The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (59 page)

I know this much, that it's high frequency stuff. And
there's a lot of mercury and copper and wiring of metals cheap and easy to
find, but what goes where, or how, least of all, why, is out of my line. Light
has mass and energy, and that mass always loses part of itself and can be
translated back to electricity, or something. Mike Laviada himself says that
what he stumbled on and developed was nothing new, that long before the war it
had been observed many times by men like Compton and Michelson and Pfeiffer,
who discarded it as a useless laboratory effect. And, of course, that was
before atomic research took precedence over everything.

When the first shock wore off—and Mike had to give me
another demonstration—I must have made quite a sight. Mike tells me I couldn't
sit down. I'd pop up and gallop up and down the floor of that ancient store
kicking chairs out of my way or stumbling over them, all the time gobbling out
words and disconnected sentences faster than my tongue could trip. Finally it
filtered through that he was laughing at me. I didn't see where it was any
laughing matter, and I prodded him. He began to get angry.

"I know what I have," he snapped. "I'm not
the biggest fool in the world, as you seem to think. Here, watch this,"
and he went back to the radio. "Turn out the light." I did, and there
I was watching myself at the Motor Bar again, a lot happier this time.
"Watch this."

The bar backed away. Out in the street, two blocks down to
the City Hall. Up the steps to the Council Room. No one there. Then Council was
in session, then they were gone again. Not a picture, not a projection of a
lantern slide, but a slice of life about twelve feet square. If we were close,
the field of view was narrow. If we were further away, the background was just
as much in focus as the foreground. The images, if you want to call them
images, were just as real, just as lifelike as looking in the doorway of a
room. Real they were, three-dimensional, stopped by only the back wall or the
distance in the background. Mike was talking as he spun the dials, but I was
too engrossed to pay much attention.

I yelped and grabbed and closed my eyes as you would if you
were looking straight down with nothing between you and the ground except a lot
of smoke and a few clouds. I winked my eyes open almost at the ends of what
must have been a long racing vertical dive, and there I was, looking at the
street again.

"Go any place up the Heaviside Layer, go down as deep
as any hole, anywhere, any time." A blur, and the street changed into a
glade of sparse pines. "Buried treasure. Sure. Find it, with what?"
The trees disappeared and I reached back for the light switch as he dropped the
lid of the radio and sat down.

"How are you going to make any money when you haven't
got it to start?" No answer to that from me. "I ran an ad in the
paper offering to recover lost articles; my first customer was the Law wanting
to see my private detective's license. I've seen every big speculator in the
country sit in his office buying and selling and making plans; what do you
think would happen if I tried to peddle advance market information? I've
watched the stock market get shoved up and down while I had barely the money to
buy the paper that told me about it.

I watched a bunch of Peruvian Indians bury the second ransom
of Atuahalpa; I haven't the fare to get to Peru, or the money to buy the tools
to dig." He got up and brought two more bottles. He went on. By that time
I was getting a few ideas.

"I've watched scribes indite the books that burnt at
Alexandria; who would buy, or who would believe me, if I copied one? What would
happen if I went over to the Library and told them to rewrite their histories?
How many would fight to tie a rope around my neck if they knew I'd watched them
steal and murder and take a bath? What sort of a padded cell would I get if I
showed up with a photograph of Washington, or Caesar? or Christ?"

I agreed that it was all probably true, but—

"Why do you think I'm here now? You saw the picture I
showed for a dime. A dime's worth, and that's all, because I didn't have the
money to buy film or to make the picture as I knew I should." His tongue
began to get tangled. He was excited. "I'm doing this because I haven't
the money to get the things I need to get the money I'll need— He was so
disgusted he booted a chair halfway across the room. It was easy to see that if
I had been around a little later, Phillips Radio would have profited. Maybe I'd
have been better off, too.

Now, although always I've been told that I'd never be worth
a hoot, no one has ever accused me of being slow for a dollar. Especially an
easy one. I saw money in front of me, easy money, the easiest and the quickest
in the world. I saw, for a minute, so far in the future with me on top of the
heap, that my head reeled and it was hard to breathe.

"Mike," I said, "let's finish that beer and
go where we can get some more, and maybe something to eat. We've got a lot of
talking to do." So we did.

Beer is a mighty fine lubricant; I have always been a pretty
smooth talker, and by the time we left the gin mill I had a pretty good idea of
just what Mike had on his mind. By the time we'd shacked up for the night
behind that beaverboard screen in the store, we were full-fledged partners. I
don't recall our even shaking hands on the deal, but that partnership still
holds good. Mike is ace high with me, and I guess it's the other way around,
too. That was six years ago; it only took me a year or so to discard some of
the corners I used to cut.

Seven days after that, on a Tuesday, I was riding a bus to
Grosse Pointe with a full briefcase. Two days after that I was riding back from
Grosse Pointe in a shiny taxi, with an empty briefcase and a pocketful of
folding money. It was easy.

"Mr. Jones—or Smith—or Brown—I'm with Aristocrat
Studios, Personal and Candid Portraits. We thought you might like this picture
of you and ... no, this is just a test proof. The negative is in our files. . .
. Now, if you're really interested, I'll be back the day after tomorrow with
our files. . . . I'm sure you will, Mr. Jones. Thank you, Mr. Jones. . .
."

Dirty? Sure. Blackmail is always dirty. But if I had a wife
and family and a good reputation, I'd stick to the roast beef and forget the
Roquefort. Very smelly Roquefort, at that. Mike liked it less than I did. It
took some talking, and I had to drag out the old one about the ends justifying
the means, and they could well afford it, anyway. Besides, if there was a
squawk, they'd get the negative free. Some of them were pretty bad.

So we had the cash; not too much, but enough to start.
Before we took the next step there was plenty to decide. There are a lot who
earn a living by convincing millions that Sticko soap is better. We had a
harder problem than that: we had, first, to make a salable and profitable
product, and second, we had to convince many, many millions that our
"Product" was absolutely honest and absolutely accurate. We all know that
if you repeat something long enough and loud enough many—or most—will accept it
as gospel truth. That called for publicity on an international scale. For the
skeptics who know better than to accept advertising, no matter how blatant, we
had to use another technique. And since we were going to get certainly only one
chance, we had to be right the first time. Without Mike's machine the job would
have been impossible; without it the job would have been unnecessary.

A lot of sweat ran under the bridge before we found what we
thought—and we still do!—the only workable scheme. We picked the only possible
way to enter every mind in the world without a fight; the field of
entertainment. Absolute secrecy was imperative, and it was only when we reached
the last decimal point that we made a move. We started like this.

First we looked for a suitable building, or Mike did, while
I flew east, to Rochester, for a month. The building he rented was an old bank.
We had the windows sealed, a flossy office installed in the front —the bullet-proof
glass was my idea—air conditioning, a portable bar, electrical wiring of
whatever type Mike's little heart desired, and a blond secretary who thought
she was working for M-E Experimental Laboratories. When I got back from
Rochester I took over the job of keeping happy the stone masons and
electricians, while Mike fooled around in our suite in the Book where he could
look out the window at his old store. The last I heard, they were selling snake
oil there. When the Studio, as we came to call it, was finished, Mike moved in
and the blonde settled down to a routine of reading love stories and saying no
to all the salesmen that wandered by. I left for Hollywood.

I spent a week digging through the files of Central Casting
before I was satisfied, but it took a month of snooping and some
under-the-table cash to lease a camera that would handle Trucolor film. That
took the biggest load from my mind. When I got back to Detroit the big view
camera had arrived from Rochester, with a truckload of glass color plates.
Ready to go.

We made quite a ceremony of it. We closed the Venetian
blinds and I popped the cork on one of the bottles of champagne I'd bought. The
blond secretary was impressed; all she'd been doing for her salary was to
accept delivery of packages and crates and boxes. We had no wine glasses, but
we made no fuss about it. Too nervous and excited to drink any more than one
bottle, we gave the rest to the blonde and told her to take the rest of the
afternoon off. After she left—and I think she was disappointed at breaking up
what could have been a good party—we locked up after her, went into the studio
itself, locked up again and went to work.

I've mentioned that the windows were sealed. All the inside
wall had been painted dull black, and with the high ceiling that went with that
old bank lobby, it was impressive. But not gloomy. Midway in the studio was
planted the big Trucolor camera, loaded and ready. Not much could we see of
Mike's machine, but I knew it was off to the side, set to throw on the back
wall. Not
on
the wall, understand, because the images produced are
projected into the air, like the meeting of the rays of two searchlights. Mike
lifted the lid and I could see him silhouetted against the tiny lights that lit
the dials.

"Well?" he said expectantly.

I felt pretty good just then, right down to my billfold.

"It's all yours, Mike," and a switch ticked over.
There he was. There was a youngster, dead twenty-five hundred years, real
enough, almost, to touch. Alexander. Alexander of Macedon.

Let's take that first picture in detail. I don't think I can
ever forget what happened in the next year or so. First we followed Alexander
through his life, from beginning to end. We skipped, of course, the little
things he did, jumping ahead days and weeks and years at a time. Then we'd miss
him, or find that he'd moved in space. That would mean we'd have to jump back
and forth, like the artillery firing bracket or ranging shots, until we found
him again. Helped only occasionally by his published lives, we were astounded
to realize how much distortion has crept into his life. I often wonder why
legends arise about the famous. Certainly their lives are as startling or
appalling as fiction. And unfortunately we had to hold closely to the accepted
histories. If we hadn't, every professor would have gone into his corner for a
hearty sneer. We couldn't take that chance. Not at first.

After we knew approximately what had happened and where, we
used our notes to go back to what had seemed a particularly photogenic section
and work on that awhile. Eventually we had a fair idea of what we were actually
going to film. Then we sat down and wrote an actual script to follow, making
allowance for whatever shots we'd have to double in later. Mike used his
machine as the projector, and I operated the Trucolor camera at a fixed focus,
like taking moving pictures of a movie. As fast as we finished a reel it would
go to Rochester for processing, instead of one of the Hollywood outfits that
might have done it cheaper. Rochester is so used to horrible amateur stuff that
I doubt if anyone ever looks at anything. When the reel was returned we'd run
it ourselves to check our choice of scenes and color sense and so on.

For example, we had to show the traditional quarrels with
his father, Philip. Most of that we figured on doing with doubles, later.
Olympias, his mother, and the fangless snakes she affected, didn't need any
doubling, as we used an angle and amount of distance that didn't call for
actual conversation. The scene where Alexander rode the bucking horse no one
else could ride came out of some biographer's head, but we thought it was so
famous we couldn't leave it. We dubbed the closeups later, and the actual
horseman was a young Scythian that hung around the royal stables for his keep.
Roxanne was real enough, like the rest of the Persians' wives that Alexander
took over. Luckily most of them had enough poundage to look luscious. Philip
and Parmenio and the rest of the characters were heavily bearded, which made
easy the necessary doubling and dubbing-in the necessary speech. (If you ever
saw them shave in those days, you'd know why whiskers were popular.)

The most trouble we had with the interior shots. Smoky wicks
in a bowl of lard, no matter how plentiful, are too dim even for fast film.
Mike got around that by running the Trucolor camera at a single frame a second,
with his machine paced accordingly. That accounts for the startling clarity and
depth of focus we got from a lens well stopped down. We had all the time in the
world to choose the best possible scenes and camera angles; the best actors in
the world, expensive camera booms, or repeated retakes under the most exacting
director can't compete with us. We had a lifetime from which to choose.

Eventually we had on film about eighty per cent of what you
saw in the finished picture. Roughly we spliced the reels together and sat
there entranced at what we had actually done. Even more exciting, even more
spectacular than we'd dared to hope, the lack of continuity and sound didn't
stop us from realizing that we'd done a beautiful job. We'd done all we could,
and the worst was yet to come. So we sent for more champagne and told the
blonde we had cause for celebration. She giggled.