Don't Look Now, Leonard Rubin [top android ebook reader txt] 📗
- Author: Leonard Rubin
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"How is it done?"
"Only Barger Electronics really knows," said Dr. Brooks, "and the Christian E. Lodge engineers. It's something to do with compressing the wave length to approximate that of light, so that images are canceled out. This leaves a clear field for subliminal techniques. If there are subvisual images projected on the walls, for instance, that's what the observers will see inside the room."
"Oh, my God!" exclaimed Miss Knox.
"The only other thing I know is that it has to be done with intersecting spheres. The machine has two portable secondary transmitters—or projectors, or whatever they call them—each emitting in all directions to form a wave-sphere. Where the two spheres overlap, you get your possible interference with light."
"Frankly, I just don't understand it."
"Any radio waves go out in all directions to form spheres." His voice had become a mutter. "You know that."
"No, I didn't."
He gave a false sigh. "Well, take an ordinary weak phone transmitter very high up in a whirlybird. That's the simplest case. You know what sound a whirlybird makes, don't you?"
"Of course," said Miss Knox.
"What?" Dr. Brooks challenged, moving at her. "How does it sound?"
"Oh, clatter-clatter chug-chug," she said, moving back.
"No. Listen closely and you'll hear any whirlybird—especially hospital ambulances—go rackety-rackety-rack groundhog, rackety-rack groundhog!—a reminder to people that they belong on the ground, one may assume. Picture a microphone attached outside the bird and wired to your transmitter. The radio waves go out in all directions through the air. Suppose your air is all of the same density, and so forth—then all the waves peter out at a constant radius and form a perfect sphere going rackety-rackety-rack groundhog!
"Now compressed waves travel a certain number of feet—theoretically, the number of foot-pounds of work the power input could perform modified by a constant value called 'e'—and at that point they revert to ordinary radio waves. This forms a sphere of compressed or supra-short waves. Do you understand that?"
"No," said Miss Knox.
"Well, anyway, where two spheres overlap, you get the Barger effect. And they can vary or limit the effect in interesting ways. Just move one or both projectors so that the waves intersect each other in different phases—"
"That's a fascinating way to back me into a corner of the room, Dr. Brooks. Now will you please let me look at my patient?"
Mr. Barger's body convulsed and twitched, and the disordered bedclothes exposed the pink, swollen layers of his throat. Only the face slept. Miss Knox reduced the feed on the water envelope, and with her palm brushed drops of moisture from the burning, out-of-focus pink skin. The drops were sticky and warm. She wiped her hands on a piece of cotton and started to prepare the blood transfusion.
"Before you get out of here," she said to Dr. Brooks, "let me thank you."
"For the information? You'll only forget it."
"No, for the crack about my age."
Slumping his eyebrows, he went to the door and stepped through almost before it could slide open.
"Wait!" she commanded in a stage whisper.
He appeared, the door sliding back harmlessly against his shoulder before it changed direction.
"What's so terrible?" she asked. "You talk as though that radiocompressor on the Silvertongue roof were going to destroy the American home, at the very least."
"They don't just have to transmit within the factory," he said. "Suppose they wanted you arrested. Say they didn't like brunettes. Well, first they get some dame to call police and say she's going to do a strip in front of the Psychiatric Pavilion wall. Then they go across First Avenue and set up a subliminal movie sequence of some stripper in action and focus it on the wall from their car. They set up two portable wave projectors and adjust their phasing to achieve the Barger effect in that one place. Then they wait for you to pass that spot on your way to church. Very little power is required; the actual radiocompression takes place across the river."
Brooks raised his pants from the knees and minced across the room, exposing curly hair above his fallen argylls. His white coat twitched from side to side. "Now here you come. A man watching the street from the broken stool at the Green Gables twists one of his cufflinks, or maybe he just whistles. This starts the projectors and you become invisible, or very blurry, while the subliminal film gives the cops what they want. Then the whole thing shuts off and the cops can see you again. You're hustled off to jail and they keep you there—along with other enemies—by making a similar visual 'fix' on the results in some polling place and putting in their own judge!"
"Oh, they'll probably just use it for advertising."
"Sure," said Brooks. "How would you like it if you were watching television with your roommate, and all of a sudden she turned into a giant pack of Silvertongue cigarettes?"
Water dripped on her palm, leaving a red stain. A ringing, ringing, and the whir of motorskates receded down the corridor. It rang and rang, her hand sticky and warm against her cheek. It rang.
The telephone. Trying to recapture something she had known, she let groping fingers stretch toward the instrument. They descended, clenched, lifted. The ringing stopped.
She forced her eyes open far enough to see her white arm return. Hunching up around her pillow with the receiver, she croaked, "Hello."
"Miss Knox?" A high voice. "Boney—it's Boney—"
"You have a nerve, Boney, to wake me up at this hour."
"This isn't Boney—it's Hilda Erwin. I'm on emergency duty and they've brought in Boney. His throat is cut—"
"No! Is he alive?"
"Yes, yes. But he may never speak again. He lay there in the street for hours and hours. Dr. Gesner's internes are here—"
"Oh, not being able to talk would be worse for him than dying. I'll come! I'll be right there!" Miss Knox dropped the receiver and swung out of bed, feeling in the darkness for her robe. She pulled it on and opened the door, and found her slippers in the faint yellow light from the hallway.
As she ran, knotting the belt of her robe, she looked up and down the ancient residential corridors for a motorbed. She stumbled against a rotten wood molding. She pressed the elevator button and turned, her loose hair swinging heavily, to face the flat eye of a clock. It was five-fifteen.
Overhead, the floor indicator creaked around its dial—seven, six, five, four—and the doors opened. There was a motorbed on the elevator.
She stepped inside and pressed the button for seven, the lowest floor with a bridge to the Mushroom. The doors shut and the car moved upward. Tripping over the torn linoleum, she managed to fall backward onto the bed's driving seat. She swung her legs around and turned on the switch.
As the doors opened, she drove out with a jolt and entered the sparkling newness of a tubular bridge which rose through the night across First Avenue. The Mushroom towered overhead, its spiral corridors glowing. Night traffic vibrated beneath her as she crossed—a crowd of trucks was baying north along the hidden cobblestones, following traffic lights which jumped from red to green, one after another, like an electronic rabbit. The trucks passed out of sight under their own diesel cloud and another pack approached in a higher key....
Then a lurch as towing cables grated and took hold in the curve of the many-windowed corridor. Whining under glass, the motorbed veered off in a rising circle around the stem of the Mushroom. Around and around again, faster, while room numbers flashed red one by one on the silver doors, over the river, over the roof garden of the Administration wing, over the river, over the garden, around and around and out, out—far out over a city of dark crumbling toys and up and up over the rim....
She approached the great transparent dome of the Mushroom looking ahead into the sky, as though enemies in immense distance were triangulating upon her. An echo of voices rolled out. Far across the marble floor, one of the emergency rooms had its lights on. The door opened and a tiny figure in a motorchair sped out and along the wall, followed by a line of running dolls in white. Some of them clustered around the man in the chair, waving their arms. Thinning like a comet's tail, the procession vanished down the south escalator. The door of the room slid shut.
She hurtled across beneath the stars and drove straight at the room, applying brakes sharply with a tightening in her stomach as the door began to open. Her long hair swept forward against her cheeks and shoulders. She jarred to a stop inside and rose, refocusing her senses on the enclosed white space.
The bedside table held a pot of paper geraniums. Something lay beneath the covers like lumber on edge, the angles of knees projecting sideways. Out of the sheets stuck part of a thin white drainpipe neck and a face like a broken roof shingle, over which the weeping Miss Erwin cast her shadow.
Brooks sat hunched over the stool, fingers buried in his hair. His lab coat was twisted awry; a bare knee protruded between two buttons.
"What happened?" asked Miss Knox.
"He's all right," Miss Erwin sobbed at her. "Delinquents—vandals—they cut his throat by the river, right in front of the hospital. The mutape says—he didn't—see their faces."
"Don't worry about him," said a low muttered voice. "He's been conscious. The doctors say he'll speak, in time." Dr. Brooks had raised his head and was trying to cover himself with the lab coat.
"River rats," Miss Knox snapped, peering at Boney's wasted face. "What do you mean, in time?"
"Two or three weeks. An expert job of quick surgery, really."
"No! No!" Miss Erwin broke into a fit of sobbing and blindly rearranged the flowers.
"Do you mean to say?—"
"Some medical students on a horror spree. Damned age of—what did that Washington press secretary say?—'atomic hyper-specialization'! That means young brains growing in channels until they explode through the wall. You remember the physicist who killed his colleagues when the English won the Nobel Prize."
"It can't be," said Miss Knox. She watched the hurt man grimace somewhere along his razor edge of nightmare.
"It's the only likelihood. Well, we can't do anything for him now, and you look a little beat. Come on, I'll buy you coffee from the vending machine on the Administration roof."
Dr. Brooks stood up, lifted Miss Knox gently beneath the arms and sat her on the motorbed, then swung a hairy shin over the driving seat. They rolled through the doorway.
"Who was that big shot in the motorchair?" Miss Knox asked. "Dr. Gesner?"
Dawn had just begun to spread. They crossed within a widening circle of mushroom-shaped arches containing portraits which drew farther away until they resembled portal guards, and then converged again in full austerity on the opposite side of the great dome.
"Director himself—they can't reach Gesner anyplace," Brooks said.
They started to descend inward from the Mushroom's edge. Numbers flashed by as they spiraled down faster along the self-steering guide rail. Over the river, over the garden. Over the river....
She leaned back against the pillows. "What was himself doing in the hospital at this hour?" she asked.
"As a matter of fact"—his shadow crossed her face as he moved the deceleration lever—"he was with me."
"With you?"
"I was listening to the newscasts in bed. He came to see me because, as resident radiologist, I'm the only person who knows anything at all about electronics. While we listened, his assistant with the high voice called him on my phone and told him about Boney."
"How did he react?"
Brooks swung his tiller bar and they veered onto the roof of the Administration wing, the door behind them cutting off all light from inside the Mushroom. They were in a formal garden filled with scent, and surrounded by distant hedges. The few remaining stars were surprised naked, floating above a monstrous concrete bird-bath.
"Like a bureaucrat," he muttered as they rolled to a stop. "First he requisitioned flowers. He's probably in here somewhere now, plotting revenge against the Commissary clerk who issued the knife they found near Boney. I know he'd love to see you rushing in your bathrobe to other people's emergencies."
"Disgusting. And they call him the Father of the Mushroom. Big shot."
"Why?" he asked. "After all, he is a bureaucrat. How did you yourself react—like a woman, no?"
He helped her down. They walked within a double row of mountain laurels to the coffee machine.
"I'd forgotten all about the
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