The Perfect Host (36 page)

Jackson said again, “I’ll tell it. We were about to go back to our stations when the screecher started up again. That meant only that the leak was getting ahead of the blowers, at first. But none of us had ever heard the screecher like that. Hinks here spotted it.”

Hinks, the guard, nodded and, oddly, blushed. “It went
Awk. Awk-awk-awk. Awk
.”

His imitation of the alarm screecher was so startlingly accurate that every man in the room jumped. Hinks blushed again and tittered, pulled himself together and said:

“It done it again, and a third time, and all of a sudden I remembered that was Mr. Ford’s code-call on the beeper.”

“Very—” said Bentow, and then his voice failed him. He swallowed hard and tried again. “Very ingenious. What has that to do with me?”

“It was Ikey,” said Ford from his chair. “Ikey’s like a light meter. Hold one candle one foot away, the meter’ll say one foot-candle. Hold twenty candles twenty feet away, it’ll still say one foot-candle.” He ran out of breath.

“Yeah,” said Jackson, “all Ikey knows is the concentration of mercury vapor in that little air space between the light and the cell. Mr. Ford took a thermometer—why they put a fever thermometer in all these local first aid kits I’ll never know, but they’re standard—and he broke it and held a little pool of mercury smaller’n a dime under the beam of Ikey’s light.”

“Shielded it off with a piece of my shirt,” whispered Ford. “As primitive as Indian smoke signals. The little bit of mercury that vaporizes at room temperature drove Ikey into hysterics when it was that close to the beam.”

“I still don’t see what this has to do with me,” said Bentow.

“You will,” snapped Jackson. “Mr. Ford told us what you said
about killing him with his own inventions. Watch what happens to you when you run into the lie-detector in court. He invented
that
, too!”

The door from the general offices opened. The guard-captain stood flat-footed and looked at every face in the room in one swift sweep. Then he pointed his finger at Bentow.

“His,” he said tersely.

“I asked the captain to get the thumb-print from that push-button outside Station Number 48,” Jackson explained, “and match it if he could in the company files. It’s yours all right.”

Bentow opened his mouth, put his hands to his face, and slumped down in a near faint.

“I think,” said Ford harshly, “that my haywire kid Dorcas is going to get that jolt I was talking about.” Then, oddly, he began to laugh. He laughed until Hinks nudged him anxiously.

“I’m all right,” whispered Ford. “Maybe I’m delirious. I was just thinking about getting that message through to you fellows. Did you know I’m leaving everything to Providence?”

There was a bumble of approving excitement in the room.

“Providence,” said Ford, “has had a lot of names at one time or another—a lot of ’em. D’you remember what the name of Jupiter’s messenger was, Jackson?”

Jackson frowned.

“Uh—Hermes?”

“No, son. It was Mercury!”

Ford shook his head and laughed again.

This is the strange story of Dr. Falu Englehart’s change of heart and the truth of how he turned from a dedicated lifetime to tear down his dream. It can be told now because, in the matter of the Titan invasion, humanity has shown itself, en masse, to have come of age—to have reached a stage of understanding.

For we in this twenty-eighth century are a strange race, only now entered upon our Third Phase, the first being an age of faith—and ignorant superstition—and the third of understanding and tolerance. The years between are a hell and a horror—the accursed five centuries which began in the eighteenth century, and which ended in near suicide in the twenty-second—years in which faith was destroyed and understanding not yet achieved.

It can be told now because it cannot hurt us. Had the story been circulated in the mad years of the Second Phase, it would have dealt a blow to humanity’s belief in itself from which it might never have recovered. Humans knew what they were, even then; but during that violent adolescence they went to insane lengths to prove that they were otherwise—that they were supreme.

When the Titans descended upon us fifty years ago and dealt their insignificant portion of death and ruin, we answered as an understanding people would. We recognized in them our counterparts, a race in the throes of the disease called conquest. We are a peaceful species, close to the land; and they did not understand that our farms and our city-less planet represented, not a primitive society, but a society fulfilled. They took our achievement for a stasis or a recidivism, our decentralization as a sign of the primitive. When we immobilized them without machines—and like all very young humanoids, they worshipped machines—and defended ourselves by the simple expedient of teaching them their own terrible acquisitive history,
why, we did not dam their stream and drive it back, like sweating savages; we dried it up. So much for that well-known tale; it does, however, demonstrate one of the ways in which we have proven our maturity, and our fitness to hear the strange story of Dr. Englehart.

Falu Englehart was born, to quote Umber’s epic poem on his life, “with stars in eyes that were myopic to all earthly things.” At nine he built his first telescope, and at twelve he developed a new technique for cataloguing novae.

He lived in the uneasy peace of the twenty-first century, when the world was an armed mechanical thing which seized upon a race to the stars as a means to absorb its overproduction while maintaining its technology.

The Gryce Expedition lit a fire in the boy Englehart which nothing could extinguish—nothing but his own incalculable energy, which he turned so strangely on it when he put it out. The epic is in error when it states that Gryce taught the boy; they never met. But Englehart followed Gryce’s every move in the newspapers, on the air—by a prepathic device known as radio—and through more esoteric talks with astronomers who had fallen under the spell of his exuberant genius. Englehart’s feeling for Gryce was an exaggerated hero-worship. When Gryce’s interstellar drive was announced, it is said that the boy, then thirteen, burst into tears of joy; and when a professional writer dared to challenge Gryce’s theories on the grounds that interplanetary travel had not yet been developed, and said that Gryce was a visionary and a mountebank, the youth traveled fifteen hundred miles by begging rides from travelers, and physically attacked the writer.

Gryce took off in his ship the
Falu
—so named from the initials of the society which built it, the First Antares League Union, and not, as Umber so flamboyantly put it, “In honor of the burning infant genius of Englehart.” Englehart, whose given name was Samuel, took the name of Falu after the ship, for he identified himself completely with it, and wanted no one to identify him otherwise.

At eighteen Falu Englehart, purely by the violence of his own desires, secured a menial position with the Gryce Laboratories and soon was at work on the counterpart of the interstellar drive which had taken Gryce away—forever. Of his years with Gryce Laboratories
there is little record, and it is a temptation to succumb, as Umber did, to the manufacture of such a record out of Englehart’s prodigious enthusiasm and the act of his departure in his own ship,
Gryce
, thirty years later.

It is certain, however, that he clung to the hope that Gryce would return longer than anyone else alive, and that he transmuted his hope into a determination to follow, and find out what had happened to the great man. One may learn something of the utter dedication of Englehart’s life by realizing that he regarded his own genius, which far outshone that of Gryce, as a secondary thing—perhaps a negligible one. But Englehart’s talent was more than a scientific one; in the trouble days of the ship
Gryce’s
departure, the lush days of government grants and popular subscriptions were over, and the union of local Antares Leagues had withered and died with the fading hope of Gryce’s return. Somehow or other Englehart took the wreckage and leavings of Gryce’s work and built with them; somehow he took upon himself the appalling task of financing the work; somehow he procured materials, met payrolls, and kept men working for him in the heat and light of his incandescent purpose.

When the
Gryce
was ready for launching, Englehart was nearly fifty years old, and in those days, fifty years marked the autumn of middle age. Umber’s poetry sketches him vaguely, but gives me an impression of a tall, compelling man, a voice like deep music, eyes filled with the immensities. Actually, Englehart was a pudgy little man of fifty, nearly bald, unmarried—and this was not a difficult state to maintain for him or for the few women he met—and, for all his monomania, a gentle-spoken citizen save when he was crossed; and then his compulsion was not that of magnetism, but of sheer nuisance.

He was nearly as forgotten by the world as Gryce, at launching time, except for sensationalist writers who drew on his manifest folly for humorous material from time to time. There was a stir of interest when it was known that he was gone, and his epitaph was written in pity and laughter, and in one or two cases, with an expression of genuine respect for his astonishing dynamism. No one respected his purpose, his goal.

And then he did the most astonishing thing of his surprising life. He came back.

His ship materialized inside the orbit of Mars, causing a warping-eddy perilously close to a primitive exploring ship, one of those pioneer interplanetary reaction-drive contraptions that had been developed since Gryce’s disappearance. Englehart himself made no calls, but the pioneers did, and Earth was ready for him when he warped in. He was welcomed as a hero, as a conquistador, a demigod. He was none of these. He was a man who, for half a century, should have been exhausted, but had never thought of it until now. It would seem that even the irony of his return, not only from the grave, but from obscurity, escaped him completely. He showed no emotion whatsoever except a dogged determination to destroy his ship, its drive, and everything pertaining to them; to spend the rest of his life in preventing mankind from ever again trying to reach the stars.

That he did this effectively, we know. For years he had had sole possession of the Gryce premises and records, and the men who had helped him and Gryce never had been able to understand, fully, the principles of the drive. Neither Gryce nor Englehart were teachers; they were doers, and apparently certain esoteric syntheses were done by no one else.

Englehart landed in the Chesapeake Bay in Old North America and was taken off, along with one of the two men who had gone with him—one of them had died on the trip—by the hysterically cheering crew of a towing-craft of some description. The
Gryce
was anchored, and Englehart was seen to lock the port with a magnekey. That same night the
Gryce
pulled her moorings, mysteriously took off out of control, and crashed into the ocean three hundred kilometers off shore. She apparently sank to the bottom and then exploded horrendously; nothing recognizable was ever found of her.

And, shortly after Englehart returned to the old Gryce plant, which had been under lock and key during his absence, there was an explosion and fire there which destroyed everything.

He made as few statements as he possibly could; the gist of them was that he had not found Gryce, though he still would not admit that Gryce was dead; that he had emerged from his drive “capsule”
in a portion of space which he did not recognize, and had spent the entire four years of his trip in an attempt to find his way back; that certain one-in-a-billion combinations of space stresses had made his flight possible at all, that the odds were incalculable against its ever being done again. He published these statements along with a short thesis on the mathematical theory of his drive, and a series of patently sequential formulae which proved the drive impracticable, the directional control impossible, and his return miraculous. The mathematical philosopher who discovered his reasoning fallacious, and further proved that the fallacy was purposely brought into the calculations, was not born for another two hundred years, and by that time there was hardly industry left on Earth to produce a clock, much less an interstellar drive. We could build such a thing today, certainly; and certainly we shall not. And the debt we owe Falu Englehart is beyond measure.

This pudgy colossus had a crew of two, a man of forty named Horton or Hawton who was an engineer, and a creature called Gudge, who was apparently some sort of menial, a twisted being of great strength. What his background was is not known. He was feted on his return to Earth with Englehart; and little as Englehart said, Gudge said so much less that it was believed that he was deaf and dumb. This is not true. He was certainly warped in body and mind, a man of intense secretiveness, and the possessor of a mad philosophy of ego-isolation which is beyond understanding. He had one amusement, and until very recently no one ever suspected it. He wrote.

He had, apparently, the dexterity of those who write long passages of verse on grains of rice, and he must have been able to do it in the dark. Certainly Englehart never dreamed that he was doing it. If he had, Englehart would have come back alone. We must picture for ourselves the great, ugly hulk of Gudge, curled on his bunk around his knotted careful hands, while his stylus made studied, microscopic marks on enduring vellumplex. There must have been no detectable sound, and no motion but his controlled breathing and the tiny jumping of a muscle at the base of his thumb. Certainly it is a picture that Gudge never drew for us; no man ever had less to
say about himself. And the events that led up to the entombment of the script, cast into a block of plastic that was carved, possibly by Gudge himself, into the only replica of the ship
Gryce
ever preserved—the concealment of the many sheets somewhere about his misshapen person, the risk he ran on leaving the ship with Englehart while carrying them, and his motivation in concealing them in an artifact that he knew would be preserved intact—these are things, also, at which we must guess. One wonders what the poet Umber would have done with the information. Gudge probably would have found his way into the epic as a doughty Boswell, and the murder of Hawton would have provided a fine counterplot of mutiny.