A Soft Barren Aftershock Read online

  “What did he mean by ‘ens’?” Eiselt asked.

  Hearn shrugged. “That puzzled us for a while until we remembered that his chief assistant’s name was Endicott. He must have wanted someone to tell Endicott something but never finished the sentence.”

  “Endicott? Where is Endicott?”

  “Dead, too.”

  Eiselt rose wordlessly and started for the door.

  “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this soon, Doctor,” he heard Hearn say behind him. Stimulant supplies are diminishing. The Department of Production is so understaffed that it hasn’t been able to issue the latest production quota and so factories and mills all over the continent have had to shut down. We’ve had food riots in some areas because the Department of Distribution has fouled up its scheduling. There’s even talk of a march on Morgan City to demand more competence and efficiency in the handling of public affairs!”

  “I’m doing the best I can!” Eiselt gritted.

  “I know you are, and you’re doing it almost single-handedly. It’s just that I dread the thought of having to call in the IMC. But I fear it must come to that if we don’t get a breakthrough soon.”

  “Never! If we can’t lick this thing. They certainly can’t do any better”’ he declared, approaching Hearn’s desk.

  “Come now, Doctor,” Hearn replied. “I know you’re a dedicated Restructurist, as are we all, but let’s be realistic. The IMC has the brains, talents and resources of a thousand worlds at its disposal. You can’t hope to compare our facilities with theirs.”

  Eiselt slammed his fist on the desk top. “We’ll solve this and we’ll do it without the help of the IMC!”

  “I hope you’re right,” Hearn said softly as he watched Eiselt storm from the office. “And I hope it’s soon.”

  Eiselt managed to cool his temper by the time he made his daily call to Sally. As her face came into focus on the viewscreen, he noticed that she looked distraught.

  “Something wrong, honey?” he asked.

  “Oh, Decker!” she cried. “They’ve gone!”

  “Who?”

  “Almost everyone! Students, faculty, administrators, fishermen, shopkeepers, everyone! They chartered groundcars and flitters and started out for Morgan City this morning!”

  Eiselt remembered the march Hearn had mentioned. “What about Doctor Bain?”

  “Oh, he’s still here. His wife wants me to stay with them until you get back. Maybe I’d better take her up on it.”

  The exodus from town had made her somewhat anxious and Eiselt wished he could be with her.

  “Good idea,” he said. Bain would look after her. After all, she was his patient and in her eighth month and if her husband couldn’t be there, someone should keep an eye on her. “Get over there as soon as possible and tell them I’ll be eternally grateful!”

  She ran a hand nervously through her brown hair. “Okay. Any luck so far?”

  “No. Every time I think I’m onto something, I wind up in a dead end.”

  The frustration was evident in her husband’s voice and Sally figured that the best thing she could do for him was allow him to get back to his work.

  “I’d better get packed now,” she told him. “Call me tomorrow.”

  “I will,” he promised and broke the connection.

  Depression was unusual for Decker Eiselt. In the past his nervous energy had always carried him through the troughs as well as over the peaks. But he felt drained now. He took the elevator down to street level and dropped into a chair by the window. That was when he spotted the dog.

  It was the dog’s gait that held his attention; the uneven, limping stride reminded him of another dog . . . years ago . . . at the university.

  Suddenly he was on his feet and racing for the elevator. He shot to the upper levels and burst into Caelen’s office just as the man was about to take another stimulant capsule.

  “Don’t take that! I’ve got one more test to make and I want you to try and sleep while I’m doing it.”

  Caelen hesitated. “I’m afraid, Decker. I’m afraid I may not wake up one of these times.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he assured him. “I want to monitor your cortex while you sleep.”

  “Are you on to something, Decker?”

  Eiselt pulled him to his feet. “I’ll explain as I wire you up. Let’s just say that I hope I’m wrong.”

  Supine on a table, a very groggy Dr. Caelen tried valiantly to focus his eyes on the oscilloscope screen and concentrate on what his younger colleague was saying.

  “See that?” Eiselt remarked, pointing to a series of spikes. “There’s an unusually high amount of cortical activity synchronized with respiration. Put that together with the symptoms of this epidemic, the nature of Sebitow’s research and his last words and the result is pretty frightening. You see, I fear Sebitow’s last words were a warning.”

  “A warning against what?”

  “Telencephalization!”

  There was no sign of recognition in Caelen’s eyes.

  “It’s a neurophysiologist’s term,” Eiselt explained. “If a lame dog out on the street hadn’t reminded me of it, the concept never would have occurred to me.”

  “Forgive me, Decker, but I’m not following you.”

  Eiselt paused. “Maybe this will help you remember: the most common and effective means of illustrating telencephalization is to take an experimental animal and sever the spinal cord at mid-thorax, or at the neck. If that happened to a man, he’d lose the use of his legs in the first instance and also the use of his arms in the latter. But an animal with a severed spinal cord—a dog or possum, for instance—can still walk! His gait is often irregular but the point is he can still get around while a man is rendered helpless. Why? Because man has telencephalized his walking ability! As part of his evolution, the higher centers of man’s nervous system have taken over many motor functions formerly performed by the lower, local centers.

  “I have a theory that Sebitow might have developed a way to cause telencephalization, possibly for use as a rehabilitation technique . . . to let higher centers take over where damaged local centers are no longer effective. But I fear the city got a blast of the radiation he was using to induce this takeover and the symptoms we’ve seen led me to the conclusion that somehow the respiratory center has been telencephalized. The encephalogram seems to confirm this.”

  “But you said nothing was wrong with the respiratory center,” Caelen rasped in a weak whisper.

  “There’s no pathology, but it seems that the voluntary areas of the forebrain are in command and are overriding the local peripheral sensors. Thus the diffuse respiratory malaise and broken breathing rhythm when you exercised. The voluntary areas of the cortex were starting to take over. They are nowhere near as efficient nor a sensitive as the local centers such as the pressoreceptors in the lungs and the chemoreceptors in the aorta and carotid arteries which work directly through the respiratory center without going near the cortex. But because of telencephalization, the respiratory center is no longer responsive to the local centers. And there lies the problem.

  “It boils down to this: You and all the other victims are breathing on the border of consciousness! This means you stop breathing when unconscious! Without oxygen the acidity of your blood goes up and the local chemoreceptors start screaming. But the respiratory center no longer responds and so impulses are finally relayed to the cortex; the cortex is roused and you wake up gasping for air. That’s the theory. I want to monitor the voluntary areas to confirm or deny it; if activity there falls off as respiration falls off, then we’ll know I’m right.”

  “What’ll we do if you’re right?” Caelen asked.

  Rather than tell him that he didn’t have the faintest idea, Eiselt pulled a blanket over him. “Try to sleep.” The exhausted administrator closed his eyes. Eiselt watched him a minute, then went over to the drug cabinet and filled a syringe with a stimulant. Just in case.

  As he sat and watched the o
scilloscope, a dull roar filtered up from the street. Going to the window, he saw a shouting, gesticulating crowd marching below. They were frightened, and they were angry, and they wanted to know what was wrong. Kamedon had been running so smoothly . . . now, chaos. Some areas were receiving no food while others received more than they could use; some factories were shut down while others received double quotas; and no one could be sure when he would next be paid. What was happening? The famous efficiency of Kamedon was breaking down and the people wanted to know why.

  Someone broke a window. Somebody else followed suit. Fascinated, Eiselt watched the march turn into a mob scene in a matter of minutes.

  He glanced over at Dr. Caelen and realized with a start that the man had stopped breathing. He cursed as he noted the reduced cortical activity on the ‘scope. Telencephalization of the respiratory center—no doubt about it now.

  He put a hand on Caelen’s shoulder and shook him. No response. Looking closer, he noticed a blue tinge to the man’s lips. With frantic haste he found a vein and injected the stimulant, then hooked up a respirator.

  Slowly, as normal breathing returned, Dr. Caelen’s eyelids opened to reveal two dull orbs. Cortical activity had increased on the oscilloscope.

  Decker Eiselt’s shoulders slumped with relief—and defeat. He was beaten. Telencephalization was an evolutionary process—although in this case the evolution was suicidal—and he had no way of combating it, no way of returning command to the local centers. The only hope for Dr. Caelen—and Kamedon—was the IMC. And Eiselt knew he would have to be the one to call them in.

  They would be gracious rescuers, of course, and would do their work skillfully and competently. The IMC would find a solution, rectify the situation and then leave, no doubt refusing to accept payment, explaining that they were only too glad to have such an opportunity to expand the perimeters of neurophysiology.

  But it would soon be known throughout the settled galaxy that Kamedon, the pride of the Restructurist movement, had found it necessary to call in the IMC. And pro-Federation propagandists were sure to waste no time in drawing an ironic comparison between Restructurist philosophy and the syndrome which had afflicted Morgan City.

  He could see it now: “Centralists suffering from over-centralization!”

  To put it mildly, the near future was going to be a most difficult period.

  Outside, the roar of the mob redoubled.

  THE CLEANING MACHINE

  Dr. Edward Parker reached across his desk and flipped the power switch on his tape recorder to the “on” position.

  “Listen if you like, Burke,” he said. “But remember: She has classic paranoid symptoms; I wouldn’t put much faith in anything she says.”

  Detective Ronald Burke, an old acquaintance on the city police force, sat across from the doctor.

  “She’s all we’ve got,” he replied with ill-concealed exasperation. “Over a hundred people disappear from an apartment house and the only person who might be able to tell us anything is a nut.”

  Parker glanced at the recorder and noticed the glowing warm-up light. He pressed the button that started the tape.

  “Listen.”

  . . . and I guess I’m the one who’s responsible for it but it was really the people who lived there in my apartment who drove me to it—they were jealous of me.

  The children were the worst. Every day as I’d walk to the store they’d spit at me behind my back and call me names. They even recruited other little brats from all over town and would wait for me on corners and doorsteps. They called me terrible names and said that I carried awful diseases. Their parents put them up to it, I know it! All those people in my apartment building laughed at me. They thought they could hide it but I heard it. They hated me because they were jealous of my poetry. They knew I was famous and they couldn’t stand it.

  Why, just the other night almost I caught three of them rummaging through my desk. They thought I was asleep and so they sneaked in and tried to steal some of my latest works, figuring they could palm them off as their own. But I was awake. I could hear them laughing at me as they searched. I grabbed the butcher knife that I always keep under my pillow and ran out into the study. I must have made some noise when I got out of bed because they ran out into the hall and closed the door just before I got there. I heard one of them on the other side say, “Boy, you sure can’t fool that old lady!”

  They were fiends, all of them! But the very worst was that John Hendricks fellow next door who was trying to kill me with an ultra-frequency sonicator. He used to turn it on me and try to boil my brains while I was writing. But I was too smart for him. I kept an ice pack on my head at all hours of the day. But even that didn’t keep me from getting those awful headaches that plague me constantly. He was to blame.

  But the thing I want to tell you about is the machine in the cellar. I found it when I went downstairs to the boiler room to see who was calling me filthy names through the ventilator system. I met the janitor on my way down and told him about it. He just laughed and said that there hadn’t been anyone down in the boiler room for two years, not since we started getting our heat piped in from the building next door. But I knew someone was down there—hadn’t I heard those voices through the vent? I simply turned and went my way.

  Everything in the cellar was covered with at least half an inch of dust—everything, that is, except the machine. I didn’t know it was a machine at that time because it hadn’t done anything yet. It didn’t have any lights or dials and it didn’t make any noise. Just a metal box with sides that ran at all sorts of odd angles, some of which didn’t seem to meet properly.

  It just sat there being clean.

  I also noticed that the floor around it was immaculately clean for about five foot in all directions. Everywhere else was filth. It looked so strange, being clean. I ran and got George, the janitor.

  He was angry at having to go downstairs but I kept pestering him until he did. He was mighty surprised.

  “What is that thing?” he said, walking toward the machine.

  Then he was gone! One moment he had been there, and then he was gone. No blinding flash or puff of smoke . . . just gone! And it happened just as he crossed into that circle of clean floor around the machine.

  I immediately knew who was responsible: John Hendricks! So I went right upstairs and brought him down. I didn’t bother to tell him what the machine had done to George since I was sure he knew all about it. But he surprised me by walking right into the circle and disappearing, just like George.

  Well, at least I wouldn’t be bothered by that ultra-frequency sonicator of his anymore. It was a good thing I had been too careful to go anywhere near that thing.

  I began to get an idea about that machine—it was a cleaning machine! That’s why the floor around it was so clean. Any dust or anything that came within the circle was either stored away somewhere or destroyed.

  A thought struck me: Why not “clean out” all of my jealous neighbors this way? It was a wonderful idea!

  I started with the children.

  I went outside and, as usual, they started in with their name-calling. (They always made sure to do it very softly but I could read their lips.) About twenty of them were playing in the street. I called them together and told them I was forming a club in the cellar and they all followed me down in a group. I pointed to the machine and told them that there was a gallon of chocolate ice cream behind it and that the first one to reach it could have it all. Their greedy little faces lighted up and they scrambled away in a mob.

  Three seconds later I was alone in the cellar.

  I then went around to all the other apartments in the building and told all those hateful people that their sweet little darlings were playing in the old boiler room and that I thought it was dangerous. I waited for one to go downstairs before I went to the next door. Then I met the husbands as they came home from work and told them the same thing. And if anyone came looking for someone, I sent him down to the cellar. I
t was all so simple: In searching the cellar they had to cross into the circle sooner or later.

  That night I was alone in the building. It was wonderful—no laughing, no name-calling, and no one sneaking into my study. Wonderful!

  A policeman came the next day. He knocked on my door and looked very surprised when I opened it. He said he was investigating a number of missing-persons reports. I told him that everyone was down in the cellar. He gave me a strange look but went to check. I followed him.

  The machine was gone! Nothing was left but the circle of clean floor. I told the officer all about it, about what horrible people they were and how they deserved to disappear. He just smiled and brought me down to the station where I had to tell my story again. Then they sent me here to see you.

  They’re still looking for my neighbors, aren’t they? Won’t listen when I tell them that they’ll never find them. They don’t believe there ever was a machine. But they can’t find my neighbors, can they? Well, it serves them right! I told them I’m the one responsible for “cleaning out” my apartment building but they don’t believe me. Serves them all right!

  “See what I mean?” said Dr. Parker with the slightest trace of a smile as he turned the recorder off. “She’s no help at all.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Burke sighed. “As loony as they come. But how can you explain that circle of clean floor in the boiler room with all those footprints around it?”

  “Well, I can’t be sure, but the ‘infernal machine’ is not uncommon in the paranoid’s delusional system. You found no trace of this ‘ultra-frequency sonicator’ in the Hendricks apartment, I trust?”

  Burke shook his head. “No. From what we can gather, Hendricks knew nothing about electronics. He was a short-order cook in a greasy spoon downtown.”

  “I figured as much. She probably found everybody gone and went looking for them. She went down to the boiler room as a last resort and, finding it deserted, concluded that everybody had been ‘cleaned out’ of the building. She was glad but wanted to give herself the credit. She saw the circle of clean floor—probably left there by a round table top that had been recently moved—and started fabricating. By now she believes every word of her fantastic story. We’ll never really know what happened until we find those missing tenants.”