A for Anything, Page 2

  “Hello,” said Wall, interrupting the voice of the operator, “this is Gilbert Wall—let me talk to MacDonald.”

  “Oh, Mr. Wall. This is Ernie, the office boy. I’ll uh, I’ll put you right through.”

  Another pause. “Hello, Gil.”

  Wall exhaled with relief. “Hello, Nate. Boy have I had a time with this call, but never mind that now. Listen, that Ewing is a maniac. I mean it. First of all, Nate, our tip was correct, that gadget of his, that Gismo really works. There is no doubt about it.” The silence struck him as odd. “Hello, Nate? Are you listening?”

  “I heard you.” Wall could see the heavy jawed face, all straight lines mouth, flat nose, narrow eyes, gray hair combel straight across tops of the born rimmed glasses as straight as a ruler. MacDonald sounded like that, dry, unemotional even in crises, and yet there was something in his tone that bothered Wall.

  “Well, it’s just as bad as we thought. Or worse. He absolutely would not listen to reason, Nate, and what’s worse, the s.o.b. got away from me.” Wall touched his temple gingerly, and winced. “It may have been my fault, I more or less lost my head and made some threats, trying to throw a scare into him, and—He took me by surprise, I never thought he had it in him, and he knocked some books over on me, and that’s why I haven’t called until now. Nate, I was out cold all night, until just a few minutes ago. I’m still not myself. Now, my idea is, he’ll be hiding out somewhere. He’s probably scared witless over all this—assaulting me, and so on. Do you check me on that, Nate?”

  The voice said, “Probably.”

  “Well, we’ve got to move fast, Nate. I know it was my ball and I bobbled it, I admit that, but we’ve got to find that guy. Swear out a warrant, or—how would this be—suppose we tell the Health Service people he’s infected with bubonic plague, or something?… Nate?”

  The voice said, “There’s a lot of noise here.”

  Wall heard a faint, distant murmur, as if a crowd of people were talking (shouting?) in the background. Then there were some underwater clicks, and MacDonald’s voice again: “What are your plans now, Gil?”

  “Plans?” said Wall, taken aback. “Well, I can either stay here—I’ve got a date with the local chief of police, I can keep that, if we decide to work through him— Or if you want me to come back for a skull session, Nate, I can charter a plane. But listen, we’ve got to get on the ball with this thing. I mean, if that maniac, Ewing, ever gets it into his head to distribute that thing, that Gismo—Nate, my mind just boggles. I can’t picture it.”

  “I’m watching it,” said MacDonald’s voice indistinctly.

  “What?” said Wall after a moment. “What did you say, Nate?”

  “I’m watching it happen,” said MacDonald’s voice. “What did you think Ewing was doing all this time?”

  “What?” said Wall again.

  “Those things were in the morning mail delivery here. Two in a box. At least a hundred people got them. Along about ten, people started copying them and giving them away to their friends and relations. Now they’re fighting in the streets.”

  “Nate—” said Wall brokenly.

  “I’ve got mine. Sent Crawford down for them. Packing now, or you wouldn’t have got me. I happen to know a place in Wyoming that’s built like a castle—you could hold off an army there. Well, take care of yourself, Gil. Nobody else will.”

  “Nate, give me a minute now, I just can’t believe it—”

  “Turn on your TV,” said MacDonald. There was a click, and the wire went dead.

  Wall stared blankly at the receiver, then turned slowly. There was a little portable TV set standing on the bench. He walked over to it, leaving the telephone receiver swinging at the end of its cord, and turned on the switch. The TV blurted: “—and down Sunset Boulevard, from Olvera Street west. And here’s a flash.” The screen lighted, showed a raster, but no face appeared. “Police Chief Victor Corsi has issued a call for special volunteer policemen to handle the crowds. It’s my hunch he won’t get any. The big question today is, Have you got a Gismo? And believe me, nothing else matters. This station will stay on the air to keep you informed as long as possible, but no thanks to its poltroon of a general manager, J. W. Kidder, or its revolting program director, Douglas M. Dow, who took off for the hills as soon as they got theirs. For my own part, I say balls to them both. And balls to the Pacific Broadcasting Company and all its little subsidiaries! Balls to Mayor Needham! And balls to—”

  Wall turned the set off. The voice stopped; the bright frame shrank, twitched, shriveled to a point of light, that faded and went out.

  Chapter Three

  Ewing opened the back screen door and stepped out into the yard. It was a still, cloudless morning; the smog was all down in the valley. The tall dry grass was uncomfortable to walk in, and he moved automatically down the shallow slope to stand under the pepper tree. In the cool cavern behind the hanging curtain of branches, the ground was bare except for the carpet of red leaves and the hard little berries. The kids had been building a hut in here with old lumber from the fence, and their toys were scattered around. Ewing’s ear registered the sudden outburst of shrill voices inside the house, and he frowned unhappily. That was not so good: you could hear them half a mile away, and they were all over the mountain in the daytime. But you couldn’t keep children locked up like criminals.

  Anyhow, they had found a good place. The cottage stood on its own half-acre terrace more than halfway up the mountainside. Above it there was only the scrubby slope of the mountain itself, bone-dry and littered with boulders, and a row of desiccated palm trees along the irrigation canal. The one neighboring house, between the cottage and the hill road, was empty and fire-gutted. Below the house there was another terrace, where evidently previous tenants had had a kitchen garden; then the land sloped abruptly down and became an orchard of tiny orange trees. Ewing had seen the owner’s name on a mailbox, down at the bottom of the mountain: Lo Vecchio, something like that. What was going to happen to him and his orchard now?

  Down below, the valley lay spread out, rolling down and receding into an improbable blueness. Ewing could see the road, diminishing to a tiny yellowish thread, and the cross-hatched patterns of tilled fields. The horizon curved around him on three sides. Eucalyptus trees masked the highways; except for an occasional airplane, or a car going or coming in the residential area just below, the world around him might have been deserted.

  The rattle of a laboring engine came echoing up in the clear air.

  Ewing started, and peered fruitlessly off to his right, where trees screened the road. That sounded like somebody coming up the hill.

  Trouble. It might be somebody from the Adventist colony down below, paying a neighborly call, but from what Ewing had seen, they all drove late-model cars. This sounded like a wreck. With his heart pumping in his throat, Ewing ran into the house, past a startled Fay and two round girl-faces at the breakfast table, and got the shotgun out of the closet. He made a second grab for the box of shells; two more jumps took him to the front porch. He was in time to see the car pull up on the road above the house.

  It was a battered, dusty Lincoln coupe with its trunk bulging open. All the chrome trim was missing from the body and fenders, and the denuded strips were measled with rust. A fine spume of steam rose from the radiator.

  “Dave boy!” shouted the driver, popping up on the far side of the car like a marionette. He was a dusty gray man in a faded jacket and sweater; Ewing lowered the gun and stared at him. That cracked, cheerful voice—

  “Platt!” he said, in mingled relief and exasperation.

  “None other! The very same! In the flesh!” Platt came stork-legged down the driveway, moving with a jerky, nervous energy, elbows pumping, his long face spilt in a yellow grin. He grabbed Ewing’s hand and shook it hard; his water-gray eyes were bright and sparkling. “Gotcha! You can’t hide from me, boy! Ends of the earth! Well, hell, it’s good to see you, Dave—hello, Fay, hello kids—but for God’s sake”—Ewi
ng turned to see that his family was clustered in the doorway; he turned back as Platt’s stream of talk went on uninterrupted—“ask a man in and give him a drink of water if you haven’t got anything better. I’m so parched I’m spitting sand. What are you up here, eagles? Hell, is this Elaine? My God, you’re big! Pretty as your old lady, too. And who’s this?”.

  Kathy, looking suspicious, retired behind her mother’s skirts. Elaine, who was twelve, was blushing like a debutante. Somehow they were all moving into the living room, and Platt threw himself into the only upholstered chair with a shout of comfort. He was leaning forward the next instant, still talking, fumbling a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket, striking a shaky light, dropping the match, pulling Elaine into a one-armed embrace and winking at Kathy.

  Platt was a man of galloping enthusiasms; a good experimental physicist, but a theorist whom nobody took seriously. He had a new theory every year, and believed in every one with a frantic, whole-souled earnestness. His greatest love was rocketry, but he had never succeeded in getting a clearance to work on classified projects. Platt’s frustration was acute, but only seemed to wind his spring tighter. He changed jobs frequently, and popped in and out of Ewing’s life: the last time they had met was in 1967.

  Elaine, who was still blushing, drew away and went toward the kitchen. “I’ll get the water for you, Mr. Platt.”

  “Call me Leroy. And not too much water, honey.”

  “There isn’t any liquor in the house,” Fay said. “We just moved in yesterday, but I can get some coffee …”

  “No, that’s OK, I’ve got a bottle in the car—the bottomless bottle, thanks to your boy here—I’ll bring it in later and we’ll have a ball, but listen, Dave—” the cigarette spilled ash down his frayed sweater—“I want to tell you, you’re the biggest genius of them all. My chapeau is off to you, boy, I mean it! I wish I’d invented that! But you did it, son—you’re the greatest. I mean it. Well”—he took the brimming glass of water from Elaine and raised it—“here’s to you, Dave Ewing, and long may you Gismo!” He sipped and made a mock-wry face, then gulped the water down.

  Ewing said, “What makes you think I—”

  “Who was working with Schellhammers?” Platt cried. “You think I didn’t see your John Henry all over that thing? Going to tell me you didn’t do it?”

  “No, but—”

  “Sure, you did! The second I saw that, I could tell. I said to myself, I got to find old Dave, and I’ll do it, too, if I have to track ‘m down like a bloodhound!”

  Fay put in, “Leroy, how did you find us?”

  “I’ll tell you, honey. See, Dave and yours truly were old army buddies, and back at Fort Benning he always used to tell me how he wanted to go live in the mountains some day—wanted to be a goddamn eagle and sneer down at all the flatland foreigners. So I figured, where would Dave go if he wanted to get out of sight in a hurry? Not down to L.A., because there’s going to be hell popping down there. Not up the coast, because that’d take too long and he might get stuck anywhere along the way. I figured, he’d head out on route ninety-one and stop the first time he came to a high place. So I followed my hunch, and when I saw this little pimple with a house on it, I came on up. See?”

  The Ewings looked at each other in dismay. Fay’s hand was on the little portable radio; she must have switched it on, because a power hum came out of the speaker. But there were no voices: the last of the local stations had gone off the air yesterday evening. She turned it off, still looking stricken.

  “Well, hell, you don’t have to stay here, do you?” Platt demanded. “Not that anybody else would find you this easy, but listen, old buddy, you too, Fay, what are you going to do with yourselves, now you don’t have to work for a living?”

  Ewing cleared his throat. “We haven’t really had time to talk about it. I’d like to build a lab somewhere, when things settle down… .”

  “Sure you would. You will, too, boy. Hell, the sky’s the limit, and that brings me to the moral of my tale. Listen, thanks to you, we can all do what we want now—and Dave, listen, you know what I want to do?”

  Ewing said the first fantastic thing that came into his head.

  “Fly to the moon, I guess.”

  “Right. Good boy—smart as a razor, no flies on you.”

  “Oh, no,” said Ewing, clutching his head.

  “Sure! Dave, listen, come on with me, bring the family—I’ve got the place picked out, and I know ten, twenty other people that’ll come in with us, but you’re the boy I wanted to see first. It’s big, boy, it’s the biggest thing in the world!”

  “You really want to build a spaceship?”

  “Going to build one, boy. Up in the Santa Rosas—the Kennelly labs, they’re made to order. All the room you want, and heavy equipment—two months to get organized, and then watch us go.”

  “Why not White Sands?”

  Platt shook his head impatiently. “I don’t want it, Davey. One thing, every space-happy nut in the country will be there by now—you’ll have to elbow ‘em out of the way to spit. Then, what have they got that we need? Hardware, yes, missile frames, yes, but most of it is the wrong scale. We’re going to start fresh, Davey, and do it right. You can’t make an interplanetary vehicle out of a Viking, boy—might as well put rockets on an outhouse. Think about this, now. Really see it.” He hitched closer, spreading his ungainly arms. “Build your ship—any size. Make it as big as an apartment house if you want—and all payload, Davey! Put everything in. Bedrooms, bowling alleys, kitchens—wup, no kitchens; don’t need ‘em. But libraries, movie theaters, laboratories—”

  Ewing started. “Leroy, have you been drinking liquor copied by the Gismo? You said something before—”

  “Sure,” said Platt impatiently. “Eating the food, too. Why not? Just put it through twice, make sure you don’t get any reversed peptide chains. Now listen, boy, pay attention—you build all that, whatever you want, get the picture? Now: put your rocket motors underneath. All you want. With the Gismo, you can have ten or a million. Now what about fuel—all those big tanks that used to kill us dead before we got off the ground? Davey, two little tanks, hydrazine and oxygen, and two Gismos. We make our fuel as we need it. Forget about your goddamn mass-energy ratios! I can jack up the goddamn Mormon Temple and take it to the moon! The moon, hell!”

  He took a breath. “Dave, think about it! We can go any goddamn where in the universe! This time next year, we’ll be on Mars. Mars.” He stood up, arms out, and became a spacesuited Martian explorer, staring keenly into the distance. “What’s that I see? Strange pyramids? Little men with six noses? We’ll find out, but let’s make it quick, because we got a date on Venus. But we’ll leave behind a bunch of big Gismos as an atmosphere plant—fifty years, a hundred years, there’ll be enough air on Mars to breathe without these helmets. Then Venus—same thing there. If there’s no oxygen, we’ll make it. Davey, a lousy hundred years from now, mankind’ll own the universe. I’m telling you! We can have Mars, and Venus, and the Jovian system, just for the asking! Then what about the stars? Listen, Davey, why not? In that ship we can live indefinitely—we can have kids there, and they’ll keep going when we kick off. Do you see it now? Doesn’t it send you?”

  He paused and glared incredulously at Ewing. “No?”

  “No. Now look, Leroy, just to take one point—this atmosphere scheme of yours. You’re going to be adding mass—billions of tons of it. It isn’t like releasing free oxygen chemically, from oxides in the soil or something like that—you’re going to perturb the orbits of the planets.”

  “Not to bother about,” said Platt energetically. “Look, look—say the mass of a small planet like Mars …” Still talking, he hauled out a small celluloid slide rule and began flipping the cursor back and forth.

  “Wait a minute,” Ewing said, “you’re going off half-cocked again.” He produced his own slide rule from his back pocket, and they bent closer to each other, both trying to talk at once.

  When she
saw this, Fay got up and went into the kitchen, taking her resigned children with her.

  Half an hour later, when she came back with coffee and sandwiches, Platt was just getting to his feet in an ecstasy of despair at human stupidity. “Well, hell,” he said. “Well, hell. Well, hell, boy. I’ll get the bottle and we’ll have a snort to celebrate, anyway. Maybe that’ll loosen you up,” he added in a stage aside. The screen door banged behind him.

  Ewing grinned ruefully and put his arm around his wife as she sat down beside him. “Better get the spare room ready,” he said.

  “Dave, no, it’s just that hot little room with the water heater in it. And we haven’t even got a mattress for him.”

  “He’ll sleep on the floor—he’ll insist on it,” Ewing said. He shook his head, feeling a sentimental warmth for Platt—so entirely himself, so unchanged after all these years.

  “Good old Leroy!” he said. “Venus!”

  Shortly before noon the house was in full sunlight. The sky was clear; the heat poured down in a breathless torrent, and the dry earth bounced it back. The air over the mountainside shimmered with heat, and the palms were dusty and brittle. Ewing picked up a clod of dirt in his hand; it crumbled into brown powder. “Hot,” said Leroy Platt, fanning himself with a shapeless fedora, “sure is hot.” The sunlight made his pale eyes look naked and mad, surprised like oysters in the white shell of his face. He put the hat back on.

  Ewing enjoyed the heat. The sun beat down on his head and shoulders as if it wanted to cook him; but his limbs moved freely, well-oiled, and tiny drops of sweat, like a golden mist, sprang out all over his arms and body. He liked his sharp-edged shadow moving crisply underfoot in the strong light. He liked thinking about the cool shade inside the house, after the heat. “We’re almost there,” he said, scrambling up.

  From the top of the little mountain they could look down on the residential area, the Adventist college and food factory, all laid out like a tabletop village. The streets were neatly drawn, the trees bright green, the housetops blue or red.