The Seventh Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Robert Silverberg
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it. There were a couple of storm windows that needed glass replaced, and by rights I should putty all of them. The chimney needed some bricks to replace the ones that had blown off in a windstorm earlier in the year, and the door should have new weatherstripping.
I sat around and read a while and then I went to bed. Just before I went to sleep I thought some about the two old ladies—one of them happy and the other dead.
The next morning I got the community chest story out of the way, first thing; then I got an encyclopedia from the library and did some reading on magnetism. I figured that I should know something about it, before I saw this whiz-bang at the university.
But I needn’t have worried so much; this Dr. Thomas turned out to be a regular Joe. We sat around and had quite a talk. He told me about magnetism, and when he found out I lived at the lake he talked about fishing; then we found we knew some of the same people, and it was all right.
Except he didn’t have a story.
“There may be one in another year or so,” he told me. “When there is, I’ll let you in on it.”
I’d heard that one before, of course, so I tried to pin him down.
“It’s a promise,” he said; “you get it first, ahead of anyone.”
I let it go at that. You couldn’t ask the man to sign a contract on it.
I was watching a chance to get away, but I could see he still had more to say. So I stayed on; it’s refreshing to find someone who wants to talk to you.
“I think there’ll be a story,” he said, looking worried, as if he were afraid there mightn’t be. “I’ve worked on it for years. Magnetism is still one of the phenomena we don’t know too much about. Once we knew nothing about electricity, and even now we do not entirely understand it; but we found out about it, and when we knew enough about it, we put it to work. We could do the same with magnetism, perhaps—if we only could determine the first fundamentals of it.”
He stopped and looked straight at me. “When you were a kid, did you believe in brownies?”
That one threw me and he must have seen it did.
“You remember—the little helpful people. If they liked you, they did all sorts of things for you; and all they expected of you was that you’d leave out a bowl of milk for them.”
I told him I’d read the stories, and I supposed that at one time I must have believed in them—although right at the moment I couldn’t swear I had.
“If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d think I had brownies in this lab. Someone—or something—shuffled my notes for me. I’d left them on the desktop held down with a paperweight; the next morning, they were spread all over, and part of them dumped onto the floor.”
“A cleaning woman,” I suggested.
He smiled at my suggestion. “I’m the cleaning woman here.”
* * * *
I thought he had finished and I wondered why all this talk of notes and brownies. I was reaching for my hat when he told me the rest of it.
“There were two sheets of the notes still underneath the paperweight,” he said. “One of them had been folded carefully. I was about to pick them up, and put them with the other sheets so I could sort them later, when I happened to read what was on those sheets beneath the paperweight.”
He drew a long breath. “They were two sections of my notes that, if left to myself, I probably never would have tied together. Sometimes we have strange blind spots; sometimes we look so closely to a thing that we are blinded to it. And there it was—two sheets laid there by accident. Two sheets, one of them folded to tie up with the other, to show me a possibility I’d never thought of otherwise. I’ve been working on that possibility ever since; I have hopes it may work out.”
“When it does…” I said.
“It is yours,” he told me.
I got my hat and left.
And I thought idly of brownies all the way back to the office.
* * * *
I had just got back to the office, and settled down for an hour or two of loafing, when old J. H.—our publisher—made one of his irregular pilgrimages of good will out into the newsroom. J. H. is a pompous windbag, without a sincere bone in his body; he knows we know this and we know he knows—but he, and all the rest of us, carry out the comedy of good fellowship to its bitter end.
He stopped beside my desk, clapped me on the shoulder, and said in a voice that boomed throughout the newsroom: “That’s a tremendous job you’re doing on the community chest, my boy.”
Feeling a little sick and silly, I got to my feet and said, “Thank you, J. H.; it’s nice of you to say so.”
Which was what was expected of me. It was almost ritual.
He grabbed me by the hand, put the other hand on my shoulder, shook my hand vigorously and squeezed my shoulder hard. And I’ll be damned if there weren’t tears in his eyes as he told me, “You just stick around, Mark, and keep up the work. You won’t regret it for a minute. We may not always show it, but we appreciate good work and loyalty and we’re always watching what you do out here.”
Then he dropped me like a hot potato and went on with his greetings.
I sat down again; the rest of the day was ruined for me. I told myself that if I deserved any commendation I could have hoped it would be for something other than the community chest stories. They were lousy stories; I knew it, and so did the Barnacle and all the rest of them. No one blamed me for their being lousy—you can’t write anything but a lousy story on a community chest drive. But they weren’t cheering me.
And I had a sinking feeling that, somehow, old J. H. had found out about the applications I had planted with a half dozen other papers and that this was his gentle way of letting me know he knew—and that I had better watch my step.
III
Just before noon, Steve Johnson—who handles the medical run along with whatever else the Barnacle can find for him to do—came over to my desk. He had a bunch of clippings in his hand and he was looking worried. “I hate to ask you this, Mark,” he said, “but would you help me out?”
“Sure thing, Steve.”
“It’s an operation. I have to check on it, but I won’t have the time. I got to run out to the airport and catch an interview.”
He laid the clips down on my desk. “It’s all in there.” Then he was off for his interview.
I picked up the clippings and read them through; it was a story that would break your heart.
There was this little fellow, about three years old, who had to have an operation on his heart. It was a piece of surgery that had been done only a time or two before, and then only in big eastern hospitals by famous medical names—and never on one as young as three.
I hated to pick up the phone and call; I was almost sure the kind of answer I would get.
But I did, and naturally I ran into the kind of trouble you always run into when you try to get some information out of a hospital staff—as if they were shining pure and you were a dirty, little mongrel trying to sneak in. But I finally got hold of someone who told me the boy seemed to be O.K. and that the operation appeared to be successful.
So I called the surgeon who had done the job. I must have caught him in one of his better moments, for he filled me in on some information that fit into the story.
“You are to be congratulated, doctor,” I told him and he got a little testy.
“Young man,” he told me, “in an operation such as this the surgeon is no more than a single factor. There are so many other factors that no one can take credit.”
The suddenly he sounded