“What?”
“It’s a false angina, I think. But take the pill. But-“ he passed a hand over his eyes-“You thought I was electrocuted, and you wondered how to straighten out my last bill. It’s a fair bill, Wilmot. I didn’t overcharge you.” Flowers opened his eyes very wide and said, “The newsboy on the corner cheated me out of my change. He-“ He swallowed and said, “The cops in the squad car just turning off Fulton Street don’t like my having white patients. One of them is thinking about running in a girl that came here.” He sobbed, “It didn’t stop, Wilmot.”
“For Christ’s sake, Myrion, lie down.”
“It didn’t stop. It’s not like a radio. You can’t turn it off. Now I can hear-everybody! Every mind for miles around is pouring into my head WHAT IT THINKS ABOUT ME-ABOUT ME-ABOUT US!”
Ensal Brubacker, who had been a clinical psychologist and not a radio engineer, had not intended his helmet to endure the strain of continuous operation nor had he thought to provide circuit-breakers. It had been meant to operate for a few moments at most, enough to reroute a few neurons, open a blocked path or two. One of its parts overheated. Another took too much load as a result, and in a moment the thing was afire. It blew the fuses and the room was in darkness. The elderly ex-Corporation Counsel managed to get the fire out, and then picked up the phone. Shouting to be heard over the screaming of Myrion Flowers, he summoned a Kings County ambulance. They knew Flowers’s name. The ambulance was there in nine minutes.
Flowers died some weeks later in the hospital-not Kings County, but he did not know the difference. He had been under massive sedation for almost a month until it became a physiological necessity to taper him off; and as soon as he was alert enough to do so he contrived to hang himself in his room.
His funeral was a state occasion. The crowds were enormous and there was much weeping. The Corporation Counsel was one of those permitted to cast a clod of earth upon the bronze casket, but he did not weep.
No one had ever figured out what the destroyed instrument was supposed to have been, and Wilmot did not tell. There are inventions and inventions, he thought, and reading minds is a job for white men. If even for white men. In the world of Myrion Flowers many seeds might sturdily grow, but some ripe fruits would mature into poison.
No doubt the machine might have broken any mind, listening in on every thought that concerned one. It was maddening and dizzying, and the man who wore the helmet would be harmed in any world; but only in the world of Myrion Flowers would he be hated to death.
TROUBLE IN TIME
To begin at the beginning everybody knows that scientists are crazy. I may be either mistaken or prejudiced, but this seems especially true of mathematico-physicists. In a small town like Colchester gossip spreads fast and furiously, and one evening the word was passed around that an outstanding example of the species Doctissimus Dementiae had finally lodged himself in the old frame house beyond the dog-pound on Court Street, mysterious crates and things having been unloaded there for weeks previously.
Abigail O'Liffey, a typical specimen of the low type that a fine girl like me is forced to consort with in a small town, said she had seen the Scientist. "He had broad shoulders," she said dreamily, "and red hair, and a scraggly little moustache that wiggled up and down when he chewed gum."
"What would you expect it to do?"
She looked at me dumbly. "He was wearing a kind of garden coat," she said. "It was like a painter's, only it was all burned in places instead of having paint on it. I'll bet he discovers things like Paul Pasteur."
"Louis Pasteur," I said. "Do you know his name, by any chance?"
"Whose – the Scientist's? Clarissa said one of the express-men told her husband it was Cramer or something."
"Never heard of him," I said. "Good night." And I slammed the screen door. Cramer, I thought – it was the echo of a name I knew, and a big name at that. I was angry with Clarissa for not getting the name more accurately, and with Abigail for bothering me about it, and most of all with the Scientist for stirring me out of my drowsy existence with remembrances of livelier and brighter things not long past.
So I slung on a coat and sneaked out the back door to get a look at the mystery man, or at least his house. I slunk past the dog-pound, and the house sprang into sight like a Christmas tree – every socket in the place must have been in use, to judge from the flood of light that poured from all windows. There was a dark figure on the unkempt lawn; when I was about ten yards from it and on the verge of turning back it shouted at me : "Hey, you! Can you give me a hand?"
I approached warily; the figure was wrestling with a crate four feet high and square. "Sure," I said.
The figure straightened. "Oh, so he's a she," it said. "Sorry, lady. I'll get a hand truck from inside."
"Don't bother," I assured it. "I'm glad to help" And I took one of the canvas slings as it took the other, and we carried the crate in, swaying perilously. "Set it here, please," he said, dropping his side of the crate. It was a he, I saw in the numerous electric bulbs' light, and from all appearances the Scientist Cramer, or whatever his name was.
I looked about the big front parlor, bare of furniture but jammed with boxes and piles of machinery. "That was the last piece," he said amiably, noting my gaze. "Thank you. Can I offer you a scientist's drink?"
"Not – ethyl?" I cried rapturously.
"The same," he assured me, vigorously attacking a crate that tinkled internally. "How do you know?"
"Past experience. My Alma Mater was the Housatonic University, School of Chemical Engineering."
He had torn away the front of the crate, laying bare a neat array of bottles. "What's a C.E. doing in this stale little place?" he asked, selecting flasks and measures.
"Sometimes she wonders," I said bitterly. "Mix me an Ethyl Martini, will you?"
"Sure, if you like them. I don't go much for the fancy swigs myself. Correct me if I'm wrong." He took the bottle labeled CH2OH. "Three cubic centimeters?"
"No – you don't start with the ethyl!" I cried. "Put four minims of fusel oil in a beaker." He complied. "Right – now a tenth of a grain of saccharine saturated in theine barbiturate ten per cent solution." His hands flew through the pharmaceutical ritual. "And now pour in the ethyl slowly, and stir, don't shake."
He held the beaker to the light. "Want some color in that?" he asked, immersing it momentarily in liquid air from a double thermos.
"No," I said. "What are you having?"
"A simple fusel highball," he said, expertly pouring and chilling a beakerful, and brightening it with a drop of a purple dye that transformed the colorless drink into a sparkling beverage. We touched beakers and drank deep.
"That," I said gratefully when I had finished coughing, "is the first real drink I've had since graduating three years ago. The stuff has a nostalgic appeal for me."
He looked blank. "It occurs to me," he said, 'that I ought to introduce myself. I am Stephen Trainer, late of Mellon, late of Northwestern, late of Cambridge, sometime fellow of the Sidney School of Technology. Now you tell me who you are and we'll be almost even."
I collected my senses and announced, "Miss Mabel Evans, late in practically every respect."
"I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Evans," he said. "Won't you sit down?"
"Thank you," I murmured. I was about to settle on one of the big wooden boxes when he cried out at me.
"For God's sake – not there!"
"And why not?" I asked, moving to another. "Is that your reserve stock of organic bases?"
"No," he said. "That's part of my time machine."