Miracle by Price
Date: 2019-01-19T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Short stories; Psychological fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Interpersonal relations -- Fiction; Inventions -- Fiction; Yosemite National Park (Calif.) -- Fiction

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Title: Miracle by Price

Author: Irving E. Cox

Release date: January 19, 2019 [eBook #58730]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MIRACLE BY PRICE ***

MIRACLE BY PRICE

BY IRVING E. COX, JR.

They said old Doctor Price was an inventive
genius but no miracle worker. Yet—if he didn't
work miracles in behalf of an over-worked
little guy named Cupid, what was he doing?

Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Memo to: Clayton, Croyden and Hammerstead, Attorneys
Attention: William Clayton
From: Walter Gordon

Dear Bill:

Enclosed is the itemized inventory of the furnishings of the late Dr. Edward Price's estate. As you requested, I personally examined the laboratory. Candidly, Bill, you needed a psychiatrist for the job, not a graduate physicist. Dr. Price was undoubtedly an inventive genius a decade ago when he was still active in General Electronics, but his lab was an embarrassing example of senile clutter.

You had an idea, Bill, that before he died Price might have been playing around with a new invention which the estate could develop and patent. I found a score of gadgets in the lab, none of them finished and none of them built for any functional purpose that I could discover.

Only two seemed to be completed. One resembled a small, portable radio. It was a plastic case with two knobs and a two-inch speaker grid. There was no cord outlet. The machine may have been powered by batteries, for I heard a faint humming when I turned the knobs. Nothing else. Dr. Price had left a handwritten card on the box. He intended to call it a Semantic-Translator, but he had noted that the word combination was awkward for commercial exploitation, and I suppose he held up a patent application until he could think of a catchier name. One sentence on that card would have amused you, Bill. Price wrote, "Should wholesale for about three-fifty per unit." Even in his dotage, he had an eye for profit.

The Semantic-Translator—whatever that may mean—might have had possibilities. I fully intended to take it back with me to General Electronics and examine it thoroughly.

The second device, which Price had labeled a Transpositor, was large and rather fragile. It was a hollow cylinder of very small wires, perhaps a foot in diameter, fastened to an open-faced console crowded with a weird conglomeration of vacuum tubes, telescopic lenses and mirrors. The cylinder of wires was so delicate that the motion of my body in the laboratory caused it to quiver. Standing in front of the wire coil were two brass rods. A kind of shovel-like chute was fixed to one rod (Price called it the shipping board). Attached to the second rod was a long-handled pair of tongs which he called the grapple.

The Transpositor was, I think, an outgrowth of Price's investigation of the relationship between light and matter. You may recall, Bill, the brilliant technical papers he wrote on that subject when he was still working in the laboratories of General Electronics. At the time Price was considered something of a pioneer. He believed that light and matter were different forms of the same basic element; he said that eventually science would learn how to change one into the other.

I seriously believe that the Transpositor was meant to do precisely that. In other words, Price had expected to transpose the atomic structure of solid matter into light, and later to reconstruct the original matter again. Now don't assume, Bill, that Price was wandering around in a senile delusion of fourth dimensional nonsense. The theory may be sound. Our present knowledge of the physical world makes the basic structure of matter more of a mystery than it has ever been.

Not that I think Price achieved the miracle. Even in his most brilliant and productive period he could not have done it. As yet our accumulation of data is too incomplete for such an experiment. I believe that Price created no more than a very realistic illusion with his arrangement of lenses and mirrors.

I saw the illusion, too; I used the machine.

There were two dials on the front of the console. One was lettered "time", and the other "distance". The "time" dial could be set for eons, centuries or hours, depending upon the position of a three-way switch beneath it; the "distance" dial could be adjusted to light years, thousand-mile units, or kilometers by a similar device. Since there was no indication which position would produce what results, I left the dials untouched. I plugged the machine into an electric outlet and pushed the starter button. The coil of wire blazed with light and the chute slid rapidly in and out of the cylinder.

That was all, at first. The starter button was labeled "the shipper", and I gathered that Price had visualized the practical application of the Transpositor as a device for transporting goods from one point to another.

I looked around the lab for something I could put into the chute. There was a card, written in red, warning me not to load beyond the dimensional limits of the chute. The only thing I saw that was small enough was the little radio-like gadget Price had called a Semantic-Translator. Loaded horizontally, it just barely fit the chute.

I pushed the shipper button a second time. Again there was a blaze of light, brighter than before, which temporarily blinded me. For a moment I saw the Semantic-Translator in the heart of the fragile, wire cylinder. It had the glow of molten steel, pouring from a blast furnace.

Then it was gone. The chute shot back to the front of the machine. The tray was empty.

Was it an illusion? I believe that, Bill, because later on, when I thought of using the grapple....

Miss Bertha Kent walked back the gravel trail from the dressing room. The early morning sun was bright and warm, but she held her woolen robe tight across her throat. She tried to avoid looking at the other camps—at the sleepy-eyed women coming out of tents, and the men starting morning fires in the stone rings.

Bitterness was etched in acid in her soul. She made herself believe it was because she hated Yosemite. The vacation had been such a disappointment. She had expected so much and—as usual—it had all gone wrong.

Her hope had been so high when school closed; this year was going to be different!

"Are you going anywhere this summer?" Miss Emmy asked after the last faculty meeting in June.

"To Yosemite for a couple of weeks, I think."

"The Park's always crowded. You ought to meet a nice man up there, Bertha."

"I'm not interested in men," Miss Kent had replied frostily. "I'm a botany teacher and it helps me professionally if I spend part of the summer observing the phenomenon of nature."

"Don't kid me, Bertha. You can drop the fancy lingo, too; school's out. You want a man as much as I do."

That was true, Miss Kent admitted—in the quiet of her own mind. Never aloud; never to anyone else. Six years ago, when Bertha Kent had first started to teach, she had been optimistic about it. She wanted to marry; she wanted a family of her own—instead of wasting her lifetime in a high school classroom playing baby sitter for other people's kids. She had saved her money for all sorts of exotic summer vacations—tours, cruises, luxury hotels—but somehow something always went wrong.

To be sure, she had met men. She was pretty; she danced well; she was never prudish; she liked the out-of-doors. All positive qualities: she knew that. The fault lay always with the men. When she first met a stranger, everything was fine. Then, slowly, Miss Kent began to see his faults. Men were simply adult versions of the muscle-bound knot-heads the administration loaded into her botany classes.

Bertha Kent wanted something better, an ideal she had held in her mind since her childhood. The dream-man was real, too. She had met him once and actually talked to him when she was a child. She couldn't remember where; she couldn't recall his face. But the qualities of his personality she knew as she did her own heart. If they had existed once in one man, she would find them again, somewhere. That was the miracle she prayed for every summer.

She thought the miracle had happened again when she first came to Yosemite.

She found an open campsite by the river. While she was putting up her tent, the man from the camp beside hers came to help. At first he seemed the prototype of everything she hated—a good-looking, beautifully co-ordinated physical specimen, as sharp-witted as a jellyfish. The front of his woolen shirt hung carelessly unbuttoned. She saw the mat of dark hair on his chest, the sculpted curves of sun-tanned muscle. No doubt he considered himself quite attractive.

Then, that evening after the fire-fall, the young man asked her to go with him to the ranger's lecture at Camp Curry. Bertha discovered that he was a graduate physicist, employed by a large, commercial laboratory. They had at least the specialized area of science in common. By the time they returned from the lecture, they were calling each other by first names. The next day Walt asked her to hike up the mist trail with him to Nevada Falls.

The familiar miracle began to take shape. She lay awake a long time that night, looking at the dancing pattern of stars visible through the open flap of her tent. This was it; Walt was the reality of her dream. She made herself forget that every summer for six years the same thing had happened. She always believed she had found her miracle; and always something happened to destroy it.

For two days the idyll lasted. The inevitable awakening began the afternoon they drove along the Wawona highway to see the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias. They left their car in the parking area and walked through the magnificent stand of cathedral trees. The trail was steep and sometimes treacherous. Twice Walt took her arm to help her. For some reason that annoyed her; finally she told him,

"I'm quite able to look after myself, Walt."

"So you've told me before."

"After all, I've been hiking most of my life. I know exactly what to do—"

"There isn't much you can't take care of for yourself, is there, Bertha?" His voice was suddenly very cold.

"I'm not one of these rattle-brained clinging vines, if that's what you mean. I detest a woman who is always yelping to a man for help."

"Independence is one thing, Bertha; I like that in a woman. But somehow you make a man feel totally inadequate. You set yourself up as his superior in everything."

"That's nonsense, Walt. I'm quite ready to grant that you know a good deal more about physics than I do."

"Say it right, Bertha. You respect the fact that I hold a PhD." He smiled. "That isn't the same thing as respecting me for a person. I knew you didn't need my help on the trail, but it was a normal courtesy to offer it. It seems to me it would be just as normal for you to accept it. Little things like that are important in relations between people."

"Forget it, Walt." She slipped her hand through his. "There, see? I'll do it just the way you want."

She was determined not to quarrel over anything so trivial, though what he said seemed childish and it tarnished the dream a little. But the rest was still good; the miracle could still happen.

Yet, in spite of all her effort, they disagreed twice more before they left the Mariposa Grove. Bertha began to see Walt as he was: brilliant, no doubt, in the single area of physical science, but basically no different from any other man. She desperately wished that she could love him; she earnestly wished that the ideal, fixed so long in her mind, might be destroyed.

But slowly she saw the miracle slip away from her. That night, after the fire-fall, Walt did not ask her to go with him to the lecture. Miserable and angry, Bertha Kent went into her tent, but not to sleep.

She lay staring at the night sky, and thinking how ugly the pin-point lights of distant suns were on the velvet void. As the hours passed, she heard the clatter of pans and voices as people at the other campsites retired. She heard Walt when he returned, whistling tunelessly. He banged around for nearly an hour in the camp next to hers. He dropped a stack of pans; he overturned a box of food; he tripped over a tent line. She wondered if he were drunk. Had their quarreling driven him to that? Walt must have loved her, then.

After a time all the Coleman lanterns in the camp were out. Still Bertha Kent did not sleep. The acid grief and bitterness tormented her with the ghost of another failure, another shattered dream. She listened to the soft music of the flowing stream, the gentle whisper of summer wind in the pines, but it gave her no peace.

Suddenly she heard quiet footsteps and the crackling of twigs behind her tent. She was terrified. It must be Walt. If he had come home drunk, he could have planned almost any kind of violence by way of revenge.

The footsteps moved closer. Bertha shook off the paralysis of fear and reached for her electric lantern. She flashed the beam into the darkness. She saw the black bulk of a bear who was pawing through her food box.

She was so relieved she forgot that a bear might also be a legitimate cause of fear. She ran from the tent, swinging the light and shooing the animal away as she would have chased a puppy. The bear swung toward her, roaring and clawing at the air. She backed away. The bear swung its paws again, and her food box shattered on the ground, in a crescendo of sound.

Bertha heard rapid footsteps under the pines. In the pale moonlight she saw Walt. He was wearing only a pair of red-striped boxer shorts. He was swinging his arms and shouting, but the noise of the falling box had already frightened the bear away.

Walt stood in the moonlight, smiling foolishly.

"I guess I came too late," he said.

"I'm quite sure the bear would have left of its own accord, Walt. They're always quite tame in the national parks, you know." As soon as she said it, she knew it was a mistake. Even though he had done nothing, it would have cost her little to thank him. The words had come instinctively; she hadn't thought how her answer would affect him. Walt turned on his heel stiffly and walked back to his tent.

With a little forethought—a little kindness—Bertha might even then have rescued her miracle. She knew that. She knew she had lost him now, for good. For the first time in her life she saw the dream as a barrier to her happiness, not an ideal. It held her imprisoned; it gave her nothing in exchange.

She slept fitfully for the rest of the night. As soon as the sun was up, she pulled on her woolen robe and went to the dressing room to wash. She walked back along the gravel path, averting her eyes from the other camps and the men hunched over the smoking breakfast fires. She hated Yosemite. She hated all the people crowded around her. She had made up her mind to pack her tent and head for home. This was just another vacation lost, another year wasted.

She went into her tent and put on slacks and a bright, cotton blouse. Then she sat disconsolate at her camp table surveying the mess the bear had made of her food box. There was nothing that she could rescue. She could drive to the village for breakfast, but the shops wouldn't open for another hour.

Behind her she heard Walt starting his Coleman stove. Yesterday he would have offered her breakfast; now he'd ignored her. All along the stream camp fires were blazing in the stone rings. Bertha wondered if she could ask the couple on the other side of her campsite for help. They had attempted to be friendly once before, and Bertha hadn't responded with a great deal of cordiality. They weren't the type she liked—a frizzy-headed, coarse-voiced blonde, and a paunchy old man who hadn't enough sense to know what a fool he looked parading around camp in the faded bathing trunks he wore all day.

Suddenly a light flashed in Bertha's face. A metal shovel slid out of nothingness and deposited a tiny, rectangular box on the table. For a long minute she stared at the box stupidly, vaguely afraid. Her mind must be playing her tricks. Such things didn't happen.

She reached out timidly and touched the box. It seemed real enough. A miniature radio of some sort, with a two-inch speaker. She turned the dials. She heard a faint humming.

The coarse-voiced blonde came toward the table.

"We just heard what happened last night, Miss Kent," she said. "Me and George. About the bear, I mean."

Bertha forced a smile. "It made rather a shambles, didn't it?"

"Gee, you can't make breakfast out of a mess like this. Why don't you come and eat with us?"

The blonde went on talking, apologizing for what she was serving and at the same time listing it with a certain pride. Strangely, Miss Kent heard not one voice, but two. The second came tinnily from the little box on the table,

"You poor, dried-up old maid. That guy who's been hanging around would have been over long before this, if you knew the first thing about being nice to a man."

Bertha gasped. "Really, if that's the way you feel—"

"Why, honey, I just asked you over for breakfast," the blonde answered; at the same time the voice from the machine said,

"I suppose George and me ain't good enough for you. O.K. by me, sister. I didn't really want you to come anyway."

Trembling, Miss Kent stood up. "I've never been so insulted!"

"What's eating you, Miss Kent?" The blonde seemed genuinely puzzled, but again the voice came from the plastic box,

"The old maid's off her rocker. You'd think she was reading my mind."

Switching her trim little hips, the blonde walked back to her own camp. Bertha Kent dropped numbly on the bench, staring at the ugly box. "Reading my mind," the woman had said. Somehow the machine had done precisely that, translating the blonde's spoken words into the real, emotional meaning behind them. It was a terrifying gadget. Bertha was hypnotized by its potential horror—like the brutal, devastating truth spoken by a child.

A camper walked past on the road, waving at Miss Kent and calling out a cheerful good morning. But again the machine read the real meaning behind the pleasant words.

"So you've finally lost your man, Miss Kent. The way you dished out the orders, it's a wonder he stayed around as long as he did. And a pity: you're an attractive woman. You should make some man a good wife."

They all thought that. The whole camp had been watching her, laughing at her. Bertha felt helpless and alone. She needed—wanted—someone else; it surprised her when she faced that fact.

Then it dawned on her: the camper was right; the blonde was right. She had lost Walt through her own ridiculous bull-headedness. In order to assert herself. To be an individualist, she had always thought. And what did that matter, if it imposed this crushing loneliness?

For a moment a kind of madness seized her. It was the diabolical machine that was tormenting her, not the truth it told. She snatched a piece of her broken food box and struck at the plastic case blindly. There was a splash of fire; the gadget broke.

She saw Walt look up from his stove. She saw him move toward her. But she stood paralyzed by a shattering trauma of pain. The voice still came from the speaker, and this time it was her own. Her mind was stripped naked; she saw herself whole, unsheltered by the protective veneer of rationalization.

And she knew the pattern of the dream-man she had loved since her childhood; she knew why the dream had been self-defeating.

For the idealization was her own father. That impossible paragon created by the worship of a child.

The shock was its own cure. She was too well-balanced to accept the tempting escape of total disorientation. Grimly she fought back the tide of madness, and in that moment she found maturity. She ran toward Walt, tears of gratitude in her eyes. She felt his arms around her, and she clung to him desperately.

"I was terrified; I needed you, Walt; I never want to be alone again."

"Needed me?" he repeated doubtfully.

"I love you." After a split-second's hesitation, she felt his lips warm on hers.

From the corner of her eye she saw a chute dart out of nowhere and scoop up the broken plastic box from the camp table. They both vanished again. That was a miracle, too, she supposed; but not nearly as important as hers.

Then the reason of a logical mind asserted its own form of realism: of course, none of it had happened. The mind-reading gadget had been a device created in her own subconscious, a psychological trick to by-pass the dream that had held her imprisoned. She knew enough psychology to understand that.

She ran her fingers through Walt's dark hair and repeated softly,

"I love you, Walt Gordon."

Was it an illusion? I believe that, Bill, because later on, when I thought of using the grapple, I brought the Semantic-Translator back from nowhere. Apparently the smaller gadget had been in the console or behind it. I hadn't seen it when I searched, because my eyes had been hurt by the glare of light.

In the process the Translator somehow got twisted around, for the chute dragged it back vertically through the coil of wire. It touched the wall of the cylinder, and the whole machine exploded.

It was impossible to save anything from the wreckage. But as a physicist I assure you, Bill, the transposition of matter into light is, in terms of our present science, a physical impossibility. It is certainly not the sort of invention that could have been produced by a senile old man, pottering around in a home laboratory. The only thing I regret is that I had no opportunity to examine the Semantic-Translator, but I'm sure it would have proved just as much nonsense.

I'm going up to Yosemite tomorrow for a couple of weeks. If you want any further details on the Price inventory, look me up at the office when I come home.

Yours,
Walt Gordon

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MIRACLE BY PRICE ***

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