The Collection (19 page)

Dr. Hale slapped a hundred-dollar bill on the ledge.
"Ticket," he gasped. "Keep change."

He grabbed the ticket and ran, getting into the plane just
as the doors were being closed. Panting, he fell into a seat, the ticket still
clutched in his hand. He was sound asleep before the hostess strapped him in
for the blind take-off.

An hour later, the hostess awakened him. The passengers
were disembarking.

Dr. Hale rushed out of the plane and ran across the field to
the airport building. A big clock told him that it was nine o'clock, and he
felt elated as he ran for the door marked "Taxis." He got into the
nearest one.

"White House," he told the driver. "How
long'll it take?"

"Ten minutes."

Dr. Hale gave a sigh of relief and sank back against the
cushions. He didn
^'
t go back to sleep this time. He was wide awake now.
But he closed his eyes to think out the words he'd use in explaining matters...
.

"Here you are, sir.
^"

Dr. Hale gave a sigh of relief and sank back against the cab
into the building. It didn't look as he had expected it to look. But there was
a desk, and he ran up to it.

"I
^'
ve got to see the President, quick. It's
vital."

The clerk frowned. "The President of what?
^"

Dr. Hale's eyes went wide. "The President of wh—say,
what building is this? And what town?"

The clerk
^'
s frown deepened. "This is the
White House Hotel," he said. "Seattle, Washington."

Dr. Hale fainted. He woke up in a hospital three hours
later. It was then midnight, Pacific Time, which meant it was three o'clock in
the morning on the Eastern seaboard. It had, in fact, been midnight already in
Washington, D.C., and in Boston, when he had been leaving the Washington
Special in Seattle.

Dr. Hale rushed to the window and shook his fists, both of
them, at the sky. A futile gesture.

Back in the East, however, the storm had stopped by
twilight, leaving a light mist in the air. The star-conscious public had
thereupon deluged the weather bureaus with telephoned requests about the
persistence of the mist.

"A breeze off the ocean is expected," they were
told. "It is blowing now, in fact, and within an hour or two will have
cleared off the light fog."

By eleven-fifteen the skies of Boston were clear.

Untold thousands braved the bitter cold and stood staring
upward at the unfolding pageant of the no longer-eternal stars. It almost
looked as though—an incredible development had occurred.

And then, gradually, the murmur grew. By a quarter to
twelve, the thing was certain, and the murmur hushed and then grew louder than
ever, waxing toward midnight. Different people reacted differently, of course,
as might be expected. There was lau
^g
hter as well as indignation,
cynical amusement as well as shocked horror. There was even admiration.

Soon, in certain parts of the city, a concerted movement on
the part of those who knew an address on Fremont Street began to take place.
Movement afoot and in cars and public vehicles, converging.

At five minutes of twelve, Rutherford R. Sniveley sat
waiting within his house. He was denying himself the pleasure of looking until,
at the last moment, the thing was complete.

It was going well. The gathering murmur of voices, mostly
angry voices, outside his house told him that. He heard his name shouted.

Just the same, he waited until the twelfth stroke of the
clock before he stepped out upon the balcony. Much as he wanted to look upward,
he forced himself to look down at the street first. The milling crowd was there
and it was angry. But he had only contempt for the milling crowd.

Police cars were pulling up, too, and he recognized the
mayor of Boston getting out of one of them, and the chief of police was with
him. But so what? There wasn't any law covering this.

Then having denied himself the supreme pleasure long enough,
he turned his eyes up to the silent sky, and there it was. The four hundred and
sixty-eight brightest stars, spelling out:

USE
SNIVELY'S
SOAP

For just a second did his satisfaction last. Then his face
began to turn an apoplectic purple.

"My heavens!
^"
said Mr. Sniveley.
"It's spelled wrong!
^"
His face grew more purple still, and
then, as a tree falls, he fell backward through the window.

An ambulance rushed the fallen magnate to the nearest
hospital, but he was pronounced dead—of apoplexy—upon entrance.

But misspelled or not, the eternal stars held their positions
as of that midnight. The aberrant motion had stopped, and again the stars were
fixed. Fixed to spell—SNIVELY'S SOAP.

Of the many explanations offered by all and sundry who
professed some physical and astronomical knowledge, none was more lucid—or closer
to the actual truth—than that put forth by Wendell Mehan, president emeritus of
the New York Astronomical Society.

"Obviously, the phenomenon is a trick of refraction,
^"
said Dr. Mehan. "It is manifestly impossible for any force contrived by man
to move a star. The stars, therefore, still occupy their old places in the
firmament.

"I suggest that Sniveley must have contrived a method
of refracting the light of the stars, somewhere in or just above the
atmospheric layer of the earth, so that they appear to have changed their
positions. This is done, probably, by radio waves or similar waves, sent on
some fixed frequency from a set—or possibly a series of four hundred and
sixty-eight sets—somewhere upon the surface of the earth. Although we do not
understand just how it is done, it is no more unthinkable that light rays
should be bent by a field of waves than by a prism or by gravitational force.

^"
Since Sniveley was not a great scientist, I
imagine that his discovery was empiric rather than logical—an accidental find.
It is quite possible that even the discovery of his projector will not enable
present-day scientists to understand its secret, any more than an aboriginal
savage could understand the operation of a simple radio receiver by taking one
apart.

"My principal reason for this assertion is the fact
that the refraction obviously is a fourth-dimensional phenomenon, or its
effect would be purely local to one portion of the globe. Only in the fourth
dimension could light be so refracted...."

There was more but it is better to skip to his final
paragraph:

"This effect cannot possibly be permanent—more permanent,
that is, than the wave-projector which causes it. Sooner or later, Sniveley's
machine will be found and shut off or will break down or wear out of its own
volition. Undoubtedly it includes vacuum tubes which will someday blow out, as
do the tubes in our radios...."

***

The excellence of Dr. Mehan's analysis was shown two months
and eight days later, when the Boston Electric Co. shut off, for non-payment of
bills, service to a house situated at 901 West Rogers Street, ten blocks from
the Sniveley mansion. At the instant of the shut-off, excited reports from the
night side of Earth brought the news that the stars had flashed back to their
former positions instantaneously.

Investigation brought out that the description of one Elmer
Smith, who had purchased that house six months before, corresponded with the
description of Rutherford R. Sniveler, and undoubtedly Elmer Smith and Rutherford
R. Sniveler were one and the same person.

In the attic was found a complicated network of four hundred
and sixty-eight radio-type antennae, each antenna of different length and
running in a different direction. The machine to which they were connected was not
larger, strangely, than the average ham
^'
s radio projector, nor did
it draw appreciably more current, according to the electric company's record.

By special order of the President of the United States, the
projector was destroyed without examination of its internal arrangement.
Clamorous protests against this high-handed executive order arose from many
sides. But inasmuch as the projector had already been broken up, the protests
were to no avail.

Serious repercussions were, on the whole, amazingly few.

Persons in general appreciated the stars more but trusted
them less.

Roger Phlutter got out of jail and married Elsie.

Dr. Milton Hale found he liked Seattle and stayed there. Two
thousand miles away from his sister, Agatha, he found it possible for the first
time to defy her openly. He enjoys life more but, it is feared, will write
fewer hooks.

There is one fact remaining which is painful to consider,
since it casts a deep reflection upon the basic intelligence of the human race.
It is proof, though, that the president's executive order was justified,
despite scientific protest.

That fact is as humiliating as it is enlightening. During
the two months and eight days during which the Sniveler machine was in
operation, sales of Sniveley Soap increased nine-hundred-twenty per cent.

DwAn Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with
gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore
throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.

He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a
position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it.
The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing
machines of all the populated planets in the universe—ninety-six billion planets—into
the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one
cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions.
Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev."

Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge
of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the
miles-long panel.

Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor
of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.
^"

^"
Thank you,
^"
said Dwar Reyn.
^"
It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has
been able to answer."

He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?"

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the
clicking of a single relay.

"Yes,
now
there is a God."

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to
grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down
and fused the switch shut.

One of the strange things about it was that Aubrey Walters
wasn
^'
t at all a strange little girl. She was quite as ordinary as
her father and mother, who lived in an apartment on Otis Street, and who played
bridge one night a week, went out somewhere another night, and spent the other
evenings quietly at home.

Aubrey was nine, and had rather stringy hair and freckles,
but at nine one never worries about such things. She got along quite well in
the not-too-expensive private school to which her parents sent her, she made
friends easily and readily with other children, and she took lessons on a
three-quarter-size violin and played it abominably.

Her greatest fault, possibly, was her predilection for
staying up late of nights, and that was the fault of her parents, really, for
letting her stay up and dressed until she felt sleepy and wanted to go to bed.
Even at five and six, she seldom went to bed before ten o
^'
clock in
the evening. And if, during a period of maternal concern, she was put to bed
earlier, she never went to sleep anyway. So why not let the child stay up?

Now, at nine years, she stayed up quite as late as her
parents did, which was about eleven o
^'
clock of ordinary nights and
later when they had company for bridge, or went out for the evening. Then it
was later, for they usually took her along. Aubrey enjoyed it, whatever it
was. She
^'
d sit still as a mouse in a seat at the theater, or regard
them with little-girl seriousness over the rim of a glass of ginger ale while
they had a cocktail or two at a night club. She took the noise and the music
and the dancing with big-eyed wonder and enjoyed every minute of it.

Sometimes Uncle Richard, her mother's brother, went along
with them. She and Uncle Richard were good friends. It was Uncle Richard who
gave her the dolls.

^"
Funny thing happened today,
^"
he'd said.
^"
I
^'
m walking down Rodgers Place, past the
Mariner Building—you know, Edith; it
^'
s where Doc Howard used to have
his office—and something thudded on the sidewalk right behind me. And I turned
around, and there was this package.
^"

^"
This package" was a white box a little
larger than a shoe box, and it was rather strangely tied with gray ribbon. Sam
Walters, Aubrey
^'
s father, looked at it curiously.

^"
Doesn
^'
t look dented,
^"
he said.
^"
Couldn
^'
t have fallen out of a very high
window. Was it tied up like that?
^"

^"
Just like that. I put the ribbon back on
after I opened it and looked in. Oh, I don
^'
t mean I opened it then
or there. I just stopped and looked up to see who
^'
d dropped
it—thinking I
^'
d see somebody looking out of a window. But nobody
was, and I picked up the box. It had something in it, not very heavy, and the
box and the ribbon looked like—well, not like something somebody
^'
d
throw away on purpose. So I stood looking up, and nothing happened, so I shook
the box a little and—
^"