The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF (73 page)

I started this just to kill time, because I got tired of just looking out the window. But when I got almost to the end I began to catch the trend of what’s going on. You’re the only one I know that can come through for me, and when you finish this you’ll know why you must
.

I don’t know who will get this to you. Whoever it is won’t want you to identify a face later. Remember that, and please, Joe – hurry!

Ed

It all started because I’m lazy. By the time I’d shaken off the sandman and checked out of the hotel, every seat in the bus was full. I stuck my bag in a dime locker and went out to kill the hour I had until the bus left. You know the bus terminal – right across from the Book-Cadillac and the Statler, on Washington Boulevard near Michigan Avenue. Like Main in Los Angeles, or maybe Sixty-third in its present state of decay in Chicago, where I was going. Cheap movies, pawnshops, and bars by the dozens, a penny arcade or two, restaurants that feature hamburg steak, bread and butter and coffee for forty cents. Before the War, a quarter.

I like pawnshops. I like cameras, I like tools, I like to look in windows crammed with everything from electric razors to sets of socket wrenches to upper plates. So, with an hour to spare, I walked out Michigan to Sixth and back on the other side of the street. There are a lot of Chinese and Mexicans around that part of town, the Chinese running the restaurants and the Mexicans eating Southern Home Cooking. Between Fourth and Fifth, I stopped to stare at what passed for a movie. Store windows painted black, amateurish signs extolling in Spanish “
Detroit premier . . . cast of thousands . . . this week only . . . ten cents—
” The few eight-by-ten glossy stills pasted on the windows were poor blowups, spotty and wrinkled; pictures of mailed cavalry and what looked like a good-sized battle. All for ten cents. Right down my alley.

Maybe it’s lucky that history was my major in school. Luck it must have been, certainly not cleverness, that made me pay a dime for a seat in an undertaker’s rickety folding chair imbedded solidly – although the only other customers were a half-dozen Sons of the Order of Tortilla – in a cast of secondhand garlic. I sat near the door. A couple of hundred-watt bulbs dangling naked from the ceiling gave enough light for me to look around. In front of me, in the rear of the store, was the screen, what looked like a white-painted sheet of beaverboard, and when over my shoulder I saw the battered sixteen millimeter projector I began to think that even at a dime it was no bargain. Still, I had forty minutes to wait.

Everyone was smoking. I lit a cigarette and the discouraged Mexican who had taken my dime locked the door and turned off the lights, after giving me a long, questioning look. I’d paid my dime, so I looked right back. In a minute the old projector started clattering. No film credits, no producer’s name, no director, just a tentative flicker before a closeup of a bewhiskered mug labeled Cortez. Then a painted and feathered Indian with the title of Guatemotzin, successor to Moctezuma; an aerial shot of a beautiful job of model-building tagged Ciudad Méjico, 1521. Shots of old muzzle-loaded artillery banging away, great walls spurting stone splinters under direct fire, skinny Indians dying violently with the customary gyrations, smoke and haze and blood. The photography sat me right up straight. It had none of the scratches and erratic cuts that characterized an old print, none of the fuzziness, none of the usual mugging at the camera by the handsome hero. There wasn’t any handsome hero. Did you ever see one of those French pictures, or a Russian, and comment on the reality and depth brought out by working on a small budget that can’t afford famed actors? This, what there was of it, was as good, or better.

It wasn’t until the picture ended with a pan shot of a dreary desolation that I began to add two and two. You can’t, for pennies, really have a cast of thousands, or sets big enough to fill Central Park. A mock-up, even, of a thirty-foot wall costs enough to irritate the auditors, and there had been a lot of wall. That didn’t fit with the bad editing and lack of sound track, not unless the picture had been made in the old silent days. And I knew it hadn’t by the color tones you get with pan film. It looked like a well-rehearsed and badly planned newsreel.

The Mexicans were easing out and I followed them to where the discouraged one was rewinding the reel. I asked him where he got the print.

“I haven’t heard of any epics from the press agents lately, and it looks like a fairly recent print.”

He agreed that it was recent, and added that he’d made it himself. I was polite to that, but he saw that I didn’t believe him and straightened up from the projector.

“You don’t believe that, do you?”

I said that I certainly did, and I had to catch a bus.

“Would you mind telling me why, exactly why?”

I said that the bus—

“I mean it. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me just what’s wrong with it.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” I told him. He waited for me to go on. “Well, for one thing, pictures like that aren’t made for the sixteen-millimeter trade. You’ve got a reduction from a thirty-five-millimeter master,” and I gave him a few of the other reasons that separate home movies from Hollywood. When I finished he smoked quietly for a minute.

“I see.” He took the reel off the projector spindle and closed the case. “I have beer in the back.” I agreed beer sounded good, but the bus – well, just one. From in back of the beaverboard screen he brought paper cups and a Jumbo bottle. With a whimsical “
Business suspended
” he closed the open door and opened the bottle with an opener screwed on the wall. The store had likely been a grocery or restaurant. There were plenty of chairs. Two we shoved around and relaxed companionably. The beer was warm.

“You know something about this line,” tentatively.

I took it as a question and laughed. “Not too much. Here’s mud,” and we drank. “Used to drive a truck for the Film Exchange.” He was amused at that.

“Stranger in town?”

“Yes and no. Mostly yes. Sinus trouble chased me out and relatives bring me back. Not any more, though; my father’s funeral was last week.” He said that was too bad, and I said it wasn’t. “He had sinus, too.” That was a joke, and he refilled the cups. We talked awhile about the Detroit climate.

Finally he said, rather speculatively, “Didn’t I see you around here last night? Just about eight.” He got up and went after more beer.

I called after him. “No more beer for me.” He brought a bottle anyway, and I looked at my watch. “Well, just one.”

“Was it you?”

“Was it me what?” I held out my paper cup.

“Weren’t you around here—”

I wiped foam off my mustache. “Last night? No, but I wish I had. I’d have caught my bus. No, I was in the Motor Bar last night at eight. And I was still there at midnight.”

He chewed his lip thoughtfully. “The Motor Bar. Just down the street?” And I nodded. “The Motor Bar. Hm-m-m.” I looked at him. “Would you like . . . sure, you would.” Before I could figure out what he was talking about he went to the back and from behind the beaverboard screen rolled out a big radio-phonograph and another Jumbo bottle. I held the bottle against the light. Still half full. I looked at my watch. He rolled the radio against the wall and lifted the lid to get at the dials.

“Reach behind you, will you? The switch on the wall.” I could reach the switch without getting up, and I did. The lights went out. I hadn’t expected that, and I groped at arm’s length. Then the lights came on again, and I turned back, relieved. But the lights weren’t on; I was looking at the street!

Now, all this happened while I was dripping beer and trying to keep my balance on a tottering chair – the street moved, I didn’t, and it was day and it was night and I was in front of the Book-Cadillac and I was going into the Motor Bar and I was watching myself order a beer and I knew I was wide awake and not dreaming. In a panic I scrabbled off the floor, shedding chairs and beer like an umbrella while I ripped my nails feeling frantically for that light switch. By the time I found it – and all the while I was watching myself pound the bar for the barkeep – I was really in a fine fettle, just about ready to collapse. Out of thin air right into a nightmare. At last I found the switch.

The Mexican was looking at me with the queerest expression I’ve ever seen, like he’d baited a mousetrap and caught a frog. Me? I suppose I looked like I’d seen the devil himself. Maybe I had. The beer was all over the floor and I barely made it to the nearest chair.

“What,” I managed to get out, “what was that?”

The lid of the radio went down. “I felt like that too, the first time. I’d forgotten.”

My fingers were too shaky to get out a cigarette, and I ripped off the top of the package. “I said, what was that?”

He sat down. “That was you, in the Motor Bar, at eight last night.” I must have looked blank as he handed me another paper cup. Automatically I held it out to be refilled.

“Look here—” I started.

“I suppose it is a shock. I’d forgotten what I felt like the first time I . . . I don’t care much any more. Tomorrow I’m going out to Phillips Radio.” That made no sense to me, and I said so. He went on.

“I’m licked. I’m flat broke. I don’t give a care any more. I’ll settle for cash and live off the royalties.” The story came out, slowly at first, then faster until he was pacing the floor. I guess he was tired of having no one to talk to.

His name was Miguel Jose Zapata Laviada. I told him mine: Lefko. Ed Lefko. He was the son of sugar beet workers who had emigrated from Mexico somewhere in the Twenties. They were sensible enough not to quibble when their oldest son left the back-breaking Michigan fields to seize the chance provided by an NYA scholarship. When the scholarship ran out, he’d worked in garages, driven trucks, clerked in stores, and sold brushes door-to-door to exist and to learn. The Army cut short his education with the First Draft to make him a radar technician; the Army had given him an honorable discharge and an idea so nebulous as to be almost merely a hunch. Jobs were plentiful then, and it wasn’t too hard to end up with enough money to rent a trailer and fill it with Army surplus radio and radar equipment. One year ago he’d finished what he’d started; finished underfed, underweight, and overexcited. But successful, because he had it.

“It” he installed in a radio cabinet, both for ease in handling and for camouflage. For reasons that will become apparent, he didn’t dare apply for a patent. I looked “it” over pretty carefully. Where the phonograph turntable and radio controls had been were vernier dials galore. One big dial was numbered 1 to 24, a couple were numbered 1 to 60, and there were a dozen or so numbered I to 25, plus two or three with no numbers at all. Closest of all, it resembled one of these fancy radio or motor testers found in a super super-service station. That was all, except that there was a sheet of heavy plywood hiding whatever was installed in place of the radio chassis and speaker. A perfectly innocent cache for . . .

Daydreams are swell. I suppose we’ve all had our share of mental wealth or fame or travel or fantasy. But to sit in a chair and drink warm beer and realize that the dream of ages isn’t a dream anymore, to feel like a god, to know that just by turning a few dials you can see and watch anything, anybody, anywhere, that has ever happened – it still bothers me once in a while.

I know this much, that it’s high frequency stuff. And there’s a lot of mercury and copper and wiring of metals cheap and easy to find, but what goes where, or how – least of all, why – is out of my line. Light has mass and energy, and that mass always loses part of itself and can be translated back to electricity, or something. Mike Laviada himself says that what he stumbled on and developed was nothing new, that long before the war it had been observed many times by men like Compton and Michelson and Pfeiffer, who discarded it as a useless laboratory effect. And, of course, that was before atomic research took precedence over everything.

When the first shock wore off – and Mike had to give me another demonstration – I must have made quite a sight. Mike tells me I couldn’t sit down. I’d pop up and gallop up and down the floor of that ancient store kicking chairs out of my way or stumbling over them, all the time gabbling out words and disconnected sentences faster than my tongue could trip. Finally it filtered through that he was laughing at me. I didn’t see where it was any laughing matter, and I prodded him. He began to get angry.

“I know what I have,” he snapped. “I’m not the biggest fool in the world, as you seem to think. Here, watch this,” and he went back to the radio. “Turn out the light.” I did, and there I was watching myself at the Motor Bar again, a lot happier this time. “Watch this.”

The bar backed away. Out in the street, two blocks down to City Hall. Up the steps to the Council Room. No one there. The Council was in session, then they were gone again. Not a picture, not a projection of a lantern slide, but a slice of life about twelve feet sqaure. If we were close, the field of view was narrow. If we were farther away, the background was just as much in focus as the foreground. The images, if you want to call them images, were just as real, just as lifelike as looking in the doorway of a room. Real they were, three-dimensional, stopped only by the back wall or the distance in the background. Mike was talking as he spun the dials, but I was too engrossed to pay much attention.

I yelped and grabbed and closed my eyes as you would if you were looking straight down with nothing between you and the ground except a lot of smoke and a few clouds. I winked my eyes open almost at the end of what must have been a long racing vertical dive, and there I was, looking at the street again.