Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

Sorry, Avram, but if the ultimate battle between Good and Evil amounts to an Armageddon between the dentists and the blood-sucking extraterrestrial slime-monsters, I know which side I’m cheering for…and it isn’t the dentists.

Rinse, please.

FOUR OF THE MEN, Weinroth, McAllister, Danbourge and Smith, sat at the table under the cold blue lighting tubes. One of them, Rorke, was in a corner speaking quietly into a telephone, and one, Fadderman, stood staring out the window at the lights of the city. One, Hansen, had yet to arrive.

Fadderman spoke without turning his head. He was the oldest of those present — the Big Seven, as they were often called.

“Lights,” he said. “So many lights. Down here.” He waved his hand toward the city. “Up there.” He gestured toward the sky. “Even with our much-vaunted knowledge, what,” he asked, “do we know?” He turned his head. “Perhaps this is too big for us. In the light of the problem, can we really hope to accomplish anything?”

Heavy-set Danbourge frowned grimly. “We have received the suffrage of our fellow-scientists, Doctor. We can but try.”

Lithe, handsome McAllister, the youngest officer of the Association, nodded. “The problem is certainly not worse than that which faced our late, great colleague, the immortal Morton.” He pointed to a picture on the panneled wall. “And we all know what he accomplished.”

Fadderman went over and took his hand. “Your words fill me with courage.”

McAllister flushed with pleasure.

“I am an old man,” Fadderman added falteringly. “Forgive my lack of spirit, Doctor.” He sat down, sighed, shook his head slowly. Weinroth, burly and red-haired, patted him gently on the back. Natty, silvery-haired little Smith smiled at him consolingly.

A buzzer sounded. Rorke hung up the telephone, flipped a switch on the wall intercom. “Headquarters here,” he said crisply.

“Dr. Carl T. Hansen has arrived,” a voice informed him.

“Bring him up at once,” he directed. “And, Nickerson—”

“Yes, Dr. Rorke?”

“Let no one else into the building. No one.”

They sat in silence. After a moment or two, they heard the approach of the elevator, heard the doors slide open, slide shut, heard the elevator descend. Heavy, steady footsteps approached; knuckles rapped on the opaque glass door.

Rorke went over to the door, said, “A conscientious and diligent scientist—”

“—must remain a continual student,” a deep voice finished the quotation.

Rorke unlocked the door, peered out into the corridor, admitted Hansen, locked the door.

“I would have been here sooner, but another emergency interposed,” Hansen said. “A certain political figure — ethics prevent my being more specific — suffered an oral hemorrhage following an altercation with a woman who shall be nameless, but, boy, did she pack a wallop! A so-called Specialist, gentlemen, with offices on Park Avenue, had been, as he called it, ‘applying pressure’ with a gauze pad. I merely used a little Gelfoam as a coagulant agent and the hemorrhage stopped almost at once. When will the public learn, eh, gentlemen?”

Faint smiles played upon the faces of the assembled scientists. Hansen took his seat. Rorke bent down and lifted two tape-recording devices to the table, set them both in motion. The faces of the men became serious, grim.

“This is an emergency session of the Steering Committee of the Executive Committee of the American Dental Association,” Rorke said, “called to discuss measures of dealing with the case of Dr. Morris Goldpepper. One tape will be deposited in the vaults of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York; the other will be similarly secured in the vaults of the Wells Fargo and Union Trust Company Bank in San Francisco. Present at this session are Doctors Rorke, Weinroth and Smith — President, First and Second Vice-presidents, respectively — Fadderman, Past President, McAllister, Public Information, Danbourge, Legal, and Hansen, Policy.”

He looked around at the set, tense faces.

“Doctors,” he went on, “I think I may well say that humanity is, as of this moment, face to face with a great danger, and it is a bitter jest that it is not to the engineers or the astronomers, not to medicine nor yet to nuclear nor any other kind of physics, that humanity must now look for salvation — but to the members of the dental profession!”

His voice rose. “Yes — to the practitioners of what has become perhaps the least regarded of all the learned sciences! It is indeed ironical. We may at this juncture consider the comments of the now deceased Professor Earnest Hooton, the Harvard anthropologist, who observed with a sorrow which did him credit that his famed University, instead of assisting its Dental School as it ought, treated it — and I quote his exact words—‘Like a yellow dog.’” His voice trembled.

McAllister’s clean-cut face flushed an angry red. Weinroth growled. Danbourge’s fist hit the table and stayed there, clenched. Fadderman gave a soft, broken sigh.

“But enough of this. We are not jealous, nor are we vindictive,” President Rorke went on. “We are confident that History, ‘with its long tomorrow,’ will show how, at this danger-fraught point, the humble and little thought-of followers of dental science recognized and sized up the situation and stood shoulder to shoulder on the ramparts!”

He wiped his brow with a paper tissue. “And now I will call upon our beloved Past President, Dr. Samuel I. Fadderman, to begin our review of the incredible circumstances which have brought us here tonight. Dr. Fadderman? If you please …”

The well-known Elder Statesman of the A.D.A. nodded his head slowly. He made a little cage of his fingers and pursed and then unpursed his lips. At length he spoke in a soft and gentle voice.

“My first comment, brethren, is that I ask for compassion. Morris Goldpepper is not to blame!

“Let me tell you a few words about him. Goldpepper the Scientist needs no introduction. Who has not read, for instance, his ‘The Bilateral Vertical Stroke and Its Influence on the Pattern of Occlusion’ or his ‘Treatment, Planning, Assemblage and Cementation of a 14-Unit Fixed Bridge’—to name only two? But I shall speak about Goldpepper the Man. He is forty-six years of age and served with honor in the United States Navy Dental Corps during the Second World War. He has been a widower since shortly after the conclusion of that conflict. Rae — the late Mrs. Goldpepper, may she rest in peace — often used to say, ‘Morry, if I go first, promise me you’ll marry again,’ but he passed it off with a joke; and, as you know, he never did.

“They had one child, a daughter, Suzanne, a very sweet girl, now married to a Dr. Sheldon Fingerhut, D.D.S. I need not tell you, brethren, how proud our colleague was when his only child married this very fine young member of our profession. The Fingerhuts are now located on Unbalupi, one of the Micronesian islands forming part of the United States Trust Territory, where Dr. Sheldon is teaching dental hygiene, sanitation and prosthesis to the natives thereof.”

Dr. Hansen asked, “Are they aware of—”

“The son-in-law knows something of the matter,” the older man said. “He has not seen fit to inform his wife, who is in a delicate condition and expects shortly to be confined. At his suggestion, I have been writing — or, rather, typing — letters purporting to come from her father, on his stationery, with the excuse that he badly singed his fingers on a Bunsen burner whilst annealing a new-type hinge for dentures and consequently cannot hold his pen.” He sipped from a glass of water.