That left Johnny Harvey.
Ah, shit, Marcus thought to himself, sure. Johnny Harvey could figure out how to do it if anybody could.
Would
he?
The more Marcus thought about it, the more he thought that Harvey just might. What little Marcus had seen of Nathanael Greene made him think that living there must be pretty lousy, lousy enough so that even dying in a mushroom cloud might be better than spending the rest of your life in a place like that. Or a worse one … . But it wouldn’t be better for Marcus. Marcus didn’t want to die. And the only thing he could think of that might keep him from it, if Muzzi blew his stack terminally and Harvey carried out the bluff, would be for him to kill Harvey first—“Hey, kid!”
Marcus stiffened and saw that Muzzi was glowering at him, holding the phone in his hand. “Wh-what?” he got out.
Muzzi studied him carefully, and the scowl became what Muzzi might have thought an ingratiating grin. “It’th your mom, thweetie. Wantth to talk to you.”
The question of how it had all gone to hell no longer interested Johnny Harvey, the question of what, if anything, there was left to hope for was taking up all his attention. He sat before the winking signal lights and dials of the power controls, wolfing down his third hamburger and carton of cold coffee, wondering what Marcus had been wondering. Would he do it? Was there a point in blowing up a city out of rage and revenge? Or was there a point in not doing it, if that meant going back to Nathanael Greene?—or some worse place. He reached for another hamburger, and then pushed the cardboard tray away in disgust. Trust Muzzi to demand food that a decent palate couldn’t stand! But those two words, “trust” and “Muzzi,” didn’t belong in the same sentence.
Trusting Muzzi had got him this far. It wasn’t far enough. There was Muzzi, stroking the nigger kid’s arm as the boy talked to his mother, on the ragged edge of hysteria; Muzzi with his jaw broken and one hand just about ruined, and still filled with enough rage and enough lust for a dozen ordinary human beings. You could forget about Feigerman and the engineers, they were just about out of it; there was Muzzi and that asshole La Croy, and the boy and himself, and how were they going to get out of here? Assume the governor gave in. Assume there really was a jet waiting for them at Kennedy. The first thing they had to do was get out of this place and into a car—not here in this street, where there could be a thousand boobytraps that would wreck any plan, but out in the open, say on the other side of the railroad tracks, where there would be a clear shot down the avenue toward the airport. It was almost like one of those cannibals and missionaries puzzles of his boyhood. Johnny Harvey had been really good at those puzzles. Was there a way to solve this one? Let the first missionary take the first cannibal across the river in the boat—only this time it was across the railroad tracks—then come back by himself to where the other missionaries and cannibals were waiting—
Only this time he was one of the cannibals, and the game was for keeps.
The boy was still on the phone, weeping now, and Muzzi had evidently got some kind of crazed idea in his head, because he had moved over to the corner where Feigerman was lying. Callously he wrenched the remains of the harness off Feigerman’s unprotesting
body. The old man wasn’t dead, but he made no sound as Muzzi began straightening out the bent metal and twisted crown. Then he got up and walked toward Johnny Harvey.
Who got up and moved cautiously away; you never knew what Muzzi was going to do.
And then he saw that Muzzi, glowering over the power-station controls, was reaching his hand out toward them; and then Johnny Harvey was really scared.
When Nillie got off the phone she just sat. She didn’t weep. Nillie de Harcourt had had much practice restraining tears in her life. They were a luxury she couldn’t afford, not now, not while Marcus was in that place with those men—with that one particular man, for she had known Muzzi by reputation and gossip and by personal pain, and she knew what particular perils her son was in. So she sat dry-eyed and alert, and watched and waited. When she heard Johnny Harvey on the phone, warning that Muzzi was getting ready to explode, demanding better food than the crap they’d been given, she looked thoughtful for a moment. But she didn’t say anything, even when the mayor and Mr. Gambiage retreated to another room for a while. Whatever they were cooking up, it satisfied neither of them. When they came out the mayor was scowling and Mr. Gambiage was shaking his head. “Do not underestimate Moots,” he warned. “He’s an animal, but he knows a trap when he sees one.”
“Shut up,” said the mayor, for once careless of a major campaign contributor. The mayor was looking truly scared. He listened irritably to some distant sound, then turned to Gambiage. “They’re still shouting out there. I thought you said you’d call off the demonstration.”
“It is called off,” said Gambiage heavily. “It takes time. It is easier to start things than to stop them.” And Nillie was listening alertly, one hand in the hand of her husband. Only when two policemen came in with a room-service rolling hotel tray of food did she let go and move forward.
“It’s all ready,” one of them said, and the mayor nodded, and Nillie de Harcourt put her hand on the cart.
“I’m taking it over there,” she said.
The mayor looked actually startled—maybe even frightened, for reasons Nillie did not try to guess. “No chance, Mrs. de Harcourt. You don’t know what kind of men they are.”
“I do know,” Nillie said steadily. “Who better? And I’m taking this food over so I can be with my son.”
The mayor opened his mouth angrily, but Mr. Gambiage put a hand on his shoulder. “Why not?” he said softly.
“Why not? Don’t be an idiot, Gambiage—” And then the mayor had second thoughts. He paused, irresolute, then shrugged. “If you insist in front of witnesses,” he said, “I do not feel I have the right to stop you.”
Nillie was moving toward the door with the cart before he could change his mind. A train flashed underneath the bridge, but she didn’t even look at it. She was absolutely certain that something was going on that she didn’t understand, something very wrong—something that would make the mayor of the city and the city’s boss of all boss criminals whisper together in front of witnesses; but what it was she did not know, and did not consider that it mattered. She went steadily across the tracks and did not falter even when she saw crazy La Croy shouting out the window at her, with his gun pointed
at her head. She didn’t speak, and she didn’t stop. She pushed right in through the door, kicking the powerplant engineers out of the way.
There they were, crazy Muzzi and crazy La Croy, both swearing at her, and sane but treacherous Johnny Harvey with his hand on a gun, moving uncertainly toward the food; and there was old Mr. Feigerman looking like death days past—
And there was Marcus, looking scared but almost unharmed. “Honey, honey!” she cried, and abandoned the food and ran to take him in her arms.
“Leave him alone, bitch!” shouted La Croy, and Muzzi thundered behind him:
“Fuckin handth up, you! Who knowth what you’ve got there—”
She turned to face them calmly. “I’ve got nothing but me,” she said; and waited for them to do whatever they were going to do.
But what they did was nothing. Johnny Harvey, not very interested in her or his companions, was moving on the cart of food, the big dish with the silver dome; he lifted the dome—
Bright bursts of light flared from under it, thunder roared, and something picked Nillie de Harcourt up and threw her against the wall.
A shard of metal had caught La Croy in the back of the head; he probably had never felt it. What there was left of Johnny Harvey was almost nothing at all. Muzzi struggled to his feet, the terrible pain in his jaw worse than ever, and stared furiously around the battered room. He could hardly see. It had not just been a bomb—they wouldn’t have risked a bomb big enough to do the job, in that place; there was something like tear gas in with it, and Muzzi was choking and gasping. But, blurrily, he could see young Marcus trying to help his half-conscious mother out the door, and he bawled, “Thtop or I blow your fuckin headth off!” And the kid turned at him, and his face was a hundred years older than his age, and for a moment even Muzzi felt an unaccustomed tingle of fright. If that kid had had a gun—
But he didn’t. “Move your fuckin atheth back in here!” roared Muzzi and slowly, hopelessly, they came back into the choking air.
But not for long.
Two minutes later they were going out again, but there had been a change. Nillie de Harcourt stumbled ahead, barely conscious. Marcus Garvey de Harcourt pushed the wheelchair, and the occupant of the wheelchair, crown on his head, muffled in a turned-up jacket … was Muzzi.
And Marcus was the most frightened he had ever been in his life, because he could not see a way to live to the other side of the bridge. He could see the governor coming toward them, with a flanking line of police, all their guns drawn; and he knew what was in Muzzi’s mind. The man had gone ape. If he couldn’t get away and couldn’t blow up the city, the next best thing was to kill the governor.
Halfway across the bridge he made his move; but Marcus also made his.
It wasn’t that he cared about the governor, but between the governor and Muzzi’s gun was someone he cared about a lot. He took a deep breath, aimed the wheelchair toward a place where the rail was down and only wooden sawhorses were between the sidewalk and the maglev strips below … and shoved.
Muzzi was quick, but not quick enough. He was not quite out of the wheelchair when it passed the point of no return.
Marcus ran to the rail and stared down, and there was Muzzi in his bandoliers and steel-ribbed jacket, plummeting toward the maglev strips, beginning to move even before he hit, bouncing up, hitting again, and all the time moving with gathering speed until he flashed out of sight, no longer alive, no longer a threat to anyone.
Genius is a subject that comes up in various science fiction tales. Since Olaf Stapledon’s
Odd John
and probably before, writers have been fascinated by the potential of human intelligence, its limits, and the possibility that it may have aspects we have not yet discovered.
Unfortunately, too many stories about really brilliant people become dull. Thankfully, “To See Another Mountain,” first published in 1958, isn’t one of those. Frederik Pohl is far too keen not to mention the oft-noticed proximity of genius and madness. Where that boundary lies and the exact implications of the two are what make this story cook.
And cook it does!
Trucks were coming up the side of the mountain again. The electric motors were quiet enough, but these were heavy-duty trucks and the reduction gears could be heard a mile off. A mile by air; that was eighteen miles by the blacktop road that snaked up the side of the mountain, all hairpin curves with banks that fell away to sheer cliffs.
The old man didn’t mind the noise. The trucks woke him up when he was dozing, as he so often was these days.
“You didn’t drink your orange juice, doctor.”
The old man wheeled himself around in his chair. He liked the nurse. There were three who took care of him, on shifts, but Maureen Wrather was his personal favorite. She always seemed to be around when he needed her. He protested: “I drank most of it.” The nurse waited. “All right.” He drank it, noting that the flavor had changed again. What was it this time? Stimulants, tranquilizers, sedatives, euphoriacs. They played him up and down like a yo-yo. “Do I get coffee this morning, Maureen?”
“Cocoa.” She put the mug and a plate with two arrowroot cookies down on the table, avoiding the central space where he laid out his endless hands of solitaire; that was one of the things the old man liked about her. “I have to get you dressed in half an hour,” she announced, “because you’ve got company coming.”
“Company? Who would be coming to see me?” But he could see from the look in her light, cheerful eyes, even before she spoke, that it was a surprise. Well, thought the old man with dutiful pleasure, that was progress, only a few weeks ago they wouldn’t have permitted him any surprises at all. Weeks? He frowned. Maybe months. All the days were like all the other days. He could count one, yesterday; two, the day before; three, last week—he could count a few simple intervals with confidence, but the ancient era of a month ago was a wash of gray confusion. He sighed. That was the price you paid for
being crazy, he thought with amusement. They made it that way on purpose, to help him “get well.” But it had all been gray and bland enough anyhow. Back
very
far ago there had been a time of terror, but then it was bland for a long, long time.
“Drink your cocoa, young fellow,” the nurse winked, cheerfully flirting. “Do you want any music?”
That was a good game. “I want a lot of music,” he said immediately. “Stravinsky—that
Sac
thing, I think. And Alban Berg. And—I know. Do you have that old one,
The Three Itta Fishies?
” He had been very pleased with the completeness of the tape library in the house on the hill, until he found out that there was something in that orange juice too. Every request of his was carefully noted and analyzed. Like the tiny microphones taped to throat and heart at night, his tastes in music were data in building up a picture of his condition. Well, that took some of the joy out of it, so the old man had added some other joy of his own.
The nurse turned solemnly to the tape player. There was a pause, a faint marking
beep
and then the quick running opening bars of the wonderful Mendelssohn concerto, which he had always loved. He looked at the nurse. “You shouldn’t tease us, doctor,” she said lightly as she left.
Dr. Adam Sidorenko had changed the world. His Hypothesis of Congruent Values, later expanded to his Theory of General Congruences, was the basis for a technology fully as complex and even more important than the nucleonics that had come from Einstein’s Energy-mass equation. This morning the brain that had enunciated the principle of congruence was occupied in a harder problem: What were the noises from the courtyard?
He was going to have his picture taken, he guessed, taking his evidence from the white soft shirt the nurse had laid out for him, the gray jacket and, above all, from the tie. He almost never wore a tie. (The nurse seldom gave him one. He didn’t like to speculate about the reasons for this.) While he was dressing, the trucks ground into the courtyard and stopped, and men’s voices came clearly.
“I don’t know who they are,” he said aloud, abandoning the attempt to figure it out.
“They’re the television crew,” said the nurse from the next mom. “Hush. Don’t spoil your surprise.”
He dressed quickly then, with excitement; why, it was a
big
surprise. There had never been a television crew on the mountain before. When he came out of the dressing room the nurse frowned and reached for his tie. “Sloppy! Why can’t you large-domes learn how to do a simple knot?” She was a very sweet girl, the old man thought, lifting his chin to help. She could have been his daughter—even his granddaughter. She was hardly twenty-five; yes, that would have been about right. His granddaughter would have been about that now—
The old man frowned and turned his head away. That was very wrong. He didn’t have a grandchild. He had had one son, no more, and the boy had died, so they had told the old man, in the implosion of the Haaroldsen Free Trawl in the Mindanao Deep. The boy had been nineteen years old, and certainly without children; and there had been something about his death, something that the old man didn’t like to remember. He squinted. Worse than that, he thought, something he
couldn’t
remember anymore.
The nurse said: “Doctor, this is for you. It isn’t much, but happy birthday.”
She took a small pink-ribboned box out of the pocket of her uniform and handed it
to him. He was touched. He saw his fingers trembling as he unwrapped the little package. That distracted him for a moment but then he dismissed it. It was honest emotion, that was all—well, and age too, of course. He was ninety-five. But it wasn’t the worrying intention tremor that had disfigured the few episodes he could remember clearly, in his first days here on the Hill. It was only gratitude and sentiment.
And that was what the box held for him, sentiment. “Thank you, Maureen. You’re good to an old man.” His eyes stung. It was only a little plastic picture-globe, with Maureen’s young face captured smiling inside it, but it was for him.
She patted his shoulder and said firmly: “You’re a good man. And a beautiful one, too, so come on and let’s show you off to your company.”
She helped him into the wheelchair. It had its motors, but he liked to have her push him and she humored him. They went out the door, down the long sunlit corridors that divided the guest rooms in the front of the building from the broad high terrace behind. Sam Krabbe, Ernest Atkinson and a couple of the others from the Group came to the doors of their rooms to nod, and to wish the old man a happy birthday. Sidorenko nodded back, tired and pleased. He listened critically to the thumping of his heart—excitement was a risk, he knew—and then grinned. He was getting as bad as the doctors.
Maureen wheeled the old man onto the little open elevator platform. They dropped, quickly and smoothly on magnetic cushions, to the lower floor. The old man leaned far over the side of his chair, studying what he could see of the elevator, because he had a direct and personal interest in it. Somebody had told him that the application of magnetic fields to nonferrous substances was a trick that had been learned from his General Congruences. Well, there was this much to it: Congruence showed that all fields were related and interchangeable, and there was, of course, no reason why what was possible should not be made what is
so
. But the old man laughed silently inside himself. He was thinking of Albert Einstein confronted with a photo of
Enola Gay
. Or himself trying to build the communications equipment that Congruence had made possible.
The nurse wheeled him out into the garden.
And there before him was the explanation of the morning’s trucks.
A whole mobile television unit had trundled up those terrible roads. And a fleet of cars and, yes, that other noise was explained too, there was a helicopter perched on the tennis court, its vanes twisting like blown leaves in the breeze that came up the mountain. The helicopter had a definite meaning, the old man knew. Someone very important must have come up in it. The air space over the institute was closed off, by government order.
And reasoning the thing through, there was a logical conclusion; government orders can be set aside only by government executives, and—yes. There was the answer.
“Are you sure you’re warm enough?” the nurse whispered. But Sidorenko hardly heard. He recognized the stocky blue-eyed man who stood chatting with one of the television crew. Sidorenko’s contacts with the world around him were censored and small, but everyone would recognize
that
man. His name was Shawn O’Connor; he was the president of the United States.
The president was shaking his hand.
“Dear man,” said President O’Connor warmly, “I can’t tell you how great a pleasure this is for me. Oh, no. You wouldn’t remember me. But I sat in on two of your Roose
lectures. Ninety-eight, it must have been. And after the second I went up and got your autograph.”
The old man shook hands and let go. 1998? Good lord, that was close to fifty years ago. True, he thought, cudgeling his memory, not very many persons had ever asked for the autograph of a mathematical physicist, but that was an endless time past. He had no recollection whatever of the event. Still, he remembered the lectures well enough. “Oh, of course,” he said. “In Leeds Hall. Well, Mr. President, I’m not certain but—”
“Dear man,” the president said cheerfully, “don’t pretend. Whatever later honors I have attained, as an engineering sophomore I was an utterly forgettable boy. You must have met a thousand like me. But,” he said, standing straighter, “you, Dr. Sidorenko, are another matter entirely. Oh, yes. You are probably the greatest man our country has produced in this century, and it is only the smallest measure of the esteem in which we hold you that I have come here today. However,” he added briskly, “we don’t want to spoil things for the cameramen, who will undoubtedly want to get all this on tape. So come over here, like a good fellow.”
The old man blinked and allowed the cameramen to bully the president and himself into the best camera angles. One of them was whistling through his teeth, one was flirting with the nurse, but they were very efficient. The old man was trembling. All right, I’m ninety-five, I’m entitled to a little senility, he thought; but was it that? Something was worrying him, nagging at his mind.
“Go ahead, Mr. President,” called the director at last, and Shawn O’Connor took from the hand of one of his alert, well-tailored men a blue and silver ribbon.
The camera purred faintly, adjusting itself to light and distance, and the president began to speak. “Dr. Sidorenko, today’s investiture is one of the most joyous occasions that has been my fortune—” Talk, talk, thought the old man, trying to listen, to identify the tune the cameraman had been whistling and to track down the thing that was bothering him all at once. He caught the president’s merry blue eyes, now shadowed slightly as they looked at him, and realized he was trembling visibly.
Well, he couldn’t
help
it, he thought resentfully. The body was shaking; the conscious mind had no control over it. He was ashamed and embarrassed, but even shame was a luxury he could only doubtfully afford. Something worse was very close and threatening to drown out mere shame, a touch of the crawling fear he had hoped never to feel again and had prayed not even to remember. He assumed a stiff smile.
“—of America’s great men, who have received the honors due them. For this reason the Congress, by unanimous resolution of both Houses, has authorized me—”
The old man, chilled and shaking, remembered the name of the tune at last.
The bear went over the mountain,
The bear went over the mountain.
The bear went over the mountain—
And what do you think he saw
?
It worried him, though he could not say why.
“—not only your scientific achievements which are honored, Dr. Sidorenko, great though these are. The truths you have discovered have brought us close to the very heart
of the universe. The great inventions of our day rest in large part on the brilliant insight you have given our scientific workers. But more than that—”
Oh, stop, whispered the old man silently to himself, and he could feel his body vibrating uncontrollably. The president faltered, smiled, shrugged and began again: “More than that, your humanitarian love for all mankind is a priceless—”
Stop, whispered the old man again, and realized with horror that he was not whispering at all. He was screaming.
“Stop!”
he bawled, and found himself trying with withered muscles to stand erect on his useless feet.
“Stop!”
The cameras deserted the president and swung in to stare, with three great glassy eyes, at the old man; and for old Sidorenko terror struck in and fastened on him. Something erupted. Something exploding and bursting, like a crash of autombiles in flame; someone shouted near him with a voice that made him cringe. He saw the nurse run in with a hypodermic, and he felt its bite.