World in a Bottle, Allen Kim Lang [children's ebooks free online txt] 📗

said. "Listen to it again." He spooled the thread back and I listened again to the fractured seven: "DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT." Then again the forty-nine clicks, seven-squared. Dorsey switched off the player.

"Let's have the distillate of your cerebrations now, Brother Bogardus," he said, dropping into the deep, red-leather easy chair beside the thread-player.

"It's syncopation, Brother Dorsey," I said.

"I'd never have given my own modest observations so high-flown a title," Dorsey said. "I'd simply have called it, country boy at heart that I am, 'Shave-and-a-Haircut, two-bits!'"

"So it is," I said. "Now we've deciphered that broadcast, and listened to the singing commercial. But I'm still puzzled, Bud. We don't have the sponsor's name and address; and I'm not at all sure I caught the name of his product. What's he advertising?"

"His presence," Dorsey said. "I interpret the message as a simple CQ."

"Seek you?" I asked.

"Yes. Radio-ham code for, I'm lonely—will somebody please talk to me?'"

"I'll accept that interpretation only till I can think of one even more fantastic," I said.

"O.K., John," Dorsey said. "Getting the address of the station was a simple exercise, thanks to my Digger confreres in Adelaide and the men at Harvard's South African radio observatory. We first heard the message two years ago. It's still being broadcast, unchanged. The fist on the key that sent out our arithmetic message belongs to someone in the neighbourhood of Alpha Centauri."

"Hot damn!" I said. "But why didn't I know about this? I read Time, and all. Why wasn't this headlined?"

"Because it's guesswork," Dorsey explained. "This may be the result of some cosmic coincidence as unrelated to intelligent planning as Bode's Law."

"You'll have to explain that to this groundsman," I said.

"Bode's law, too, looks like an intelligently devised code of some sort," Dorsey said. "Take the series: 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, 192. Add 4 to each number, and divide by ten. The result will be, when you take the asteroid belt into consideration and fudge a little, very nearly the proportional distance from the sun of the first seven planets. Accident, or evidence of intelligent planning? Turned out there are excellent physical reasons for this relationship, reasons old Johann Elert Bode couldn't possibly have guessed. Things like this make astronomers leary of teleology. Make them avoid the splendid guess."

"Go ahead, make a splendid guess," I said. "I won't report you to the Astronomers Union."

"Sure," Dorsey said. "Alpha Centauri, as the U. Cal's five-meter Luna 'scope demonstrated several years ago, has a system of at least three planets. We don't know much about those planets except their time of revolution."

"And that one of them has a citizen clever enough to calculate natural squares and build a radio transmitter...."

"... one hell of a transmitter!" Dorsey said.

"... and whistle, 'Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits,'" I went on; "which musical interlude argues for a certain degree of conviviality on the part of our Centaurian. This thing of his message, though. Do you think he was just looking for other hams to talk with?"

"Then he's awfully patient, sending out the same 'CQ' for two solid years," Dorsey said. "It's hardly practical to communicate between stars, John. Broadcasting from here to Alpha C. and back, it would take more than nine years just to ask how's the wife and kids.

"The way it looks to me, our friend out there got the duty of cutting an educational recording to be broadcast automatically to the rest of the galaxy. Kind of a lighthouse, to help his race get in touch with any relatives it might have. That same recording has been played over and over again ever since, sending To Whom It Might Concern its dual message. Simple math—and the most persistent rhythmical cliche known to man."

"What's being done about it?" I asked.

"We've answered," Dorsey said. "A big radio noise on the moon is broadcasting the same message, minus the syncopation, and adding the next two terms; all this beamed toward Alpha Centauri. And two years ago, the Defense Department cut other programs to the bone to start construction of Orion Zeta, the sixth of the big nuclear-pulse ships. She's up in von Weizsäcker Crater on the back of the moon now, John, nearly finished. She's not meant to call at solar-system ports."

"The government thinks, and you think, that our operator four and a half light-years from here was human," I said.

"I can't speak for the government. But that's what I think. Isn't it human to toss notes out to sea in bottles? What's more human than dropping a joke into an arithmetical table?"

"All we've got to do to prove your splendid guess is to highjack a germ-free spaceship," I said. "You and me and any of the other Lapins who feel as we do. We'll go shake the hand—or other prehensile member, if he's not human after all—of our Centaurian thread-jockey. What's to keep our feet in the mud, when our heads are 'way the hell out in a southern constellation?"

"I gather, Herr Doktor, that you jest," Dorsey said. "If you were serious, I'd point out one minor flaw in your blueprint for adventure. It would take our little band of pirates one hundred twenty-five years to get to Alpha Centauri, after we'd stolen the ship. That's with the gas-pedal to the floor."

"I was joking," I said. "I was pretending to be the hero of one of those TV space-operas we used to watch.... But if I were serious, I don't think a mere century and a quarter would faze me. We couldn't reach our goal in person, Bud; but we could send our children's children. All we'd need to make the trip, if I were serious about my suggestion, would be a few more volunteers. A proper proportion of those volunteers had best be philoprogenitive females."

"Do you think the BICUSPID brass will be happy to see its expensive guinea-pigs taking off into space?" Dorsey asked. "Since '29, John, there's been eighty million bucks poured into gnotobiotics here at Central University. We're the payoff. We can hardly expect Dr. McQueen to stand on the launching-pad, tossing roses and shouting Bon Voyage as we blast off forever."

"I think they could be persuaded to be, if not enthusiastic, at least resigned to our departure," I said.

"It does prisoners good to plot escape-plans, even when they're as obviously fantastic as this one," Dorsey said. "Go on, John."

"As you say, our purpose in this adventure would be to escape," I said. "There's no place on earth that can take us, so we're forced to escape into space. We'll have to talk this up around the Big Tank to see how many want to break out with us. What the sex-distribution of the volunteers is, whether we've got the right range of specialists to man a spaceship. Right, Bud?"

"It's your dream," Dorsey said.

"O.K. Immermann Man appears to have been germ-free," I said. "Perhaps his culture had been gnotobiotic for so long that they'd forgotten the existence of micro-organisms. Landing on other planets, they'd not rediscover the danger of infectious disease till it was too late. Suddenly they'd start falling, dying of illnesses as mysterious to them as the plague was to men of the Renaissance. This may have been the manner in which the original owner of the Immermann skull died, on Mars. We have a reasonable suspicion that there was germ-free human life in our corner of the galaxy twenty thousand years ago. Perhaps, as you suggested, these visitors were members of an exploration party. From Alpha Centauri? Is our ham who hammered out the table-of-squares a member of that gnotobiotic race? Is he our brother in purity?"

"Go on, Johnny," Dorsey said. "You ain't even winded, yet."

"The Orion Zeta is being built for deep space," I went on. "Some group from earth is certain to set out in her on the four-generation hop to Alpha Centauri. Would it be morally right to allow this group of ambassadors to be made up of 'normal,' contaminated humans? To carry to a possibly defenceless population a mixed bag of goodies like Micrococcus ureae, Bacillus vulgaris, Staphylococcus aureus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis—a whole spectrum of benign and malignant bacteria? Remember, Bud, bugs that are benign or only mildly pernicious on earth might prove to be killers away from home."

"Lots of maybes," Dorsey said. "Lots of perhapses."

"I've got one more shaft in the quiver," I said. "This one's got a poisoned point, and it carries the names of our keepers. It's dirty, Bud. It's hardly fair to Dr. McQueen to use such blackmail."

"Blackmail sounds like just what we need," Dorsey said.

"O.K. Thirty of us were born into the Big Tank," I said. "One has already died as a result of his mental state, caused by imprisonment. Another is certain to die within the next few days. Had they been entirely sane, Mike Bohrman and Mary deWitte wouldn't have shed their sterility-suits outside the Tank. Without purpose to their lives, they cracked up.

"Two of us dead in the first twenty-six years of the human studies at BICUSPID," I went on. "Two, out of an original thirty. An attrition-rate of six and seven-tenths percent. How many more Lapins will wander out to commit innocent suicide in the snow, their minds messed up by the frustration and hopelessness of the guinea-pig way of life? How many more of us will escape from the Big Tank into the morgue? The Orion Zeta could be our salvation, Bud. It could give us the sort of purpose human beings must have in order to live."

Dorsey shook his head. "The Defense Department set up its young Clydeside in von Weizsäcker Crater just to build, test, and launch one ship: the Zeta. Two years of round-the-chronometer work have been poured into her," he said. "She's cost four billion dollars so far, Johnny; and they haven't bought the living-room furniture yet. I hardly think the generals will volunteer the result of all this effort to serve as psychotherapy for twenty-eight neurotic Hoosiers."

"You miss the point, Bud," I said. "We Lapins were born to crew the Zeta. Where else could you find a crew that's already spent twenty-odd years or so inside a box, living together in close quarters, being conditioned against claustrophobia? This Big Tank of ours could be a grounded spaceship, Bud! It's airtight, armored against outside dangers, even has the formaldehyde sump to serve us for airlock. What's a sterility-suit, anyway, but a special breed of space suit? Could you find a better crew than us twenty-eight, skilled in two dozen professions, young, sound of wind and limb, and willing as hell to take on the job? None of whom will ever have appendicitis, halitosis, toothache, barber's itch, or athlete's foot? Any one of whom can, in case of accident, first-aid his wounds with a spit-damp handkerchief, and heal wholesome? Man, we're what those generals have been dreaming of! Once we've been trained to aim that big ship and kick her off the back of the moon, we'll be the finest extra-solar crew that ever blasted free of the system!"

"One question," Dorsey said. "Where do I sign Ship's Articles?"

Dr. McQueen was in Chicago for three days before he found Mary Lofting, née deWitte. She had wakened that morning suffering from a headache, a stiff neck, and four degrees of fever. Her husband had called an ambulance to take her to Michael Reese Hospital. There, just before she'd lost consciousness, Mary had asked a nurse to call BICUSPID. The C.U. authorities had in turn called Dr. McQueen in Chicago.

She came home on a stretcher, a bottle of fructose solution dripping into her veins. Mary had already been loaded with a double-barreled shotgun-blast of every antibiotic she could safely take. Dr. McQueen rode back to the University in the ambulance with her, and with her husband. Lofting, holding the girl's hand, explained time after time that she'd never told him about the likely consequence of her removing her chastity-suit in an un-chaste world. The basketball player said he'd never forgive himself if she didn't recover.

Mary was taken to the C.U. hospital. Wearing a sterility-suit, I attended her examination, which was conducted by my chief-of-service, the staff pathologist, as well as the hospital's internist and neurologist. I took a few cc's of Mary's cerebrospinal fluid back with me to the BICUSPID contaminated labs. There, to anticipate a few days' deliberate bacterial growth in media, her meningoencephalitis was discovered to have been caused by Erysipelothrix monocytogenes, an organism whose more usual victims are rabbits. Mary's husband could explain her coming in contact with so exotic a pathogen only by the fact that they'd visited the Brookfield Zoo on the second, and last, day of their honeymoon.

By the time these technical details were known they were academic. The epidemiological problem had become secondary to the pathological. Mary Lofting had died.

I was asked to assist Dr. McQueen and the senior pathologist at autopsy—I was, after all, a resident