Nightfall and Other Stories Part 29

Polen knew. His machines had by-pa.s.sed the screen of verbalization and dragged the unconscious into the sunlight. The boy and the girl, the son and the mother. For that matter, the cat and the mouse or the snake and the bird. The data rattled together in its universality and it had all poured into and through Polen until he could no longer bear the touch of life.

In the last few years he had so painstakingly schooled his thoughts in other directions. Now these two came, dabbling in his mind, stirring up its mud.

Casey batted abstractedly across the tip of his nose to dislodge a fly. "Too bad," he said. "I used to think you could get some fascinating things out of, say, rats. Well, maybe not fascinating, but then not as boring as the stuff you would get out of our somewhat-human beings. I used to think--"

Polen remembered what he used to think.

Casey said, "d.a.m.n this DOT. The flies feed on it, I think. You know, I'm going to do graduate work in chemistry and then get a job on insecticides. So help me. I'll personally get something that will kill the vermin."

They were in Casey's room, and it had a somewhat keroseny odor from the recently applied insecticide.

Polen shrugged and said, "A folded newspaper will always kill."

Casey detected a non-existent sneer and said instantly, "How would you summarize your first year's work, Polen? I mean aside from the true summary any scientist could state if he dared, by which I mean: 'Nothing.' "

"Nothing," said Polen. "There's your summary."

"Go on," said Casey. "You use more dogs than the physiologists do and I bet the dogs mind the physiological experiments less. I would."

"Oh, leave him alone," said Winthrop. "You sound like a piano with 87 keys eternally out of order. You're a bore!"

You couldn't say that to Casey.

He said, with sudden liveliness, looking carefully away from Winthrop, "I'll tell you what you'll probably find in animals, if you look closely enough. Religion."

"What the d.i.c.kens!" said Winthrop, outraged. "That's a foolish remark."

Casey smiled. "Now, now, Winthrop. d.i.c.kens is just a euphemism for devil and you don't want to be swearing."

"Don't teach me morals. And don't be blasphemous."

"What's blasphemous about it? Why shouldn't a flea consider the dog as something to be wors.h.i.+pped? It's the source of warmth, food, and all that's good for a flea."

"I don't want to discuss it."

"Why not? Do you good. You could even say that to an ant, an anteater is a higher order of creation. He would be too big for them to comprehend, too mighty to dream of resisting. He would move among them like an unseen, inexplicable whirlwind, visiting them with destruction and death. But that wouldn't spoil things for the ants. They would reason that destruction was simply their just punishment for evil. And the anteater wouldn't even know he was a deity. Or care."

Winthrop had gone white. He said, "I know you're saying this only to annoy me and I am sorry to see you risking your soul for a moment's amus.e.m.e.nt. Let me tell you this," his voice trembled a little, "and let me say it very seriously. The flies that torment you are your punishment in this life. Beelzebub, like all the forces of evil, may think he does evil, but it's only the ultimate good after all. The curse of Beelzebub is on you for your good. Perhaps it will succeed in getting you to change your way of life before it's too late."

He ran from the room.

Casey watched him go. He said, kughing, "I told you Winthrop believed in Beelzebub. It's funny the respectable names you can give to superst.i.tion." His laughter died a little short of its natural end.

There were two flies in the room, buzzing through the vapors toward him.

Polen rose and left in heavy depression. One year had taught him little, but it was already too much, and his laughter was thinning. Only his machines could a.n.a.lyze the emotions of animals properly, but he was already guessing too deeply concerning the emotions of men.

He did not like to witness wild murder-yearnings where others could see only a few words of unimportant quarrel.

Casey said, suddenly, "Say, come to think of it, you did try some of my flies, the way Winthrop says. How about that?"

"Did I? After twenty years, I scarcely remember," murmured Polen.

Winthrop said, "You must. We were in your laboratory and you complained that Casey's flies followed him even there. He suggested you a.n.a.lyze them and you did. You recorded their motions and buzzings and wing-wiping for half an hour or more. You played with a dozen different flies."

Polen shrugged.

"Oh, well," said Casey. "It doesn't matter. It was good seeing you, old man." The hearty hand-shake, the thump on the shoulder, the broad grin-- to Polen it all translated into sick disgust on Casey's part that Polen was a "success" after all.

Polen said, "Let me hear from you sometimes."

The words were dull thumps. They meant nothing. Casey knew that. Polen knew that. Everyone knew that. But words were meant to hide emotion and when they failed, humanity loyally maintained the pretense.

Winthrop's grasp of the hand was gentler. He said, "This brought back old times, Polen. If you're ever in Cincinnati, why don't you stop in at the meeting-house? You'll always be welcome."

To Polen, it all breathed of the man's relief at Polen's obvious depression. Science, too, it seemed, was not the answer, and Winthrop's basic and ineradicable insecurity felt pleased at the company.

"I will," said Polen. It was the usual polite way of saying, I won't.

He watched them thread separately to other groups.

Winthrop would never know. Polen was sure of that. He wondered if Casey knew. It would be the supreme joke if Casey did not.

He had run Casey's flies, of course, not that once alone, but many times. Always the same answer! Always the same unpublishable answer.

With a cold s.h.i.+ver he could not quite control, Polen was suddenly conscious of a single fly loose in the room, veering aimlessly for a moment, then beating strongly and reverently in the direction Casey had taken a moment before.

Could Casey not know? Could it be the essence of the primal punishment that he never learn he was Beelzebub?

Casey! Lord of the Flies!

I suppose that one of those stock phrases for which everyone is responsible at one time or another is: "Well, whatever does he see in her?" Or, "Well, whatever does she see in him?"

It's a ridiculous question because the sort of thing that he sees in her or she sees in him that isn't visible to the general population is probably you-know-very-well-what.

Just the same, I'm as p.r.o.ne to sneer as the next fellow and when I see a movie in which the girl falls in love with a fellow who has no visible advantages outside of being tall, lean, strong, fearless, and incredibly handsome, I am naturally disgusted. "Whatever does she see in him?" I ask.

Pressed for a reason for the sneer, I can point out that this tan, lean, strong, fearless, and incredibly handsome fellow almost invariably has the brain capacity of a gnat. He speaks in an occasional grunt and views the world with dim eyes backed by a lackl.u.s.ter brain. He is known to all and sundry, and particularly to the girl who is trying to mask her mad pa.s.sion for him, as a "big lug," or, possibly, as a "big galoot."

These lugs or galoots are particularly impervious to even subhuman understanding of feminine psychology and the more they display this the more desperately they are loved.

I ten you I can't stand it. The fact that I know darned well that if I ever tried to compete for a girl with one of these tall, lean cretins, I would lose out, makes it worse. So I took my revenge; I decided never to write a big lug into one of my stories.

As far as I knew I never did. As of yesterday, I would have sworn to that, and backed the oath with any sum of money. Yet when I read over "n.o.body Here But--" just now, prior to writing a fitting introduction, I realized with sinking heart and disbelieving mind that here was a story with a galoot.

Good Lord!

First appearance--Star Science Fiction Stories, 19;3. Copyright, 1953, by Ballantine Books, Inc.

n.o.body Here but--

You see, it wasn't our fault. We had no idea anything was wrong until I called Cliff Anderson and spoke to him when he wasn't there. What's more, I wouldn't have known he wasn't there, if it wasn't that he walked in while I was talking to him.

No, no, no, no-- I never seem to be able to tell this straight. I get too excited. --Look, I might as well begin at the beginning. I'm Bill Billings; my friend is Cliff Anderson. I'm an electrical engineer, he's a mathematician, and we're on the faculty of Midwestern Inst.i.tute of Technology. Now you know who we are.

Ever since we got out of uniform, Cliff and I have been working on calculating machines. You know what they are. Norbert Wiener popularized them in his book, Cybernetics. If you've seen pictures of them, you know that they're great big things. They take up a whole wall and they're very complicated; also expensive.

But Cliff and I had ideas. You see, what makes a thinking machine so big and expensive is that it has to be full of relays and vacuum tubes just so that microscopic electric currents can be controlled and made to flicker on and off, here and there. Now the really important things are those little electric currents, so-- I once said to Cliff, "Why can't we control the currents without all the salad dressing?"

Cliff said, "Why not, indeed," and started working on the mathematics.

How we got where we did in two years is no matter. It's what we got after we finished that made the trouble. It turned out that we ended with something about this high and maybe so wide and just about this deep-- No, no. I forget that you can't see me. I'll give you the figures. It was about three feet high, six feet long, and two feet deep. Got that? It took two men to carry it but it could be carried and that was the point. And still, mind you, it could do anything the wall-size calculators could. Not as fast, maybe, but we were still working.

We had big ideas about that thing, the very biggest. We could put it on s.h.i.+ps or airplanes. After a while, if we could make it small enough, an automobile could carry one.

We were especially interested in the automobile angle. Suppose you had a little thinking machine on the dashboard, hooked to the engine and battery and equipped with photoelectric eyes. It could choose an ideal course, avoid cars, stop at red lights, pick the optimum speed for the terrain. Everybody could sit in the back seat and automobile accidents would vanish.

All of it was fun. There was so much excitement to it, so many thrills every time we worked out another consolidation, that I could still cry when I think of the time I picked up the telephone to call our lab and tumbled everything into the discard.

I was at Mary Ann's house that evening-- Or have I told you about Mary Ann yet? No. I guess I haven't.

Mary Ann was the girl who would have been my fiancee but for two ifs. One, if she were willing, and two, if I had the nerve to ask her. She has red hair and crams something like two tons of energy into about 110 pounds of body which fills out very nicely from the ground to five and a half feet up. I was dying to ask her, you understand, but each time I'd see her coming into sight, setting a match to my heart with every movement, I'd just break down.

It's not that I'm not good-looking. People tell me I'm adequate. I've got all my hair; I'm nearly six feet tall; I can even dance. It's just that I've nothing to offer. I don't have to tell you what college teachers make. With inflation and taxes, it amounts to just about nothing. Of course, if we got the basic patents rolled up on our little thinking machine, things would be different. But I couldn't ask her to wait for that, either. Maybe, after it was all set-Anyway, I just stood there, wis.h.i.+ng, that evening, as she came into the living room. My arm was groping blindly for the phone.

Mary Ann said, "I'm all ready, Bill. Let's go."

I said, "Just a minute. I want to ring up Cliff."

She frowned a little, "Can't it wait?"

"I was supposed to call him two hours ago," I explained.

It only took two minutes. I rang the lab. Cliff was putting in an evening of work and so he answered. I asked something, then he said something, I asked some more and he explained. The details don't matter, but as I said, he's the mathematician of the combination. When I build the circuits and put things together in what look like impossible ways, he's the guy who shuffles the symbols and tells me whether they're really impossible. Then, just as I finished and hung up, there was a ring at the door.

For a minute, I thought Mary Ann had another caller and got sort of stiff-backed as I watched her go to the door. I was scribbling down some of what Cliff had just told me while I watched. But then she opened the door and it was only Cliff Anderson after all.

He said, "I thought I'd find you here-- h.e.l.lo, Mary Ann. Say, weren't you going to ring me at six? You're as reliable as a cardboard chair." Cliff is short and plump and always willing to start a fight, but I know him and pay no attention.

I said, "Things turned up and it slipped my mind. But I just called, so what's the difference?"

"Called? Me? When?"

I started to point to the telephone and gagged. Right then, the bottom fell out of things. Exactly five seconds before the doorbell had sounded I had been on the phone talking to Cliff in the lab, and the lab was six miles away from Mary Ann's house.

I said, "I--just spoke to you."

I wasn't getting across. Cliff just said, "To me?" again.

I was pointing to the phone with both hands now, "On the phone. I called the lab. On this phone here! Mary Ann heard me. Mary Ann, wasn't I just talking to--"

Mary Ann said, "I don't know whom you were talking to. --Well, shall we go?" That's Mary Ann. She's a stickler for honesty.

I sat down. I tried to be very quiet and clear. I said, "Cliff, I dialed the lab's phone number, you answered the phone, I asked you if you had the details worked out, you said, yes, and gave them to me. Here they are. I wrote them down. Is this correct or not?"

I handed him the paper on which I had written the equations.

Cliff looked at them. He said, "They're correct. But where could you have gotten them? You didn't work them out yourself, did you?"

"I just told you. You gave them to me over the phone."

Cliff shook his head, "Bill, I haven't been in the lab since seven fifteen. There's n.o.body there."

"I spoke to somebody, I tell you."

Mary Ann was fiddling with her gloves. "We're getting late," she said.

I waved my hands at her to wait a bit, and said to Cliff, "Look, are you sure--"

"There's n.o.body there, unless you want to count Junior." Junior was what we called our pint-sized mechanical brain.

We stood there, looking at one another. Mary Ann's toe was still hitting the floor like a time bomb waiting to explode.

Then Cliff laughed. He said, "I'm thinking of a cartoon I saw, somewhere. It shows a robot answering the phone and saying, 'Honest, boss, there's n.o.body here but us complicated thinking machines.' "

I didn't think that was funny. I said, "Let's go to the lab."

Mary Ann said, "Hey! We won't make the show."

I said, "Look, Mary Ann, this is very important. It's just going to take a minute. Come along with us and we'll go straight to the show from there."

She said, "The show starts--" And then she stopped talking, because I grabbed her wrist and we left.

That just shows how excited I was. Ordinarily, I wouldn't ever have dreamed of shoving her around. I mean, Mary Ann is quite the lady. It's just that I had so many things on my mind. I don't even really remember grabbing her wrist, come to think of it. It's just that the next thing I knew, I was in the auto and so was Cliff and so was she, and she was rubbing her wrist and muttering under her breath about big gorillas.

I said, "Did I hurt you, Mary Ann?"

She said, "No, of course not. I have my arm yanked out of its socket every day, just for fun." Then she kicked me in the s.h.i.+n.

She only does things like that because she has red hair. Actually, she has a very gentle nature, but she tries very hard to live up to the redhead mythology. I see right through that, of course, but I humor her, poor kid.

We were at the laboratory in twenty minutes.

The Inst.i.tute is empty at night. It's emptier than a building would ordinarily be. You see, it's designed to have crowds of students rus.h.i.+ng through the corridors and when they aren't there, it's unnaturally lonely. Or maybe it was just that I was afraid to see what might be sitting in our laboratory upstairs. Either way, footsteps were uncomfortably loud and the self-service elevator was downright dingy.