"What's eating you, Miss Kent?" The blonde seemed genuinely puzzled,
but again the voice came from the plastic box,
"The old maid's off her rocker. You'd think she was reading my mind."
Switching her trim little hips, the blonde walked back to her own camp.
Bertha Kent dropped numbly on the bench, staring at the ugly box.
"Reading my mind," the woman had said. Somehow the machine had done
precisely that, translating the blonde's spoken words into the real,
emotional meaning behind them. It was a terrifying gadget. Bertha was
hypnotized by its potential horror--like the brutal, devastating truth
spoken by a child.
A camper walked past on the road, waving at Miss Kent and calling out
a cheerful good morning. But again the machine read the real meaning
behind the pleasant words.
"So you've finally lost your man, Miss Kent. The way you dished out the
orders, it's a wonder he stayed around as long as he did. And a pity:
you're an attractive woman. You should make some man a good wife."
They all thought that. The whole camp had been watching her, laughing
at her. Bertha felt helpless and alone. She needed--wanted--someone
else; it surprised her when she faced that fact.
Then it dawned on her: the camper was right; the blonde was right. She
had lost Walt through her own ridiculous bull-headedness. In order to
assert herself. To be an individualist, she had always thought. And
what did that matter, if it imposed this crushing loneliness?
For a moment a kind of madness seized her. It was the diabolical
machine that was tormenting her, not the truth it told. She snatched a
piece of her broken food box and struck at the plastic case blindly.
There was a splash of fire; the gadget broke.
She saw Walt look up from his stove. She saw him move toward her. But
she stood paralyzed by a shattering trauma of pain. The voice still
came from the speaker, and this time it was her own. Her mind was
stripped naked; she saw herself whole, unsheltered by the protective
veneer of rationalization.
And she knew the pattern of the dream-man she had loved since her
childhood; she knew why the dream had been self-defeating.
For the idealization was her own father. That impossible paragon
created by the worship of a child.
The shock was its own cure. She was too well-balanced to accept the
tempting escape of total disorientation. Grimly she fought back the
tide of madness, and in that moment she found maturity. She ran toward
Walt, tears of gratitude in her eyes. She felt his arms around her, and
she clung to him desperately.
"I was terrified; I needed you, Walt; I never want to be alone again."
"Needed me?" he repeated doubtfully.
"I love you." After a split-second's hesitation, she felt his lips warm
on hers.
From the corner of her eye she saw a chute dart out of nowhere and
scoop up the broken plastic box from the camp table. They both vanished
again. That was a miracle, too, she supposed; but not nearly as
important as hers.
Then the reason of a logical mind asserted its own form of realism:
of course, none of it had happened. The mind-reading gadget had been
a device created in her own subconscious, a psychological trick to
by-pass the dream that had held her imprisoned. She knew enough
psychology to understand that.
She ran her fingers through Walt's dark hair and repeated softly,
"I love you, Walt Gordon."
* * * * *
Was it an illusion? I believe that, Bill, because later on, when I
thought of using the grapple, I brought the Semantic-Translator back
from nowhere. Apparently the smaller gadget had been in the console or
behind it. I hadn't seen it when I searched, because my eyes had been
hurt by the glare of light.
In the process the Translator somehow got twisted around, for the chute
dragged it back vertically through the coil of wire. It touched the
wall of the cylinder, and the whole machine exploded.
It was impossible to save anything from the wreckage. But as a
physicist I assure you, Bill, the transposition of matter into light
is, in terms of our present science, a physical impossibility. It is
certainly not the sort of invention that could have been produced by a
senile old man, pottering around in a home laboratory. The only thing I
regret is that I had no opportunity to examine the Semantic-Translator,
but I'm sure it would have proved just as much nonsense.
I'm going up to Yosemite tomorrow for a couple of weeks. If you want
any further details on the Price inventory, look me up at the office
when I come home.
Yours,