He turned at the touch of a hand upon his shoulder. "Dr. Blaustein! I had nearly forgotten. Here, I want to talk to you."
He dragged the small psychiatrist to one side and hissed in his ear, "Listen, can you persuade Ralson to be introduced to these people? This is his triumph."
Blaustein said, "Ralson is dead."
"What!"
"Can you leave these people for a time?"
"Yes… yes-Gentlemen, you will excuse me for a few minutes?"
He hurried off with Blaustein.
The Federal men had already taken over. Unobtrusively, they barred the doorway to Ross's office. Outside there were the milling crowd discussing the answer to Alamogordo that they had just witnessed. Inside, unknown to them, was the death of the answerer. The G-man barrier divided to allow Grant and Blaustein to enter. It closed behind them again.
For a moment, Grant raised the sheet. He said, "He looks peaceful."
"I would say-happy," said Blaustein.
Darrity said, colorlessly, "The suicide weapon was my own knife. It was my negligence; it will be reported as such."
"No, no," said Blaustein, "that would be useless. He was my patient and I am responsible. In any case, he would not have lived another week. Since he invented the projector, he was a dying man."
Grant said, "How much of this has to be placed in the Federal files? Can't we forget all about his madness?"
"I'm afraid not, Dr. Grant," said Darrity.
"I have told him the whole story," said Blaustein, sadly.
Grant looked from one to the other. "I'll speak to the Director. I'll go to the President, if necessary. I don't see that there need be any mention of suicide or of madness. He'll get full publicity as inventor of the field projector. It's the least we can do for him." His teeth were gritting.
Blaustein said, "He left a note."
"A note?"
Darrity handed him a sheet of paper and said, "Suicides almost always do. This is one reason the doctor told me about what really killed Ralson."
The note was addressed to Blaustein and it went:
"The projector works; I knew it would. The bargain is done. You've got it and you don't need me any more. So I'll go. You needn't worry about the human race, Doc. You were right. They've bred us too long; they've taken too many chances. We're out of the culture now and they won't be able to stop us. I know. That's all I can say. I know."
He had signed his name quickly and then underneath there was one scrawled line, and it said:
"Provided enough men are penicillin-resistant."
Grant made a motion to crumple the paper, but Darrity held out a quick hand.
"For the record, Doctor," he said.
Grant gave it to him and said, "Poor Ralson! He died believing all that trash."
Blaustein nodded. "So he did. Ralson will be given a great funeral, I suppose, and the fact of his invention will be publicized without the madness and the suicide. But the government men will remain interested in his mad theories. They may not be so mad, no, Mr. Darrity?"
"That's ridiculous, Doctor," said Grant. "There isn't a scientist on the job who has shown the least uneasiness about it at all."
"Tell him, Mr. Darrity," said Blaustein.
Darrity said, "There has been another suicide. No, no, none of the scientists. No one with a degree. It happened this morning, and we investigated because we thought it might have some connection with today's test. There didn't seem any, and we were going to keep it quiet till the test was over. Only now there seems to be a connection.
"The man who died was just a guy with a wife and three kids. No reason to die. No history of mental illness. He threw himself under a car. We have witnesses, and it's certain he did it on purpose. He didn't die right away and they got a doctor to him. He was horribly mangled, but his last words were 'I feel much better now' and he died."
"But who was he?" cried Grant.
"Hal Ross. The guy who actually built the projector. The guy whose office this is."
Blaustein walked to the window. The evening sky was darkening into starriness.
He said, "The man knew nothing about Ralson's views. He had never spoken to Ralson, Mr. Darrity tells me. Scientists are probably resistant as a whole. They must be or they are quickly driven out of the profession. Ralson was an exception, a penicillin-sensitive who insisted on remaining. You see what happened to him. But what about the others; those who have remained in walks of life where there is no constant weeding out of the sensitive ones. How much of humanity is penicillin-resistant?"
"You believe Ralson?" asked Grant in horror.
"I don't really know."
Blaustein looked at the stars.
Incubators?
In 1950, the Korean War broke out and that was a depressing time indeed, almost as depressing as the present. I will not conceal from you that I am not enthusiastic over what Othello called the "quality, pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war."
World War II had been something unique. That was one war there could be few idealistic qualms over. We were fighting an absolute evil that seemed quite beyond the usual defame-the-enemy routine; and there seemed a reasonable hope that once the war was over there would be some way of setting up a form of world organization to prevent future wars.
The euphoria of the days of the immediate end of the war and of the setting up of the United Nations didn't last long and the Korean War spelled final ruin to the first great hopes.
You might think that we science fiction writers were luckier than most. We had so nice a way of "escaping." Off we could go into space, leaving the Earth-bound problems of the day behind us. Well, escape isn't that easy. It is harder than you think to divorce yourself from reality, and when, in the days of Korea, I blasted off in my spaceship for the empty distances between the stars, what did I find? An interstellar war, a battle for a spaceship.
I wasn't escaping at all! But one more thing. Before the days of television there was something called radio, and in the late 1940S and early 1950s, we had science fiction on it. Radio didn't have the problem of the complicated and expensive sets that television requires in order to give a semblance of reality to science fiction. It can do everything with sound effects, and the proper sounds can be made into the most bizarre visual effects in the mind.
The programs involved-"Two Thousand Plus" and "Dimension X"-were, unfortunately, not heavily sponsored when they were sponsored at all and they did not last long, but while they were on, they were intensely satisfying to me. What's more, they ran no less than three of my stories. One of them was "Nightfall" (of course), and a second was "C-Chute."
In the radio version of "C-Chute," Mullen was played by an actor with a distinctive voice-dry, restrained, unemotional, and gentle. It was exactly Mullen's voice. Once television came in, I found that voice, and matched the face to it, and that looked like Mullen.
It is so pleasant, every time I see him, to be able to say (despite the fact that he is a fairly tall man), "There's Mullen." Mullen is the only one of all my characters I have seen in the flesh, and I have carefully refrained from ever finding out the actor's real name. I want him to remain Mullen.
First appearance-Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1951. Copyright, 1951, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.
C-Chute
Even from the cabin into which he and the other passengers had been herded, Colonel Anthony Windham could still catch the essence of the battle's progress. For a while, there was silence, no jolting, which meant the spaceships were fighting at astronomical distance in a duel of energy blasts and powerful force-field defenses.