The Medusa Club is, loosely speaking, an association for professional
science fiction writers. No two of them will agree on what science
fiction is--or on anything else--but they all write it, or have
written it, or pretend they can write it, or something. They have three
kinds of meetings, or two and a half. One is for club politics, one is
for drinking, and the third is also for drinking, only more so. As a
rule, they meet in people's apartments, usually Preacher Flatt's or Ray
Alvarez', but every year at this time they rent a hotel ballroom and
throw a whingding. I'm a member in bad standing; the last time I paid
my dues was in 1950.
Rod Pfehl (the P is silent, as in Psmith) was standing in the doorway,
drunk, with a wad of dollar bills in his hand. "I'm the treasurer," he
said happily. "Gimme." Either he was the treasurer, or he had conned
a lot of people into thinking so. I paid him and started zigzagging
slowly across the floor, trading hellos, looking for liquor.
Tom Q. Jones went by in a hurry, carrying a big camera. That was
unusual; Tom Q. is head components designer for a leading radio-TV
manufacturer, and has sold, I guess, about two million words of science
fiction, but this was the first time I had ever seen him in motion,
or with anything but a highball in his hand. I spotted Punchy Carrol,
nut-brown in a red dress; and Duchamp biting his pipe; and Leigh
MacKean with her pale protoNordic face, as wistful and fey as the
White Knight's; and there was a fan named Harry Somebody, nervously
adjusting his hornrims as he peered across the room; and, this being
the Christmas Party, there were a lot of the strangest faces on earth.
Most of them were probably friends of friends, but you never knew;
one time there had been a quiet banker-type man at a Medusa meeting,
sitting in a corner and not saying much, who turned out to be Dorrance
Canning, an old idol of mine; he wrote the "Woman Who Slept" series
and other gorgeous stuff before I was out of knee pants.
There were two blue-jacketed bartenders, and the drinks were
eighty-five cents. Another reason I moved to the country is that the
amusements are cheaper. Nursing my collins, I steered around two broad
rumps in flounced satin and ran into Tom Q. He snapped a flashbulb in
my face, chortled something, and went away while I was still dazzled.
Somebody else with a lemon-colored spot for a head shook my left hand
and muttered at me, but I wasn't listening; I had just figured out that
what Tom had said, was, "There's no _film_ in it!"
* * * * *
Somebody fell down on the waxed floor; there was a little flurry of
screams and laughter. I found myself being joggled, and managed to
put away an inch of the collins to save it. Then I thought I saw Art
Greymbergen, my favorite publisher, but before I could get anywhere
near him Carrol's clear Sunday-school voice began calling, "The program
is about to begin--please take your seats!" and a moment later people
were moving sluggishly through the bar archway.
I looked at my watch, then hauled out my copy of the little
mimeographed sheet, full of earnest jocularity, that the club sent out
every year to announce the Party. It said that the program would begin
somewhere around 10, and it was that now.
This was impossible. The program always pivoted on Bill Plass, and Bill
never got there, or anywhere, until the party was due to break up.
But I looked when I got down near the bandstand, and by God there he
was, half as large as life, gesturing, flashing his Charlie Chaplin
grin, teetering like a nervous firewalker. He saw me and waved hello,
and then went on talking to Asa Akimisov, Ph.D. (A-K-I-M-I-S-O-V,
please, and never mind the Akimesian, or Akimsiov.)
Maybe it _was_ them atom bombs, I found a vacant folding chair with
a good view of the platform, and a better one of a striking brunette
in blue. Akimisov got up on the platform, with his neck sticking out
of his collar like a potted palm (he had lost forty pounds, again)
and began telling jokes. Ace is the second funniest man in Medusa,
the first being Plass; the peculiar thing is that Plass writes humor
professionally, and delivers his annual set-pieces the same way--the
rest of the time he is merely a perfectly fascinating morbid wit--but
Akimisov, who writes nothing but the most heavily thoughtful fiction
in the business, bubbles with humor all the time, a poor man's Sam
Levenson. I was going to write an article once proving that a writer's
personality on paper was his real one turned inside out, but I fell
afoul of some exceptions. Like Tom Q., who was still flashing his bulbs
over at the side of the platform, and being noisily suppressed--you
could paper him all over with his published stories, and never know the
difference.
The program was good, even for Medusa. Ned Burgeon, wearing a sky-blue
dinner jacket and a pepper-and-salt goatee, played his famous
twenty-one-string guitar; a dark-haired girl, a new one to me, sang in
a sweet, strong contralto; there was a skit involving Punchy Carrol as
a dream-beast, L. Vague Duchamp as a bewildered spaceman, and B. U.
Jadrys, the All-Lithuanian Boy, as a ticket agent for the Long Island
Railroad. Then came Plass's annual monologue, and there is just nothing
like those. I'm not exaggerating out of parochial pride (once a year
is enough Medusa for me): the simple truth is that Plass is a comic
genius.
He had his audience laid out flat, gasping and clutching its sides. Why
should a man like that waste his time writing fiction?
Toward the end he paused, looked up from his notes, and ad-libbed a
biting but not very funny wisecrack about--well, I'd better not say
about what. A certain member in the audience stiffened and half got
up, and there was a little embarrassed murmur under the laughter, but
it was over in a minute. Bill looked flustered. He went back to his
prepared speech, finished, and got a roar of applause.
I did my share, but I was worried. Bill can charm the rattles off
a snake; if he wanted to go in for quack-doctoring, nut cultism or
Canadian mining stock, let alone night-club comedy, he could be a
millionaire. That _gaffe_ simply hadn't been like him, at all. Still,
it was Bill's Dostoevskian soul that made him the funny man he was, and
God only knew what had been happening to him in the year since I'd been
in town....
Akimisov, as m.c., delivered the final words. He bowed, straightened,
and his pants fell down.
In the dressing room, when I got back there, Bill was busy apologizing
to the member on whose toes he had trodden--that apology would have
soothed a tiger with a toothache--and Akimisov, with a bewildered
expression, was holding up his pants. That was what I was curious
about; it was another false note--I didn't think Ace would stoop that
low for a laugh. The pants were too big for him, of course, but Ace had
always struck me as the kind of guy who wears a belt _and_ suspenders.
He did; but the tongue had come out of the belt-buckle, and all the
suspenders buttons had popped, all at once. Scouts were being sent out
to look for a belt that would fit.
I wandered out into the hall again. I was beginning to get a peculiar
feeling on one drink. Too many fresh vegetables; I can't take it like
I used to. So I went to the bar and got another.
When I came out, the brunette in the blue evening gown was standing
near the doorway listening to Larry Bagsby. Next thing I knew, she let
out a whoop, grabbed her bosom, and fetched Larry a good one on the
ear. This was unfair. I was a witness, and Larry hadn't done a thing
except look; her overworked shoulder straps had simply given way, like
Akimisov's suspenders.
* * * * *
Curiouser and curiouser.... The noises around me were picking up in
volume and tempo, for all the world like a dancehall scene in a Western
movie, just before somebody throws the first table. There was a thud
and a screech off to my right; I gathered that somebody else had fallen
down. Then a tinkle of bursting glass, and another little chorus of
shouts, and then another thud. It went on like that. The crowd was on
the move, in no particular direction; everybody was asking everybody
else what was going on.
I felt the same way, so I went looking for Ray Alvarez; you can always
count on him to tell you the answer, or make one up.
Tom Q. went by, flashing that camera, and it wasn't till the mob had
swallowed him that I realized he wasn't replacing the bulb between
shots--the same one was blazing over and over.
Well, a few years ago it was silly putty; the year before that,
Diarrhetics. This year, everlasting flash bulbs--and no film in the
camera.
Ned Burgeon passed me, his grin tilting his whiskers dangerously near
the lighted stub in his cigarette holder; he was carrying the guitar
case as if he were wading ashore with it. I saw Duchamp off to one
side, talking to somebody, gesturing emphatically with his pipe.
It isn't so, but occasionally you get the impression that science
fiction writers are either very tall or very short. I watched H. Drene
Pfeiffer stilt by, Ray Bolgerish in an astonishing skin-tight suit of
horseblanket plaid, followed by Will Kubatius and the _heldentenor_
bulk of Don W. Gamble, Jr. I lowered my sights. Sandwiched between the
giants there ought to have been half a dozen people I'd have been glad
to see--if not Alvarez, then Bill Plass or his brother Horty; or Jerry
Thaw; Bagsby; Preacher Flatt, who looks too much like a marmoset to
be true.... But no: down on those lower levels there was nobody but an
eleven-year-old boy who had got in by mistake, and the ubiquitous fan,
Harry _You_-Know, the one with the glasses and all that hair. I tacked,
veering slightly, and beat across the room the other way.
There was another crash of glass, a _big_ one, and a louder chorus of
yells. It wasn't all automatic female shrieks, this time; I caught a
couple of male voices, raised in unmistakable anger.
The crowd was thinning out a little; droves of friends of friends
appeared to be heading for the coat room. Across one of the clear
spaces came a pretty blonde, looking apprehensive. In a minute I
saw why. Her skirt billowed out around her suddenly and she yelled,
crouched, holding the cloth down with both hands, then sunfished away
into the crowd. A moment later the same thing happened to a tall
brown-haired girl over to my left.
That was too much. Glancing up, I happened to see the big cut-glass
chandelier begin swaying gently from side to side, jingling faintly,
working up momentum. I moved faster, buttonholing everyone I knew:
"Have you seen Ray? Have you seen Ray?"
I heard my name, and there he was, standing like stout Cortez atop the
piano, where he could see the whole room like an anthill. I climbed up
beside him. Alvarez, to quote Duchamp's description, is a small rumpled
man with an air of sleepy good-nature. This is apt until you get close
to him, when you discover he is about as sleepy as a hungry catamount.
"Hi," he said, with a sidewise glance.
"Hi. What do you think's doing it?"
"It could be," said Ray, speaking firmly and rapidly, "a local
discontinuity in the four-dimensional plenum that we're passing
through. Or it could be poltergeists--that's perfectly possible, you
know." He gave me a look, daring me to deny it.
"You think so?"
"It _could_ be."
"By golly, I believe you're right," I said. This is the only way to
handle Alvarez when he talks nonsense. If you give him the slightest
degree of resistance, he will argue along the same line till doomsday,
just to prove he can.
"Mmm," he said thoughtfully, screwing up his face. "No, I
don't--think--so."
"No?"
"No," he said positively. "You notice how the thing seems to travel
around the room?" He nodded to a fist fight that was breaking out a
few yards from us, and then to a goosed girl leaping over by the bar
entrance. "There's a kind of irregular rhythm to it." He moved his
hand, illustrating. "One thing happens--then another thing--now here it
comes around this way again--"
A fat friend of a friend and her husband backed up against the platform
just below us, quivering. There was something wrong with my fingers;
they felt warm. The collins glass was turning warm. Warm, _hell_--I
yelped and dropped it, sucking my fingers. The glass looped and fell
neatly on the flowered hat of the friend of a friend, and liquid
splattered. The woman hooted like a peanut whistle. She whirled,
slipped in the puddle and lurched off into the arms of a hairy authors'
agent. Her husband dithered after her a couple of steps, then came back
with blood in his eye. He got up as far as the piano stool when, as far
as I could make out, his pants split up the back and he climbed down
again, glaring and clutching himself.
"Now it's over in the middle," said Ray imperturbably. "It _might_
be poltergeists, I won't say it isn't. But I've got a hunch there's
another answer, actually."
I said something dubious. A hotel-manager-looking kind of a man had
just come in and was looking wildly around. Punchy Carrol went up to
him, staring him respectfully right in the eye, talking a quiet six to
his dozen. After a moment he gave up and listened. I've known Punchy
ever since she was a puppy-eyed greenhorn from Philadelphia, and I
don't underestimate her any more. I knew the manager-type would go away
and not call any cops--at least for a while.
I glanced down at the floor, and then looked again. There were little
flat chips of ice scattered in the wetness. That could have been from
the ice cubes; but there was _frost_ on some of the pieces of glass.
_Hot on the bottom, cold on top!_
"Ray," I said, "something's buzzing around in my mind. Maxwell's
demon." I pointed to the frosted bits of glass. "That might--No, I'm
wrong, that couldn't account for all these--"
He took it all in in one look. "Yes, it could!" he snapped. His
cat-eyes gleamed at me. "Maxwell had the theory of the perfect heat
pump--it would work if you could only find a so-called demon, about the
size of a molecule, that would bat all the hot molecules one way, and
all the cold ones the other."
"I know," I said, "But--"
"Okay, I'm just explaining it to you."
What he told me was what I was thinking: Our unidentified friend had
some way of changing probability levels. I mean, all the molecules of
air under a woman's skirt _could_ suddenly decide to move in the same
direction--or all the molecules in a patch of flooring _could_ lose
their surface friction--it just wasn't likely. If you could _make_ it
likely--there wasn't any limit. You could make honest dice turn up a
thousand sevens in a row. You could run a car without an engine; make
rain or fair weather; reduce the crime index to zero; keep a demagogue
from getting re-elected....
Well, if all that was true, I wanted in. And I didn't have the ghost
of a chance--I was out of touch; I didn't know anybody. Ray knew
everybody.
* * * * *
"Spread out, folks!" said a bullhorn voice. It was Samwitz, of course,
standing on a bench at the far wall. Kosmo Samwitz, the Flushing
Nightingale; not one of the Medusa crowd, usually--a nice enough guy,
and a hard-working committeeman, but the ordinary Manhattan meeting
hall isn't big enough to hold his voice. "Spread out--make an equal
distance between you. That way we can't get into any fights." People
started following his orders, partly because they made sense, partly
because, otherwise, he'd go on bellowing.
"That's good--that's good," said Samwitz. "All right, this meeting is
hereby called to order. The chair will entertain suggestions about what
the nature of these here phenomenon are...."
Ray showed signs of wanting to get down and join the caucus; he loves
parliamentary procedure better than life itself; so I said hastily,
"Let's get down with the crowd, Ray. We can't see much better up here,
anyway."
He stiffened. "You go if you want to," he said quietly. "I'm staying
here, where I can keep an eye on things."
The chandelier was now describing stately circles, causing a good
deal of ducking and confusion, but the meeting was getting on with its
business, namely, arguing about whether to confirm Kosmo by acclamation
or nominate and elect a chairman in the usual way. That subject, I
figured, was good for at least twenty minutes. I said, "Ray, will you
tell me the truth if I ask you something?"
"Maybe." He grinned.
"Are you doing this?"
He threw his head back and chuckled, "No-o, I'm not doing it." He
looked at me shrewdly, still grinning. "Is that why you were looking
for me?"
I admitted it humbly. "It was just a foolish idea," I said. "Nobody we
know could possibly--"
"_I_ don't know about that," he said, squinting thoughtfully.
"Ah, come on, Ray."
He was affronted. "Why not? We've got some pretty good scientific
brains in Medusa, you know. There's Gamble--he's an atomic physicist.
There's Don Bierce; there's Duchamp; there's--"
"I know," I said, "I know, but where would any of them have got hold of
a thing like _this_?"
"They could have invented it," he said stoutly.
"You mean like Balmer and Phog Relapse running the Michelson experiment
in their cellar, and making it come out that there _is_ an ether drift,
only it's _down_?"