The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (72 page)

"Beasly," said Abbie, in her best drill-sergeant
voice, "you get right up there and get that thing untied."

"Yes'm," Beasly said. He was a gangling,
loose-jointed man who didn't look too bright.

"And see you be careful with it. I don't want it all
scratched up."

"Yes'm," said Beasly.

"I'll help," Taine offered.

The two climbed into the truck and began unlashing the old
monstrosity.

"It's heavy," Abbie warned. "You two be
careful of it."

"Yes'm," said Beasly.

It was heavy and it was an awkward thing to boot, but Beasly
and Taine horsed it around to the back of the house and up the stoop and
through the back door and down the basement stairs, with Abbie following
eagle-eyed behind them, alert to the slightest scratch.

The basement was Taine's combination workshop and display
room for antiques. One end of it was filled with benches and with tools and
machinery and boxes full of odds and ends and piles of just plain junk were
scattered everywhere. The other end housed a collection of rickety chairs,
sagging bedposts, ancient highboys, equally ancient lowboys, old coal scutties
painted gold, heavy iron fireplace screens and a lot of other stuff that he had
collected from far and wide for as little as he could possibly pay for it.

He and Beasly set the TV down carefully on the floor. Abbie
watched them narrowly from the stairs.

"Why, Hiram," she said, excited, "you put a
ceiling in the basement. It looks a whole lot better."

"Huh?" asked Taine.

"The ceiling. I said you put in a ceiling."

Taine jerked his head up and what she said was true. There
was a ceiling there, but he'd never put it in.

He gulped a little and lowered his head, then jerked it
quickly up and had another look. The ceiling was still there.

"It's not that block stuff," said Abbie with open
admiration. "You can't see any joints at all. How did you manage it?"

Taine gulped again and got back his voice. "Something I
thought up," he told her weakly.

"You'll have to come over and do it to our basement.
Our basement is a sight. Beasly put the ceiling in the amusement room, but
Beasly is all thumbs."

"Yes'm," Beasly said contritely.

"When I get the time," Taine promised, ready to
promise anything to get them out of there.

"You'd have a lot more time," Abbie told him
acidly, "if you weren't gadding around all over the country buying up that
broken-down old furniture that you call antiques. Maybe you can fool the city
folks when they come driving out here, but you can't fool me."

"I make a lot of money out of some of it," Taine
told her calmly.

"And lose your shirt on the rest of it," she said.

"I got some old china that is just the kind of stuff
you are looking for," said Taine. "Picked it up just a day or two
ago. Made a good buy on it. I can let you have it cheap."

"I'm not interested," she said and clamped her
mouth tight shut.

She turned around and went back up the stairs.

"She's on the prod today," Beasly said to Taine.
"It will be a bad day. It always is when she starts early in the
morning."

"Don't pay attention to her," Taine advised.

"I try not to, but it ain't possible. You sure you
don't need a man? I'd work for you cheap."

"Sorry, Beasly. Tell you what—come over some night soon
and we'll play some checkers."

"I'll do that, Hiram. You're the only one who ever asks
me over. All the others ever do is laugh at me or shout."

Abbie's voice came bellowing down the stairs. "Beasly,
are you coming? Don't go standing there all day. I have rugs to beat."

"Yes'm," said Beasly, starting up the stairs.

At the truck, Abbie turned on Taine with determination:
"You'll get that set fixed right away? I'm lost without it."

"Immediately," said Taine.

He stood and watched them off, then looked around for
Towser, but the dog had disappeared. More than likely he was at that wood-chuck
hole again, in the woods across the road. Gone off, thought Taine, without his
breakfast, too.

The teakettle was boiling furiously when Taine got back to
the kitchen. He put coffee in the maker and poured in the water. Then he went
downstairs.

The ceiling was still there.

He turned on all the lights and walked around the basement,
staring up at it.

It was a dazzling white material and it appeared to be
translucent— up to a point, that is. One could see into it, but he could not
see through it. And there were no signs of seams. It was fitted neatly and
tightly around the water pipes and the ceiling lights.

Taine stood on a chair and rapped his knuckles against it
sharply. It gave out a bell-like sound, almost exactly as if he'd rapped a
fingernail against a thinly-blown goblet.

He got down off the chair and stood there, shaking his head.
The whole thing was beyond him. He had spent part of the evening repairing
Banker Stevens' lawn mower and there'd been no ceiling then.

He rummaged in a box and found a drill. He dug out one of
the smaller bits and fitted it in the drill. He plugged in the cord and climbed
on the chair again and tried the bit against the ceiling. The whirling steel
slid wildly back and forth. It didn't make a scratch. He switched off the drill
and looked closely at the ceiling. There was not a mark upon it. He tried
again, pressing against the drill with all his strength. The bit went
ping
and
the broken end flew across the basement and hit the wall.

Taine stepped down off the chair. He found another bit and
fitted it in the drill and went slowly up the stairs, trying to think. But he
was too confused to think. That ceiling should not be up there, but there it
was. And unless he were stark, staring crazy and forgetful as well, he had not
put it there.

In the living room, he folded back one corner of the worn
and faded carpeting and plugged in the drill. He knelt and started drilling in
the floor. The bit went smoothly through the old oak flooring, then stopped. He
put on more pressure and the drill spun without getting any bite.

And there wasn't supposed to be anything underneath the
wood! Nothing to stop a drill. Once through the flooring, it should have
dropped into the space between the joists.

Taine disengaged the drill and laid it to one side.

He went into the kitchen and the coffee now was ready. But
before he poured it, he pawed through a cabinet drawer and found a pencil
flashlight. Back in the living room he shone the light into the hole that the
drill had made.

There was something shiny at the bottom of the hole.

He went back to the kitchen and found some day-old doughnuts
and poured a cup of coffee. He sat at the kitchen table, eating doughnuts and
wondering what to do.

There didn't appear, for the moment at least, much that he
could do. He could putter around all day trying to figure out what had happened
to his basement and probably not be any wiser than he was right now.

His money-making Yankee soul rebelled against such a horrid
waste of time.

There was, he told himself, that maple four-poster that he
should be getting to before some unprincipled city antique dealer should run
afoul of it. A piece like that, he figured, if a man had any luck at all,
should sell at a right good price. He might turn a handsome profit on it if he
only worked it right.

Maybe, he thought, he could turn a trade on it. There was
the table model TV set that he had traded a pair of ice skates for last winter.
Those folks out Woodman way might conceivably be happy to trade the bed for a
reconditioned TV set, almost like brand new. After all, they probably weren't
using the bed and, he hoped fervently, had no idea of the value of it.

He ate the doughnuts hurriedly and gulped down an extra cup
of coffee. He fixed a plate of scraps for Towser and set it outside the door.
Then he went down into the basement and got the table TV set and put it in the
pickup truck. As an afterthought, he added a reconditioned shotgun which would
be perfectly all right if a man were careful not to use these far-reaching,
powerful shells, and a few other odds and ends that might come in handy on a
trade.

He got back late, for it had been a busy and quite
satisfactory day. Not only did he have the four-poster loaded on the truck, but
he had as well a rocking chair, a fire screen, a bundle of ancient magazines,
an old-fashioned barrel churn, a walnut highboy and a Governor Winthrop on
which some half-baked, slap-happy decorator had applied a coat of apple-green
paint. The television set, the shotgun and five dollars had gone into the
trade. And what was better yet, he'd managed it so well that the Woodman family
probably was dying of laughter at this very moment about how they'd taken him.

He felt a little ashamed of it—they'd been such friendly
people. They had treated him so kindly and had him stay for dinner and had sat
and talked with him and shown him about the farm and even asked him to stop by
if he went through that way again.

He'd wasted the entire day, he thought, and he rather hated
that, but maybe it had been worth it to build up his reputation out that way as
the sort of character who had softening of the head and didn't know the value
of a dollar. That way, maybe some other day, he could do some more business in
the neighborhood.

He heard the television set as he opened the back door,
sounding loud and clear, and he went clattering down the basement stairs in
something close to a panic. For now that he'd traded off the table model,
Abbie's set was the only one downstairs and Abbie's set was broken.

It was Abbie's set, all right. It stood just where he and
Beasly had put it down that morning and there was nothing wrong with it—nothing
wrong at all. It was even televising color.

Televising color!

He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and leaned against
the railing for support.

The set kept right on televising color.

Taine stalked the set and walked around behind it.

The back of the cabinet was off, leaning against a bench
that stood behind the set, and he could see the innards of it glowing cheerily.

He squatted on the basement floor and squinted at the
lighted innards and they seemed a good deal different from the way that they
should be. He'd repaired the set many times before and he thought he had a good
idea of what the working parts would look' like. And now they all seemed
different, although just how he couldn't tell.

A heavy step sounded on the stairs and a hearty voice came
booming down to him.

"Well, Hiram, I see you got it fixed."

Taine jackknifed upright and stood there slightly frozen and
completely speechless.

Henry Horton stood foursquarely and happily on the stairs,
looking very pleased.

"I told Abbie that you wouldn't have it done, but she
said for me to come over anyway—Hey, Hiram, it's in color! How did you do it,
man?"

Taine grinned sickly. "I just got fiddling
around," he said.

Henry came down the rest of the stairs with a stately step
and stood before the set, with his hands behind his back, staring at it fixedly
in his best executive manner.

He slowly shook his head. "I never would have
thought," he said, "that it was possible."

"Abbie mentioned that you wanted color."

"Well, sure. Of course I did. But not on this old set.
I never would have expected to get color on this set. How did you do it,
Hiram?"

Taine told the solemn truth. "I can't rightly
say," he said.

Henry found a nail keg standing in front of one of the
benches and rolled it out in front of the old-fashioned set. He sat down warily
and relaxed into solid comfort.

"That's the way it goes," he said. "There are
men like you, but not very many of them. Just Yankee tinkerers. You keep
messing around with things, trying one thing here and another there and before
you know it you come up with something."

He sat on the nail keg, staring at the set.

"It's sure a pretty thing," he said. "It's
better than the color they have in Minneapolis. I dropped in at a couple of the
places the last time I was there and looked at the color sets. And I tell you
honest, Hiram, there wasn't one of them that was as good as this."

Taine wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve. Somehow or
other, the basement seemed to be getting warm. He was fine sweat all over.

Henry found a big cigar in one of his pockets and held it
out to Taine.

"No, thanks. I never smoke."

"Perhaps you're wise," said Henry. "It's a
nasty habit."

He stuck the cigar into his mouth and rolled it east to
west.

"Each man to his own," he proclaimed, expansively.
"When it comes to a thing like this, you're the man to do it. You seem to
think in mechanical contraptions and electronic circuits. Me, I don't know a
thing about it. Even in the computer game, I still don't know a thing about it;
I hire men who do. I can't even saw a board or drive a nail. But I can
organize. You remember, Hiram, how everybody snickered when I started up the
plant?"

"Well, I guess some of them did, at that."

"You're darn tooting they did. They went around for
weeks with their hands up to their faces to hide smart-aleck grins. They said,
what does Henry think he's doing, starting up a computer factory out here in
the sticks; he doesn't think he can compete with those big companies in the
east, does he? And they didn't stop their grinning until I sold a couple of
dozen units and had orders for a year or two ahead."

He fished a lighter from his pocket and lit the cigar
carefully, never taking his eyes off the television set.

"You got something there," he said, judiciously,
"that may be worth a mint of money. Some simple adaptation that will fit
on any set. If you can get color on this old wreck, you can get color on any
set that's made."