Part 1

Don't Look Now

BY LEONARD RUBIN

Illustrated by WOOD

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine April 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The Royalty Party wasn't what you would imagine--it stood for a great deal, but there was as much it wanted no part of!

"You're not allowed in the ambulance," Miss Knox said.

They were both typical advertising men, down to the motorskates strapped beneath their shoes. Their faces were so utterly undistinctive as to seem fuzzy. Each carried a large flat briefcase with a coil antenna sticking out.

"Watch it!" the attendant growled, and they skated aside with a whir.

Big Carl came driving up the ramp, ducked his head to enter, and brought the bed to a stop in the belly of the ambulance. Miss Knox pressed the button and the door closed in the admen's faces.

When Mr. Barger was lowered from the hovering ambulance, his swollen, tearful eyes were sun-blind. Square hands clenched over and over with pain. Above the rotors' _rackety-rackety-rack_, Miss Knox shouted soothing things. She didn't wait for an answer. He was the worst case of laryngitis she had ever known--the only case, really, in her professional experience. Abolished diseases always came back virulently.

She and the bed sank between white hospital walls and landed in the room with a bump. The waiting attendant walked around the platform, folding the safety gates. He unhooked the four support cables, each vanishing out of his grasp like spaghetti slurped from a plate.

Just as the ceiling closed overhead, cutting off sight and sound of the whirlybird against the sun, Brooks, the radiologist, came in through the door, shepherding an entire class of medical students. Then two nurses seemed to clear an inoffensive path through the chemically tainted air of the corridor--and after them came Dr. Gesner, the greatest throat man in the country. Miss Knox knew him from his portrait in the Mushroom.

Brooks winked her an "At ease!" with a shaggy eyebrow and followed the fat man through the crowd. Dr. Gesner went to the bed and sat down. He was Barger's weight, with the same sort of elephantine bones, but he was almost two feet shorter. He stared at the nose and cheeks protruding from the bedclothes, and opened a fat black bag.

* * * * *

A bell rang three times in the corridor. Five interns scurried into the room and stopped still, watching Dr. Gesner as though he were a golden calf. On each side of the doorway stood a student nurse at attention.

Mr. Barger stopped twitching and opened one eye wide. His chin lifted, and his other chins came out from under the sheet's folded edge.

One of Dr. Gesner's hands felt through the black bag. It emerged dragging a mutape by one wire. Brooks leaned forward and took out the rest of the apparatus. Shaking the hair off his forehead, he plugged into the bedside computer relay and placed the rubber-rimmed cup against the patient's skull, just over the Broca convolution.

Mr. Barger remained staring at the doctor through a gray film. The mutape chattered rapidly. Miss Knox craned her neck, deciphering the punched tape as it unrolled from the recorder in Brooks' hands. Sweat popped out on Mr. Barger's forehead.

"Help me, damn it," read Mr. Barger's tape. "I know you. You abolished laryngitis; why should it come to me now? I have a right to stop misuse of my work and to be free from pain--my patent is vital--free from pain. I want to be free...." His face turned pink in a new contortion and the hands folded over.

"Yes," Dr. Gesner said as the chatter stopped. "I know it hurts." He smiled gently in the middle of his face. He was writing on an index card, but his main effort was devoted to getting up from the bed with the help of two internes. "It will hurt this badly for twenty-four hours. Then the injection will have the upper hand." He turned to Brooks. "Please pass the tape around, Doctor. If any students haven't seen the X-rays yet, they're in my file."

Mr. Barger's face grayed a little; the sweat had turned to patches of crust against his skin. Dipping cotton in alcohol, Miss Knox bathed his forehead.

"That's all," said Dr. Gesner, handing her the card as the students began to vanish.

She stalked after him. "No examination, Doctor?" she asked, ignoring Brooks' horrified expression.

"Unnecessary, Nurse." He backed away from her and the door slid open. "I've already seen the X-rays and charts you phoned from the ambulance. And the patient cannot open his mouth. His intravenous menu is all here...."

"Yes, Doctor."

Three bells sounded in the corridor. "Calling Dr. Gesner. Emergency. Please come to the telephone. Emergency. Calling Dr. Gesner...."

He rolled his eyes at the index card in her hand. "You yourself are to take the shots prescribed for you, to prevent your catching or carrying the disease. In that bed, but for the grace of God...." He was crying softly.

"Doctor!" said Brooks, and the internes and nurses gasped.

"After all," said Dr. Gesner, "I _did_ abolish laryngitis."

* * * * *

Miss Knox walked back up the drive and struck a cigarette on one of the stone lions. It glowed in the dark, but the river breeze blew it out before she could draw. She snorted in annoyance.

Miss Erwin looked up sharply.

"Is there _anywhere_ where you can still buy matches?" asked Miss Knox.

"Not in New York City. Why?"

"We used to just try again when a cigarette didn't light. Now we have to throw it away."

"Of course," said Miss Erwin. "That's how they train us to be right the first time."

"Ridiculous. That's how they sell more cigarettes."

"Why, _Miss Knox_! You sound like Royalty!"

Miss Knox laughed. "I'm not ready to join the British Commonwealth yet. No fooling, Hilda, you see the Silvertongue cigarette factory across the river?"

Miss Erwin twisted white-gloved hands in the dark. "Why, no ... mmm, smell that spray." An ocean-breathing tugboat passed, its complicated silhouette blocking the view. "No-oooooo," the whistle blew.

"Just wait till that tug is gone. There, Miss Erwin. Do you see the Silvertongue factory? Just before the Williamsburg Bridge."

"Is it the one with the new radio--the radio-thing on top?"

"Radiocompressor. Yes."

"They used to put _names_ on those factories. All lit up."

"Well, ladies--ladies," said a gravel voice beyond the entrance lights. "How is life in the Toadstool?"

"Boney!" said Miss Knox.

"The what?" asked Miss Erwin.

"That's what Dr. Brooks called it. Now you tell me what he meant--he wouldn't say. Toadstool."

"Come into the light, Boney--you frighten us," said Miss Erwin.

The man appeared, smiling, and climbed the first stone step. Resting his elbows on the lion and his chin in his hand, he looked down on them sideways.

"Not _another_ new suit," said Miss Knox.

It was an archaic double-breasted suit in good condition. Where the jacket hiked up in back, a wide expanse of extra trouser seat had been folded over and tucked beneath the belt.

"Hundred-fifty-dollar suit," he said.

"With or without the bottle?" asked Miss Knox.

"What bottle?"

"The one that bangs on your ribs when the breeze blows."

"Now listen here, lady...." He came down the step.

"Boney, I'm only kidding. You know that."

"Kidding. _Kidding._ And here I was giving you inside information. _Inside_ information."

"What information?"

Bringing his drawn face so close that they could smell the wine, he gave both women a look of scorn. Then he backed away and leaned his padded shoulder against the lion.

"Boney, she's sorry," said Miss Erwin.

"I am not," said Miss Knox.

* * * * *

He glowered at her and walked away into the dark, his spider legs dissolving sooner than expected. Then he marched back.

"Sorry," he said. "Ha. I won't tell you. I'm going to tell it to the Director himself."

"Forget it, Boney. He'd throw you out again. You'd better just tell us."

His skeleton hand stretched toward the water. "You see that radio presser?"

"You mean the new radiocompressor on the Silvertongue factory?"

"_Radio_compressor. All right. Do you ladies know what it does?"

"Anything," Miss Knox said. "Our patient, Mr. Barger, builds them. He told us all about it the moment he came. In Greek."

"Not--not _all_ about it. _I_ know all about it. I had a big deal going--my Armenian partner and me, we were buying up neckties to sell in the hospital...."

"_What_ do you know? And will you _stop_ blowing in my face?"

He glowered.

"I'm sorry, Boney."

"Radiocompressors can do things--any things--without touching. Like rolling cigarettes or chopping up tobacco. The radio waves are so small they--push things." He pushed the air with his left hand. "Not just go through them." He wiggled the brittle fingers of his right.

"Everyone knows that," said Miss Knox. "What you mean is that the supra-short wave has an intense direct effect on matter. It was in all the papers."

"Oh, is that so? Is _that_ so? Well, you listen to me. _This_ isn't in all the papers."

"All right, go on." Miss Knox struck a cigarette, which blew out. She threw it down and succeeded in lighting another.

"You can fool people, also, with the same radio waves," said Boney.

"You mean hide behind the door with a wave compressor and push chairs around? Like that?"

"Don't be silly. Nothing like _that_. Dr. Brooks told me today, when I was sweeping his _private_ lab in the Toadstool, he told me they make one kind where if you put it on a table, say, no one can see what else is there. You could put--a cat on the table, and anyone would think it was just a table with a radio presser. Until the cat jumped off. Then you could see it."

"Can it jump off?" asked Miss Knox.

"Can it jump off? Did you ever see a cat that couldn't jump? And that's not all--"

"Quite a trick," she said.

"No trick. You could rule the world with that, ladies. Think about it. Rule the world. Got a cigarette? After all, I always get you coffee."

She handed him one.

Miss Erwin stared across the river. "I hope it isn't a new kind of bomb," she said.

Boney pulled out a stick match and struck it on the stone lion. Cupping his hands around the flame, he lit up and walked away.

* * * * *

"But, Dr. Brooks, when you tell Boney things like that," said Miss Knox, "he believes them, and he quotes you like mad. Don't you care about your reputation at all?"

"My dear woman," Dr. Brooks replied, "I've been interested in many things in my years, but getting my portrait in the Mushroom has never been one of them--"

Mr. Barger's legs spasmed suddenly and shot straight out, jerking the covers from his fat-layered neck. But the pink shut eyelids hadn't quivered.

"--and, anyway, Boney is right," Dr. Brooks finished. "Why do you think the Royalties want government control of the whole invention?"

Miss Knox was tucking the covers around his warm, sticky jowls. "But he said you said--"

"I said she said we said." Brooks grabbed her chin between his thumb and forefinger. "Did you know that machine on the Silvertongue roof could get at us inside our own homes?"

She shook her head, swinging his arm from side to side.

"If you know nothing about it, girlie, let me explain." He squeezed her chin tighter. "You saw those two men from the Christian E. Lodge Corporation--Silvertongue, that is--who came this afternoon to see Barger? The ones on motorskates?"

"They shouldn't allow those buzzing things in the hospital. They make more noise than a whirlybird." She backed away, tugging at the white-coated arm until her chin was released. "I mean I saw them yesterday. They tried to get in the bird. I don't know why _they_ visit him--he can't say a word. Doesn't he have a family?"

"No, but the Silvertongue men love him like a brother. Barger designed their radiocompressor--the one in all the newspapers. Here, you can see it from the window if you--"

"I know, Dr. Brooks."

"Do you know what that machine can really do, girlie?"

"When I was your age--" Miss Knox began.

"You are. I just _look_ young. That machine can cure and shred tobacco with supra-short waves on a polished magnesium bowl, just the way the papers say, but they have cheaper ways to process their tobacco. They really use the machine for guided tours of the factory. Public relations."

"You mean float visitors through the air?"

"No. You'd need the power of ten maritime atomic piles in series just to lift Dr. Gesner to the height of--"

"Very funny!"

"--his own square root. What they can do with that machine is to disguise an object--say the incoming leaf tobacco. They can make it look firm, golden, and so forth. The girls at the sorting tables, wherever the guided tour happens to be, will all look like Norma Norden. They'll be dressed as angels and work in heaven. Then the V.I.P.s can tour the girls' homes and dormitories, and instead of a dirty slum, they'll see--they'll see _mushrooms_, if they like."

"How is it done?"

"Only Barger Electronics really knows," said Dr. Brooks, "and the Christian E. Lodge engineers. It's something to do with compressing the wave length to approximate that of light, so that images are canceled out. This leaves a clear field for subliminal techniques. If there are subvisual images projected on the walls, for instance, that's what the observers will see inside the room."

"Oh, my God!" exclaimed Miss Knox.

"The only other thing I know is that it has to be done with intersecting spheres. The machine has two portable secondary transmitters--or projectors, or whatever they call them--each emitting in all directions to form a wave-sphere. Where the two spheres overlap, you get your possible interference with light."

"Frankly, I just don't understand it."

"Any radio waves go out in all directions to form spheres." His voice had become a mutter. "You know that."

"No, I didn't."

* * * * *

He gave a false sigh. "Well, take an ordinary weak phone transmitter very high up in a whirlybird. That's the simplest case. You know what sound a whirlybird makes, don't you?"

"Of course," said Miss Knox.

"What?" Dr. Brooks challenged, moving at her. "How does it sound?"

"Oh, clatter-clatter chug-chug," she said, moving back.

"No. Listen closely and you'll hear any whirlybird--especially hospital ambulances--go _rackety-rackety-rack groundhog_, _rackety-rack groundhog_!--a reminder to people that they belong on the ground, one may assume. Picture a microphone attached outside the bird and wired to your transmitter. The radio waves go out in all directions through the air. Suppose your air is all of the same density, and so forth--then all the waves peter out at a constant radius and form a perfect sphere going _rackety-rackety-rack groundhog_!

"Now compressed waves travel a certain number of feet--theoretically, the number of foot-pounds of work the power input could perform modified by a constant value called 'e'--and at that point they revert to ordinary radio waves. This forms a sphere of compressed or supra-short waves. Do you understand that?"

"No," said Miss Knox.

"Well, anyway, where two spheres overlap, you get the Barger effect. And they can vary or limit the effect in interesting ways. Just move one or both projectors so that the waves intersect each other in different phases--"

"That's a fascinating way to back me into a corner of the room, Dr. Brooks. Now will you please let me look at my patient?"

Mr. Barger's body convulsed and twitched, and the disordered bedclothes exposed the pink, swollen layers of his throat. Only the face slept. Miss Knox reduced the feed on the water envelope, and with her palm brushed drops of moisture from the burning, out-of-focus pink skin. The drops were sticky and warm. She wiped her hands on a piece of cotton and started to prepare the blood transfusion.

"Before you get out of here," she said to Dr. Brooks, "let me thank you."

"For the information? You'll only forget it."

"No, for the crack about my age."

Slumping his eyebrows, he went to the door and stepped through almost before it could slide open.

"Wait!" she commanded in a stage whisper.

He appeared, the door sliding back harmlessly against his shoulder before it changed direction.

"What's so terrible?" she asked. "You talk as though that radiocompressor on the Silvertongue roof were going to destroy the American home, at the very least."

"They don't just have to transmit within the factory," he said. "Suppose they wanted you arrested. Say they didn't like brunettes. Well, first they get some dame to call police and say she's going to do a strip in front of the Psychiatric Pavilion wall. Then they go across First Avenue and set up a subliminal movie sequence of some stripper in action and focus it on the wall from their car. They set up two portable wave projectors and adjust their phasing to achieve the Barger effect in that one place. Then they wait for you to pass that spot on your way to church. Very little power is required; the actual radiocompression takes place across the river."

Brooks raised his pants from the knees and minced across the room, exposing curly hair above his fallen argylls. His white coat twitched from side to side. "Now here you come. A man watching the street from the broken stool at the Green Gables twists one of his cufflinks, or maybe he just whistles. This starts the projectors and you become invisible, or very blurry, while the subliminal film gives the cops what they want. Then the whole thing shuts off and the cops can see _you_ again. You're hustled off to jail and they keep you there--along with other enemies--by making a similar visual 'fix' on the results in some polling place and putting in their own judge!"

"Oh, they'll probably just use it for advertising."

"Sure," said Brooks. "How would you like it if you were watching television with your roommate, and all of a sudden she turned into a giant pack of Silvertongue cigarettes?"

* * * * *

Water dripped on her palm, leaving a red stain. A ringing, ringing, and the whir of motorskates receded down the corridor. It rang and rang, her hand sticky and warm against her cheek. It rang.

The telephone. Trying to recapture something she had known, she let groping fingers stretch toward the instrument. They descended, clenched, lifted. The ringing stopped.

She forced her eyes open far enough to see her white arm return. Hunching up around her pillow with the receiver, she croaked, "Hello."

"Miss Knox?" A high voice. "Boney--it's Boney--"

"You have a nerve, Boney, to wake me up at this hour."

"This isn't Boney--it's Hilda Erwin. I'm on emergency duty and they've brought in Boney. His throat is cut--"

"_No!_ Is he alive?"

"Yes, yes. But he may never speak again. He lay there in the street for hours and hours. Dr. Gesner's internes are here--"

"Oh, not being able to talk would be worse for him than dying. I'll come! I'll be right there!" Miss Knox dropped the receiver and swung out of bed, feeling in the darkness for her robe. She pulled it on and opened the door, and found her slippers in the faint yellow light from the hallway.

As she ran, knotting the belt of her robe, she looked up and down the ancient residential corridors for a motorbed. She stumbled against a rotten wood molding. She pressed the elevator button and turned, her loose hair swinging heavily, to face the flat eye of a clock. It was five-fifteen.

Overhead, the floor indicator creaked around its dial--seven, six, five, four--and the doors opened. There was a motorbed on the elevator.

She stepped inside and pressed the button for seven, the lowest floor with a bridge to the Mushroom. The doors shut and the car moved upward. Tripping over the torn linoleum, she managed to fall backward onto the bed's driving seat. She swung her legs around and turned on the switch.

As the doors opened, she drove out with a jolt and entered the sparkling newness of a tubular bridge which rose through the night across First Avenue. The Mushroom towered overhead, its spiral corridors glowing. Night traffic vibrated beneath her as she crossed--a crowd of trucks was baying north along the hidden cobblestones, following traffic lights which jumped from red to green, one after another, like an electronic rabbit. The trucks passed out of sight under their own diesel cloud and another pack approached in a higher key....

Then a lurch as towing cables grated and took hold in the curve of the many-windowed corridor. Whining under glass, the motorbed veered off in a rising circle around the stem of the Mushroom. Around and around again, faster, while room numbers flashed red one by one on the silver doors, over the river, over the roof garden of the Administration wing, over the river, over the garden, around and around and out, out--far out over a city of dark crumbling toys and up and up over the rim....

* * * * *

She approached the great transparent dome of the Mushroom looking ahead into the sky, as though enemies in immense distance were triangulating upon her. An echo of voices rolled out. Far across the marble floor, one of the emergency rooms had its lights on. The door opened and a tiny figure in a motorchair sped out and along the wall, followed by a line of running dolls in white. Some of them clustered around the man in the chair, waving their arms. Thinning like a comet's tail, the procession vanished down the south escalator. The door of the room slid shut.

She hurtled across beneath the stars and drove straight at the room, applying brakes sharply with a tightening in her stomach as the door began to open. Her long hair swept forward against her cheeks and shoulders. She jarred to a stop inside and rose, refocusing her senses on the enclosed white space.

The bedside table held a pot of paper geraniums. Something lay beneath the covers like lumber on edge, the angles of knees projecting sideways. Out of the sheets stuck part of a thin white drainpipe neck and a face like a broken roof shingle, over which the weeping Miss Erwin cast her shadow.

Brooks sat hunched over the stool, fingers buried in his hair. His lab coat was twisted awry; a bare knee protruded between two buttons.

"What happened?" asked Miss Knox.

"He's all right," Miss Erwin sobbed at her. "Delinquents--vandals--they cut his throat by the river, right in front of the hospital. The mutape says--he didn't--see their faces."

"Don't worry about him," said a low muttered voice. "He's been conscious. The doctors say he'll speak, in time." Dr. Brooks had raised his head and was trying to cover himself with the lab coat.

"River rats," Miss Knox snapped, peering at Boney's wasted face. "What do you mean, in time?"

"Two or three weeks. An expert job of quick surgery, really."

"No! No!" Miss Erwin broke into a fit of sobbing and blindly rearranged the flowers.

"Do you mean to say?--"

"Some medical students on a horror spree. Damned age of--what did that Washington press secretary say?--'atomic hyper-specialization'! That means young brains growing in channels until they explode through the wall. You remember the physicist who killed his colleagues when the English won the Nobel Prize."

"It can't be," said Miss Knox. She watched the hurt man grimace somewhere along his razor edge of nightmare.

"It's the only likelihood. Well, we can't do anything for him now, and you look a little beat. Come on, I'll buy you coffee from the vending machine on the Administration roof."

Dr. Brooks stood up, lifted Miss Knox gently beneath the arms and sat her on the motorbed, then swung a hairy shin over the driving seat. They rolled through the doorway.

"Who was that big shot in the motorchair?" Miss Knox asked. "Dr. Gesner?"