Read Ebook: Dark recess by Smith George O George Oliver Poulton Peter Illustrator

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Ebook has 522 lines and 20075 words, and 11 pages

Hanson took a brief rest from the hard job, by recalling and telling Maculay every risque story he could remember.

Then he was at it again, prying and probing, and reversing Maculay's attitude on gambling, liquor, tobacco, and politics. He made a slight revision on Cliff's idea of proper dress; the physicist had a horror of appearing dirty, even when engaged in the dirtiest of jobs. With some effort the doctor convinced Maculay that a mechanic emerging from beneath a car with a face full of grime was not automatically an undesirable character, either to men or women. The crux of the matter was whether he liked that condition of dirt or not.

With a number of factors accomplished, Hanson took a deep breath, felt his pulse, counted his heartbeat and respiration, and fished for a pill from his desk and swallowed it quickly before he went on. The hardest part was to come.

Cliff took himself seriously, far too seriously. With delicate verbal barbs, Hanson began to poke fun at some of the imbecilities of pedantic reasoning. Maculay offered resistance at first, but Hanson worked him over the ground carefully, pointing out that Maculay, the only man in the world capable of understanding the variable-matrix wave mechanics, was in no position to snort at his fellow man. After all, Gertrude Stein had once gained great popularity on the theory that no one could understand her and therefore she must be sheer genius. Eventually he had Cliff laughing over an old limerick:

Hanson worked over Maculay's Equations with a bit of acid humor. In third person, he had Maculay chuckling over the physicist who worked for years on some mathematics that did not come out even. Gradually, the doctor convinced his patient that he was not Clifford Maculay, the renowned abstract mathematician, but Maculay's nephew--the black sheep of the family--who viewed the brainy members with as much distaste as they viewed him. Young Cliff had often been mistaken for his brilliant uncle, and found this funny, since he felt himself smarter than his namesake; he, young Cliff, had fun whereas his uncle had only hard work to show for his life. Actually, any pondering of his uncle's work made young Cliff sick to his stomach, and he was glad to ignore such things; the whole theory was so much stupidity.

And for one year, Clifford Maculay, physicist, would be as different from his former self as was possible without breaking the law to bits.

"At the end of this year, you will return to your apartment in Washington, take a good night's sleep, and awaken as Doctor Clifford Maculay. Then, and only then will you remember; and you will realize furthermore that this job of relaxation has been forced upon you for your own good. You will then be able to solve the error in your calculations."

Hanson paused for a moment, pondering as to the advisability of giving the hypnotized physicist a key-word to bring him out of the post-hypnotic suggestion. But Doctor Hanson was seventy years old; he knew all too well that a year from this moment he might be dead and gone. He viewed it calmly, but not disinterestedly, and decided against a key-word; it only introduced a conflicting factor.

Let the man awaken of his own accord.

Then he awakened Maculay, who sat back in his chair with a chuckle, reached for a cigarette from the box on Hanson's desk, and puffed at it with relish.

"How do you feel?" asked the doctor.

"Like a million," said Maculay.

"Good. Come back in one year. I'll have my girl make an appointment. For now, we're all finished."

Doctor Hanson stood and watched Maculay head for the door; the physicist's step had a certain bounce, curtailed by the fact that the unused muscles of his body were not used to the catlike stride of the completely balanced, healthy man. A few days of that sort of bounce and Maculay would have it. The door closed exuberantly and Cliff was on his way to a one-year binge.

He paused once outside of the doctor's office. Ava Longacre was bent over some notes, and Cliff viewed her contemplatively. She stood up and smiled at him. It was a sort of professional smile, the kind she gave all of the doctor's visitors; it made no difference to Ava whether the visitor were seventy or seventeen. She gave each of them the same dry smile.

Cliff crossed the office in a quick stride and put both hands on her shoulders. He drew her forward, felt her instant stiffening relax; with a cheerful upsurge of spirit he put an arm around her, tilted her face upward with his free hand and kissed her. He felt her yield to him, press against him softly, then respond.

Cliff knew he could have her, but in that moment he also knew that he really did not want her. Ava was a bit over thirty; she had a quiet, mature quality--good-looking, but far past the radiant flush of youth. A hard-working woman, efficient, intelligent, Hanson's nurse, medical aide, and receptionist, did not offer the fun and frivolity that Cliff Maculay sought.

He stepped back and smiled down at her. "Nice," he said with a chuckle. Then he kissed her again, lightly on the mouth, turned, and left the office.

Her cheeks burning, Ava Longacre stamped into Hanson's office.

"What goes on?" she demanded. "What on earth did you do to that man?"

"Why?"

"He came in here like the proverbial absent-minded professor, his eyes blank and sort of muttering to himself about radiation mechanics or the like. He didn't even look at me."

"Then?"

"On his way out he sort of grabbed me and kissed me."

Hanson nodded appreciatively. "You liked it?" he chuckled.

Ava sat down, landing in the chair with a thud. "When a man puts a hand on me and my knees turn to jelly," she said quietly, "I oscillate madly between hating his guts and wanting him to try it again. That sort of thing would play hell with a girl's morals."

"Shucks," chuckled Hanson. "I've just violated all of the rules of medicine. I've just treated a man against his will--and turned an introvert inside out."

"You sure did," nodded Ava.

"He'll be back again in a year--and normal, then."

"But how do you turn an introvert inside out?"

"Reverse his sense of values."

"But--"

"His memory pattern? That's difficult. To make him more or less stable for that year, I sort of tampered with his memory on a temporary basis, also. He thinks he is all sorts of things that he has never been--but has probably wanted to be from time to time."

"Is that why he kissed me?"

"Partly. But you're the woman he should have when normal, not as he is now. That's--"

"So you gave him a false memory, complete with a lot of details to explain just about every possible question, hey?"

"Yep."

"And just how was this background furnished?" she demanded.

"Remember it is only temporary and need not be complete. Just sufficient to justify its being."

"Don't quibble."

Hanson laughed. "Well, when a man of seventy starts to furnish a bit of background for a youth of thirty-odd, what better than a few true experiences from the old man's past."

Ava Longacre snorted. "I'll bet you were a hellion in your youth," she snapped. "And in your old age you're a nasty old lecher."

Hanson squinted at her. "I wish I were forty again," he leered. "But worry not, m'lady. Maybe the basic idea was mine, but Maculay kissed you on his own account. And I commend his taste."

Ava uttered a single, explosive "Oh!" and stalked out angrily, slamming the door behind her. She leaned against the hardwood panels and listened to the roar of Hanson's laughter die in a slow gurgle. She pegged it properly as part hysteria; the hours of hard mental effort spent on Maculay would have taken a lot of pep out of the Old Boy, and he would then clutch at anything remotely amusing and make an uproariously funny incident out of it. But this was not funny.

She remembered Maculay's hand on her, and her body went supple against the door. Then by sheer mental effort she snapped her head erect and walked from the door, determined to forget it.

Ava did not recognize the fact that for hours, days, or months--and perhaps forever--she might be telling herself that it was a good thing to forget about.

It came with a roar of sound from the radio, which eliminated all communications instantly, and continued on a diminishing power for an hour until it fell below the cosmic noise level. It appeared in the celestial globe as an ebon shaft; measurements made it a half mile in diameter but extending from beyond the range of the globe in both directions. It was as straight as it could be. On the other ships, the same facts were noted.

Upon the several planets of the solar system, cosmic-ray counters went crazy. Showers of unprecedented violence bathed the solar system in a raging torrent of high-energy particles. The showers continued, diminishing in intensity as time went on; the slower particles arriving last, of course.

The auroras flamed bright for an hour; as soon as the shift had shaken the wits out of every human in the solar system, the big observatories set their big glasses on the fixed stars and consulted quadrant-protractors to ascertain what the shift had done. On photographic plates of operating telescopes, the shift was barely noticeable upon the images of brighter stars. The dimmer ones had danced aside and back too swiftly for the emulsion to register. But it had been a swift jiggle up and back; now things were as they had been once more save for the big mystery that caused the radio lanes to buzz, and made men ask their neighbors what it could have been.

Cliff Maculay, bent back across the bar with his elbows hooked over the edge and a glass in his right hand, chuckled amusedly.

"But this isn't funny," complained a comely woman in a strapless gown at his left.

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