The Ultimate Egoist (46 page)

“Why, he got sore. He got so sore he dropped everything and ran home to take a poke at her!”

“Ah,” said Berbelot. “And the Breather laughs easily, and you think it would—”

“It would,” I nodded, “get angry easily, if we could find the right way to do it.”

Berbelot rubbed his long hands together and beamed. “You’re a hot-headed fool, Hamilton, and I’m convinced that your genius is a happy accident quite unattached to your hypothetical mind. But I must congratulate you for the idea. In other words, you think if we get the Breather sore enough, it will try to get even, and contact us some way or other? I’ll be darned!”

“Thought you’d like it,” I said.

“Well, come on,” he said testily. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go down to the laboratory!” Suddenly he stopped. “Er … Hamilton … this story of yours. Did that man poke his wife after he got home?”

“I dunno,” I said blankly. “I just made up the story to illustrate my point. Could be.”

“Hm-m-m. If the Breather decided to … I mean, it’s a big creature, you know, and we have no idea—”

“Oh, never mind that,” I laughed, “the Breather can’t get past a television screen!”

Which only goes to show you how little I knew about the Ether Breather.

I was amazed by Berbelot’s laboratory museum. Did you know that in the old days more than two hundred years ago, they used electrically powered sets with a ground glass, fluorescent screen built right into the end of huge cathode tubes? Imagine. And before that, they used a revolving disk with holes punctured spirally, as a scanning mechanism! They had the beginnings of frequency modulation, though. But their sets were so crude, incredible as it may seem, that atmospheric disturbances caused interference in reception! Berbelot had copies of all these old and laughable attempts at broadcasting and receiving devices.

“All right, all right,” he snapped, elbow-deep in one of the first polychrome transmitters, “you’ve been here before. Come over here and give me a hand. You’re gawking like a castor bean farmer.”

I went over and followed his directions as he spot-welded, relayed,
and wound a coil or two of hair-fine wire. “My gosh,” I marveled, “how did you ever learn so much about television, Berbelot? I imagine it must have used up a little of your spare time to make a fortune in the perfume business.”

He laughed. “I’ll tell you, Hamilton,” he said. “Television and perfumery are very much alike. You know yourself that no such lovely women ever walk the Earth as you see every day in the news broadcasts. For the last eighty years, since the Duval shade selector was introduced, television has given flawless complexions to all the ladies that come over the air, and bull-shoulders to all the men. It’s all very phony, but it’s nice to look at. Perfumery is the same proposition. A woman who smelled like a rose petal naturally would undoubtedly have something the matter with her. But science gets to work on what has been termed, through the ages, as ‘B.O.’ My interest in aesthetically deluding the masses led me to both sciences.”

“Very ingenious,” I said, “but it isn’t going to help you to make the Breather sore.”

“My dear boy,” he said, “don’t be obtuse. Oh, turn down the nitrogen jets a trifle—that’s it.” He skillfully spotted seven leads into the video-circuit of the polychrome wave generator. “You see,” he went on, running the leads over to a box control with five push buttons and a rheostat set into it, “the Breather requires very special handling. It knows us and how our minds work, or it could never have thought, for instance, of having our secretary of state recite risqué verse over the air, the first time that official used color television. Now, you are noteworthy for your spontaneity. How would you go about angering this puff of etheric wind?”

“Well, I’d … I’d tell it it was a dirty so-and-so. I’d insult it. I’d say it was a sissy and dare it to fight. I … I’d—”

“That’s what I thought,” said Berbelot unkindly. “You’d cuss it out in your own foul idiom, forgetting that it has no pride to take down, and, as far as we know, no colleagues, community, inamoratae, or fellows to gossip to. No, Hamilton, we can’t insult it. It can insult us because it knows what we are and how we think, but we know nothing of it.”

“How else can you get a being sore, then, when you can’t hold
it up to ridicule or censure before itself or its fellow creatures?”

“By doing something to it personally that it won’t like.”

“Yeah—take a poke at it. Kick it in its vibrations. Stick a knife into its multiple personality.”

Berbelot laughed. “To change the subject, for no apparent reason,” he said, “have you ever run across my
Vierge Folle?
”

“A new perfume? Why, no.”

Berbelot crossed the room and came back with a handful of tiny vials. “Here.”

I sniffed. It was a marvelously delicate scent. It was subtle, smooth, calling up a mental picture of the veins in fine ivory. “Mmm. Nice.”

“Try this one,” he said. I did. It was fainter than the other; I had to draw in a lot of it before I detected the sweet, faint odor. “It’s called
Casuiste
,” said Berbelot. “Now try this one. It’s much fainter, you’ll have to really stretch to get it at all.”

“Nice business,” I grinned. “Making the poor unsuspecting male get inside the circle of the vixen’s arms before he’s under her spell.” I’d been reading some of his ad proofs. He chuckled. “That’s about the idea. Here.”

Berbelot handed me the vial and I expelled all the air in my lungs, hung my nose over the lip of the tube and let the air in with a roar. Next thing I knew I was strangling, staggering, swearing and letting go murderous rights and lefts at empty air. I thought I was going to die and I wished I could. When I blinked the tears out of my eyes, Berbelot was nowhere to be seen. I raged around the laboratory and finally saw him whisk around behind a massive old photoelectric transmitter. With a shriek I rushed him. He got practically inside the machine and I began taking it apart, with the firm conviction that I would keep on taking things apart long after I reached him. Luckily for him there were four thick busbars between us. He crouched behind them giggling until I reached a red-eyed state of wheezing impotence.

“Come out!” I gasped. “You ape-faced arthritic, come out of there and I’ll hit you so hard you’ll throttle on your shoelaces!”

“That,” he said instructively, “was a quadruple quintessence of musk.” He grinned. “Skunk.” He looked at me and laughed outright. “Super-skunk.”

I wrenched ineffectually at the bars. “A poor thing, but your very own, I’ll bet,” I said. “I am going to stick your arm so far down your neck you’ll digest your fingernails.”

“Mad, aren’t you?”

“Huh?”

“I said, you’re sore. I didn’t cuss you out, or hold you up to ridicule, or anything, and look how mad you are!”

I began to see the light. Make the Breather angry by—“What are you gibbering about?”

He took out a white handkerchief and waved it as he unwrapped his own body from the viscera of the old-fashioned transmitter. I had to grin. What can you do with a man like that?

“O.K.,” I said. “Peace, brother. But I’d suggest you treat the Breather better than you just treated me. And how in blazes you expect to get a smell like that through a polychrome transmitter is a little beyond me.”

“It isn’t simple,” he said, “but I think it can be done. Do you know anything about the wave theory of perception?”

“Not a helluva lot,” I said. “Something about a sort of spectrum arrangement of the vibrations of sensory perception, isn’t it?”

“Mmm … yes. Thought waves are of high-frequency, and although ether-borne, not of an electromagnetic character. So also are the allied vibrations, taste and smell. Sound, too.”

“Wait a minute! Sound is a purely physical vibration of air particles against our auditory apparatus.”

“Of course—from the source of the sound
to
that apparatus. But from the inner ear to the hearing center in the brain, it is translated into a wave of the spectrum group I’m talking about. So with touch and sight.”

“I begin to see what you’re driving at. But how can you reach the Breather with these waves—providing you can produce and transmit them?”

“Oh, I can do that. Simply a matter of stepping up high-frequency emanations.”

“You seem pretty confident that the Breather will be affected by the same waves that influence our senses.”

“I wouldn’t use the same waves. That’s why I brought up the spectrum theory. Now look; we’ll take thought waves of the purely internal psyche … the messages that relay brain impulses to different brain centers. Pure thought, with no action; pure imagery. These are of a certain wave length. We’ll call it 1,000. Now, take the frequencies of smell, touch and sight waves. They’re 780, 850, and 960 respectively. Now, how did we contact the Ether Breather?”

“By the polychrome wave.”

“That’s right.”

“And you mean that the ratio—”

Berbelot nodded. “The ratio between the Breather’s thought waves and its sensory vibrations must be the same as that between ours.”

“Why must it be?”

“Because its mental reactions are the same, as I told you before—only exaggerated. It reasons as we do, more or less. Its mental setup corresponds with ours.”

“Doggone,” I said admiringly, “it’s all so simple when you’re told how to do it. You mean, then, to discover the ratio between what is to me a pain in the neck, and what it would be to the Breather.”

“That’s it. But it won’t be a pain in the neck.”

“Where will it be, then?”

“You’re tuning in the wrong frequency,” he chuckled. “I’m going to make him suffer the best way I know how, and—my business is perfumery.”

“Ah,” I breathed.

“Now, I’m going to cook up something really pretty. I’m going to turn out a stench that will make the Breather’s illimitable edges curl!”

“From the smell of that essence of ancient egg you just gassed me with,” I said, “it ought to be pretty.”

“It will be. Let’s see; for a base we’ll use butyl mercaptan. Something sweet, and something sour—”

“—something borrowed and something blue.”

“Don’t be a silly romanticist.” He was busy at his chemical bench. “I’ll scorch a little pork fat and … ah. Attar of roses.”

For a moment he was quiet, carefully measuring drops of liquid
into a sealed exciter. Then he flipped the switch and came over to me. “It’ll be ready in a jiffy. Let’s rig up the transmitter.”

We did as we had done before, a year ago. We maneuvered the transmitting cells of the polychrome transmitter over and above a receiver. It would send to Berbelot’s country place eight hundred miles away by a directional beam, and return the signal by wire. If the Breather interfered, it would show up on the receiver. When we had done it before, we had had the odd experience of holding a conversation with our own images on the screen.

“Now I’ll distill my
odeur d’ordure
,” he said, “and when it’s run through, you can be my guinea pig.”

“Not on your life, Berbelot,” I said, backing away. He grinned and went about fixing his still. It was a beautiful little glass affair, and he worked entirely under a huge bell jar in transferring it from the exciter. Butyl and burned meat and attar of roses. My gosh.

In half an hour it was ready—a dusty brown colloid, just a few drops in the retort. “Come on, Hamilton,” said Berbelot, “just a little sniff. I want to give you a preview.”

“Uh-uh!” I snorted. “Here—wait.”

I gave a buzz on the buzzer, and in a couple of seconds Cogan, Berbelot’s valet, popped in. Cogan’s face always reminded me, for some reason, of a smorgasbord tray.

“Did you bring your nose?” I asked, leading him over to the chemical bench.

“Yessir.”

“Well”—I slid back the little panel in the neck of the retort, standing at arm’s length—“stick it in there.”

“Oh, but I—” He looked plaintively toward Berbelot, who smiled.

“Well … oh!” The “Well” was diffidence, and the “Oh” was when I grabbed him by the collar and stuck his face in the warm fumes.

Cogan went limp and stiffened so fast that he didn’t move. He rose slowly, as if the power of that mighty stench was lifting him by the jawbone, turned around twice with his eyes streaming, and headed for the door. He walked lightly and slowly on the balls of his feet, with his arms bent and half raised, like a somnambulist. He walked
smack into the doorpost, squeaked, said, “Oh … my … goodness—” faintly, and disappeared into the corridor.

“Well,” said Berbelot pensively. “I really think that that stuff smells bad.”

“Seems as though,” I grinned. “I … oh, boy!” I ran to the retort and closed the slide. “Good gosh! Did we give him a concentrated shot of
that?
”

“
You
did.”

It permeated the room, and of all malodorous effluvia, it was the most noisome. It was rotten celery, than which there is no more sickening smell in nature. It was rancid butter. It was bread-mold. It was garlic garnishing fermented Limburger. It was decay. It was things running around on six legs, mashed. It was awful.

“Berbelot,” I gasped, “you don’t want to kill the Breather.”

“It won’t kill him. He just won’t like it.”

“Check.
Whew!
” I mopped my face. “Now how are you going to get it up to the Ether Breather?”

“Well, we’ll use the olfactometer on it,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Trade gadget. I knocked it together years ago. Without it I wouldn’t have made a cent in this business.” He led me over to a stand on which was an enormously complicated machine, all glittering relays and electratomic bridges. “Good heavens!” I said. “What does it do—play music?”

“Maybe you wondered why I could reel off so much about the wave theory of sensory perception,” he said. “Look—see these dials? And this sensitized knob?”

“Yeah?”

“That fist-sized, faceted knob has each of its twelve hundred and two sides coated with a different chemical reagent, very sensitive. I drop it into a smell—”

“You
what?
”

“You heard me. An odor is an emanation of gases from the smellable specimen, constituting a loss of mass of about one fifty-billionth in a year, more or less, depending on the strength of the odor and the consistency of the emanating body. Now, I expose this
knob to our Cogan-crusher”—he walked over to the retort with the knob in his hand, trailing its cable, and slid the panel back a bit—“and the gas touches every surface. Each reacts if it can. The results are collected, returned to the olfactometer, translated into a number on the big dial.”