Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

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.”

I could only gulp. That blow was devastating.

“You see,” continued van Manderpootz, “one’s ideals are implanted very early. That’s why you continually fall in love with girls who possess one or another feature that reminds you of her, her hair, her nose, her mouth, her eyes. Very simple, but rather curious.”

“Curious!” I blazed. “Curious, you say! Everytime I look into one of your damned contraptions I find myself in love with a myth! A girl who’s dead, or married, or unreal, or turned into an old woman! Curious, eh? Damned funny, isn’t it?”

“Just a moment,” said the professor placidly. “It happens, Dixon, that she has a daughter. What’s more, Denise resembles her mother. And what’s still more, she’s arriving in New York next week to study American letters at the University here. She writes, you see.”

That was too much for immediate comprehension. “How—how do you know?” I gasped.

It was one of the few times I have seen the colossal blandness of van Manderpootz ruffled. He reddened a trifle, and said slowly, “It also happens, Dixon, that many years ago in Amsterdam, Haskel van Manderpootz and de Lisle d’Agrion were—very friendly—more than friendly, I might say, but for the fact that two such powerful personalities as the Dragon Fly and van Manderpootz were always at odds.” He frowned. “I was almost her second husband. She’s had seven, I believe; Denise is the daughter of her third.”

“Why—why is she coming here?”

“Because,” he said with dignity, “van Manderpootz is here. I am still a friend of de Lisle’s.” He turned and bent over the complex device on the table. “Hand me that wrench,” he ordered. “Tonight I dismantle this, and tomorrow start reconstructing it for Isaak’s head.”

But when, the following week, I rushed eagerly back to van Manderpootz’s laboratory, the idealizator was still in place. The professor greeted me with a humorous twist to what was visible of his bearded mouth. “Yes, it’s still here,” he said, gesturing at the device. “I’ve decided to build an entirely new one for Isaak, and besides, this one has afforded me considerable amusement. Furthermore, in the words of Oscar Wilde, who am I to tamper with a work of genius. After all, the mechanism is the product of the great van Manderpootz.”

He was deliberately tantalizing me. He knew that I hadn’t come to hear him discourse on Isaak, or even on the incomparable van Manderpootz. Then he smiled and softened, and turned to the little inner office adjacent, the room where Isaak stood in metal austerity. “Denise!” he called, “come here.”

I don’t know exactly what I expected, but I do know that the breath left me as the girl entered. She wasn’t exactly my image of the ideal, of course; she was perhaps the merest trifle slimmer, and her eyes—well, they must have been much like those of de Lisle d’Agrion, for they were the clearest emerald I’ve ever seen. They were impudently direct eyes, and I could imagine why van Manderpootz and the Dragon Fly might have been forever quarreling; that was easy to imagine, looking into the eyes of the Dragon Fly’s daughter.