Thunder and Roses (17 page)

What was supposed to happen when the tape ran out? Who or what would come and look at it when it was all done? You know, he didn’t care. He just wanted to read that tape, is all. Seems there’s a lot of guys write history books and stuff. And he wanted to call them liars. He wanted to tell them the way it really was. Can you imagine? So there I am, cutting away with my super-torch on what seems to be a solid wall made out of some stuff has no right to be so tough. I can still see it.

So dark, and me with black goggles on, and the doc with his back to me so’s he won’t wreck his eyes, spoutin’ along about history and the first unbiased account of it. And how he was going to thrust it on the world and just kill all those guys with all those theories.

I remember quitting once for a breather and letting the mercury cells juice up a bit while I had a smoke. Just to make talk I ask Sykes when does he think that transmitter is going to go to work.

“Oh,” he says. “It already did. It’s finished. That’s how I knew that my figuring was right. That tape has a certain rate through the machine. It’s in millimeters per month. I have the figure. It wouldn’t matter to you. But something happened a while ago that made it possible to check. July sixteenth, nineteen hundred and forty-five, to be exact.”

“You don’t tell me,” I says.

“Oh,” he says, real pleased, “but I do! That day something happened which put a wiggle in the wire there—the thing I was looking for all along. It was the crimp that triggered the transmitter. I happened to be in the cave at the time.

“The transmitter started up and the little disk spun around like mad. Then it stopped. I looked in the papers the next week to see what it was. Nothing I could find. It wasn’t until the following August that I found out.”

I suddenly caught wise.

“Oh—the atom bomb! You mean that rig was set up to send something as soon as an atomic explosion kicked off somewhere on earth!”

He nodded his head. By the glare of the red-hot rock he looked like a skinny old owl.

“That’s right. That’s why we’ve got to get in there in a hurry. It was after the second Bikini blast that the cave got sealed up. I don’t know if that transmission is ever going to be picked up.

“I don’t know if anything is going to happen if it is picked up. I do know that I have the wire decoded and I mean to get those records before anybody else does.”

If that wall had been any thicker I never would’ve gotten through. When I got my circle cut and the cut-out piece dropped inside, my rig was about at its last gasp. So was Sykes. For the last two hours he’d been hoppin’ up an’ down with impatience.

“Thirty years’ work,” he kept saying. “I’ve waited for this for thirty years and I won’t be stopped now. Hurry up! Hurry up!”

And when we had to wait for the opening to cool I thought he’d go wild. I guess that’s what built him up to his big breakdown. He sure was keyed up.

Well, at last we crawled into the place. He’d talked so much about it that I almost felt I was comin’ back to something instead of seeing it for the first time.

There was the machines, the big one about seven feet tall, dumbbell shaped, and the little one sort of a rounded cube with a bunch of macaroni on top that was this antenna he was talking about.

We lit a pressure lantern that flooded the place with light—it was small, with a floor about nine by nine—and he jumped over to the machines.

He scrabbles around and hauls out some wire. Then he stops and stands there looking stupid at me.

“What’s the matter, Doc?” I say. I called him Doc.

He gulps and swallows.

“The reel’s empty. It’s empty! There’s only eight inches of wire here. Only—” and that was when he fainted.

I jumped up right away and shook him and shoved him around a little until his eyes started to blink. He sits up and shakes himself.

“Refilled,”
he says. He is real hoarse. “Kemp! They’ve been here!”

I began to get the idea. The lower chamber is empty. The upper one is full. The whole set-up is arranged to run off a new recording. And where is Sykes’ thirty years’ work?

He starts to laugh. I look at him. I can’t take that. The place is too small for all that noise. I never heard anybody laugh like that. Like short screams, one after the other, fast. He laughs and laughs.

I carry him out. I put him down outside and go in for my gear. I can hear him laughing out there and that busted-up voice of his echoing in the gulch. I get everything onto the backpack and go to put out the pressure lantern when I hear a little click.

It’s that transmitter. The little red and black disk is turning around on it. I just stand there watching it. It only runs for three or four minutes. And then it begins to get hot in there.

I got scared. I ducked out of the hole and picked up Sykes. He didn’t weigh much. I looked back in the hole. The cave was lit up. Red. The machines were cherry-red, straw-colored, white, just that quick. They melted. I saw it. I ran.

I don’t hardly remember getting to the rope and tying Sykes on
and climbing up and hauling him up after me. He was quiet then, but conscious. I carried him away until the light from the gulch stopped me. I turned around to watch.

I could see a ways down into the gulch. It was fillin’ up with lava. It was lightin’ up the whole desert. And I never felt such heat. I ran again.

I got to the car and dumped Sykes in. He shifted around on the seat some. I asked him how he felt. He didn’t answer that but mumbled a lot of stuff.

Something like this.

“They knew we’d reached the atomic age. They wanted to be told when. The transmitter did just that. They came and took the recordings and refilled the machine.

“They sealed off the room with something they thought only controlled atomic power could break into. This time the transmitter was triggered to human beings in that room. Your torch did it, Kemp—that three-hundred-years-in-the-future torch! They think we have atomic power! They’ll come back!”

“Who, Doc? Who?” I says.

“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “There’d be only one reason why someone—some creature—would want to know a thing like that. And that’s so they could stop us.”

I laughed at him. I got in and started the car and laughed at him.

“Doc,” I said, “we ain’t goin’ to be stopped now. Like the papers say, we’re in the atomic age if it kills us. But we’re in for keeps. Why, humanity would have to be killed before it’d get out of this atomic age.”

“I know that, Kemp—I know—that’s what I mean! What have we done? What have we done?”

After that he’s quiet a while and when I look at him again I see he’s dead. So I brought him in. In the excitement I faded. It just didn’t look good to me. I knew nobody would listen to a yarn like that.

There was silence in the courtroom until somebody coughed, and then everyone felt he had to make a sound with his throat or his feet. The coroner held up his hand.

“I kin see what Brother Kemp was worried about. If that story is true I, for one, would think twice about tellin’ it.”

“He’s a liar!” roared a prospector from the benches. “He’s a murderin’ liar! I have a kid reads that kind of stuff, an’ I never did like to see him at it. Believe me, he’s a-goin’ to cut it out as of right now. I think this Kemp feller needs a hangin’!”

“Now, Jed!” bellowed the coroner. ‘If we kill off this man we do it legal, hear?” The sudden hubbub quieted, and the coroner turned to the prisoner.

“Listen here, Kemp—somethin’ jest occurred to me. How long was it from the time of the first atom blast until the time that room got sealed up?”

“I dunno. About two years. Little over. Why?”

“An’ how long since that night you been talking about, when Sykes died?”

“Or was murdered,” growled the prospector.

“Shut up, Jed. Well, Kemp?”

“About eighteen mon—No. Nearer two years.”

“Well then,” said the coroner, spreading his hands. “If there was anything in your story, or in that goofy idea of the dead man’s about someone comin’ to kill us off—well, ain’t it about time they did?”

There were guffaws, and the end of the grange hall disappeared in a burst of flame. Yelling, cursing, some screaming, they pushed and fought their way out into the moonlit road.

The sky was full of ships.

T
HE CHANDELIERS ON
the eighty-first floor of the Empire State Building swung wildly without any reason. A company of soldiers marched over a new, well-built bridge, and it collapsed. Enrico Caruso filled his lungs and sang, and the crystal glass before him shattered.

And Vernon Drecksall composed his Largo.

He composed it in hotel rooms and scored it on trains and ships, and it took more than twenty-two years. He started it in the days when smoke hung over the city, because factories used coal instead of broadcast power; when men spoke to men over wires and never saw each other’s faces; when the nations of earth were ruled by the greed of a man or the greed of men. During the Thirty Days War and the Great Change which followed it, he labored; and he finished it on the day of his death.

It was music. That is a silly, inarticulate phrase. I heard a woman say “Thank you” to the doctor who cured her cancer, and then she cried, for the words said so little. I knew a man who was born lonely, and whose loneliness increased as he lived until it was a terrible thing. And then he met the girl he was to marry, and one night he said, “I love you.” Just words; but they filled the incredibly vast emptiness within him; filled it completely, so that there was enough left over to spill out in three syllables, eight letters.… The Largo—it was music. Break away from individual words; separate yourself from the meaning of them strung together, and try to imagine music like Drecksall’s Largo in E Flat. Each note was more than polished—burnished. As music is defined as a succession of notes, so the Largo was a thing surpassing music; for its rests, its upbeats, its melodic pauses were silences blended in harmony, in discord. Only Drecksall’s genius could give tangible, recognizable tone to silence. The
music created scales and keys and chords of silence, which played in exquisite counterpoint with the audible themes.

It was dedicated to Drecksall himself, because he was a true genius, which means that everything in the universe which was not a part of him existed for him. But the Largo was written for Wylie, and inspired by Gretel.

They were all young when they met. It was at a summer resort, one of those strange outposts of city settlement houses. The guests were plumbers and artists and bankers and stenographers and gravicab drivers and students. Pascal Wylie was shrewd and stocky, and came there to squander a small inheritance at a place where people would be impressed by it. He had himself convinced that when the paltry thousands were gone he could ease himself into a position where more could be gotten by someone else’s efforts. Unfortunately this was quite true. It is hardly just, but people like that can always find a moneymaker to whom their parasitism is indispensable.

Gretel was one of the students. Without enthusiasm, she attended a school in the city which taught a trade for which she was not fitted and which would not have supported her if she had been. Wylie’s feminine counterpart, she was spending her marriageable years as he spent his money, in places where it would impress others less fortunate. Like him, she lived in a passively certain expectation that when her unearned assets were gone, the future would replace them. Her most valuable possession was a quick smile and a swifter glance, which she used very often—whenever, in fact, a remark was made in her presence which she did not understand. The smile and the glance were humorous and understanding and completely misleading. The subtler the remark, the quicker her reaction. Her rather full lips she held slightly parted, and one watched them to catch the brilliantly wise thought they were about to utter. They never did. She was always surrounded by quasisophisticates, and pseudo-intellectuals whose conversation got farther and farther above her silly head until she retreated behind one slightly raised golden eyebrow, her whole manner indicating that the company was clever, but a bit below her. She was unbelievably dumb and an utterly fascinating person to know slightly.

Vernon Drecksall washed pots and groomed vegetables for the waspish cook. He had a violin and he cared about little else, but he had discovered that to be able to play he must eat, and this job served to harness his soul to earth, where it did not belong. He got as many dollars each week as he worked hours each day, an arrangement which was quite satisfactory by his peculiar standards.

Each night after Drecksall had scoured the last of his eight dozen pots, disposed of his three bushels of garbage, and swabbed down an acre and a half of floor-space, he went to his room for his violin and then headed for the privacy of distance. Up into the forest on a rocky trail that took him to the brink of a hilltop lake he would go; beating through thick undergrowth he reached a granite boulder that shouldered out into the water at the end of a point. Night after night he stood there on that natural stage and played with almost heartbreaking abandon. Before him stretched the warm, black water, studded with starlight, like the eyes of an audience. Like the glow of an usher’s torch the riding lights of a passing heliplane would move over the water. Like the breathing of twenty thousand spellbound people, the water pressed and stroked and rustled on the bank. But there was never any applause. That suited his mood. They didn’t applaud Lincoln at Gettysburg either.

Every ten days the pot-walloper was given a day off, which meant that he worked only until noon, which, again, generally turned out to be four in the afternoon after various emergency odds and ends had been taken care of. Then he had the privilege of circulating among people who disliked him on sight while he mourned that the woods were full of vandals and the lake was full of boats and the telejuke box was incapable of anything but rhythmically insincere approaches to total discord. He didn’t look forward to his days off, until he saw Gretel.

She was sitting on an ancient Hammond electric organ, staring off into space, and thinking about absolutely nothing. The mountain sunset streamed through a window behind her, making her hair a halo and her profiled body the only thing in the universe fit to be framed by that glorious light. Drecksall was unprepared for the sight; he was blinded and enslaved. He didn’t believe her. She must be
music. It was, for him, a perfectly rational conclusion, for she was past all understanding, and until now nothing not musical had struck him that way. He moved over to her and told her so. He was not trying to be poetic when he said, “Someone played you on the organ, and you were too lovely to come out as sound.” He was simply stating what he believed.