Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

“You’ll have to excuse my selections. They’re all pretty old. I—er—inherited most of them from a grandfather.”

In a few minutes Philon spotted the Smyth Report. Fixing its position well in mind he turned away. MacDonald was saying, “Come down in the basement and I’ll show you my hobby room.”

“Glad to.” As MacDonald led the way Philon whispered to John, “You’ll find the book on the second shelf from the bottom on the right side.”

John returned him a stony stare of belligerence and Philon clamped his jaw. The boy dropped his glance and gave a reluctant nod of acquiescence.

Upstairs a half hour later Ursula, who had filled her small ashtray with a mound of stubs, suddenly told Philon she was going home.

“But, Ursula, I thought that—”

With thin-lipped impatience she snapped, “I just remembered I had another engagement at eight.”

Mrs. MacDonald was genuinely sorry. “Oh, that’s too bad, I thought we could have the whole evening together.”

Casting a meaningful glance at John and getting a confirming cold-eyed nod in return, Philon got on his feet. “Sorry, folks. Maybe we’ll get together another time.”

“I hope so,” MacDonald said.

In angry silence Philon walked home. Not until they were all in the house and Ursula was hastening toward her second-floor room did he say a word. “I suppose your ’other engagement’ means the Cairo again tonight?”

Ascending on the escalator Ursula turned to look scornfully over her shoulder. “Yes! Anything to escape from boredom. All that woman talked about while you were in the basement was redecorating the house or about cooking and asking my opinions. Ugh!”

Philon laughed mirthlessly. “Yeah, I guess she picked a flat number to discuss those things with. Anything you might have learned about them you must have got out of a psychoplay.”

Stepping off the escalator at the top Ursula spit a nasty epithet his way, then disappeared into the upstairs hall.

John stood at the foot of the escalator, a reluctant witness to the bickering. Divining his attitude Philon mentally shrugged it off. The kid might as well learn what married life was like in these modern days.

“You got the book, eh?”

John pulled a book from his suit coat and laid it on a small table. “Yes, there’s the book—and I never felt so rotten about anything in all my life!”

Philon said, “Kid, you’ve got a lot to learn about getting along in this world.”

“All right—so I’ve got a lot to learn,” John cried bitterly. “But there must be more to life than trying to stop the other guy from stripping the shirt off your back while you succeed in stripping off his!”

With that he took the escalator to the upper hall while Philon watched him disappear.

Left alone now, Philon settled into a chair by a window and stared down the street at the MacDonald house. Odd people—it almost seemed they didn’t belong in this time and period, considering their queer ways of thinking and looking at things. MacDonald himself in particular had some odd personal attitudes.

Like that incident in his basement—Philon had curiously pulled open a heavy steel door to a small cubicle filled with a most complex arrangement of large coils and heavy insulators and glassed-in filaments. MacDonald was almost rude in closing the door when he found Philon opening it. He had fumbled and stuttered around, explaining the room was a niche where he did a little experimenting on his own. Yes, strange people.

The next day Philon eagerly hastened to a bookstore dealing in antique editions. Hugging the book closely Philon told himself his troubles were all over. The book would surely bring between fifty and a hundred grand.

A clerk approached. “Can I help you?”

“I want to talk to Mr. Norton himself.”

The clerk spoke into a wrist transmitter. “Mr. Norton, a man to see you.”

In a few moments a bulbous man came heavily down the aisle, peering through dark tinted glasses at Philon. “Yes?”

“I have a very rare first edition of Smyth’s Atomic Energy,” said Philon, showing the book.

Norton adjusted his glasses, then took the book. He carefully handled it, looking over the outside of the covers, then thumbed the pages. After a long frowning moment, he said, “Publication date is nineteen forty-six but the book’s fairly new. Must have been kept hermetically sealed in helium for a good many years.”

“Yeah, yeah, it was,” Philon said matter-of-factly. “Came from my paternal grandfather’s side of the family. A book like this ought to be worth at the very least seventy-five thousand.”

But the bulbous Mr. Norton was not impressed. He shrugged vaguely. “Well—it’s just possible—” He looked up at Philon suddenly. “Before I make any offer to you I shall have to radiocarbon date the book. Are you willing to sacrifice a back flyleaf in the process?”

“Why a flyleaf?”

“We have to convert a sample of the book into carbon dioxide to geigercount the radioactivity in the carbon. You see, all living things like the cotton in the rags the paper is made of absorb the radioactive carbon fourteen that is formed in the upper atmosphere by cosmic radiation. Then it begins to decay and we can measure very accurately the amount, which gives us an absolute time span.”

With a frustrated feeling Philon agreed. “Well okay then. It’s a waste of time I think. The book is obviously a first edition.”

“It will take the technician about two hours to complete the analysis. We’ll have an answer for you—say after lunch.”

The two hours dragged by and Philon eagerly hastened to the store.

When Mr. Norton appeared he wore the grim look of a righteously angry man. He thrust the book at Philon. “Here, sir, is your book. The next time you try to foist one over on a book trader remember science is a shrewd detective and you’ll have to be cleverer than you’ve been this time. This book is, I’ll admit, a clever job, but nevertheless a forgery. It was not printed in nineteen forty-six. The radiocarbon analysis fixes its age at a mere five or six years. Good day, sir!”

Philon’s mouth fell open. “But—but the MacDonalds have had it for….” He caught himself, and stammered, “There must be some mistake because I….”

Norton said firmly, “I bid you good day, sir!”

With a sense of the sky falling in on him, Philon found himself out on the street. No one could be trusted nowadays and he shouldn’t have been surprised at the MacDonalds. Everyone had a little sideline, a gimmick, to put one over on whoever was gullible enough to swallow it.

Why should he assume a hillbilly family from way out in Oregon was any different? This was probably Bill MacDonald’s little racket and it was just Philon’s bad luck to stumble on it. MacDonald probably peddled his spurious first editions down on Front Street for a few hundred dollars to old bookstores unable to afford radiocarbon dating.

For awhile he stared out his office window, brooding. The fifty grand just wasn’t to be had—legally or illegally. And when he recalled Feisel’s little gem about the man falling out his office window Philon was definitely ill.

Then the cunning that comes to the rescue of all scheming gentry who depend on their wits emerged from perverse hiding. An ingenious idea to solve the nagging problem of the fifty thousand arrived full-blown. Grinning secretively to himself, he walked into the telecommunications room.

He got the Technical Reference Room at the Public Library and asked for the detailed plans of the big electronic National Vote Tabulating machine in Washington. At the other end a microfilm reel clicked into place, ready to obey his finger-tip control.

For two hours he read and read, making notes and studying the circuits of the complicated machine. Then, satisfied with his information, he returned the microfilm.