"What do you see?"
"My own face in the mirror."
"Of course. Now I start the reflector rotating." There was a faint whir,
and the mirror was spinning smoothly, still with only a slightly blurred
image of myself. "Listen, now," continued van Manderpootz. "Here is what
you are to do. You will think of a generic noun. 'House,' for instance.
If you think of house, you will see, not an individual house, but your
ideal house, the house of all your dreams and desires. If you think of
a horse, you will see what your mind conceives as the perfect horse,
such a horse as dream and longing create. Do you understand? Have you
chosen a topic?"
"Yes." After all, I was only twenty-eight; the noun I had chosen
was--girl.
"Good," said the professor. "I turn on the current."
There was a blue radiance behind the mirror. My own face still stared
back at me from the spinning surface, but something was forming behind
it, building up, growing. I blinked; when I focused my eyes again, it
was--_she_ was--there.
Lord! I can't begin to describe her. I don't even know if I saw her
clearly the first time. It was like looking into another world and
seeing the embodiment of all longings, dreams, aspirations, and ideals.
It was so poignant a sensation that it crossed the borderline into pain.
It was--well, exquisite torture or agonized delight. It was at once
unbearable and irresistible.
But I gazed. I had to. There was a haunting familiarity about the
impossibly beautiful features. I had seen the face--somewhere--sometime.
In dreams? No; I realized suddenly what was the source of that
familiarity. This was no living woman, but a synthesis. Her nose was the
tiny, impudent one of Whimsy White at her loveliest moment; her lips
were the perfect bow of Tips Alva; her silvery eyes and dusky velvet
hair were those of Joan Caldwell. But the aggregate, the sum total, the
face in the mirror--that was none of these; it was a face impossibly,
incredibly, outrageously beautiful.
Only her face and throat were visible, and the features were cool,
expressionless, and still as a carving. I wandered suddenly if she could
smile, and with the thought, she did. If she had been beautiful before,
now her beauty flamed to such a pitch that it was--well, insolent; it
was an affront to be so lovely; it was insulting. I felt a wild surge of
anger that the image before me should flaunt such beauty, and yet
be--_non-existent_! It was deception, cheating, fraud, a promise that
could never be fulfilled.
Anger died in the depths of that fascination. I wondered what the rest
of her was like, and instantly she moved gracefully back until her full
figure was visible. I must be a prude at heart, for she wasn't wearing
the usual cuirass-and-shorts of that year, but an iridescent
four-paneled costume that all but concealed her dainty knees. But her
form was slim and erect as a column of cigarette smoke in still air, and
I knew that she could dance like a fragment of mist on water. And with
that thought she did move, dropping in a low curtsy, and looking up with
the faintest possible flush crimsoning the curve of her throat. Yes, I
must be a prude at heart; despite Tips Alva and Whimsy White and the
rest, my ideal was modest.
It was unbelievable that the mirror was simply giving back my thoughts.
She seemed as real as myself, and--after all--I guess she was. As real
as myself, no more, no less, because she was part of my own mind. And at
this point I realized that van Manderpootz was shaking me and bellowing,
"Your time's up. Come out of it! Your half-hour's up!"
He must have switched off the current. The image faded, and I took my
face from the tube, dropping it on my arms.
"O-o-o-o-o-oh!" I groaned.
"How do you feel?" he snapped.
"Feel? All right--physically." I looked up.
Concern flickered in his blue eyes. "What's the cube root of 4913?" he
crackled sharply.
I've always been quick at figures. "It's--uh--17," I returned dully.
"Why the devil--?"
"You're all right mentally," he announced. "Now--why were you sitting
there like a dummy for half an hour? My idealizator must have worked, as
is only natural for a van Manderpootz creation, but what were you
thinking of?"
"I thought--I thought of 'girl'," I groaned.
He snorted. "Hah! You would, you idiot! 'House' or 'horse' wasn't good
enough; you had to pick something with emotional connotations. Well, you
can start right in forgetting her, because she doesn't exist."
I couldn't give up hope, as easily as that. "But can't you--can't
you--?" I didn't even know what I meant to ask.
"Van Manderpootz," he announced, "is a mathematician, not a magician. Do
you expect me to materialize an ideal for you?" When I had no reply but
a groan, he continued. "Now I think it safe enough to try the device
myself. I shall take--let's see--the thought 'man.' I shall see what the
superman looks like, since the ideal of van Manderpootz can be nothing
less than superman." He seated himself. "Turn that switch," he said.
"Now!"
I did. The tubes glowed into low blue light. I watched dully,
disinterestedly; nothing held any attraction for me after that image of
the ideal.
"Huh!" said van Manderpootz suddenly. "Turn it on, I say! I see nothing
but my own reflection."
I stared, then burst into a hollow laugh. The mirror was spinning; the
banks of tubes were glowing; the device was operating.
Van Manderpootz raised his face, a little redder than usual. I laughed
half hysterically. "After all," he said huffily, "one might have a lower
ideal of man than van Manderpootz. I see nothing nearly so humorous as
your situation."
The laughter died. I went miserably home, spent half the remainder of
the night in morose contemplation, smoked nearly two packs of
cigarettes, and didn't get to the office at all the next day.
* * * * *
Tips Alva got back to town for a week-end broadcast, but I didn't even
bother to see her, just phoned her and told her I was sick. I guess my
face lent credibility to the story, for she was duly sympathetic, and
her face in the phone screen was quite anxious. Even at that, I couldn't
keep my eyes away from her lips because, except for a bit too lustrous
make-up, they were the lips of the ideal. But they weren't enough; they
just weren't enough.
Old N. J. began to worry again. I couldn't sleep late of mornings any
more, and after missing that one day, I kept getting down earlier and
earlier until one morning I was only ten minutes late. He called me in
at once.
"Look here, Dixon," he said. "Have you been to a doctor recently?"
"I'm not sick," I said listlessly.
"Then for Heaven's sake, marry the girl! I don't care what chorus she
kicks in, marry her and act like a human being again."
"I--can't."
"Oh. She's already married, eh?"
Well, I couldn't tell him she didn't exist. I couldn't say I was in love
with a vision, a dream, an ideal. He thought I was a little crazy,
anyway, so I just muttered "Yeah," and didn't argue when he said
gruffly: "Then you'll get over it. Take a vacation. Take _two_
vacations. You might as well for all the good you are around here."
I didn't leave New York; I lacked the energy. I just mooned around the
city for a while, avoiding my friends, and dreaming of the impossible
beauty of the face in the mirror. And by and by the longing to see that
vision of perfection once more began to become overpowering. I don't
suppose anyone except me can understand the lure of that memory; the
face, you see, had been my ideal, my concept of perfection. One sees
beautiful women here and there in the world; one falls in love, but
always, no matter how great their beauty or how deep one's love, they
fall short in some degree of the secret vision of the ideal. But not the
mirrored face; she was my ideal, and therefore, whatever imperfections
she might have had in the minds of others, in my eyes she had none.
None, that is, save the terrible one of being only an ideal, and
therefore unattainable--but that is a fault inherent in all perfection.
It was a matter of days before I yielded. Common sense told me it was
futile, even foolhardy, to gaze again on the vision of perfect
desirability. I fought against the hunger, but I fought hopelessly, and
was not at all surprised to find myself one evening rapping on van
Manderpootz's door in the University Club. He wasn't there; I'd been
hoping he wouldn't be, since it gave me an excuse to seek him in his
laboratory in the Physics Building, to which I would have dragged him
anyway.
There I found him, writing some sort of notations on the table that held
the idealizator. "Hello, Dixon," he said. "Did it ever occur to you that
the ideal university cannot exist? Naturally not since it must be
composed of perfect students and perfect educators, in which case the
former could have nothing to learn and the latter, therefore, nothing
to teach."
What interest had I in the perfect university and its inability to
exist? My whole being was desolate over the non-existence of another
ideal. "Professor," I said tensely, "may I use that--that thing of yours
again? I want to--uh--see something."
My voice must have disclosed the situation, for van Manderpootz looked
up sharply. "So!" he snapped. "So you disregarded my advice! Forget her,
I said. Forget her because she doesn't exist."
"But--I can't! Once more, Professor--only once more!"
He shrugged, but his blue, metallic eyes were a little softer than
usual. After all, for some inconceivable reason, he likes me. "Well,
Dixon," he said, "you're of age and supposed to be of mature
intelligence. I tell you that this is a very stupid request, and van
Manderpootz always knows what he's talking about. If you want to stupefy
yourself with the opium of impossible dreams, go ahead. This is the last
chance you'll have, for tomorrow the idealizator of van Manderpootz goes
into the Bacon head of Isaak there. I shall shift the oscillators so
that the psychons, instead of becoming light quanta, emerge as an
electron flow--a current which will actuate Isaak's vocal apparatus and
come out as speech." He paused musingly. "Van Manderpootz will hear the
voice of the ideal. Of course Isaak can return only what psychons he
receives from the brain of the operator, but just as the image in the
mirror, the thoughts will have lost their human impress, and the words
will be those of an ideal." He perceived that I wasn't listening, I
suppose. "Go ahead, imbecile!" he grunted.
I did. The glory that I hungered after flamed slowly into being,
incredible in loveliness, and somehow, unbelievably, even more beautiful
than on that other occasion. I know why now; long afterwards, van
Manderpootz explained that the very fact that I had seen an ideal once
before had altered my ideal, raised it to a higher level. With that face
among my memories, my concept of perfection was different than it had
been.
So I gazed and hungered. Readily and instantly the being in the mirror
responded to my thoughts with smile and movement. When I thought of
love, her eyes blazed with such tenderness that it seemed as if--I--I,
Dixon Wells--were part of those pairs who had made the great romances of
the world, Heloise and Abelard, Tristram and Isolde, Aucassin and
Nicolette. It was like the thrust of a dagger to feel van Manderpootz
shaking me, to hear his gruff voice calling, "Out of it! Out of it!
Time's up."
I groaned and dropped my face on my hands. The Professor had been right,
of course; this insane repetition had only intensified an unfulfillable
longing, and had made a bad mess ten times as bad. Then I heard him
muttering behind me. "Strange!" he murmured. "In fact, fantastic.
Oedipus--oedipus of the magazine covers and billboards."
I looked dully around. He was standing behind me, squinting, apparently,
into the spinning mirror beyond the end of the black tube. "Huh?" I
grunted wearily.
"That face," he said. "Very queer. You must have seen her features on a
hundred magazines, on a thousand billboards, on countless 'vision
broadcasts. The oedipus complex in a curious form."
"Eh? Could _you_ see her?"
"Of course!" he grunted. "Didn't I say a dozen times that the psychons
are transmuted to perfectly ordinary quanta of visible light? If you
could see her, why not I?"
"But--what about billboards and all?"
"That face," said the professor slowly. "It's somewhat idealized, of
course, and certain details are wrong. Her eyes aren't that pallid
silver-blue you imagined; they're green--sea-green, emerald colored."
"What the devil," I asked hoarsely, "are you talking about?"
"About the face in the mirror. It happens to be, Dixon, a close
approximation of the features of de Lisle d'Agrion, the Dragon Fly!"
"You mean--she's real? She exists? She lives? She--"
"Wait a moment, Dixon. She's real enough, but in accordance with your
habit, you're a little late. About twenty-five years too late, I should
say. She must now be somewhere in the fifties--let's see--fifty-three, I
think. But during your very early childhood, you must have seen her face
pictured everywhere, de Lisle d'Agrion, the Dragon Fly."