Brain Wave (14 page)

“They’ll find something.”

“I wonder. The assignment of building a stable world order is herculean, but you and I realize that for the new humanity it’s possible—indeed, only a matter of years. But what then? At best, man may sit back and stagnate in an unchanging smugness. A horribly empty sort of life.”

“Science—”

“Oh, yes, the scientists will have a field day for a while.
But most of the physicists I’ve Calked to lately suspect that the potential range of science is not unlimited. They think the variety of discoverable natural laws and phenomena must be finite, all to be summed up in one unified theory—and that we’re not far from that theory today. It’s not the sort of proposition which can ever be proved with certainty, but it looks probable.

“And in no case can we all be scientists.”

Mandelbaum looked out into darkness.
How quiet the night is
, he thought. Wrenching his mind from the vision of Sarah and the children: “Well, how about the arts? We’ve got to develop a whole new painting, sculpture, music, literature, architecture—and forms that have never been imagined before!”

“If we get the right kind of society.” (Art, throughout history, has had a terrible tendency to decay, or to petrify into sheer imitation of the past. It seems to take some challenge to wake it up again. And again, my friend, we can’t all be artists either.)

“No?” (I wonder if every man won’t be an artist and a scientist and a philosopher and—)

“You’ll still need leaders, and stimulus, and a world symbol.” (That’s the basic emptiness in us today: we haven’t found a symbol. We have no myth, no dream. ‘Man is the measure of all things’—well, when the measure is bigger than everything else, what good is it?)

“We’re still pretty small potatoes.” Mandelbaum gestured at the window and the bluely glimmering sky. (There’s a whole universe out there, waiting for us.)

“I think you have the start of an answer,” said Rossman slowly. (Earth has grown too small, but astronomical space—it may hold the challenge and the dream we need. I don’t know. All I know is that we had better find one.)

There was a thin buzz from the telecom unit beside Mandelbaum. He reached over and flipped the switch. There was a sudden feeling of weariness in him. He ought to be tense, jittering with excitement, but he only felt tired and hollow.

The machine clicked a few signals: “Space station robot reports flight of rockets from Urals. Four are due at New York in about ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes!” Rossman whistled. “They must have an atomic drive.”

“No doubt.” Mandelbaum dialed for Shield Center in the Empire State Building. “Brace your machinery, boys,” he said. “Ten minutes to go.”

“How many?”

“Four. They must figure on our stopping at least three, so they’ll be powerful brutes. Hydrogen-lithium warheads, I imagine.”

“Four, eh? Okay, boss. Wish us luck.”

“Wish
you
luck?” Mandelbaum grinned crookedly.

The city had been told that the project was an experiment in illumination. But when the blueness strengthened to a steady glow, like a roof of light, and the sirens began to hoot, everyone must have guessed the truth. Mandelbaum thought of husbands clutching wives and children to them and wondered what else might be happening.
Prayer? Not likely; if there was to be a religion in the future, it could not be the animism which had sufficed for the blind years. Exaltation in battle? No, that was another discarded myth. Wild panic? Maybe a little of that
.

Rossman had seen at least a good deal of truth
, thought Mandelbaum.
There was nothing for man to do now, in the hour of judgment, except to scream with fear or to stoop over those he loved and try to shelter them with his pitiful flesh. No one could honestly feel that he was dying for something worthy. If he shook his fist at heaven, it was not in anger against evil, it was only a reflex
.

Emptiness—Yes
, he thought, I
suppose we do need new symbols
.

Rossman got up and felt his way through the dusk to a cabinet where he opened a drawer and took out a bottle. “This is some ‘42 burgundy I’ve been saving,” he said. (Will you drink with me?)

“Sure,” said Mandelbaum. He didn’t care for wine, but he had to help his friend. Rossman wasn’t afraid, he was old and full of days, but there was something lost about him. To go out like a gentleman—well, that was a symbol of sorts.

Rossman poured into crystal goblets and handed one to Mandelbaum with grave courtesy. They clinked glasses
and drank. Rossman sat down again, savoring the taste.

“We had burgundy on my wedding day,” he said.

“Ah, well, no need to cry into it,” answered Mandelbaum. “The screen will hold. It’s the same kind of force that holds atomic nuclei together—nothing stronger in the universe.”

“I was toasting animal man,” said Rossman. (You are right, this is his last gasp. But he was in many ways a noble creature.)

“Yeah,” said Mandelbaum. (He invented the most in-genius weapons.)

“Those rockets—” (They do represent something. They are beautiful things, you know, clean and shining, built with utter honesty. It took many patient centuries to reach the point where they could be forged. The fact that they carry death for us is incidental.)

(I don’t agree.) Mandelbaum chuckled, a sad little sound in the great quiet around him.

There was a luminous-dialed clock in the room. Its sweep-second hand went in a long lazy circle, once around, twice around, three times around. The Empire State was a pylon of darkness against the dull blue arc of sky. Mandelbaum and Rossman sat drinking, lost in their own thoughts.

There was a glare like lightning all over heaven, the sky was a sudden incandescent bowl. Mandelbaum covered his dazzled eyes, letting the goblet fall shattering to the floor. He felt the radiance on his skin like sunshine, blinking on and off. The city roared with thunder.

—two, three, four.

Afterward there was another stillness, in which the echoes shuddered and boomed between high walls. A wind sighed down the empty streets, and the great buildings shivered slowly back toward rest.

“Good enough,” said Mandelbaum. He didn’t feel any particular emotion. The screen had worked, the city lived —all right, he could get on with his job. He dialed City Hall. “Hello, there. All okay? Look, we got to get busy, check any panic and—”

Out of the corner of one eye he saw Rossman sitting quietly, his unfinished drink on the arm of the chair.

CORINTH sighed and pushed the work from him. The murmurs of the evening city drifted faintly up to him through a window left open to the October chill. He shivered a little, but fumbled out a cigarette and sat for a while smoking.

Spaceships
, he thought dully.
Out at Brookhaven they’re building the first star ship
.

His own end of the project was the calculation of intranuclear stresses under the action of the drive field, a task of some complexity but not of such overreaching importance that the workers couldn’t go ahead on the actual construction before he finished. He had been out there just today, watching the hull take shape, and his professional self had found a cool sort of glory in its perfected loveliness. Every organ of the ship, engine and armor and doors and ports and controls, was a piece of precision engineering such as Earth had never seen before. It was good to be a part of such work.

Only—

He swore softly, grinding out the cigarette in an overloaded ashtray and rising to his feet. It was going to be one of his bad nights; he needed Helga.

The Institute hummed around him as he went down the familiar halls. They were working on a twenty-four hour schedule now, a thousand liberated minds spreading toward a horizon which had suddenly exploded beyond imagination. He envied the young technicians. They were the strong and purposeful and balanced, the future belonged to them and they knew it. At thirty-three, he felt exhausted with years.

Helga had come back to resume directorship here: on its new basis, it was a full-time job for a normal adult, and
she had the experience and the desire to serve. He thought that she drove herself too hard, and realized with a muted guilt that it was largely his fault. She never left before he did, because sometimes he needed to talk to her. This was going to be one of those times.

He knocked. The crisp voice over the annunciator said, “Come in,” and he did not miss the eagerness in her voice or the sudden lighting in her eyes as he entered.

“Come have dinner with me, won’t you?” he invited.

She arched her brows, and he explained hastily: “Sheila’s with Mrs. Mandelbaum tonight. She—Sarah—she’s good for my wife, she’s got a sort of plain woman sense a man can’t have. I’m at loose ends—”

“Sure.” Helga began arranging her papers and stacking them away. Her office was always neat and impersonal, a machine could have been its occupant. “Know a joint?”

“You know I don’t get out much these days.”

“Well, let’s try Rogers’. A new night club for the new man.” Her smile was a little sour. “At least they have decent food.”

He stepped into the small adjoining bathroom, trying to adjust his untidy clothes and hair. When he came out, Helga was ready. For an instant he looked at her, perceiving every detail with a flashing completeness undreamed of in the lost years. They could not hide from each other and—she with charasteristic honesty, he with a weary and grateful surrender—had quit trying. He needed someone who understood him and was stronger than he, someone to talk to, to draw strength from. He thought that she only gave and he only took, but it was not a relationship he could afford to give up.

She took his arm and they went out into the street. The air was thin and sharp in their lungs, it smelled of autumn and the sea. A few dead leaves swirled across the sidewalk before them, already frost had come.

“Let’s walk,” she said, knowing his preference. “It isn’t far.”

He nodded and they went down the long half-empty ways. The night loomed big above the street lamps, the cliffs of Manhattan were mountainously black around them and only a rare automobile or pedestrian went by. Corinth
thought that the change in New York epitomized what had happened to the world.

“How’s Sheila’s work?” asked Helga. Corinth had obtained a job for his wife at the relief center, in the hope that it would improve her morale. He shrugged, not answering. It was better to lift his face into the wind that streamed thinly between the dark walls. She fell into his silence; when he felt the need for communication, she would be there.

A modest neon glow announced Rogers’ Cafe. They turned in at the door, to find a blue twilight which was cool and luminous, as if the very air held a transmuted light.
Good trick
, thought Corinth,
wonder how they do it?
—and in a moment he had reasoned out the new principle of fluorescence on which it must be based. Maybe an engineer had suddenly decided he would prefer to be a restaurateur.

There were tables spaced somewhat farther apart than had been the custom in earlier times. Corinth noted idly that they were arranged in a spiral which, on the average, minimized the steps of waiters from dining room to kitchen and back. But it was a machine which rolled up to them on soft rubber wheels and extended a slate and stylus for them to write their orders on.

The menu listed few meat dishes—there was still a food shortage—but Helga insisted that the soya supreme was delicious and Corinth ordered it for both of them. There would be an aperitif too, of course.

He touched glasses with her over the white cloth. Her eyes were grave on his, waiting.
“Was hael.”

“Drinc hael,”
she answered. Wistfully: “I’m afraid our descendants will not understand our ancestors at all. The whole magnificent barbarian heritage will be animal mouthings to them, won’t it? When I think of the future I sometimes feel cold.”

“You too,” he murmured, and knew that she let down her reserve only because it made it easier for him to unburden himself.

A small orchestra came out. Corinth recognized three men among them who had been famous musicians before the change. They carried the old instruments, strings and a few woodwinds and one trumpet, but there were some
new ones too. Well, until philharmonic associations came back, if they ever did, no doubt serious artists would be glad of a chance to play in a restaurant—at that, they’d have a more appreciative audience than usual in the past.

His eyes went around among the customers. They were ordinary-looking people, hornyhanded laborers side by side with thin stoop-shouldered clerks and balding professors. The new nakedness had obliterated old distinctions, everybody was starting from scratch. There was an easy informality of dress, open-necked shirts, slacks and jeans, an occasional flamboyant experiment. Physical externals were counting for less every day.

There was no conductor. The musicians seemed to play extemporaneously, weaving their melodies in and out around a subtle, tacit framework. It was a chill sort of music, ice and green northern seas, a complex, compelling rhythm underlying the sigh of strings. Corinth lost himself for a while, trying to analyze it. Now and then a chord would strike some obscure emotional note within him, and his fingers tightened on the wine glass. A few people danced to it, making up their own figures as they went. He supposed that in the old days this would have been called a jam session, but it was too remote and intellectual for that. Another experiment, he thought. All humanity was experimenting, striking out after paths in a suddenly horizonless world.

He turned back to Helga, surprising her eyes as they rested on him. The blood felt hot in his face, and he tried to talk of safe things. But there was too much understanding between them. They had worked and watched together, and now there was a language of their own, every look and gesture meant something, and the meanings flickered back and forth, interlocking and breaking and meeting again, until it was like talking with one’s own self.

“Work?” he asked aloud, and it meant: (How has your task been the last few days?)