The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (73 page)

He chuckled raoistly around the mouthful of cigar. "If
RCA knew what was happening here this minute, they'd go out and cut their
throats."

"But I don't know what I did," protested Taine.

"Well, that's all right," said Henry, happily.
"I'll take this set up to the plant tomorrow and turn loose some of the
boys on it. They'll find out what you have here before they're through with
it."

He took the cigar out of his mouth and studied it intently,
then popped it back in again.

"As I was saying, Hiram, that's the difference in us.
You can do the stuff, but you miss the possibilities. I can't do a thing, but I
can organize it once the thing is done. Before we get through with this, you'll
be wading in twenty-dollar bills clear up to your knees."

"But I don't have-"

"Don't worry. Just leave it all to me. I've got the
plant and whatever money we may need. We'll figure out a split."

"That's fine of you," said Taine mechanically.

"Not at all," Henry insisted, grandly. "It's
just my aggressive, grasping sense of profit. I should be ashamed of myself,
cutting in on this."

He sat on the keg, smoking and watching the TV perform in
exquisite color.

"You know, Hiram," he said, "I've often
thought of this, but never got around to doing anything about it. I've got an
old computer up at the plant that we will have to junk because it's taking up
room that we really need. It's one of our early models, a sort of experimental
job that went completely sour. It sure is a screwy thing. No one's ever been
able to make much out of it. We tried some approaches that probably were
wrong—or maybe they were right, but we didn't know enough to make them quite
come off. It's been standing in a corner all these years and I should have
junked it long ago. But I sort of hate to do it. I wonder if you might not like
it—just to tinker with."

"Well, I don't know," said Taine.

Henry assumed an expansive air. "No obligation, mind
you. You may not be able to do a thing with it—I'd frankly be surprised if you
could, but there's no harm in trying. Maybe you'll decide to tear it down for
the salvage you can get. There are several thousand dollars' worth of equipment
in it. Probably you could use most of it one way or another."

"It might be interesting," conceded Taine, but not
too enthusiastically.

"Good," said Henry, with an enthusiasm that made
up for Taine's lack of it. "I'll have the boys cart it over tomorrow. It's
a heavy thing. I'll send along plenty of help to get it unloaded and down into
the basement and set up."

Henry stood up carefully and brushed cigar ashes off his
lap.

"I'll have the boys pick up the TV set at the same
time," he said.

"I'll have to tell Abbie you haven't got it fixed yet.
If I ever let it get into the house, the way it's working now, she'd hold onto
it."

Henry climbed the stairs heavily and Taine saw him out the
door into the summer night.

Taine stood in the shadow, watching Henry's shadowed figure
go across the Widow Taylor's yard to the next street behind his house. He took
a deep breath of the fresh night air and shook bis head to try to clear his
buzzing brain, but the buzzing went right on.

Too much had happened, he told himself. Too much for any
single day—first the ceiling and now the TV set. Once he had a good night's
sleep he might be in some sort of shape to try to wrestle with it.

Towser came around the corner of the house and limped slowly
up the steps to stand beside his master. He was mud up to his ears.

"You had a day of it, I see," said Taine.
"And, just like I told you, you didn't get the woodchuck."

"Woof,"
said Towser, sadly.

"You're just like a lot of the rest of us," Taine
told him, severely. "Like me and Henry Horton and all the rest of us.
You're chasing something and you think you know what you're chasing, but you
really don't. And what's even worse, you have no faint idea of why you're
chasing it."

Towser thumped a tired tail upon the stoop.

Taine opened the door and stood to one side to let Towser
in, then went in himself.

He went through the refrigerator and found part of a roast,
a slice or two of luncheon meat, a dried-out slab of cheese and half a bowl of
cooked spaghetti. He made a pot of coffee and shared the food with Towser.

Then Taine went back downstairs and shut off the television
set. He found a trouble lamp and plugged it in and poked the light into the
innards of the set.

He squatted on the floor, holding the lamp, trying to puzzle
out what had been done to the set. It was different, of course, but it was a
little hard to figure out in just what ways it was different. Someone had
tinkered with the tubes and had them twisted out of shape and there were little
white cubes of metal tucked here and there in what seemed to be an entirely
haphazard and illogical manner—although, Taine admitted to himself, there
probably was no haphazardness.

And the circuit, he saw, had been rewired and a good deal of
wiring had been added.

But the most puzzling thing about it was that the whole
thing seemed to be just jury-rigged—as if someone had done no more than a
hurried, patch-up job to get the set back in working order on an emergency and
temporary basis.

Someone, he thought!

And who had that someone been?

He hunched around and peered into the dark corners of the
basement and he felt innumerable and many-legged imaginary insects running on
his body.

Someone had taken the back off the cabinet and leaned it
against the bench and had left the screws which held the back laid neatly in a
row upon the floor. Then they had jury-rigged the set and jury-rigged it far
better than it had ever been before.

If this was a jury-job, he wondered, just what kind of job
would it have been if they had had the time to do it up in style?

They hadu't had the time, of course. Maybe they had been
scared off when he had come home—scared off even before they could get the back
on the set again.

He stood up and moved stiffly away.

First the ceiling in the morning—and now, in the evening, Abbie's
television set.

And the ceiling, come to think of it, was not a ceiling
only. Another liner, if that was the proper term for it, of the same material
as the ceiling, had been laid beneath the floor, forming a sort of boxed-in
area between the joists. He had struck that liner when he had tried to drill
into the floor.

And what, he asked himself, if all the house were like that,
too?

There was just one answer to it all:
There was something
in the house with him!

Towser had heard that
something
or smelled it or in
some other manner sensed it and had dug frantically at the floor in an attempt
to dig it out, as if it were a woodchuck.

Except that this, whatever it might be, certainly was no
woodchuck.

He put away the trouble light and went upstairs.

Towser was curled up on a rug in the living room beside the
easy chair and beat his tail in polite decorum in greeting to his master.

Taine stood and stared down at the dog. Towser looked back at
him with satisfied and sleepy eyes, then heaved a doggish sigh and settled down
to sleep.

Whatever Towser might have heard or smelled or sensed this
morning, it was quite evident that as of this moment he was aware of it no
longer.

Then Taine remembered something else.

He had filled the ketde to make water for the coffee and had
set it on the stove. He had turned on the burner and it had worked the first
time.

He hadn't had to kick the stove to get the burner going.

He woke in the morning and someone was holding down his feet
and he sat up quickly to see what was going on.

But there was nothing to be alarmed about; it was only
Towser who had crawled into bed with him and now lay sprawled across his feet.

Towser whined softly and his back legs twitched as he chased
dream rabbits.

Taine eased his feet from beneath the dog and sat up,
reaching for his clothes. It was early, but he remembered suddenly that he had
left all of the furniture he had picked up the day before out there in the
truck and should be getting it downstairs where he could start reconditioning
it.

Towser went on sleeping.

Taine stumbled to the kitchen and looked out of the window
and there, squatted on the back stoop, was Beasly, the Horton man-of-all-work.

Taine went to the back door to see what was going on.

"I quit them, Hiram," Beasly told him. "She
kept on pecking at me every minute of the day and I couldn't do a thing to
please her, so I up and quit."

"Well, come on in," said Taine. "I suppose
you'd like a bite to eat and a cup of coffee."

"I was kind of wondering if I could stay here, Hiram.
Just for my keep until I can find something else."

"Let's have breakfast first," said Taine,
"then we can talk about it."

He didn't like it, he told himself. He didn't like it at
all. In another hour or so Abbie would show up and start stirring up a ruckus
about how he'd lured Beasly off. Because, no matter how dumb Beasly might be,
he did a lot of work and took a lot of nagging and there wasn't anyone else in
town who would work for Abbie Horton.

"Your ma used to give me cookies all the time,"
said Beasly. "Your ma was a real good woman, Hiram."

"Yes, she was," said Taine.

"My ma used to say that you folks were quality, not
like the rest in town, no matter what kind of airs they were always putting on.
She said your family was among the first settlers. Is that really true,
Hiram?"

"Well, not exactly first settlers, I guess, but this
house has stood here for almost a hundred years. My father used to say there
never was a night during all those years that there wasn't at least one Taine
beneath its roof. Things like that, it seems, meant a lot to father."

"It must be nice," said Beasly, wistfully,
"to have a feeling like that. You must be proud of this house,
Hiram."

"Not really proud; more like belonging. I can't imagine
living in any other house."

Taine turned on the burner and filled the kettle. Carrying
the kettle back, he kicked the stove. But there wasn't any need to kick it; the
burner was already beginning to take on a rosy glow.

Twice in a row, Taine thought. This thing is getting better!

"Gee, Hiram," said Beasly, "this is a dandy
radio."

"It's no good," said Taine. "It's broke.
Haven't had the time to fix it."

"I don't think so, Hiram. I just turned it on. It's
beginning to warm up."

"It's beginning to—Hey, let me see!" yelled Taine.

Beasly told the truth. A faint hum was coming from the
tubes.

A voice came in, gaining in volume as the set warmed up.

It was speaking gibberish.

"What kind of talk is that?" asked Beasly.

"I don't know," said Taine, close to panic now.

First the television set, then the stove and now the radiol

He spun the tuning knob and the pointer crawled slowly
across the dial face instead of spinning across as he remembered it, and
station after station sputtered and went past.

He tuned in the next station that came up and it was strange
lingo, too—and he knew by then exactly what he had.

Instead of a $39.50 job, he had here on the kitchen table an
all-band receiver like they advertised in the fancy magazines.

He straightened up and said to Beasly: "See if you can
get someone speaking English. I'll get on with the eggs."

He turned on the second burner and got out the frying pan.
He put it on the stove and found eggs and bacon in the refrigerator.

Beasly got a station that had band music playing.

"How's that?" he asked.

"That's fine," said Taine.

Towser came out from the bedroom, stretching and yawning. He
went to the door and showed he wanted out.

Taine let him out.

"If I were you," he told the dog, "I'd lay
off that woodchuck. You'll have all the woods dug up."

"He ain't digging after any woodchuck, Hiram."

"Well, a rabbit, then."

"Not a rabbit, either. I snuck off yesterday when I was
supposed to be beating rugs. That's what Abbie got so sore about."

Taine grunted, breaking eggs into the skillet.

"I snuck away and went over to where Towser was. I
talked with him and he told me it wasn't a woodchuck or a rabbit. He said it
was something else. I pitched in and helped him dig. Looks to me like he found
an old tank of some sort buried out there in the woods."

"Towser wouldn't dig up any tank," protested
Taine. "He wouldn't care about anything except a rabbit or a
woodchuck."

"He was working hard," insisted Beasly. "He
seemed to be excited."

"Maybe the woodchuck just dug his hole under this old
tank or whatever it might be."

"Maybe so," Beasly agreed. He fiddled with the
radio some more. He got a disk jockey who was pretty terrible.

Taine shoveled eggs and bacon onto plates and brought them
to the table. He poured big cups of coffee and began buttering the toast.

"Dive in," he said to Beasly.

"This is good of you, Hiram, to take me in like this. I
won't stay no longer than it takes to find a job."

"Well, I didn't exactly say-"

"There are times," said Beasly, "when I get
to thinking I haven't got a friend and then I remember your ma, how nice she
was to me and all-"

"Oh, all right," said Taine.

He knew when he was licked.

He brought the toast and a jar of jam to the table and sat
down, beginning to eat.

"Maybe you got something I could help you with,"
suggested Beasly, using the back of his hand to wipe egg off his chin.

"I have a load of furniture out in the driveway. I
could use a man to help me get it down into the basement."