Collected short fiction, p.585
Collected Short Fiction, page 585
I had the evening off, but when I phoned Carol she told me that Eon was taking her out to dinner. I went rather morosely back to the shop and helped Dr. Zerlinger run the preliminary tests on a new paramagnetic alloy. Carol was calling when I got back to my room at midnight. She was sobbing into the phone, and she wanted to know if I had quarreled with Eon.
“He stood me up!” she gasped. “Never even called. You know him, Charley—how strange and moody he is. I’m so frightened about him! Where could he be?”
Drunk somewhere, I thought. But I didn’t say so. I went with Carol to the house where we had found him a room. He wasn’t there, and Mrs. Montoya knew nothing about him. We checked the three bars in Valdes, but he had not been seen.
He didn’t report for work next morning. The project security officers failed to find him anywhere. They questioned Carol about him, and grilled me as if they almost suspected that I had planted him to steal information for the Kremlin, Fortunately, he had not been inside the secret shops, and I felt certain that no harm had been done.
Only a few weeks later, however, General Barlow called us out of the shoos to an emergency meeting at the headquarters building. When we were packed into a guarded conference room, he Stalked to the speaker’s stand.
“Some blabbermouthed fool has leaked!” His drill-field voice was brittle with wrath. “Or else some damned spy has sold us out. Listen to this!”
He jerked his head at Colonel Fearing, the quiet little security chief, who was standing by with a tape recorder. There was a wail of funeral music, and then a doom-laden voice began to proclaim that the American capitalistic-reactionary atomic murderers were preparing their crowning atrocity against the defenseless peoples of the world.
“The latest propaganda blast across the Iron Curtain,” the general rasped. “Our monitors picked up this English-language version last night.”
“—red-handed lackey scientists paid by the Wall Street gangsters have set up this new murder-laboratory in the American desert, near the village of Valdes,” the machine ran on. “They are building an atomic fusion reactor, of a new and criminally dangerous type. With it, they are preparing to murder every living thing on Earth.
“Even themselves!
“It is known that this new atomic murder device has been designed to start a hydro-lithium nuclear fusion reaction in absolution of lithium salts. Apparently these pig-headed American atomic murderers are determined to ignore one terrible fact which was pointed out today by a peace-loving Soviet atomic scientist. That deadly fact is this—all the oceans of the Earth are actually dilute solutions of lithium salts.
“These American atomic murderers are preparing to detonate the whole Earth, unless their criminal experiments are halted by prompt action from the peace-loving peoples of the democratic Soviet nations.”
The angry general raised his hand, and Colonel Fearing shut off the machine.
“Lies!” Barlow barked. “The same old stinking lies. Actually, as most of you know, the lithium content of sea water is excessively small, and I have been assured a hundred times by competent authorities that the hydro-lithium reaction cannot possibly maintain itself outside the fusion field. In fact, we’re still far from sure that we can maintain it anywhere, even inside the reactor.”
He caught his breath, glaring at us.
“Yet these particular lies are extremely dangerous to the project, and to our whole defense program, because they have been wrapped so cleverly around a core of fact—the key secret that we have allowed some fool or traitor to betray. They are doubly dangerous, because we can’t deny them.”
“Why not?” Zerlinger inquired.
“Because we’ve no idea how much secret information has been compromised.” Barlow glowered at him. “We must assume, however, that if the commissars knew how to build a fusion reactor of their own, they’d keep quiet and build it. Since they didn’t, they’re pretty obviously fishing for more information.
“You see we can’t say anything at all, without giving them more. Any departure from our established policy of simply ignoring such charges would at least confirm the existence of Project Lightyear. Our lips are sealed.
“But we must stop that leak!”
As the spy-hunt began, I recalled Eon Hunter’s defiant declaration that he was going to adjust the world instead of himself. Now his words had an ominous ring. It seemed conceivable to me that his twisted bitterness had made him a dupe of the Communists, and I took my suspicions to the security officers.
They interrogated me all over again, dredging up everything I could recall about Eon’s habits and associates. I knew that they would go from me to Carol, and that night I stopped at her apartment to find out how she had stood the ordeal. She came to the door with tear-stains on her face, and she whitened with anger when she saw me.
“You jealous fool!” Her voice was choked and bitter. “What have you done now?”
“Nothing so bad.” I shrugged. “If Eon’s innocent, he can clear himself. But if he is, I’d like to know why he ran away.”
“You never understood him,” she whispered savagely. “You’re not fit to!” Her voice lifted hysterically. “He’s no spy! And I’ll always hate you, for trying to tattle on him.”
“Please, Carol.” I stepped toward her in the doorway. “You’re all keyed up. Let’s go out somewhere for a drink—”
She stopped me with a stinging slap.
“Get out!” she gasped. “I never want to see you again!”
The door slammed in my face.
But she called me one night, not two weeks later. Her voice was hoarse from crying. She hadn’t heard from Eon, and she was making up her mind to get over him again.
“I’m terribly sorry I slapped you, Charley,” she whispered. “Because I guess you’re right. I know Eon has always hated the world he was born into. I’m afraid he wouldn’t stop at anything to smash what he hates.”
Her slap wasn’t hard to forgive. She let me come by for her. We had two drinks in a bar, and drove out on the mesa. We didn’t stay long. She was trying a little too hard to be gay, and she broke into tears when I kissed her.
“I can’t help it, darling,” she sobbed. “All this isn’t very fair to you. But I just can’t get over Eon.”
Colonel Fearing told me a few days later that the federal agents had found Eon, without much difficulty. It turned out that he had simply walked away from Valdes in a fit of depression, and hitch-hiked to New York City. He was living there under his own name, and he soon convinced the investigators that he had never betrayed or even learned any facts about the hydro-lithium reactor.
Far from attempting to destroy the profit system, so he told the federal men, he had decided to make the best of it. He had given up his forlorn dabblings in poetry and art, and found a job with an advertising agency. Surprisingly, his new employers valued him highly. When they came to his defense, the investigation was dropped.
Things went badly at Valdes that winter. Carol was sick with unhappiness, alternating between moods of spiritless despondency and savage efforts to be cheerful. We went out together now and then, but I knew that I could never really take Eon’s place. As far as I could, I let the project take hers.
The source of the security leak had never been found. General Barlow decided that it must have been only a thoughtless slip of somebody’s tongue, in the wrong company. But damage enough was already done.
If the commissars were really fishing for more information, they got none. They kept hammering at us with their propaganda barrages until the phrase “pig-headed atomic murderers” began to get under everybody’s skin, but the general refused to authorize any official statement that we were not really about to detonate the Earth.
Even in America, the seed of lies took root. Responsible newspaper and TV reporters picked up the propaganda charges. Carol herself began quizzing me uneasily about how much lithium was dissolved in sea water, and what would keep it from reacting with the hydrogen.
Dr. Draven, the President’s stooped old scientific adviser, flew out from Washington with more bad news.
“You’d think the Comrades were falling for their own propaganda.” His yellow parchment face was creased with a faint sardonic smile. “They’re acting as if they really believe you’re about to set atomic fire to the planet.”
Apprehension quenched his yellow smile.
“Central Intelligence says they’re getting set for what they’ll probably call a preventive attack on our main industrial and defense centers. Valdes seems to be Target Number One. Their mobilization schedule doesn’t leave you much more time.”
We tried to rush the project.
But we were already working under too much pressure. Tired men blundered. A superconductor coil was cooled too fast in the annealing furnace, so that it blew out on the test rack. Dr. Zerlinger was critically burned by the flash of vaporized metal, and without his dogged courage the rest of us found it hard to keep our faith in the Lightyear alive.
Even the weather was against us. Unpredicted floods of rain turned the desert soil to bottomless mud that sank beneath our test racks on the field. Later in the winter, when that damage had been repaired, unforecast blizzards came howling across the mesa whenever we tried to schedule an open-air test. Spring brought savage southwest winds and abrasive clouds of yellow grit that cut the finish from whatever it touched. A sandstorm was blowing when Carol called me at the shop, late one Sunday afternoon.
“Guess what!” She was breathless with excitement. “Eon’s here!”
“I’ll keep out of sight.” I tried not to seem too sulky. “Just forget our dinner date. I’ve work enough to do.”
“Wait, Charley!” Her voice seemed puzzled and somewhat hurt. “It’s you he wants to see. So please come on out. I’m cooking a Mexican dinner for the three of us.”
“I don’t want to see Eon,” I protested. “And I’m afraid it wouldn’t be a very cozy party.”
“You’ve got to come.” She seemed oddly desperate. “You’ll see why.” Eon opened the door for me, at her apartment. The change in him astonished me, not that he had become any sleek and cynical huckster. Though his shirt was clean for once, his dark hair was still rumpled untidily, and his gaunt face looked sullen and hungry as ever. The difference was a new sureness in him, a glint of purpose in his unsmiling eyes and a strength in his quick handshake, that made me wonder what had happened to him.
“Hullo, Guilborn.” He took my hat and nodded at a chair, as if he owned the place. “I want to talk to you. About your experiments with the hydro-lithium reaction.”
“Hold on, Hunter.” I reached for my hat. “You were employed here. You ought to know I can’t discuss anything of the sort with any unauthorized person. Certainly not with you.”
He kept my hat.
“Take it easy, Guilborn.” He grimaced stiffly. “I’m not looking for any more trouble with the FBI. I don’t want any secrets. I flew back here just to tell you something.”
“Don’t tell me.” I got hold of my hat. “If you know anything you think ought to be reported, Carol can give you the number of the project security office.”
I was turning to leave, when Carol came out of the kitchenette, trailing the tantalizing odors of tacos and enchiladas. She was adorably domestic, with a smudge of flour on her nose, but when I saw the look she gave Eon, I knew she was farther away from me than the moon.
“Charley, you’ve just got to listen.” She took my hat and hung it in the entry closet.
“Okay.” I sat down reluctantly, facing Eon. “I’ll listen. But first I want to know where you’ve learned anything at all about anybody’s research into the hydro-lithium reaction.”
“From two sources, Guilborn,” he answered quietly. “From the FBI, when you set them after me. From all the recent news stories about the danger of a thermonuclear reaction getting out of control, after the federal men had called them to my attention.”
“If that propaganda has upset you, you can start relaxing,” I told him. “Of course it’s true there is a trace of lithium in sea water, and somewhat more in the crust of the Earth and even in your own body. There’s plenty of hydrogen. But the two elements have existed side by side since the Earth was born, through every sort of cataclysm. No conceivable effect could set off an uncontrolled reaction—”
“Wrong, Guilborn,” Eon broke in softly. “There’s one effect that you have failed to consider.”
He spoke with a disconcerting air of knowing what he was talking about. I flinched from a pang of alarm, before I could remind myself that he had always been peculiarly opaque to every fact of science.
“Huh?” I blinked and got my breath. “What effect?”
“It follows from the working of what you might call a metaphysical law. I got the first hint of it years ago, back in high school, when Carol and I fouled up your gravity experiment.” He grinned sardonically. “Remember?”
“No experiment works every time,” I muttered defensively. “But what is this metaphysical law that is going to blow up the Earth?”
He paused to smile fondly up at Carol, as she came to sit on the arm of his chair.
“This may upset you, Guilborn.” He looked back at me, as quietly deliberate as if he had failed to catch my intended sarcasm. “But you’ll eventually have to accept the discovery I have made—that nature isn’t quite the cold dead machine that you physicists like to imagine.”
“Then what is it?”
“Mind and matter are bound together more closely than even the parapsychologists have ever guessed,” he said. “I believe the universe was created by Intelligence. I know it responds to creative belief.”
“Somebody, Jeans, I think, used to say that the Architect of the universe must have been a mathematician. And I suppose mathematics is a mental exercise.” I nodded impatiently. “But what’s this about creative belief?”
“The universe is not complete.” Eon stood up excitedly. “Creation is still going on.” His low voice turned hoarse with a hurried urgency, and his deep-set eyes were burning with something like fanaticism. “Everything around us is still being molded and remolded by what people believe.”
I tried not to smile. “So you think we’re all suffering from a kind of mass hallucination that the world exists?”
“No.” He scowled at my amusement. “The universe is real enough. But it’s still evolving. The process is quite orderly and usually very gradual, something that has been going on around us all our lives, so much a part of us that we’re seldom aware of it at all—”
“If you’re talking about the evolution of life on Earth, or of the stars in the galaxy—”
“I’m not,” he said sharply. “I’m talking about more basic changes, in what you call the laws of nature.”
“The crust of the Earth is a record that goes back a couple of billion years, and it’s full of proof that nature hasn’t changed very much in that short time.” I couldn’t help smiling again. “I guess it’s no secret that we’re working with the laws of physics here at the project, but I certainly haven’t noticed any alterations from day to day.”
“You never will.” He stalked toward me restlessly. “Because all your laboratories are set up on the false premise that the laws of nature never change. I had to find a different sort of laboratory, to test my theory about that metaphysical law. That’s why I went into the advertising game.”
“Huh?” I had hardly heard him, because I was busy formulating a new theory of my own. The saturnine defiance smouldering in his eyes and snarling in his voice brought back his old threat that he would adjust the world and not himself, and I recalled that the source of our security leak had never been found. If Eon had been responsible after all, it occurred to me, he must have come back now with this preposterous fabrication to trick me into spilling something more about the project. I decided to play along with him, and report everything to Colonel Fearing.
“And what did you find out?”
“The theory holds up, Guilborn.” His dark, hard face wore a cold elation. “If enough people really believe anything, it tends to become the truth!”
“That’s too much!” I couldn’t help snorting. “Haven’t you got the cart in front of the horse? Physical effects do create faith, but I doubt very much that the proposition works the other way around——”
“But it does.” Annoyance began to edge his voice. “That metaphysical truth is the very foundation of the universe. Naturally it’s hard for you to grasp, because you’re a scientist. You’re used to thinking backwards. But if you’ll open your mind for half a minute, I can show you that everything around us has been shaped by belief.”
“You mean the Earth used to be flat, because people thought it was?”
“Exactly!” He nodded triumphantly. “No doubt magic used to work, in prehistoric times, as well as atom bombs do today. The apparent facts of your modern scientific universe were not discovered, Guilborn. They were invented. You’ve invented some of them yourself.”
The sheer novelty of that notion caught me for an instant.
“Just look back at your own work,” his urgent voice went on. “Wasn’t the experimental evidence always pretty flimsy and ambiguous, in the beginning? Weren’t you always pretty anxious to believe you really had something new? Wasn’t your main difficulty always to convert the skeptics? Didn’t you always have a good many experimental failures—until you had managed to build up a sufficient potential of creative belief to solidify your new idea into fact?”
I shook my head uncomfortably—I couldn’t help recalling that first emergency conference in the old resort hotel, when we had shaped the basic theory of the hydro-lithium drive out of nothing more than sheer necessity. Earlier researchers, I remembered, had failed to find any effect at all of magnetic fields upon nuclear cross sections.
But I tried to get hold of myself. “Nonsense!” I groped wildly for some telling argument. “Suppose magic used to work, as you were saying. What stopped it?”
“Skepticism,” Eon answered promptly. “It was a bitter battle of beliefs, fought for several thousand years, with a good many of the champions on both sides burned at the stake. But the scientists, so-called, proved to be the slicker magicians. They finally turned the tide of faith. Their victory uprooted the old facts of magic, and forced their clever new facts into the framework of reality.”
