[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man, of
course, is king. But how about a live wire, a smart
businessman, in a civilization of 100% pure chumps?
Some things had not changed. A potter's wheel was still a potter's
wheel and clay was still clay. Efim Hawkins had built his shop near
Goose Lake, which had a narrow band of good fat clay and a narrow beach
of white sand. He fired three bottle-nosed kilns with willow charcoal
from the wood lot. The wood lot was also useful for long walks while
the kilns were cooling; if he let himself stay within sight of them,
he would open them prematurely, impatient to see how some new shape or
glaze had come through the fire, and--_ping!_--the new shape or glaze
would be good for nothing but the shard pile back of his slip tanks.
A business conference was in full swing in his shop, a modest cube
of brick, tile-roofed, as the Chicago-Los Angeles "rocket" thundered
overhead--very noisy, very swept-back, very fiery jets, shaped as
sleekly swift-looking as an airborne barracuda.
The buyer from Marshall Fields was turning over a black-glazed one
liter carafe, nodding approval with his massive, handsome head. "This
is real pretty," he told Hawkins and his own secretary, Gomez-Laplace.
"This has got lots of what ya call real est'etic principles. Yeah, it
is real pretty."
"How much?" the secretary asked the potter.
"Seven-fifty each in dozen lots," said Hawkins. "I ran up fifteen dozen
last month."
"They are real est'etic," repeated the buyer from Fields. "I will take
them all."
"I don't think we can do that, doctor," said the secretary. "They'd
cost us $1,350. That would leave only $532 in our quarter's budget.
And we still have to run down to East Liverpool to pick up some cheap
dinner sets."
"Dinner sets?" asked the buyer, his big face full of wonder.
"Dinner sets. The department's been out of them for two months now. Mr.
Garvy-Seabright got pretty nasty about it yesterday. Remember?"
"Garvy-Seabright, that meat-headed bluenose," the buyer said
contemptuously. "He don't know nothin' about est'etics. Why for don't
he lemme run my own department?" His eye fell on a stray copy of
_Whambozambo Comix_ and he sat down with it. An occasional deep chuckle
or grunt of surprise escaped him as he turned the pages.
Uninterrupted, the potter and the buyer's secretary quickly closed a
deal for two dozen of the liter carafes. "I wish we could take more,"
said the secretary, "but you heard what I told him. We've had to
turn away customers for ordinary dinnerware because he shot the last
quarter's budget on some Mexican piggy banks some equally enthusiastic
importer stuck him with. The fifth floor is packed solid with them."
"I'll bet they look mighty est'etic."
"They're painted with purple cacti."
* * * * *
The potter shuddered and caressed the glaze of the sample carafe.
The buyer looked up and rumbled, "Ain't you dummies through yakkin'
yet? What good's a seckertary for if'n he don't take the burden of
_de_-tail off'n my back, harh?"
"We're all through, doctor. Are you ready to go?"
The buyer grunted peevishly, dropped _Whambozambo Comix_ on the floor
and led the way out of the building and down the log corduroy road to
the highway. His car was waiting on the concrete. It was, like all
contemporary cars, too low-slung to get over the logs. He climbed down
into the car and started the motor with a tremendous sparkle and roar.
"Gomez-Laplace," called out the potter under cover of the noise, "did
anything come of the radiation program they were working on the last
time I was on duty at the Pole?"
"The same old fallacy," said the secretary gloomily. "It stopped us on
mutation, it stopped us on culling, it stopped us on segregation, and
now it's stopped us on hypnosis."
"Well, I'm scheduled back to the grind in nine days. Time for another
firing right now. I've got a new luster to try...."
"I'll miss you. I shall be 'vacationing'--running the drafting room of
the New Century Engineering Corporation in Denver. They're going to put
up a two hundred-story office building, and naturally somebody's got to
be on hand."
"Naturally," said Hawkins with a sour smile.
There was an ear-piercingly sweet blast as the buyer leaned on the horn
button. Also, a yard-tall jet of what looked like flame spurted up from
the car's radiator cap; the car's power plant was a gas turbine, and
had no radiator.
"I'm coming, doctor," said the secretary dispiritedly. He climbed down
into the car and it whooshed off with much flame and noise.
The potter, depressed, wandered back up the corduroy road and
contemplated his cooling kilns. The rustling wind in the boughs was
obscuring the creak and mutter of the shrinking refractory brick.
Hawkins wondered about the number two kiln--a reduction fire on a load
of lusterware mugs. Had the clay chinking excluded the air? Had it
been a properly smoky blaze? Would it do any harm if he just took one
close--?
* * * * *
Common sense took Hawkins by the scruff of the neck and yanked him
over to the tool shed. He got out his pick and resolutely set off on a
prospecting jaunt to a hummocky field that might yield some oxides. He
was especially low on coppers.
The long walk left him sweating hard, with his lust for a peek into the
kiln quiet in his breast. He swung his pick almost at random into one
of the hummocks; it clanged on a stone which he excavated. A largely
obliterated inscription said:
ERSITY OF CHIC
OGICAL LABO
ELOVED MEMORY OF
KILLED IN ACT
The potter swore mildly. He had hoped the field would turn out to be a
cemetery, preferably a once-fashionable cemetery full of once-massive
bronze caskets moldered into oxides of tin and copper.
* * * * *
Well, hell, maybe there was some around anyway.
He headed lackadaisically for the second largest hillock and sliced
into it with his pick. There was a stone to undercut and topple into
a trench, and then the potter was very glad he'd stuck at it. His
nostrils were filled with the bitter smell and the dirt was tinged with
the exciting blue of copper salts. The pick went _clang_!
Hawkins, puffing, pried up a stainless steel plate that was quite badly
stained and was also marked with incised letters. It seemed to have
pulled loose from rotting bronze; there were rivets on the back that
brought up flakes of green patina. The potter wiped off the surface
dirt with his sleeve, turned it to catch the sunlight obliquely and
read:
"HONEST JOHN BARLOW
"Honest John," famed in university annals, represents a challenge
which medical science has not yet answered: revival of a human being
accidentally thrown into a state of suspended animation.
In 1988 Mr. Barlow, a leading Evanston real estate dealer, visited
his dentist for treatment of an impacted wisdom tooth. His dentist
requested and received permission to use the experimental anesthetic
Cycloparadimethanol-B-7, developed at the University.
After administration of the anesthetic, the dentist resorted to his
drill. By freakish mischance, a short circuit in his machine
delivered 220 volts of 60-cycle current into the patient. (In a
damage suit instituted by Mrs. Barlow against the dentist, the
University and the makers of the drill, a jury found for the
defendants.) Mr. Barlow never got up from the dentist's chair and
was assumed to have died of poisoning, electrocution or both.
Morticians preparing him for embalming discovered, however, that
their subject was--though certainly not living--just as certainly
not dead. The University was notified and a series of exhaustive
tests was begun, including attempts to duplicate the trance state
on volunteers. After a bad run of seven cases which ended fatally,
the attempts were abandoned.
Honest John was long an exhibit at the University museum, and
livened many a football game as mascot of the University's Blue
Crushers. The bounds of taste were overstepped, however, when a
pledge to Sigma Delta Chi was ordered in '03 to "kidnap" Honest
John from his loosely guarded glass museum case and introduce him
into the Rachel Swanson Memorial Girls' Gymnasium shower room.
On May 22nd, 2003, the University Board of Regents issued the
following order: "By unanimous vote, it is directed that the remains
of Honest John Barlow be removed from the University museum and
conveyed to the University's Lieutenant James Scott III Memorial
Biological Laboratories and there be securely locked in a specially
prepared vault. It is further directed that all possible measures
for the preservation of these remains be taken by the Laboratory
administration and that access to these remains be denied to all
persons except qualified scholars authorized in writing by the
Board. The Board reluctantly takes this action in view of recent
notices and photographs in the nation's press which, to say the
least, reflect but small credit upon the University."
* * * * *
It was far from his field, but Hawkins understood what had happened--an
early and accidental blundering onto the bare bones of the Levantman
shock anesthesia, which had since been replaced by other methods. To
bring subjects out of Levantman shock, you let them have a squirt of
simple saline in the trigeminal nerve. Interesting. And now about that
bronze--
He heaved the pick into the rotting green salts, expecting no
resistence and almost fractured his wrist. _Something_ down there was
_solid_. He began to flake off the oxides.
A half hour of work brought him down to phosphor bronze, a huge casting
of the almost incorruptible metal. It had weakened structurally over
the centuries; he could fit the point of his pick under a corroded boss
and pry off great creaking and grumbling striae of the stuff.
Hawkins wished he had an archeologist with him, but didn't dream of
returning to his shop and calling one to take over the find. He was an
all-around man: by choice and in his free time, an artist in clay and
glaze; by necessity, an automotive, electronics and atomic engineer
who could also swing a project in traffic control, individual and
group psychology, architecture or tool design. He didn't yell for a
specialist every time something out of his line came up; there were so
few with so much to do....
He trenched around his find, discovering that it was a great
brick-shaped bronze mass with an excitingly hollow sound. A long strip
of moldering metal from one of the long vertical faces pulled away,
exposing red rust that went _whoosh_ and was sucked into the interior
of the mass.
It had been de-aired, thought Hawkins, and there must have been an
inner jacket of glass which had crystalized through the centuries and
quietly crumbled at the first clang of his pick. He didn't know what a
vacuum would do to a subject of Levantman shock, but he had hopes, nor
did he quite understand what a real estate dealer was, but it might
have something to do with pottery. And _anything_ might have a bearing
on Topic Number One.
* * * * *
He flung his pick out of the trench, climbed out and set off at a
dog-trot for his shop. A little rummaging turned up a hypo and there
was a plasticontainer of salt in the kitchen.
Back at his dig, he chipped for another half hour to expose the
juncture of lid and body. The hinges were hopeless; he smashed them off.
Hawkins extended the telescopic handle of the pick for the best
leverage, fitted its point into a deep pit, set its built-in fulcrum,
and heaved. Five more heaves and he could see, inside the vault, what
looked like a dusty marble statue. Ten more and he could see that it
was the naked body of Honest John Barlow, Evanston real estate dealer,
uncorrupted by time.
The potter found the apex of the trigeminal nerve with his needle's
point and gave him 60 cc.
In an hour Barlow's chest began to pump.