* * * * *
I hurried Marge and Doreen along toward our little two-story building.
Once we got into the air-conditioned reception room, Marge sank down
gratefully onto the settee and I switched on the television set with the
big 24-inch tube Tom had built.
Biltom Electronics makes TV components, computer parts, things like
that. Tom Kennedy is the brains. Me, Bill Rawlins, I do the legwork, and
tend to the business details.
"It's uncanny the way all those cars suddenly stopped when our bus broke
down," Marge said as we waited for the picture to come on. "Any day now
this civilization of ours will get so complicated a bus breaking down
someplace will bring the whole thing to a halt. Then where will we be?"
"Elmer says silly-zation is doomed!" Doreen put in happily.
The way she rolled the word out made me stare at her.
Marge only nodded. "That's what Elmer says, all right," she agreed, a
trifle grim.
"Why does Elmer say silly-zation is doomed?" I asked Doreen.
"Because it's getting hotter." The kid gave it to me straight. "All the
ice at the North Pole is gonna melt. The ocean is gonna rise two hundred
feet. Then everybody who doesn't live on a hill is gonna be drownded.
That's what Elmer says and Elmer isn't ever wrong."
[Illustration: Illustrated by CAVAT]
Doreen they called her! Why not Cassandra? The stuff kids spout these
days!
I gave her a foolish grin. I wanted Marge to get the idea I was really a
family man at heart. "That's very interesting, Doreen. Now look, there's
the baseball game. Let's watch, shall we?"
We weren't very late after all. It was the top half of the second
inning, the score one to one, Erskine in trouble with two men on and
only one down. The colors were beautiful. Marge and I were just settling
back to watch when Doreen wrinkled her nose.
"I saw that game yesterday!" she announced.
"You couldn't have, sweetheart," I told her. "Because it's only being
played today. The world's first ball game ever broadcast in color."
"There was a game on Elmer's TV," Doreen insisted. "The picture was
bigger and the colors prettier, too."
"Absolutely impossible." I was a little sore. I hate kids who tell fibs.
"There never was a game broadcast in color before. And, anyway, you
won't find a color tube this big any place outside of a laboratory."
"But it's true, Bill." Marge looked at me, wide-eyed. "Elmer only has a
little seven-inch black and white set his uncle gave him. But he's
rigged up some kind of lens in front of it, and it projects a big color
picture on a white screen."
I saw that she was serious. My eyes bugged slightly. "Listen," I said,
"who is this Elmer character? I want to meet him!"
"He's my cousin from South America," Doreen answered. "He thinks
grownups are stupid." She turned to Marge. "I have to go to the
bathroom," she said primly.
"Through that door." Marge pointed.
Doreen trotted out, clutching her hat box.
* * * * *
"Elmer thinks grownups are stupid?" I howled. "Listen, how old is this
character who says silly-zation is doomed and can convert a black and
white broadcast into color?"
"He's thirteen," Marge told me. I goggled at her. "Thirteen," she
repeated. "His father is some South American scientist. His mother died
ten years ago."
I sat down beside her. I lit a cigarette. My hands were shaking. "Tell
me about him. _All_ about him."
"Why, I don't know very much," Marge said. "Last year Elmer was sick,
some tropic disease. His father sent him up here to recuperate. Now
Alice--that's his aunt, Doreen's mother--is at her wits' end, he makes
her so nervous."
I lit another cigarette before I realized I already had one. "And he
invents things? A boy genius? Young Tom Edison and all that?"
Marge frowned. "I suppose you could say that," she conceded. "He has the
garage full of stuff he's made or bought with the allowance his father
sends him. And if you come within ten feet of it without permission, you
get an electric shock right out of thin air. But that's only part of it.
It--" she gave a helpless gesture--"it's Elmer's effect on everybody.
Everybody over fifteen, that is. He sits there, a little, dark,
squinched-up kid wearing thick glasses and talking about how climatic
changes inside fifty years will flood half the world, cause the collapse
of civilization--"
"Wait a minute!" I cut in. "Scientists seem to think that's possible in
a few thousand years. Not fifty."
"Elmer says fifty," Marge stated flatly. "From the way he talks, I
suspect he's figured out a way to speed things up and is going to try it
some day just to see if it works. Meanwhile he fools around out there in
the garage, sneering about the billions of dollars spent to develop
color TV. He says his lens will turn any ordinary broadcast into color
for about twenty-five dollars. He says it's typical of the muddled
thinking of our so-called scientists--I'm quoting now--to do everything
backward and overlook fundamental principles."
"Bro-ther!" I said.
Doreen came trotting back in then, with her hat box. "I'm tired of that
game," she said, giving the TV set a bored glance. And as she said it
the tube went dark. The sound cut off.
"Damn!" I swore. "Must be a power failure!" I grabbed the phone and
jiggled the hook. No dice. The phone was dead, too.
"You're funny," Doreen giggled. "It's just the unhappy genii. See?"
She flicked over the catch on the hatbox.
And the picture came back on. The sound started up. "--swings and misses
for strike two!" The air conditioner began to hum.
Marge and I stared. Mouths open. Wide.
* * * * *
"You did that, Doreen?" I asked it very carefully. "You made the
television stop and start again?"
"The unhappy genii did," Doreen told me. "Like this." She flicked the
catch back. The TV picture blacked out. The sound stopped in the middle
of a word. The air conditioner whispered into silence.
Then she flipped the catch the other way.
"--fouls the second ball into the screen," the announcer said. Picture
okay. Air conditioner operating. Everything normal except my pulse and
respiration.
"Doreen, sweetheart--" I took a step toward her--"what's in that box?
What _is_ an unhappy genii?"
"Not unhappy." You know how scornful an eight-year-old can be? Well, she
was. "Unhap-_pen_. It makes things unhappen. Anything that works by
electracity, it stops. Elmer calls it his unhappen genii. Just for fun."
"Oh, now I get it," I said brightly. "It makes electricity not
work--unhappen. Like television sets and air conditioners and
automobiles and bus engines."
Doreen giggled.
Marge sat bolt upright. "Doreen! _You_ caused that traffic jam? You and
that--that gadget of Elmer's?"
Doreen nodded. "It made all the automobile engines stop, just like Elmer
said. Elmer's never wrong."
Marge looked at me. I looked at Marge.
"A field of some kind," I said. "A field that prevents an electric
current from flowing. Meaning no combustion motor using an electric
spark can operate. No electric motors. No telephones. No radio or TV."
"Is that important?" Marge asked.
"Important?" I yelled. "Think of the possibilities just as a weapon! You
could blank out a whole nation's transportation, its communications, its
industry--"
I got hold of myself. I smiled my best I-love-children smile. "Doreen,"
I said, "let me look at Elmer's unhappen genii."
The kid clutched the box.
"Elmer told me not to let anybody look at it. He said he'd statuefy me
if I did. He said nobody would understand it anyway. He said he might
show it to Mr. Einstein, but not anybody else."
"That's Elmer, all right," Marge muttered.
I found myself breathing hard. I edged toward Doreen and put my hand on
the hatbox. "Just one quick look, Doreen," I said. "No one will ever
know."
She didn't answer. Just pulled the box away.