Alternating Currents (11 page)

I—knowing what I was doing, with, as they say, malice aforethought—deliberately shot to death Laurence Connaught.

They execute murderers. So they mean to execute me.

Especially because Laurence Connaught had saved my life.

Well, there are extenuating circumstances. I do not think they would convince a jury.

Connaught and I were close friends for years. We lost touch during the war. We met again in Washington, a few years after the war was over. We had, to some extent, grown apart; he had become a man with a mission. He was working very hard on something and he did not choose to discuss his work and there was nothing else in his life on which to form a basis for communication. And—well, I had my own life, too. It wasn’t scientific research in my case—I flunked out of med school, while he went on. I’m not ashamed of it; it is nothing to be ashamed of. I simply was not able to cope with the messy business of carving corpses. I didn’t like it, I didn’t want to do it, and when I was forced to do it, I did it badly. So—I left.

Thus I have no string of degrees, but you don’t need them in order to be a Senate guard.

~ * ~

Does
that sound like a terribly impressive career to you? Of course not; but I liked it. The Senators are relaxed and friendly when the guards are around, and you learn wonderful things about what goes on behind the scenes of government. And a Senate guard is in a position to do favors—for newspapermen, who find a lead to a story useful; for government officials, who sometimes base a whole campaign on one careless, repeated remark; and for just about anyone who would like to be in the visitors’ gallery during a hot debate.

Larry Connaught, for instance. I ran into him on the street one day, and we chatted for a moment, and he asked if it was possible to get him in to see the upcoming foreign relations debate. It was; I called him the next day and told him I had arranged for a pass. And he was there, watching eagerly with his moist little eyes, when the Secretary got up to speak and there was that sudden unexpected yell, and the handful of Central American fanatics dragged out their weapons and began trying to change American policy with gunpowder.

You remember the story, I suppose. There were only three of them, two with guns, one with a hand grenade. The pistol men managed to wound two Senators and a guard. I was right there, talking to Connaught. I spotted the little fellow with the hand grenade and tackled him. I knocked him down, but the grenade went flying, pin pulled, seconds ticking away. I lunged for it. Larry Connaught was ahead of me.

The newspaper stories made heroes out of both of us. They said it was miraculous that Larry, who had fallen right on top of the grenade, had managed to get it away from himself and so placed that when it exploded no one was hurt.

For it did go off—and the flying steel touched nobody. The papers mentioned that Larry had been knocked unconscious by the blast. He was unconscious, all right.

He didn’t come to for six hours and when he woke up, he spent the next whole day in a stupor.

I called on him the next night. He was glad to see me.

“That was a close one, Dick,” he said. “Take me back to Tarawa.”

I said, “I guess you saved my life, Larry.”

“Nonsense, Dick! I just jumped. Lucky, that’s all.”

“The papers said you were terrific. They said you moved so fast, nobody could see exactly what happened.”

He made a deprecating gesture, but his wet little eyes were wary. “Nobody was really watching, I suppose.”

“I was watching,” I told him flatly.

He looked at me silently for a moment.

“I was between you and the grenade,” I said. “You didn’t go past me, over me, or through me. But you were on top of the grenade.”

He started to shake his head.

I said, “Also, Larry, you fell
on
the grenade. It exploded underneath you. I know, because I was almost on top of you, and it blew you clear off the floor of the gallery. Did you have a bulletproof vest on?”

~ * ~

He
cleared his throat. “Well, as a matter of—”

“Cut it out, Larry! What’s the answer?”

He took off his glasses and rubbed his watery eyes. He grumbled, “Don’t you read the papers? It went off a yard away.”

“Larry,” I said gently, “I was there.”

He slumped back in his chair, staring at me. Larry Connaught was a small man, but he never looked smaller than he did in that big chair, looking at me as though I were Mr. Nemesis himself.

Then he laughed. He surprised me; he sounded almost happy. He said, “Well, hell, Dick—I had to tell somebody about it sooner or later. Why not you?”

I can’t tell you all of what he said. I’ll tell most of it—but not the part that matters.

I’ll never tell
that
part to
anybody
.

Larry said, “I should have known you’d remember.” He smiled at me ruefully, affectionately. “Those bull sessions in the Caféterias, eh? Talking all night about everything. But you remembered.”

“You claimed that the human mind possessed powers of psychokinesis,” I said. “You argued that just by the mind, without moving a finger or using a machine, a man could move his body anywhere, instantly. You said that nothing was impossible to the mind.”

I felt like an absolute fool saying those things; they were ridiculous notions. Imagine a man
thinking
himself from one place to another! But—I had been on that gallery.

I licked my lips and looked to Larry Connaught for confirmation.

“I was all wet,” Larry laughed. “Imagine!”

I suppose I showed surprise, because he patted my shoulder.

He said, becoming sober, “Sure, Dick, you’re wrong, but you’re right all the same. The mind alone can’t do anything of the sort—that was just a silly kid notion. But,” he went on, “
but
there are—well, techniques—linking the mind to physical forces—simple physical forces that we all use every day—that can do it all. Everything! Everything I ever thought of and things I haven’t found out yet.

“Fly across the ocean? In a second, Dick! Wall off an exploding bomb? Easily! You saw me do it. Oh, it’s work. It takes energy—you can’t escape natural law. That was what knocked me out for a whole day. But that was a hard one; it’s a lot easier, for instance, to make a bullet miss its target. It’s even easier to lift the cartridge out of the chamber and put it in my pocket, so that the bullet can’t even be fired. Want the Crown Jewels of England? I could get them, Dick!”

I asked, “Can you see the future?”

He frowned. “That’s silly. This isn’t supersti—”

“How about reading minds?”

~ * ~

Larry’s
expression cleared. “Oh, you’re remembering some of the things I said years ago. No, I can’t do that either, Dick. Maybe, some day, if I keep working at this thing— Well, I can’t right now. There are things I can do, though, that are just as good.”

“Show me something you can do,” I asked.

He smiled. Larry was enjoying himself; I didn’t begrudge it to him. He had hugged this to himself for years, from the day he found his first clue, through the decade of proving and experimenting, almost always being wrong, but always getting closer.... He
needed
to talk about it. I think he was really glad that, at last, someone had found him out.

He said, “Show you something? Why, let’s see, Dick.” He looked around the room, then winked. “See that window?”

I looked. It opened with a slither of wood and a rumble of sash weights. It closed again.

“The radio,” said Larry. There was a
click
and his little set turned itself on. “Watch it.”

It disappeared and reappeared.

“It was on top of Mount Everest,” Larry said, panting a little.

The plug on the radio’s electric cord picked itself up and stretched toward the baseboard socket, then dropped to the floor again.

“No,” said Larry, and his voice was trembling, “I’ll show you a hard one. Watch the radio, Dick. I’ll run it without plugging it in! The electrons themselves—”

He was staring intently at the little set. I saw the dial light go on, flicker, and hold steady; the speaker began to make scratching noises. I stood up, right behind Larry, right over him.

I used the telephone on the table beside him. I caught him right beside the ear and he folded over without a murmur. Methodically, I hit him twice more, and then I was sure he wouldn’t wake up for at least an hour. I rolled him over and put the telephone back in its cradle.

I ransacked his apartment. I found it in his desk: All his notes. All the information. The secret of how to do the things he could do.

I picked up the telephone and called the Washington police. When I heard the siren outside, I took out my service revolver and shot him in the throat. He was dead before they came in.

~ * ~

For
, you see, I knew Laurence Connaught. We were friends. I would have trusted him with my life. But this was more than just a life.

Twenty-three words told how to do the things that Laurence Connaught did. Anyone who could read could do them. Criminals, traitors, lunatics—the formula would work for anyone.

Laurence Connaught was an honest man and an idealist, I think. But what would happen to any man when he became God? Suppose you were told twenty-three words that would let you reach into any bank vault, peer inside any closed room, walk through any wall? Suppose pistols could not kill you?

They say power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And there can be no more absolute power than the twenty-three words that can free a man of any jail or give him anything he wants. Larry was my friend. But I killed him in cold blood, knowing what I did, because he could not be trusted with the secret that could make him king of the world.

<>

~ * ~

The Mapmakers

It was one of those crazy, chance-in-a-million accidents. A particle of meteoric matter slammed into
Starship Terra II
in hyperspace. It was only a small particle, but it penetrated three bulkheads, injuring Lieutenant Groden and destroying the Celestial Atlas. It couldn’t happen in a hundred years - but it had happened.

That was the end of the road for
Starship Terra II.
The damage-control parties patched the bulkheads easily enough. But the Atlas - the only record on board of the incomprehensible Riemannian configurations of hyperspace - was a total loss.

The captain gave orders for Spohn, the Celestial Atlas, to be buried in space and called an emergency officers’ meeting in the wardroom.

Terra II
was in normal space and free fall. A trace of smoky kerosene odour still hung in the wardroom, but there was none of the queasy unrecognizable slipping motion of the hyperspace ‘jump’, and the captain had ordered the ship spun to give them a touch of simulated gravity. The officers were managing to look alert and responsive as they faced their skipper.

The captain was a hard-muscled, hard-eyed career naval officer, and by definition an ambitious man - else he would hardly have asked for the command of a charting flight. He walked briskly in from his own quarters, neither hurrying nor slow. He would walk at that same pace to receive his admiral’s stars when that day came, or to his execution, if it ever came to that.

He assumed his place at the head of the table and took the precise ten seconds his martinet mind allotted him for looking around the wardroom. Then he said,’ We’re in trouble.’

The men in the wardroom hitched their hips a quarter inch closer to the ward table.

The captain nodded and said it again, ‘We’re in the soup, and we’re a long way from home, and nobody is going to come to get us out of it. We’ll have to do it ourselves, if we can. Ciccarelli’s trying to get us a fix, but I can tell you right now, we’re not close to Sol. There isn’t a constellation in the sky that you or I or anybody else ever saw before. We might be a hundred light-years from home, we might be ten thousand.’

The Exec cleared his throat. ‘Sir, what about our records ?’

‘What records? They went with the Atlas, Hal. We can’t retrace our way to Earth.’

‘No, sir, that’s not what I mean. I understand that. But our charting records from Earth to here, we still have those. They won’t do us any good, because we can’t follow them backward - hyperspace doesn’t work that way But Earth needs them.’

‘Sure. What can we do about it ? If we could get them back, we could get back ourselves. The whole trouble - Yes ? What is it, Lorch?’

Ensign Lorch saluted from the door of the wardroom. ‘Spohn’s body, sir,’ he rapped out. ‘It’s ready for burial now. Would the captain like to conduct the services ?’

‘The captain will. What about Groden ?’

Lorch said. ‘He isn’t good, sir. He’s unconscious and his head is bandaged up. The surgeon thinks it’s bad. But we won’t know for sure for at least a couple of hours.’

The captain nodded, and Lorch quickly took his seat. He was the youngest officer in
Terra II
in years, six months out of the Academy and still unable to vote. He listened to the discussion of ways and means with deference masking a keen feeling of excitement. The adventure of the unknown star lanes! That was why Lorch had signed up in the charting service, and he was getting it.