"You won't be able to be in the treatment room, you understand, but I'd want you out here."
"Anything you say."
The patient looked careworn when she arrived. Her eyelids drooped and her voice was low and she mumbled.
Bishop's glance was casual as he sat quietly, unnoticed, in the corner. He saw her enter the treatment room and waited patiently, thinking: What if it works? Why not package brainwave lights with appropriate sound accompaniment to combat the blues-to increase energy-to heighten love? Not just for sick people but for normal people, who could find a substitute for all the pounding they'd ever taken with alcohol or drugs in an effort to adjust their emotions-an utterly safe substitute based on the brain waves themselves…And finally, after forty-five minutes, she came out.
She was placid now, and the lines had somehow washed out of her face.
"I feel better, Dr. Cray," she said, smiling. "I feel much better."
"You usually do," said Dr. Cray quietly.
"Not this way," said the woman. "Not this way. This time it's different. The other times, even when I thought I felt good, I could sense that awful depression in the back of my head just waiting to come back the minute I relaxed. Now-it's just gone."
Dr. Cray said, "We can't be sure it will always be gone. We'll make an appointment for, say, two weeks from now but you'll call me before then if anything goes wrong, won't you? Did anything seem different in the treatment?"
The woman thought a bit. "No," she said hesitantly. Then: "The flickering light, though. That might have been different. Clearer and sharper somehow."
"Did you hear anything?"
"Was I supposed to?"
Dr. Cray rose. "Very well. Remember to make that appointment with my secretary."
The woman stopped at the door, turned, and said, "It's a happy feeling to feel happy," and left.
Dr. Cray said, "She didn't hear anything, Mr. Bishop. I suppose that your counter-beat reinforced the normal brainwave pattern so naturally that the sound was, so to speak, lost in the light…And it may have worked, too."
She turned to Bishop, looking him full in the face. "Mr. Bishop, will you consult with us on other cases? We'll pay you as much as we can, and if this turns out to be an effective therapy for mental disease, we'll see that you get all the credit due you."
Bishop said, "I'll be glad to help out, Doctor, but it won't be as hard as you may think. The work is already done."
"Already done?"
"We've had musicians for centuries. Maybe they didn't know about brain waves, but they did their best to get the melodies and beats that would affect people, get their toes tapping, get their muscles twitching, get their faces smiling, get their tear ducts pumping, get their hearts pounding. Those tunes are waiting. Once you get the counter-beat, you pick the tune to fit."
"Is that what you did?"
"Sure. What can snap you out of depression like a revival hymn? It's what they're meant to do. The beat gets you out of yourself. It exalts you. Maybe it doesn't last long by itself, but if you use it to reinforce the normal brain-wave pattern, it ought to pound it in."
"A revival hymn?" Dr. Cray stared at him, wide-eyed.
"Sure. What I used in this case was the best of them all. I gave her 'When the Saints Go Marching In.' "
He sang it softly, finger-snapping the beat, and by the third bar, Dr. Cray's toes were tapping.
This next one was requested by Bell Telephone Magazine over an excellent lunch. What they wanted was a 3,000-word story centering on a problem in communications. There were two broad requirements; first, that it be farther out than any of the methods of communication now under development by Bell Telephone, and, second, that I not postulate an end to the requirements for communications corporations.
As it happened, Kim Armstrong, the editor of the magazine, who was at the lunch, was an extraordinarily charming woman, but I would have agreed to tackle the story anyway, because before the lunch was over I had a plot outline safely tucked away in my head. [People ask me sometimes if I keep a notebook on me at all times to jot down ideas. I do, but it's inside my head, and therefore never gets mislaid.] I got to work on it on October 19, 1975. Ms. Armstrong liked it when it was done, and it appeared in the February 1976 issue of the magazine.
Old-fashioned
Ben Estes knew he was going to die and it didn't make him feel any better to know that that was the chance he had lived with all these years. The life of an astro-miner, drifting through the still largely uncharted vastness of the asteroid belt, was not particularly sweet, but it was quite likely to be short.
Of course, there was always the chance of a surprise find.that would make you rich for life, and this had been a surprise find all right. The biggest surprise in the world, but it wasn't going to make Estes rich. It would make him dead.
Harvey Funarelli groaned softly from his bunk, and Estes turned, with a wince of his own as his muscles creaked. They had been badly mishandled. That he wasn't hit as viciously as Funarelli had been was surely because Funarelli was the larger man, and had been closer to the point of near-impact.
Estes looked somberly at his partner and said, "How do you feel, Harv?"
Funarelli groaned again. "I feel broken at every joint. What the hell happened? What did we hit?"
Estes walked over, limping slightly, and said, "Don't try to stand up."
"I can make it," said Funarelli, "if you'll just reach out a hand. Wow! I wonder if I've got a broken rib. Right here. What happened, Ben?"
Estes pointed at the main portview. It wasn't a large one, but it was the best a two-man astro-mining vessel could be expected to have. Funarelli moved toward it very slowly, leaning on Estes' shoulder. He looked out.
There were the stars, of course, but the experienced astronautic mind blanks those out. There are always the stars. Closer in, there was a gravel bank of boulders of varying size, all moving slowly relative to their neighbors like a swarm of very, very lazy bees.
Funarelli said, "I've never seen anything like that before. What are they doing here?"
"Those rocks," said Estes, "are what's left of a shattered asteroid, I suspect, and they're still circling what shattered them, and what shattered us."
"What?" Funarelli peered vainly into the darkness.
Estes pointed. "That!" There was a faint little sparkle in the direction he was pointing.
"I don't see anything."
"You're not supposed to. That's a black hole." Funarelli's close-cropped black hair stood on end as a matter of course, and his staring dark eyes added a touch of horror. He said, "You're crazy."
"No. Black holes can come in all sizes. That's what the astronomers say. That one is about the mass of a large asteroid, I think, and we're moving around it. How else could something we can't see be holding us ill orbit?"
"There's no report on any-"
"I know. How can there be? It can't be seen. It's massOoops, there comes the Sun." The slowly rotating ship had brought the Sun into view and the portview automatically polarized into opacity. "Anyway," said Estes, "we discovered the first black hole actually to be encountered anywhere in the Universe. Only we won't live to see ourselves get the credit."
Funarelli said, "What happened?"
"We got close enough for the tidal effects to smash us up."
"What tidal effects?"
Estes said, "I'm not an astronomer, but as I understand it, even when the total gravitational pull of a thing like that isn't large, you can get so close to it that the pull becomes intense. That intensity falls off so rapidly with increasing distance that the near end of an object is pulled far more strongly than the far end. The object is therefore stretched. The closer and bigger an object is, the worse the effect. Your muscles were torn. You're lucky your bones weren't broken."