Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (25 page)

In California, the Hollywood moguls had wisely seen to it that you had three years to raise any issue that might have to do with plagiarism. Three years and absolutely no more.

I now was well beyond that three-year limitation. The movie I was seeing on television was a rerun, a possibly nineteenth or twentieth or thirty-fifth rerun. I should have seen more movies, the lawyer suggested: I should have seen this movie the week it was released. There was absolutely nothing, the lawyer told me, I could do.

But I could burn. And burn.
And
burn.

I tell you, it was enough to put a writer in a slump.

Written 1950——Published 1951

Dr. Amadeus Ballyhock pointed with pride across the enormous campus of Meg, Beth, & Hal Thurman University.

"There,"
he breathed to the eager group about him. "That completely streamlined building decorated with diagonal stripes. The glory of M.B. & H.T.U. and the very latest addition to our magnificent educational facilities. The Dimenocommunaplex!"

"A whole building," the young woman at his right said in man-pleasing awe. "And one machine!"

The university president smiled affably from her to the rest of his visitors. His broad chest expanded visibly under the expensively tailored clear-glass shirt he wore. "Yes.
One
machine."

"The only thing, sir," an extremely handsome fellow who was the star of
Tuesday's TV Tabloid
said uncertainly, "the only thing, doctor, is that the Dimenocommunaplex can hardly be considered educational. I mean—since it won't be used for teaching. I mean—it's a research tool, isn't it? For a Nut?"

All the other journalists looked thoughtful at this and began to scratch well-shampooed heads with extremely well-manicured fingernails.

"You know, Steve," the pretty girl commented slowly, "I think you have something there. If it's for a Nut, it can't be very educational. It's
Opening New Frontiers
stuff, not the kind of material any sponsor is paying for. When a Nut is involved in a story, you have to take notes; it gets so technical. And once you take notes, what happens to the spontaneity of good TV journalism?"

"There isn't any, Laura," the young man nodded. "Not with notes that you have to read from in order to explain things. I mean—no human interest. Then you might as well get back to dry-as-dust
paper
reporting, like they used to have in the old days."

"The days of the Nuts," someone else said. "The twentieth century." Everybody shuddered.

Dr. Ballyhock shook himself abruptly. "Not at all," he said loudly. Then, as they all looked at him, he repeated reassuringly: "Not at all!
Not at all!
"

"How do you mean, sir?" Steve asked. "Anything with a name like Dimenocommunaplex must be a Nut project."

"Quite. But, first of all, my dear fellow, the Nut involved is under careful guard and the supervision of some of our poorest minds. And may I comment here, parenthetically and with pride, on our faculty and student body, which this year possesses the very lowest average intelligence quotient of any college in the entire country?"

"You don't say!" Laura looked around enthusiastically. "That
is
worth a plug on
my
show. I like to talk about
progress
. It makes my audience feel we're advancing, kind of. Know what I mean?"

"I certainly do," Dr. Ballyhock told her, smiling warmly at the pleasing curves of her body, completely visible through the green-tinged transparent frock she wore. "Now, you journalists will need to take no notes on the Dimenocommunaplex, for the simple but entirely sufficient reason that none of you will even begin to understand its operation. It has been made so thoroughly a Nut project that only the most degraded Nuts can figure out how it works. Humans, like you, me, and your TV audience, can do no more than describe its operation and effects—if any."

There was a general sigh of relief. Steve came forward and offered his hand. "My apologies, doctor. I really didn't mean to imply that—that—that—well,
you
know."

Dr. Ballyhock nodded. "Quite. A journalist reaching millions of sets cannot be too careful. We have had more than enough of Nut thinking in this country! Now that we understand each other again, may I suggest that the explanation of the educational significance of the Dimenocommunaplex wait until we are all on our scooters and on our way to it? The experiment is due to begin at four-thirty sharp. And an unstable individual is being kept waiting."

—|—

They mounted the gaily colored little conveyances again, pulled the beribboned handlebar switches, and floated off to the agreeable accompaniment of tiny silver bells clustered on the miniature rear bumpers.

"What is the significance of the Dimenocommunaplex educationally?" the university president began once more from his position in the lead scooter. "Well, first there is the merely visual interest of the student body in such a very complex piece of machinery. We will give one credit for every hour spent in the building looking at the apparatus. Surely this is not an unpleasant or, should I say,
nutty
way of spending one's compulsory college time? Surely that group entering the Arithmetic Building will prefer it to the hour they must now willy-nilly spend on Long Division and Decimals? These youngsters may go on to acquire a doctorate in Administration like mine; they will then have to harness and be responsible for the dangerous mental energies of from ten to a hundred Nuts. What better place for them to meet the creatures than in their early college years?"

"And the rest of the educational aspect is communication," Laura said. "At least, that's what I read in the university throwaway my studio received. Dimensional communication. What's that?"

"That's a Nut's phrase," Dr. Ballyhock shrugged; "a Nut will therefore have to explain it. My intelligence quotient is well below the hundred-and-twenty danger point, I am happy to say. Dimensional communication? It would seem to imply communication between the dimensions. What good that would do, I cannot imagine. But, as with all Nut developments, you never can tell. It might lead to this, or it might lead to that. For example, the scooters we are on at the moment are powered by a kind of radiant energy discovered by an astronomical Nut who was fooling around with cosmic rays. Another less degraded Nut—one who was almost human, in fact—applied it to vehicles in an engineering design that enabled normal human technicians to manufacture scooters for the rest of us. That's why all the expense we go to in feeding and taking care of Nuts is so very necessary. You never know when one of their attacks of applied science—or even an absolute fit of pure science, for that matter—is going to lead to something useful."

"Or dangerous!" This came from a young matron floating at the edge of the group. "Remember atomic bombs, philosophy, dynamite—all those terrible things Nuts used to make in the old days?" She pulled the pink glassite jacket about her shoulders and shuddered fastidiously.

"The old days. That's just the point. Remember your history, please," Dr. Ballyhock admonished. "First man domesticated life in the form of the lower animal to provide him with food. Then he domesticated matter in the form of machines to do his work for him. Then came his greatest and most recent achievement! He domesticated mind in the form of Nuts to do his
thinking
for him."

They arrived at the striped building with backswept buttresses and alighted. Steve pointed to a barbed-wire-enclosed compound of low and old-fashioned brick buildings directly behind it. "Is that the Nut school, doctor? I mean, I know you have one on your campus. I did a human-interest expose on it three years ago."

"Yes. Please don't look so upset, ladies. The creatures are not in a dangerously large quantity, and they are very well guarded. Our national educational laws still require universities to maintain at least one college—with separate but equal facilities—for those pathetically high IQs, but the day is not too far distant, I hope, when they will all be segregated—as most of them already are—in safe and sound institutions under the unblinking supervision of Nut specialists."

The guard swung the barred doors open at Dr. Ballyhock's nod.

Inside, the building—which was one room and one electronic machine—looked as if a wire-spinning spider had danced out an all-time arachnidian masterpiece within its walls. Banks of transformers awaited action about their compact cores; tubes, spattered like raindrops upon a huge metal plate in the center of the room, sat energyless and unwinking.

Near the metal plate was a heavily laden switchboard at which stood a man, unkempt, somewhat hairy, and scowling. Delicate metallic threads encircled both his ankles and disappeared into a hole in the floor: it was evident that, as he walked away from the hole, they unwound from a subterranean spool; and, as he came closer to it, the slack was pulled in. Two guards walked with him; the one on his right carrying an efficient little blaster, the one on his left a tiny radio switch which controlled the action of the restraining thread.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the TV tabloids," the president intoned. "This is Physics Nut 6B306, or, as he was entered on his birth certificate, Raymond J. Tinsdale. He was born of entirely normal parents who had no suspicion of his mental flaws until a series of clever childish inventions forced them to a child-test administrator, who revealed the truth."

"How awful!" Laura moaned. "It almost makes you not want to have children; it could happen to anybody!"

Dr. Ballyhock nodded gravely. "It could. The consolation is that the freak would be well taken care of for the rest of its life: the parents would never have to see it again. And, of course, we use them in a kind of occupational therapy upon each other."

"The zoo," said Physics Nut 6B306 bitterly. "The traveling zoo come to look at people. And now they'll want to be entertained. Does it matter to them that my rig isn't even ready?"

"Now, now, now," the president warned. "Don't get obstreperous, or we'll have to deprive you of equipment and books for a week. Please start explaining what it is you have here. And, guard! Make him put on his shirt. There are ladies present!"

As he squirmed back into the shirt proffered by the guard, Physics Nut 6B306 shook his head. "The atmosphere itself is air-conditioned; the seasons are controlled; every blasted tinted garment is completely transparent—yet you can't take a single scrap off, no time, no place! What a world!" He beat a fist into an open palm and sighed. "All right. We call this rig a Dimenocommunaplex. Not because we want to, but we had to call it something, and JoJo here thought we should christen it the Ballyhocker. So it's a Dimenocommunaplex. It's intended for interdimensional communication."

"Like the fourth?" Steve suggested brightly.

"No, not like the fourth. There are an infinite number of dimensional universes, coexisting with us but neither in our time nor in our space. They adjoin us on the entropy gradient."

A rustle of inattention and discomfort. "Nut words like entropy," someone muttered. "Entropy
gradient
! Make him start."

"Entropy might be defined as the increasing randomness of energy," Physics Nut 6B306 went on more rapidly as he tried to ignore Dr. Ballyhock's signals. "The rate at which our universe is proceeding to its own space-time death. A universe whose entropy gradient is steeper would be imperceptible to our senses and instruments. In that case, furthermore, all radiation in it would operate at much higher frequencies than in our universe. How
much
higher, we can only estimate. And since this is a communicative—"

"Please begin," the president ordered. "We are normal humans and interested in results, not explanations. Theory can come later."

"The problem in communicating with such an adjoining universe," the guarded man went on defiantly, "is chiefly one of finding the correct frequency at which their equivalent of, say, electromagnetic or radio wave patterns occur. Going up past our highest conceivable frequencies with the interdimensional translating device I have developed, we might still create only heat waves in their plenum. Approximation is all we can do each time; continued careful experimentation must go on. In turn, assuming intelligent creatures in such an adjoining universe, their problem would be to find a sufficiently low frequency (in their terms) with which they could reach us. Again, they would—"

"I'm getting confused," Laura said plaintively. "Make him begin."

Dr. Ballyhock gestured, and the guard holding the radio switch poised a hand over it suggestively. Physics Nut 6B306 bit his lip and walked over to the switchboard. He pulled one switch forward a single notch and released a little automatic device which beeped twice, then four times, then eight. A pause and it beeped three times, nine times, and twenty-seven.

"Control, that's the answer," the president of M.B. & H.T.U. remarked complacently. "Back in the old days, creatures like that lived in and around normal humanity and wreaked fearful harm, what with constant uncomfortable changes and strange ideas all the time. Progress began with the appointment of lay commissions to supervise science, but we still had a long way to go before we reached our present perfect control. Today, just as we use machines to check on other machines and dogs to herd sheep, we use one kind of Nut as a control on other kinds. A Psychological Nut, for example, devised the tests with which we check this specimen periodically to make certain he is not contemplating anything dangerous. A Mechanical Engineering Nut designed the self-winding spool that—"

"Is it over?" Laura asked. "I mean, the experiment?"

"Yes, it's over!" Physics Nut 6B306 told her. "We have transmitted a signal that can be evaluated as the product of mathematically advanced creatures by any intelligent organisms in an adjoining universe that happen to receive it. Now we must wait for a possible reply. The reply may come on any radio frequency; in fact, since the creatures transmitting to us will be approximating our much lower entropy gradient, it may come as sound. We must be careful—"