Collected short fiction, p.346
Collected Short Fiction, page 346
“Don’t alarm yourself,” Brant said soothingly. “Of course we must keep your case secret, at least until we have data enough to support an announcement. But for your sake as well as for science, you must allow me to study your new power.”
Nervously, he was polishing his glasses.
“You are my uncle.” he declared abruptly. “Your name is Homer Brown Your home is in Pottsville, upstate. You are staying with me for a few days, while you undergo an examination at the hospital.”
“Hospital?”
MR. PEABODY began a feeble protest. Ever since Beth was born, he had felt a horror of hospitals. Even the odor, he insisted, was enough to make him ill.
In the midst of his objections, however, he found himself bundled into a taxi.
Brant whisked him into the huge gray building, past nurses and internes. There was an endless ser es of examinations, with remote alert politeness that surrounded him, he guessed that he was supposed to be insane. At Iasi Brant called him into a tiny consultation room, and locked the door.
His manner was suddenly respectful—and oddly grave.
“Mr. Peabody, I must apologize for all my doubts,” he said. “The X-ray proves the incredible. Here, you may see it for yourself.”
He made Mr. Peabody sit before two mirrors, that each reflected a rather gruesome-looking skull. The two images merged into one. At the base of the skull, beyond the staring eye sockets Brant pointed out a little ragged black object.
“That’s it.”
“You mean the meteor?”
“It is a foreign body. Naturally, we can’t determine its true nature, without recourse to brain surgery. But the X-ray shows the scars of its passage through brain tissue and frontal bone—miraculously healed. It is doubtless the object which struck you.”
Mr. Peabody had staggered to his feet, gasping voicelessly.
“Brain surgery!” he whispered hoarsely. “You aren’t—”
Very slowly, Brant shook his head.
“I wish we could,” hi; said gravely. “But he operation is impossible. It would involve a section of the cerebrum itself. No surgeon I know would dare attempt it.”
Gently, he took Mr. Peabody’s arm. His voice fell.
“It, would be unfair to conceal from you he fact that your case is extremely serious.”
Mr. Peabody’s knees were shaking.
“Doctor, what do you mean?”
Brant pointed solemnly at the X-ray aims.
“That foreign body is radioactive,” he said deliberately. “I noticed that the film ended to fog, and I find that an electroscope near your head is soon discharged.” The doctor’s face was tense and white.
“You understand that it can’t be removed,” he said. “And the destructive effect of its radiations upon the brain tissue will inevitably be fatal, within a few weeks.”
He shook his head, while Mr. Peabody stared uncomprehendingly.
Brant’s smile was tight, bitter.
“Your life, it seems, is the price you must pay for your gift.”
V
MR. PEABODY let Brant take him back to the little apartment. The throbbing in his head was an incessant reminder that the rays of the stone were destroying his brain. Despair numbed him, and he felt sick with pain.
“Now that I know I’m going to die,” he told the doctor, “there is just one thing I’ve got to do. I must use the gift to make money enough so that my family will be cared for.”
“You’ll be able to do that, I’m sure,” Brant agreed. Filling a pipe, he came to Mr. Peabody’s chair. “I don’t want to excite your hopes unduly,” he said slowly. “But I want to suggest one possibility.”
“Eh?” Mr. Peabody half rose. “You mean the stone might be removed?” Brant was shaking his head.
“It can’t be, by any ordinary surgical technique,” he said. “But I was just thinking: your extraordinary power healed the wound it made in traversing the brain. If you can acquire control over the creation and manipulation of living matter, we might safely attempt the operation—depending on your gift to heel the section.”
“There’s no use to it.” Mr. Peabody sank wearily back into Brant’s easy chair. “I’ve tried, and I can’t make anything alive. The power was simply not granted me.”
“Nonsense,” Brant told him. “The difficulty, probably, is just that you don’t know enough biology. A little instruction in biochemistry, anatomy, and physiology ought to fix you up.”
“I’ll try,” Mr. Peabody agreed. “But first my family must be provided for.” After the doctor had given him a lesson on the latest discoveries about atomic and molecular structure, he found himself able to create objects of the precious metals, with none of them turning out like the gold brick.
For two days he drove himself to exhaustion, making gold and platinum. He shaped the metal into watch cases, old-fashioned jewelry, dental work, and medals, so that it could be disposed of without arousing suspicion.
Brant took a handful of the trinkets to a dealer in old gold. He returned with five hundred dollars, and the assurance that the entire lot, gradually marketed, would net several thousand.
Mr. Peabody felt ill with the pain and fatigue of his creative efforts, and he was still distressed with a fear of the law. He learned from the newspapers that the police were watching his house, and he dared not even telephone his daughter Beth.
“They all think I’m insane; even Beth does,” he told Brant. “Probably I’ll never see any of them again. I want you to keep the money, and give it to them after I am gone.”
“Nonsense,” the young doctor said. “When you get a little more control over your gift, you will be able to fix everything up.”
BUT even Brant had to admit that Mr. Peabody’s increasing illness threatened to cut off the research before they had reached success.
Unkempt and hollow-eyed, muttering about “energy-conversion” and “entropy-reverse,” Brant sat up night after night while Mr. Peabody slept, plowing through heavy tomes on relativity and atomic physics, trying to discover a sane explanation of the gift.
“I believe that roaring you say you hear,” he told Mr. Peabody, “is nothing less than a sense of the free radiant energy of cosmic space. The radioactive stone has somehow enabled your brain—perhaps by stimulation of the imaginative faculty that is rudimentary in all of us—has enabled you to concentrate and convert that diffuse energy into material atoms.”
Mr. Peabody shook his fevered, throbbing head.
“What good is your theory to me?” Despair moved him to a bitter recital of his case.
“I can work miracles, but what good has the power done me? It has driven me from my family, it has made me a fugitive from justice. It had turned me into a sort of guinea pig, for your experiments. It is nothing but a headache—a real one, I mean. And it’s going to kill me, in the end.”
“Not,” Brant assured him, “if you can learn to create living matter.”
Not very hopefully, for the pain and weakness that accompanied his miraculous efforts were increasing day by day. Mr. Peabody followed I rant’s lectures in anatomy and physiological. He materialized blobs of protoplasm and simple cells and bits of tissue.
The doctor evidently had grandiose ideas of a miraculous human being. He set Mr. Peabody to studying and creating human limbs and organs. After a few days, the bathtub was filled with a strange lot of miraculous debris, swimming in a preservative solution.
Then Mr. Peabody rebelled.
“I’m getting too weak, doctor,” he insisted faintly. “My power is somehow—going. Sometimes it seems that things are going to flicker out again, instead of getting real. I know I can’t make anything as large as a human being.”
“Well, make something small,” Brant told him. “Remember, if you give up, you are giving up your life.”
And presently, with a manual of marine biology on his knees, Mr. Peabody was forming small miraculous goldfish in the bowl he had made on the night of his arrival. They were gleaming, perfect—except that they always floated to the top of the water, dead.
BRANT had gone out. Mr. Peabody was alone, before the bowl, when Beth slipped silently into the apartment. She looked pale and distressed.
“Dad!” she cried anxiously. “How are you?” She came to him, and took his trembling hands. “Hex warned me on the phone not to comm he was afraid the police would follow me. But I don’t think they saw me. And I had to come, Dad. I was so worried. But how are you?”
“Y think I’ll be alt right,” Mr. Peabody lied stoutly, and tried to conceal the tremor in his voice. “I’m glad to see you, dear. Tell me about your mother and Bill.”
“They’re all right. But Dad, you look so ill!”
“Here, I’ve something for you.” Mr. Peabody took the five hundred dollars out of his wallet, and put it in her hands. “There will be more, after—later.”
“But, Dad—”
“Don’t worry, dear, it isn’t counterfeit.”
“It isn’t that.” Her voice was distressed. “Rex has tried to tell me about these miracles. I don’t understand them, Dad; I don’t know what to believe. But I do know we don’t want the money you make with them. None of us.”
Mr. Peabody tried to cover his hurt.
“But my dear,” he asked, “bow are you going to live?”
“I’m going to work, next week,” she said. “I’m going to be a reception clerk for a dentist—until Rex has an office of his own. And Mom is going to take two boarders, in the spare room.”
“But,” said Mr. Peabody, “there is William.”
“Bill already has a job,” Beth informed him. “You know the fellow he ran into? Well, the man has a garage. He let Bill go to work for him. Bill gets fifteen a week, and pays back six for the accident. Bill’s doing all right.”
The way she looked when she said it made it clear to Mr. Peabody that there had been a guiding spirit in his family’s remarkable reformation—and that Beth had had a lot to do with it. Mr. Peabody smiled at her gratefully to show that he understood, but he said nothing.
She refused to watch him demonstrate his gift.
“No. Dad.” She moved back almost in horror from the little bowl with the lifeless goldfish floating in it. “I don’t like magic, and I don’t believe in something for nothing. There is always a catch to it.”
She came and took his hand again, earnestly.
“Dad,” she begged softly, “why don’t you give up this gift? Whatever it is. Why don’t you explain everything to the police and your boss, and try to get your old job back?”
Mr. Peabody shook his head, with a wry little smile.
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t be so easy, explaining,” he said. “But I’m ready to give up the gift—whenever I can.”
“I don’t understand you, Dad.” Her face was trembling. “Now I must go. I hope the police didn’t see me. I’ll come back, whenever I can.”
She departed, and Mr. Peabody wearily returned to his miraculous goldfish.
Five minutes later the door was flung unceremoniously open. Mr. Peabody looked up, startled. And the gleaming ghost of a tiny fish, half-materialized, shimmered and vanished.
Mr. Peabody had expected to see Brant, returning. But four policemen, two in plain clothes, trooped into the room. They triumphantly informed him that he was under arrest, and began searching the apartment.
“Hey, Sergeant!” came an excited shout from the bathroom. “Looks like this Doc Brant is in the ring, too. And it ain’t only jewel-robbery and fraud and counterfeiting. It’s murder—with mutilation!”
The startled officers converged watchfully upon Mr. Peabody, and handcuffs jingled. Mr. Peabody, however, was looking curiously elated for a man just arrested under charge of the gravest of crimes. The haunting shadow of pain cleared from his face, and he smiled happily.
“Hey, they’re gone!” It was the patrolman in the bathroom. His horror-tinged excitement had changed to bewildered consternation. “I saw ’em, a minute ago. I swear it. But now there ain’t nothing in the tub but water.”
The sergeant stared suspiciously at Mr. Peabody, who looked bland but exhausted. Then he made a few stinging remarks to the bluecoat standing baffled in the doorway. Finally he swore with much feeling.
Mr. Peabody’s hollow eyes had dosed. The smile on his face softened into weary relaxation. The detective sergeant caught him, as he swayed and fell. He had gone to sleep.
VI
HE WOKE next morning in a hospital room. Dr. Brant was standing beside the bed. In answer to Mr. Peabody’s first alarmed question, he grinned reassuringly.
“You are my patient,” he explained. “You have been under my care for an unusual case of amnesia. Very convenient disorder, amnesia. And you are doing very well.”
t “The police?”
Brant gestured largely.
“You’ve nothing to fear. There’s no evidence that you were guilty of any criminal act. Naturally they wonder how you came into possession of the counterfeit; but certainly they can’t prove you made it. I have already told them that, as a victim of amnesia, you will not be able to tell them anything.”
Mr. Peabody sighed and stretched himself under the sheets, gratefully.
“Now, I’ve got a couple of questions,” Brant said. “What was it that happened so fortunately to the debris in the bathtub? And to the stone in your head? For the X-ray shows that it is gone.”
“I just undid them,” Mr. Peabody said. Brant caught his breath, and nodded very slowly.
“I see,” he said at last. “I suppose the inevitable counterpart of creation must be annihilation. But how did you do it?”
“It came to me, just as the police broke in,” Mr. Peabody said. “I was creating another one of those damned goldfish, and I was too tired to finish it. When I heard the door, I made a little effort to—well, somehow let it go, push it away.”
He sighed again, happily.
“That’s the way it happened. The goldfish flickered out of existence; it made an explosion in my head, like a bomb.
That gave me the feel of unmaking. Annihilation, you call it. Much easier than creating, once you get the knack of it. I took care of the things in the bathroom, and the stone in my brain.”
“I see.” Brant took a restless turn across the room, and came back to ask a question. “Now that the stone is gone,” he said, “I suppose your remarkable gift is—lost?”
It was several seconds before Mr. Peabody replied. Then he said softly:
“It was lost.”
THAT statement, however, was a lie.
Mr. Peabody had learned a certain lesson. The annihilation of the meteoric stone had ended his pain. But, as he had just assured himself by the creation and instant obliteration of a small goldfish under the sheets, his power was intact.
Still a bookkeeper, Mr. Peabody is still outwardly very much the same man as he was that desperate night when he walked upon Bannister Fill. Yet there is now a certain subtle difference in him.
A new confidence in his bearing has caused Mr. Berg to increase his responsibilities and his pay. The yet unsolved mysteries surrounding his attack of amnesia cause his family and his neighbors to regard him with a certain awe. William now only very rarely calls him “Gov.”
Mr. Peabody remains very discreet in the practice of his gift. Sometimes, when he is quite alone, he ventures to provide himself with a miraculous cigarette. Once, in the middle of the night, a mosquito which had tormented him beyond endurance simply vanished.
And he has come, somehow, into possession of a fish ng outfit which is the envy of his friends—and which he now finds time to use.
Chiefly, however. his gift is reserved for performing inexplicable tricks for the delight of his two grandchildren, and the, creation of tiny and miraculous toys.
All of which, be strictly enjoins them, must be kept secret from their parents, Beth and Dr. Brant.
The Fortress of Utopia
On a Lifeless Mystery Satellite, Five Lone Mortals Summon Secret Forces of the Citadel of Science to Free the Earth from the Doom of the Dark Nebula!
CHAPTER I
Rocket to Nowhere
FIRST men to the moon! Standing on the flag-draped platform at the World’s Fair grounds, on that sultry summer day of 1939, Jay Cartwright was aware of his hammering heart. He forgot the white sea of intent up-turned faces beyond the ropes. The hum of speech faded from his ears. He saw only the racing hands of the watch on his wrist—racing toward the calculated second of the start.
Dwarfed in the Trylon’s shadow, the slim bright spindle of the rocket” stood in a roped-off space of the green parkway in the Transportation Zone. Flash bulbs flickered and news-reel cameras hummed.
Jay Cartwright was oblivious to all this, did not care much for ceremonial pomp. He was a slender, low-voiced young man, with mild blue eyes and yellow hair. He disliked publicity, and it was only for the sake of little Delorme, designer of the rocket, that he had agreed to this staged take-off, publicity being to the diminutive inventor as welcome as water to a duck.
How would it really feel? A thousand times, Cartwright had imagined the wild intense elation of the first man to step upon the moon, drunk with his victory over space. Would it be like that? And what would they find? Just barren lava fields? Or, as Delorme had hinted, something more amazing?
He knew the danger. His attorneys had been pointing it out for months. A man with a hundred and forty millions, they insisted, had no business to risk his life on such a suicidal project. But, Cartwright always told them, other things could be more important than danger.
He started back to awareness.
“Oui, we may be keeled,” Delorme was saying, bowing happily at the television cameras. “But if so, we shall die gladly in ze sairvice of science.”
Jay Cartwright did not so readily accept the idea of dying. When the newshawks pressed him for a statement, he forced himself to face the staring iconoscopes and the microphones, and said:
“I know we take a risk. I am willing to accept it, because I think our flight can be a useful thing. Today the world is sick with unemployment. It is jittery with the dread of war. But the science that built our rocket is international. If we win the moon, it will be a victory for all the world. Perhaps that will help the spirit of men.”
