The Celestial Blueprint and Others Stories Page 10

  But the queerest thing about him was his thick spectacles, so heavily tinted with rose that Jack could not see the eyes behind them. The afternoon light seemed to bounce off the lenses in such a manner that no matter what angle you looked at them, you could not pierce them. And they curved to hide the sides of his eyes completely.

  Mister had explained that he was an albino, and he needed the glasses to dim the glare on his eyes. Jack stopped being Uncas for a minute to listen. He had never seen an albino before, and, indeed, he did not know what one was.

  “I don’t mind the youngster,” said Mister. “Let him play here if he wants to. He’s developing his imagination, and he may be finding more stimuli in this front room than he could in all of outdoors. We should never cripple the fine gift of imagination in the young. Imagination, fancy, fantasy—or whatever you call it—is the essence and mainspring of those scientists, musicians, painters, and poets who amount to something in later life. They are adults who have remained youths.”

  Mister addressed Jack, “You’re the Last of the Mohicans, and you’re about to sneak up on the French captain and tomahawk him, aren’t you?”

  Jack blinked. He nodded his head. The opaque rose lenses set in Mister’s face seemed to open a door into his naked grey skull.

  The man said, “I want you to listen to me, Jack. You’ll forget my name, which isn’t important. But you will always remember me and my visit, won’t you?”

  Jack stared at the impenetrable lenses and nodded dumbly. Mister turned to Jack’s father. “Let his fancy grow. It is a necessary wish-fulfillment play. Like all human young who are good for anything at all, he is trying to find the lost door to the Garden of Eden. The history of the great poets and men-of-action is the history of the attempt to return to the realm that Adam lost, the forgotten Hesperides of the mind, the Avalon buried in our soul.”

  Mr. Crane put his fingertips together. “Yes?”

  “Personally, I think that-some day man will realize just what he is searching for and will invent a machine that will enable the child to project, just as a film throws an image on a screen, the visions in his psyche.

  “I see you’re interested,” he continued. “You would be, naturally, since you’re a professor of philosophy. Now, let’s call the toy a specterscope, because through it the subject sees the spectres that haunt his unconscious. Hal Hal But how does it work? I’ll tell you. My native country’s scientists have developed a rather simple device, though they haven’t published anything about it in the scientific journals. Let me give you a brief explanation: Light strikes the retina of the eye; the rods and cones pass on impulses to the bipolar cells, which send them on to the optic nerve, which goes to the brain . . .”

  “Elementary and full of gaps,” said Jack’s father.

  "Pardon me,” said Mister. “A bare outline should be enough. You’ll be able to fill in the details. Very well. This specterscope breaks up the light going into the eye in such a manner that the rods and cones receive only a certain wavelength. I can’t tell you what it is, except that it’s in the visual red. The scope also concentrates like a burning-glass and magnifies the power of the light.

  “Result? A hitherto-undiscovered chemical in the visual purple of the rods is activated and stimulates the optic nerve in a way he had not guessed possible. An electrochemical stimulus then irritates the subconscious until it fully wakes up.

  “Let me put it this way. The subconscious is not a matter of location but of organization. There are billions of possible connections between the neurons of the cortex. Look at those potentialities as so many cards in the same pack. Shuffle the cards one way and you have the common workaday cogito, ergo sum mind. Reshuffle them, and, bingol you have the combination of neurons, or cards, of the unconscious. The specterscope does the redealing. When the subject gazes through it, he sees for the first time the full impact and result of his underground mind’s workings in other perceptics than dreams or symbolical behavior. The subjective Garden of Eden is resurrected. It is my contention that this specterscope will some day be available to all children.

  “When that happens, Mr. Crane, you will understand that the world will profit from man’s secret wishes. Earth will be a far better place. Paradise, sunken deep in every man, can be dredged out.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jack’s father, stroking his chin thoughtfully with a finger. “Children like my son are too introverted as it is. Give them this psychological toy, and you would watch them grow, not into the outside world, but into themselves. They would fester. Man has been expelled from the Garden. His history is a long, painful climb toward something different. It is something that is probably better than the soft and flabby Golden Age. If man were to return, he would regress, become worse than static, become infantile or even embryonic. He would be smothered in the folds of his own dreams.”

  “Perhaps,” said the salesman. “But I think you have a very unusual child here. He will go much farther than you may think. Why? Because he is sensitive and has an imagination that only needs the proper guidance. Too many children become mere ciphers and paunches and round “O” minds full of tripe. They’ll stay on earth. That is, I mean they’ll be stuck in the mud.”

  “You talk like no insurance salesman I’ve ever met.”

  “Like all those who really want to sell, I’m a born psychologist,” Mister shrilled. “Actually, I have an advantage. I have a Ph.D. in psychology. I would prefer staying at home for laboratory work, but since I can help my starving children— I am not joking—so much more by coming to a foreign land and working at something that will put food in their mouths,

  I do it. I can’t stand to see my little ones go hungry. Moreover,” he said with a wave of his long-fingered hand, “this whole planet is really a lab that beats anything within four walls.”

  “You spoke of famine. Your accent—your name. You’re a Greek, aren’t you?”

  “In a way,” said Mister. “My name, translated, means gracious or kindly or well-meaing.” His voice became brisker. “The translation is apropos. I’m here to do you a service. Now, about these monthly premiums . . .”

  Jack shook himself and stepped out of the mold of fascination that Mister’s glasses seemed to have poured around him. Uncas again, he crawled on all fours from chair to divan to stool to the fallen log which the adults thought was an easy chair. He stuck his head from behind it and sighted along the broomstick-musket at his father. He’d shoot that white man dead and then take his scalp. He giggled at that, because his father really didn’t have any hairlock to take.

  At that moment, Mister decided to take off his specs and polish them with his breastpocket handkerchief. While he answered one of Mr. Crane’s questions, he let them dangle from his fingers. The lenses were level with Jack’s gaze. One careless glance was enough to jerk his eyes back to them. One glance stunned him so that he could not at once understand that what he was seeing was not reality.

  There was his father across the room. But it wasn’t a room. It was a space outdoors under the low branch of a tree whose trunk was so big it was as wide as the wall had been. Nor was the Persian rug there. It was replaced by a close-cropped bright green grass. Here and there foot-high flowers with bright yellow petals tipped in scarlet swayed beneath an internal wind. Close to Mr. Crane’s feet a white horse no larger than a fox terrier bit off the flaming end of a plant.

  All those things were wonderful enough—but was that naked giant who sprawled upon a moss-covered boulder his father? No! Yes! Though the features were no longer pinched and scored and pale, though they were glowing and tanned and smooth like a young athlete’s they were his father’s! Even the thick, curly hair that fell down over a wide forehead and the panther-muscled body could not hide his identity.

  Though it tore at his nerves, and though he was afraid that once he looked away he would never again seize the vision, Jack ripped his gaze away from the rosy view.

  The descent to the grey and rasping reality was so painfu
l that tears ran down his cheeks, and he gasped as if struck in the pit of the stomach. How could beauty like that be all around him without his knowing it?

  He felt that he had been blind all his life until this moment and would be forever eyeless again, an unbearable forever, if he did not look through the glass again.

  He stole another hurried glance, and the pain in his heart and stomach went away, his insides became wrapped in a soft wind. He was lifted. He was floating, a pale red, velvety air caressed him and buoyed him.

  He saw his mother run from around the tree. That should have seemed peculiar, because he had thought she was dead. But there she was, no longer flat-walking and coughing and thin and wax-skinned but golden-brown and curvy and bouncy. She jumped at Daddy and gave him a long kiss. Daddy didn’t seem to mind that she had no clothes on. Oh, it was so wonderful. Jack was drifting on a yielding and wine-tinted air and warmed with a wind that seemed to swell him out like a happy balloon. . . .

  Suddenly he was falling, hurtling helplessly and sickeningly through a void while a cold and drab blast gouged his skin and spun him around and around. The world he had always known shoved hard against him. Again, he felt the blow in the solar plexus and saw the grey tentacles of the living reality reach for his heart.

  Jack looked up at the stranger, who was just about to put his spectacles on the bridge of his long nose. His eyelids were closed. Jack never did see his eyes.

  That didn’t bother him. He had other things to think about. He crouched beside the chair while his brain tried to move again, tried to engulf a thought and failed because it could not become fluid enough to find the idea that would move his tongue to shriek, No! No! No!

  And when the salesman rose and placed his papers in his case and patted Jack on the head and bent his opaque rose spectacles at him and said good-by and that he wouldn’t be coming back because he was going out of town to stay, Jack was not able to move or say a thing. Nor for a long time after the door had closed could he break through the mass that gripped him like hardened lava. By then, no amount of screams and weeping would bring Mister back. All his father could do was to call a doctor who took the boy’s temperature and gave him pills.

  IV

  JACK STOOD inside the wire and bent his neck back to watch a huge black and silver oyster feel the dusk for a landing-field with its single white foot and its orange toes. Blindingly, lights sprang to attention over the camp.

  When Jack had blinked his eyes back to normal, he could see over the flat half-mile between the fence and the ship. It lay quiet and glittering and smoking in the flood-beams. He could see the round door in its side swing open. Men began filing out. A truck rumbled across the plain and pulled up beside the metal bulk. A very tall man stepped out of the cab and halted upon the running board, from which he seemed to be greeting the newcomers or giving them instructions. Whatever he was saying took so long that Jack lost interest.

  Lately, he had not been able to focus his mind for any length of time upon anything except that one event in the past. He wandered around and whipped glances at his comrades’ faces, noting listlessly that their uniforms and shaved heads had improved their appearance. But nothing would be able to chill the feverishness of their eyes.

  Whistles shrilled. Jack jumped. His heart beat faster. He felt as if the end of the quest were suddenly close. Somebody would be around the comer. In a minute that person would be facing him, and then . . .

  Then, he reflected, and sagged with a wave of disappointment at the thought, then there was nobody around the comer. It always happened that way. Besides, there weren’t any corners in this camp. He had reached the wall at the end of the alley. Why didn’t he stop looking?

  Sergeants lined the prisoners up four abreast preparatory to marching them into the barracks. Jack supposed it was time to turn in for the night. He submitted to their barked orders and hard hands without resentment. They seemed a long way off. For the ten thousandth time, he was thinking that this need not have happened.

  If he had been man enough to grapple with himself, to wrestle as Jacob did with the angel and not let loose until he had felled the problem, he could be teaching philosophy in a quiet little college, as his father did. He had graduated from high school, and then, instead of going to college, as his father had so much wanted him to, he had decided he would work a year. With his earnings, he would see the world.

  He had seen it, but, when his money ran out, he had not returned home. He had drifted, taking jobs here and there, sleeping in flop-houses, jungles, park benches, and freight cars.

  When the newly created Bureau of Health and Sanity had frozen jobs in an effort to solve the transiency problem, Jack had refused to work. He knew that he would not be able to quit a job without being arrested at once. Like hundreds of thousands of other youths, he had begged and stolen and hidden from the local police and the Bohas.

  Even through all those years of misery and wandering, he had not once admitted to himself the true nature of this fog-cottoned grail. He knew it, and he did not know it. It was patroling the edge of his mind, circling a faroff periphery, recognizable by a crude silhouette but nameless. Any time he wanted to, he could have summoned it closer and said, You are it, and I know you, and I know what I am looking for. It is ... ? Is what? Worthless? Foolish? InsaneP A dream?

  Jack had never had the courage to take that action. When it seemed the thing was galloping closer, charging down upon him, he ran away. It must stay on the horizon, moving on, always moving, staying out of his grasp.

  “All you guys, for’ard ’arch!”

  Jack did not move. The truck from the rocket had come through a gate and stopped by the transies, and about fifty men were getting off the back.

  The man behind Jack bumped into him. Jack paid him no attention. He did not move. He squinted at the group who had come from the rocket. They were very tall, hump-shouldered, and dressed in light grey-green Palm Beach suits and tan Panama hats. Each held a brown leather briefcase at the end of a long, thin arm. Each wore on the bridge of his long nose a pair of rose-colored glasses.

  A cry broke hoarsely from the transies. Some of those in front of Jack fell to their kees as if a sudden poison had paralyzed their legs. They called out and stretched out open hands. A boy by Jack's side sprawled face-down on the sand while he uttered over and over again, “Mr. Pelopoeus! Mr. Pelopoeus!”

  The name meant nothing to Jack. He did feel repulsed at seeing the fellow turn on his side, bend his neck forward, bring his clenched fists up against his chest, and jackknife his legs against his arms. He had seen it many times before in the transie jungles, but he had never gotten over the sickness it had first caused him.

  He turned away and came almost nose to nose with one of the men from the rocket. He had put down his briefcase so it rested against his leg and taken a white handkerchief out of his breast pocket to wipe the dust from his lenses. His lids were squeezed shut as if he found the lights unbearable.

  Jack stared and could not move while a name that the boy behind him had been crying out slowly worked it way through his consciousness. Suddenly, like the roar of a flashflood that is just rounding the bend of a dry gulch, the syllables struck him. He lunged forward and clutched at the spectacles in the man’s hand. At the same time he yelled over and over the words that had filled out the blank in his memory.

  “Mr. Eumenes! Mr. Eumenes!”

  A sergeant cursed and slammed his fist into Jack’s face. Jack fell down, fiat on his back. Though his jaw felt as if it were tom loose from its hinge, he rolled over on his side, raised himself on his hands and knees, and began to get up to his feet.

  “Stand still!” bellowed the sergeant. “Stay in formation or you’ll get more of the same!”

  Jack shook his head until it cleared. He crouched and held out his hands toward the man, but he did not move his feet. Over and over, half-chanting, half-crooning, he said, “Mr. Eumenes! The glasses! Please, Mr. Eumenes, the glasses 1”

  The forty-n
ine Mr. Eumenae-and-otherwise looked incuriously with impenetrable rosy eyes. The fiftieth put the white handkerchief back in his pocket. His 'mouth opened. False teeth gleamed. With his free hand he took off his hat and waved it at the crowd and bowed.

  His tilted head showed a white fuzzlike hair that shot up over his pale scalp. His gestures were both comic and terrifying. The hat and the inclination of his body said far more than words could. They said, Good-by forever and bon voyage!

  Then, Mr. Eumenes straightened up and opened his lids.

  At first, the sockets looked as if they held no eyeballs, as if they were empty of all but shadows.

  Jack saw them from a distance. Mr. Eumenes-or-his-twin was shooting away faster and faster and becoming smaller and smaller. No! He himself was. He was rocketing away within his own body. He was falling down a deep well.

  He, Jack Crane, was a hollow shaft down which he slipped and screamed, away, away, from the world outside. It was like seeing from the wrong end of a pair of binoculars that lengthened and lengthened while the man. with the long-sought-for treasure in his hand flew in the opposite direction as if he had been connected to the horizon by a rubber band and somebody had released it and he was flying towards it, away from Jack.

  Even as this happened, as he knew vaguely that his muscles were locking into the posture of a beggar, hands out, pleading, face twisted into an agony of asking, lips repeating his croon-chant, he saw what had occurred.

  The realization was like the sudden, blinding, and at the same time clarifying light that sometimes comes to epileptics just as they are going into a seizure. It was the thought that he had kept away on the horizon of his mind, the thought that now charged in on him with long leaps and bounds and then stopped and sat on its haunches and grinned at him while its long tongue lolled.