NINE TOMORROWS Tales of the Near Future Page 9

  He said, “I don’t think it’s Earth getting us. Let’s face it.”

  Kaunas looked up sharply. He was a little fellow with quick, nervous movements of his hands. He habitually wore clothes that looked a shade too large for him.

  He said, “Villiers! I know. I think about him sometimes.” Then, with an air of desperation, “I got a letter from him.”

  Ryger sat upright, his olive complexion darkening further and said with energy, “You did? When?”

  “A month ago.”

  Ryger turned to Talliaferro. “How about you?”

  Talliaferro blinked placidly and nodded.

  Ryger said, “He’s gone crazy. He claims he’s discovered a practical method of mass-transference through space.

  —He told you two also? —That’s it, then. He was always a little bent. Now he’s broken.”

  He rubbed his nose fiercely and Talliaferro thought of the day Villiers had broken it.

  For ten years, Villiers had haunted them like the vague shadow of a guilt that wasn’t really theirs. They had gone through their graduate work together, four picked and dedicated men being trained for a profession that had reached new heights in this age of interplanetary travel.

  The Observatories were opening on the other worlds, surrounded by vacuum, unblurred by air.

  There was the Lunar Observatory, from which Earth and the inner planets could be studied; a silent world in whose sky the home-planet hung suspended.

  Mercury Observatory, closest to the sun, perched at Mercury’s north pole, where the terminator moved scarcely at all, and the sun was fixed on the horizon and could be studied in the minutest detail.

  Ceres Observatory, newest, most modern, with its range extending from Jupiter to the outermost galaxies.

  There were disadvantages, of course. With interplanetary travel still difficult, leaves would be few, anything like normal life virtually impossible, but this was a lucky generation. Coming scientists would find the fields of knowledge well-reaped and, until the invention of an interstellar drive, no new horizon as capacious as this one would be opened.

  Each of these lucky four, Talliaferro, Ryger, Kaunas, and Villiers, was to be in the position of a Galileo, who by owning the first real telescope, could not point it anywhere in the sky without making a major discovery.

  But then Romero Villiers had fallen sick and it was rheumatic fever. Whose fault was that? His heart had been left leaking and limping.

  He was the most brilliant of the four, the most hopeful, the most intense—and he could not even finish his schooling and get his doctorate.

  Worse than that, he could never leave Earth; the acceleration of a spaceship’s take-off would kill him.

  Talliaferro was marked for the Moon, Ryger for Ceres, Kaunas for Mercury. Only Villiers stayed behind, a life-prisoner of Earth.

  They had tried telling their sympathy and Villiers had rejected it with something approaching hate. He had railed at them and cursed them. When Ryger lost his temper and lifted his fist, Villiers had sprung at him, screaming, and had broken Ryger’s nose.

  Obviously Ryger hadn’t forgotten that, as he caressed his nose gingerly with one finger.

  Kaunas’s forehead was an uncertain washboard of wrinkles. “He’s at the Convention, you know. He’s got a room in the hotel—405.”

  “I won’t see him,” said Ryger.

  “He’s coming up here. He said he wanted to see us. I thought—He said nine. He’ll be here any minute.”

  “In that case,” said Ryger, “if you don’t mind, I’m leaving.” He rose.

  Talliaferro said, “Oh, wait a while. What’s the harm in seeing him?”

  “Because there’s no point. He’s mad.”

  “Even so. Let’s not be petty about it. Are you afraid of him?”

  “Afraid!” Ryger looked contemptuous.

  “Nervous, then. What is there to be nervous about?”

  “I’m not nervous,” said Ryger.

  “Sure you are. We all feel guilty about him, and without real reason. Nothing that happened was our fault.” But he was speaking defensively and he knew it.

  And when, at that point, the door signal sounded, all three jumped and turned to stare uneasily at the barrier that stood between themselves and Villiers.

  The door opened and Romero Villiers walked in. The others rose stiffly to greet him, then remained standing in embarrassment, without one hand being raised.

  He stared them down sardonically.

  He’s changed, thought Talliaferro.

  He had. He had shrunken in almost every dimension. A gathering stoop made him seem even shorter. The skin of his scalp glistened through thinning hair, the skin on the back of his hands was ridged crookedly with bluish veins. He looked ill. There seemed nothing to link him to the memory of the past except for his trick of shading his eyes with one hand when he stared intently and, when he spoke, the even, controlled baritone of his voice.

  He said, “My friends! My space-trotting friends! We’ve lost touch.”

  Talliaferro said, “Hello, Villiers.”

  Villiers eyed him. “Are you well?”

  “Well enough.”

  “And you two?”

  Kaunas managed a weak smile and a murmur. Ryger snapped, “All right, Villiers. What’s up?”

  “Ryger, the angry man,” said Villiers. “How’s Ceres?”

  “It was doing well when I left. How’s Earth?”

  “You can see for yourself,” but Villiers tightened as he said that.

  He went on, “I am hoping that the reason all three of you have come to the Convention is to hear my paper day after tomorrow.”

  “Your paper? What paper?” asked Talliaferro.

  “I wrote you all about it. My method of mass-transference.”

  Ryger smiled with one corner of his mouth. “Yes, you did. You didn’t say anything about a paper, though, and I don’t recall that you’re listed as one of the speakers. I would have noticed it if you had been.”

  “You’re right. I’m not listed. Nor have I prepared an abstract for publication.”

  Villiers had flushed and Taliaferro said soothingly, “Take it easy, Villiers. You don’t look well.”

  Villiers whirled on him, lips contorted. “My heart’s holding out, thank you.”

  Kaunas said, “Listen, Villiers, if you’re not listed or abstracted—”

  “You listen. I’ve waited ten years. You have the jobs in space and I have to teach school on Earth, but I’m a better man than any of you or all of you.”

  “Granted—” began Talliaferro.

  “And I don’t want your condescension either. Mandel witnessed it. I suppose you’ve heard of Mandel. Well, he’s chairman of the astronautics division at the Convention and I demonstrated mass-transference for him. It was a crude device and it burnt out after one use but—Are

  you listening?”

  “We’re listening,” said Ryger coldly, “for what that counts.”

  “He’ll let me talk about it my way. You bet he will. No warning. No advertisement. I’m going to spring it at them like a bombshell. When I give them the fundamental relationships involved it will break up the Convention. They’ll scatter to their home labs to check on me and build devices. And they’ll find it works. I made a live mouse disappear at one spot in my lab and appear in another. Mandel witnessed it.”

  He stared at them, glaring first at one face, then at another. He said, “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  Ryger said, “If you don’t want advertisement, why do you tell us?”

  “You’re different. You’re my friends, my classmates. You went out into space and left me behind.”

  “That wasn’t a matter of choice,” objected Kaunas in a thin, high voice.

  Villiers ignored that. He said, “So I want you to know now. What will work for a mouse will work for a human. What will move something ten feet across a lab will move it a million miles across space. I’ll be on the Moon, and on Mercury,
and on Ceres and anywhere I want to go. I’ll match every one of you and more. And I’ll have done more for astronomy just teaching school and thinking, than all of you with your observatories and telescopes and cameras and spaceships.”

  “Well,” said Talliaferro, “I’m pleased. More power to you. May I see a copy of the paper?”

  “Oh, no.” Villiers’ hands clenched close to his chest as though he were holding phantom sheets and shielding them from observation. “You wait like everyone else. There’s only one copy and no one will see it till I’m ready. Not even Mandel.”

  “One copy,” cried Talliaferro. “If you misplace it—”

  “I won’t. And if I do, it’s all in my head.”

  “If you—” Talliaferro almost finished that sentence with “die” but stopped himself. Instead, he went on after an almost imperceptible pause, “—have any sense, you’ll scan it at least. For safety’s sake.”

  “No,” said Villiers, shortly. “You’ll hear me day after tomorrow. You’ll see the human horizon expanded at one stroke as it never has been before.”

  Again he stared intently at each face. “Ten years,” he said. “Good-by.”

  “He’s mad,” said Ryger explosively, staring at the door as though Villiers were still standing before it.

  “Is he?” said Talliaferro thoughtfully. “I suppose he is, in a way. He hates us for irrational reasons. And, then, not even to scan his paper as a precaution—”

  Talliaferro fingered his own small scanner as he said that. It was just a neutrally colored, undistinguished cylinder, somewhat thicker and somewhat shorter than an ordinary pencil. In recent years, it had become the hallmark of the scientist, much as the stethoscope was that of the physician and the micro-computer that of the statistician. The scanner was worn in a jacket pocket, or clipped to a sleeve, or slipped behind the ear, or swung at the end of a string.

  Talliaferro sometimes, in his more philosophical moments, wondered how it was in the days when research men had to make laborious notes of the literature or file away full-sized reprints. How unwieldy!

  Now it was only necessary to scan anything printed or written to have a micro-negative which could be developed at leisure. Talliaferro had already recorded every abstract included in the program booklet of the Convention. The other two, he assumed with full confidence, had done likewise.

  Talliaferro said, “Under the circumstances, refusal to scan is mad.”

  “Space!” said Ryger hotly. “There is no paper. There is no discovery. Scoring one on us would be worth any lie to him.”

  “But then what will he do day after tomorrow?” asked Kaunas.

  “How do I know? He’s a madman.”

  Talliaferro still played with his scanner and wondered idly if he ought to remove and develop some of the small slivers of film that lay stored away in its vitals. He decided against it. He said, “Don’t underestimate Villiers. He’s a brain.”

  “Ten years ago, maybe,” said Ryger. “Now he’s a nut. I propose we forget him.”

  He spoke loudly, as though to drive away Villiers and all that concerned him by the sheer force with which he discussed other things. He talked about Ceres and his work—the radio-plotting of the Milky Way with new radioscopes capable of the resolution of single stars.

  Kaunas listened and nodded, then chimed in with information concerning the radio emissions of sunspots and his own paper, in press, on the association of proton storms with the gigantic hydrogen flares on the sun’s surface.

  Talliaferro contributed little. Lunar work was unglamorous in comparison. The latest information on long-scale weather forecasting through direct observation of terrestrial jet-streams would not compare with radioscopes and proton storms.

  More than that, his thoughts could not leave Villiers. Villiers was the brain. They all knew it. Even Ryger, for all his bluster, must feel that if mass-transference were at all possible then Villiers was a logical discoverer.

  The discussion of their own work amounted to no more than an uneasy admission that none of them had come to much. Talliaferro had followed the literature and knew. His own papers had been minor. The others had authored nothing of great importance.

  None of them—face the fact—had developed into space-shakers. The colossal dreams of school days had not come true and that was that. They were competent routine workmen. No less. Unfortunately, no more. They knew that.

  Villiers would have been more. They knew that, too. It was that knowledge, as well as guilt, which kept them antagonistic.

  Talliaferro felt uneasily that Villiers, despite everything, was yet to be more. The others must be thinking so, too, and mediocrity could grow quickly unbearable. The mass-transference paper would come to pass and Villiers would be the great man after all, as he was always fated to be apparently, while his classmates, with all their advantages, would be forgotten. Their role would be no more than to applaud from the crowd.

  He felt his own envy and chagrin and was ashamed of it, but felt it none the less.

  Conversation died, and Kaunas said, his eyes turning away, “Listen, why don’t we drop in on old Villiers?”

  There was a false heartiness about it, a completely unconvincing effort at casualness. He added, “No use leaving bad feelings—unnecessarily—”

  Talliaferro thought: He wants to make sure about the mass-transference. He’s hoping it is only a madman’s nightmare so he can sleep tonight.

  But he was curious himself, so he made no objection, and even Ryger shrugged with ill grace and said, “Hell, why not?”

  It was a little before eleven then.

  Talliaferro was awakened by the insistent ringing of his door signal. He hitched himself to one elbow in the darkness and felt distinctly outraged. The soft glow of the ceiling indicator showed it to be not quite four in the morning.

  He cried out, “Who is it?” The ringing continued in short, insistent spurts. Growling, Talliaferro slipped into his bathrobe. He opened the door and blinked in the corridor light. He recognized the man who faced him from the trimensionals he had seen often enough.

  Nevertheless, the man said in an abrupt whisper, “My name is Hubert Mandel.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Talliaferro. Mandel was one of the Names in astronomy, prominent enough to have an important executive position with the World Astronomical Bureau, active enough to be Chairman of the Astronautics section here at the Convention.

  It suddenly struck Talliaferro that it was Mandel for whom Villiers claimed to have demonstrated mass-transference. The thought of Villiers was somehow a sobering one.

  Mandel said, “You are Dr. Edward Talliaferro?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then dress and come with me. It is very important. It concerns a mutual acquaintance.”

  “Dr. Villiers?”

  Mandel’s eyes flickered a bit. His brows and lashes were so fair as to give those eyes a naked, unfringed appearance. His hair was silky-thin, his age about fifty. He said, “Why Villiers?”

  “He mentioned you last evening. I don’t know any other mutual acquaintance.”

  Mandel nodded, waited for Talliaferro to finish slipping into his clothes, then turned and led the way. Ryger and Kaunas were waiting in a room one floor above Talliaferro’s. Kaunas’s eyes were red and troubled. Ryger was smoking a cigarette with impatient puffs.

  Talliaferro said, “We’re all here. Another reunion.” It fell flat.

  He took a seat and the three stared at one another. Ryger shrugged.

  Mandel paced the floor, hands keep in his pockets. He said, “I apologize for any inconvenience, gentlemen, and I thank you for your co-operation. I would like more of it. Our friend, Romero Villiers, is dead. About an hour ago, his body was removed from the hotel. The medical judgment is heart failure.”

  There was a stunned silence. Ryger’s cigarette hovered halfway to his lips, then sank slowly without completing its journey.

  “Poor devil,” said Talliaferro.

  “Horrible,�
�� whispered Kaunas hoarsely. “He was—”

  His voice played out.

  Ryger shook himself. “Well, he had a bad heart. There’s nothing to be done.”

  “One little thing,” corrected Mandel quietly. “Recovery.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Ryger sharply.

  Mandel said, “When did you three see him last?”

  Talliaferro spoke. “Last evening. It turned out to be a reunion. We all met for the first time in ten years. It wasn’t a pleasant meeting, I’m sorry to say. Villiers felt he had cause for anger with us, and he was angry.”

  “That was—when?”

  “About nine, the first time.”

  “The first time?”

  “We saw him again later in the evening.”

  Kaunas looked troubled. “He had left angrily. We couldn’t leave it at that. We had to try. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t all been friends at one time. So we went to his room and—”

  Mandel pounced on that. “You were all in his room?”

  “Yes,” said Kaunas, surprised.

  “About when?”

  “Eleven, I think.” He looked at the others. Talliaferro nodded.

  “And how long did you stay?”

  “Two minutes,” put in Ryger. “He ordered us out as though we were after his paper.” He paused as though expecting Mandel to ask what paper, but Mandel said nothing. He went on. “I think he kept it under his pillow. At least he lay across the pillow as he yelled at us to leave.”

  “He may have been dying then,” said Kaunas, in a sick whisper.

  “Not then,” said Mandel shortly. “So you probably all left fingerprints.”

  “Probably,” said Talliaferro. He was losing some of his automatic respect for Mandel and a sense of impatience was returning. It was four in the morning, Mandel or no. He said, “Now what’s all this about?”

  “Well, gentlemen,” said Mandel, “there’s more to Villiers’ death than the fact of death. Villiers’ paper, the only copy of it as far as I know, was stuffed into the cigarette flash-disposal unit and only scraps of it were left. I’ve never seen or read the paper, but I knew enough about the matter to be willing to swear in court if necessary that the remnants of unflashed paper in the disposal unit were of the paper he was planning to give at this Convention. —You seem doubtful, Dr. Ryger.”