s all right.”
Locke shook his head. “Mr. Cameron. Is this man to come along?”
The director glanced back, his face puzzled. “He . . . what? Oh, yes. He’s to come with us.”
“If you say so.” Locke looked sourer than ever, but fell in behind DuBrose.
They went past Communications, and the secretary raised his eyebrows at Sally. She made a hopeless gesture. DuBrose took a long breath. It was up to him now. And he was very much afraid of what they might see in that sanatorium.
The dropper took them to a lower level, and now Locke took the lead, herding the others toward an express crosstown Way. DuBrose settled back on the seat and tried to relax. He watched the ivory-pale, luminous ceiling of the tube slide past overhead, but that smooth synthetic substance made no barrier to his thoughts. They probed beyond, into the roaring clamor of the Spaces where the machines thundered in the heartbeat of the city, peopling those abysses with a clamorous life of their own. No men worked there. The men who ran the machines sat comfortably in the air-conditioned, soundproofed buildings, with the scanning windows giving them the illusion of a life that wasn’t underground! Unless you opened one of the valves, you could spend your life in Low Chicago and never realize that it was more than a mile beneath the earth’s surface.
Claustrophobia had been one of the first problems. And plenty of neuroses had ripened into full psychoses before certain necessities had been met and certain problems solved. Neuroses that only the warmen had, because the majority of the civilian population didn’t have to live underground. Decentralization had saved them from being bomb targets.
“This station,” Locke said over his shoulder. DuBrose touched a button under the chair’s arm. The three seats slid off the fast belt into a spur track, slowed down and stopped. Locke silently led the way into a pneumocar that stood waiting. He closed the door and reached for the controls.
DuBrose grabbed a strap just as a lean finger stabbed at top acceleration.
His stomach massaged his spine. By the time his sight came back, after the momentary blackout, he was automatically playing the old game every warman played—the hopeless task of trying to orient himself and guess the direction in which the car was plunging. It wasn’t possible, of course.
Only twenty men really knew where Low Chicago was located—top-rankers at GHQ. The labyrinth of tunnels that branched from the cavern ended in as many different spots, some a mile away, some five hundred miles. And, because of the winding course, all the cars took exactly fifteen minutes to reach their destinations.
Low Chicago might be under the cornfields of Indiana, under Lake Huron, or under the ruins of old Chicago, for all the war workers knew. They simply went to one of the Gates known to them, were identified, and got into a pneumocar. Then, a quarter of an hour later, they were in Low Chicago. As simple as that. Every underground city had the same system, a preventative measure against drill-bombs. There were other precautions, too, but DuBrose wasn’t a technician. He had been told it was impossible to get a triangulated radio fix on any war city—and accepted the fact.
War, these days, was more of a chess game than a series of battles.
The car stopped; they walked through a short tube into the cabin of a helicopter. The vanes shrieked. The plane rose and maneuvered jerkily in a quarter turn. Through a window DuBrose could see the feathery branches of trees slipping downward. Then, as they rose higher, an arid stretch of hills was visible. DuBrose wondered what state they were in. Illinois? Indiana? Ohio?
He leaned forward anxiously. There was something—
“Eh?” Cameron glanced at him.
DuBrose spun a dial on the window-frame; a circle in the plastic thickened to a lens, bringing the distant scene closer. He looked once and relaxed.
“Dud,” Locke said. DuBrose had not thought the pilot had noticed his movement.
“One of the domes, that’s all,” Cameron said, settling back. But DuBrose didn’t stop staring at the silvery, tattered thing on the hillside.
It was a hemisphere, a hundred feet in diameter, and there were seventy-four of then scattered over America, all exactly alike. DuBrose could not remember when they had been perfectly opaque, mirror-silvery shells; he had been eight years old when they had appeared out of nowhere, all at once, cryptic with their secret that had never been solved. No one had been able to get into them, and nothing tangible had ever come out. Seventy-four shining hemispheres had come from somewhere, causing a near-panic. Another secret weapon of the enemy.
An area thirty miles around each shell had been cleared of civilians, while experts tried to solve the problem, expecting at any moment that the things would blow up. A year later they were still working.
Five years later they continued their tests—more sporadically.
Then the unbroken smoothness of the domes began to be marred. Striae made networks across the polished substance that wasn’t matter. And the webs broadened, as though quicksilver were flaking from the back of a mirror, until the shells were tattered and split. It was possible to see inside then, but there was nothing inside—simply bare ground.
Nevertheless no one had been able to get into a dome. The force, whatever it was, remained constant; something like solid energy made an impassable barrier to solids.
Long since the public, continuing to think the enigmas a secret weapon that had failed, had named them Duds. The title stuck.
“Dud,” Locke said, and turned on the auxiliary rockets. The landscape vanished in a blur.
DuBrose glanced at Cameron, wondering how soon the alkaloid surrogate would wear off. Pix weren’t infallible. Sometimes—
But sight of the director’s calm, relaxed face reassured him. It would he all right. It had to be.
Cameron was looking at the altitude gauge on the instrument panel. It was smiling at him.
II.
Dr. Lomar Brann, the neuropsychiatrist in charge of the sanatorium, was a compact, dapper, alert man with a waxed moustache and sleek black hair. He had a way of clipping his words that made him seem brusquer than he was. Now his eyes narrowed a little at sight of Cameron, but if he noticed the director’s euphoria, he didn’t show it.
“Hello, Cameron,” he said, tossing charts on his desk. “I’ve been expecting to see you. How are you, DuBrose?”
Cameron smiled. “I’m under sealed orders, Brann. I don’t know what I’m here for.”
“Well . . . I know. I’ve had my own orders. You’re to examine Case M-204.”
The director jerked his thumb toward a visor screen on the wall. It showed a patient fidgeting nervously in his chair, while the oval inset screen just above held a close-up of the man’s face.
The audio was saying softly:
“They were always after me and the birds whose ferds couldn’t stop and the noises trees freeze sees words always go like words—”
Brann turned the visor off. The wire-tape spool stopped unreeling; the recording faded and died into silence. “That’s not the one,” Brann said. “He’s—”
“Dementia praecox, eh?”
“Yes, d. p. Disoriented, rhymes words—usual case history. I’ll have no trouble curing him, though. Two months and he’ll be on a farm topside.”
That was the usual procedure after psycho-patients had undergone treatment in the underground hospital-city. They were put into the care of specially selected sponsors, where the cure could progress under more normal conditions. DuBrose had made a survey of the system as part of his psych field work.
Brann looked slightly puzzled. He had noticed the euphoria, then—but he wouldn’t comment on it while DuBrose and Locke were there. He said, “I suppose we may as well look at M-204.”
Cameron said, “His identity is secret?”
“Not my field. The Secretary of War will tell you later, don’t worry about that. I’m just supposed to show you the patient. Mr. Locke, if you’ll wait here—”
The guide nodded and settled himself more comfortably into a chair. Brann ushered Cameron and DuBrose through a door into a cool, softly lighted corridor. “He’s my own private case. Nobody else sees him, except the two nurses. Constant attendance, of course.”
“Violent?”
“No,” Brann said. “It—isn’t my field, really. The man—” He unlocked a door. “Through here.
The man has hallucinations. A perfectly ordinary case, except for one thing.”
Cameron grunted. “What’s the diagnosis?”
“Well, tentatively—paranoia. He’s assumed another identity. A rather . . . ah . . . exalted one.”
“Christ?”
“No. We’ve plenty of patients who’ve taken on that identity, Cameron. M-204 believes he’s Mohammed.
“Symptoms?”
“Passive. We force-feed him. You see, he’s Mohammed after Mohammed’s death.”
“Old stuff,” Cameron said, “Retreat to the womb—escape mechanism?”
“What’s his position?” DuBrose asked, and Brann nodded approvingly.
“Good point. Not the foetal posture at all. He stays on his back, legs extended, hands crossed on his chest. He doesn’t talk, he keeps his eyes shut.” The neuropsychiatrist unlocked another door.
“He’s in this private suite. Nurse!”
A husky red-headed male nurse appeared as they stepped into a well-furnished, comfortable hospital room. A serving table stood in one corner; equipment for force-feeding was in its glass case, and there was a transparent-paneled plastic door in the further wall. The nurse nodded toward that door.
“The patient’s being examined, sir.”
Brann said, “A technician of some sort, Cameron. Not medical. I think his field’s physics.”
DuBrose was staring at a six-foot stepladder which seemed incongruously out of place in the neat, sterile chamber. The plastic door opened. A worried-looking man popped out, blinked at them through thick-lensed spectacles, and said, “I’ll need this.” He seized the ladder and disappeared.
“All right,” Brann said. “Let’s take a look.”
The adjoining room was a solitary, but comfortable enough. A bed had been pushed out from the wall. A few pieces of technical equipment were on the floor, and the physicist was pushing the step-ladder toward the bed.
M-204 lay flat on his back, hands folded on his chest, his eyes closed and his lined face perfectly blank and expressionless. But he wasn’t lying on the bed. He was floating in the air five feet above it.
Automatically DuBrose looked for wires, though he knew there was no reason for hocus-pocus here. There were no wires. Nor was M-204 supported by glass or transparent plastic, he—floated.
“Well?” Brann said.
Cameron said. “Mohammed’s coffin . . . suspended halfway between heaven and earth. How’s it done, Brann?”
The doctor touched his mustache. “That’s out of my field. We’ve taken the usual tests. C.B.C., urinalysis, cardiograms, basal—and we had a time doing it.” he added, grimacing. “We had to strap the patient down to run our X-rays. He floats!”
The physicist, perched precariously on the stepladder, was doing cryptic things with wires and gauges. He made a low, baffled noise. DuBrose watched the technician move a gadget slowly back and forth.
“This is crazy,” he said.
“He’s been here since yesterday morning,” Brann said. “M-204 was found in his laboratory suspended in midair. He was irrational then, but he could talk. He explained he was Mohammed.
After half an hour, he became completely passive.”
“How did you get him here?” DuBrose asked.
The doctor fingered his mustache. “The same way we’d get a balloon here. We can maneuver him around. When we let go, he bobs up again. That’s all.”
Cameron stared at M-204. “Man of about forty . . . notice his fingernails?”
“I did,” Brann said grimly. “Up to a week ago, they were well-kept.”
“What was he doing this last week?”
“Working on something I’m not allowed to know about. Secret military information.”
“So . . . he discovered a means of neutralizing gravity . . . and the shock of it . . . no. Because he’d be expecting just such results. If he’d been working on—say—a bombsight, and suddenly found himself floating up off the floor—” Cameron scowled. “But how can a man—”
“He can’t,” the physicist said from the stepladder. “He just can’t do it. Even theoretical antigravity requires machines. My instruments must be bollixed up.”
Cameron said, “How?”
The technician held up a gauge. “It’s registering—see the needle? Now watch.” He touched a metal-tipped wife to M-204’s temple. The needle flipped back to zero. Then it shot wildly to the limit, wavered there, and subsided back to the zero mark again.
The technician descended. “Fine. My instruments don’t work when I use them on that guy. They work all right elsewhere. But—I don’t know. Maybe he’s suffered some chemical or physical change. Though even then I should be able to make a qualitative analysis. It’s crazy.” Muttering, he repacked his equipment.
Cameron said, “It’s theoretically possible for an object to float in air, though, isn’t it?”
“You mean an object heavier than air. Sure. Helium will inflate a dirigible. Magnetism will hold up a chunk of iron. Theoretically it’s quite possible for this man to float. That isn’t the problem at all. Theoretically practically anything’s possible. But there’s got to be a logical reason. How can I find a reason when my instruments don’t work?”
He made a despairing gesture, his wrinkled, gnomish face twisted in angry lines. “They want me to work blind, anyway. I’ve got to find out what this man was working on. That’s where I’ll find the explanation. Not here!”
Brann looked at Cameron. “Any questions?”
“No. Not yet, anyhow.”
“Then let’s go back to my office.”
Locke was still waiting when they came in. He stood up impatiently.
“Ready, Mr. Cameron?”
“What next?”
“The secretary of War.”
DuBrose groaned inaudibly.
III.
Within the next four hours—
A rocket engineer traced a circuit for the ninety-fourth time, sat back, and started to laugh. His laughter changed to a shrill, incessant screaming. The infirmary doctor finally shot apomorphine into the man’s arm, before painting the raw throat. But when the engineer woke up he instantly began screaming again. As long as he made noises he was safe.
The circuit the engineer had been tracing was part of a gadget the enemy had dropped in quantity.
Four of these gadgets exploded, killing seven technicians and wrecking valuable equipment. The ones that exploded were the Duds.
A physicist rose from the papers on his desk, went quietly to his workroom, and rigged up an effective high-voltage circuit. Then he electrocuted himself.
