Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

“Despite his great scientific accomplishments,” Dr. Fadderman went on, “Morry had an impractical streak in him. Often I used to call on him at his bachelor apartment in the Hotel Davenport on West End Avenue, where he moved following his daughter’s marriage, and I would find him immersed in reading matter of an escapist kind — tales of crocodile hunters on the Malayan Peninsula, or magazines dealing with interplanetary warfare, or collections of short stories about vampires and werewolves and similar superstitious creations.

“‘Morry,’ I said reproachfully, ‘what a way to spend your off-hours. Is it worth it? Is it healthy? You would do much better, believe me, to frequent the pool or the handball court at the Y. Or,’ I pointed out to him, ‘if you want to read, why ignore the rich treasures of literature: Shakespeare, Ruskin, Elbert Hubbard, Edna Ferber, and so on? Why retreat to these immature-type fantasies? ’ At first he only smiled and quoted the saying, ‘Each to his or her own taste.’”

The silence which followed was broken by young Dr. McAllister. “You say,” he said, “‘at first.’”

Old Dr. Fadderman snapped out of his revery. “Yes, yes. But eventually he confessed the truth to me. He withheld nothing.”

The assembled dental scientists then learned that the same Dr. Morris Goldpepper, who had been awarded not once but three successive times the unique honor of the Dr. Alexander Peabody Medal for New Achievements in Dental Prosthesis, was obsessed with the idea that there was sentient life on other worlds — that it would shortly be possible to reach these other worlds — and that he himself desired to be among those who went.

“‘Do you realize, Sam?’ he asked me,” reported Fadderman. “‘Do you realize that, in a very short time, it will no longer be a question of fuel or even of metallurgy? That submarines capable of cruising for weeks and months without surfacing foretell the possibility of traveling through airless space? The chief problem has now come down to finding how to build a take-off platform capable of withstanding a thrust of several million pounds.’ And his eyes glowed.”

Dr. Fadderman had inquired, with good-natured sarcasm, how the other man expected this would involve him . The answer was as follows: Any interplanetary expedition would find it just as necessary to take along a dentist as to take along a physician, and that he — Dr. Goldpepper — intended to be that dentist!

Dr. Weinroth’s hand slapped the table with a bang. “By thunder, I say the man had courage!”

Dr. Rorke looked at him with icy reproof. “I should be obliged,” he said stiffly, “if there would be no further emotional outbursts.”

Dr. Weinroth’s face fell. “I beg the Committee’s pardon, Mr. President,” he said.

Dr. Rorke nodded graciously, indicated by a gesture of his hand that Dr. Fadderman had permission to continue speaking. The old man took a letter from his pocket and placed it on the table.

“This came to me like a bolt from the blue beyond. It is dated November 8 of last year. Skipping the formal salutation, it reads: ‘At last I stand silent upon the peak in Darien’—a literary reference, gentlemen, to Cortez’s alleged discovery of the Pacific Ocean; actually it was Balboa—‘my great dream is about to be realized. Before long, I shall be back to tell you about it, but just exactly when, I am not able to say. History is being made! Long live Science! Very sincerely yours, Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S.’”

He passed the letter around the table.

Dr. Smith asked, “What did you do on receiving this communication, Doctor?”

Dr. Fadderman had at once taken a taxi to West End Avenue. The desk clerk at the hotel courteously informed him that the man he sought had left on a vacation of short but not exactly specified duration. No further information was known. Dr. Fadderman’s first thought was that his younger friend had gotten some sort of position with a Government project which he was not free to discuss, and his own patriotism and sense of duty naturally prevented him from making inquiries.

“But I began, for the first time,” the Elder Statesman of American Dentistry said, “to read up on the subject of space travel. I wondered how a man 46 years of age could possibly hope to be selected over younger men.”

Dr. Danbourge spoke for the first time. “Size,” he said. “Every ounce would count in a spaceship and Morris was a pretty little guy.”

“But with the heart of a lion,” Dr. Weinroth said softly. “Miles and miles and miles of heart.”

The other men nodded their agreement to this tribute.

But as time went on and the year drew to its close and he heard no word from his friend, Dr. Fadderman began to worry. Finally, when he received a letter from the Fingerhuts, saying that they had not been hearing either, he took action.

He realized it was not likely that the Government would have made plans to include a dentist in this supposed project without communicating with the A.D.A. and he inquired of the current President, Dr. Rorke, if he had any knowledge of such a project, or of the whereabouts of the missing man. The answer to both questions was no. But on learning the reasons for Dr. Fadderman’s concern, he communicated with Col. Lemnel Coggins, head of the USAF’s Dental Corps.

Col. Coggins informed him that no one of Dr. Goldpepper’s name or description was or had been affiliated with any such project, and that, in fact, any such project was still — as he put It—“still on the drawing-board.”

Drs. Rorke and Fadderman, great as was their concern, hesitated to report Dr. Goldpepper missing. He had, after all, paid rent on apartment, office and laboratory, well in advance. He was a mature man, of very considerable intelligence, and one who presumably knew what he was doing.

“It is at this point,” said Dr. Danbourge, “that I enter the picture. On the 11th of January, I had a call from a Dr. Milton Wilson, who has an office on East 19th Street, with a small laboratory adjoining, where he does prosthetic work. He told me, with a good deal of hesitation, that something exceedingly odd had come up, and he asked me if I knew where Dr. Morris Goldpepper was …”

The morning of the 11th of January, an elderly man with a curious foreign accent came into Dr. Wilson’s office, gave the name of Smith and complained about an upper plate. It did not feel comfortable, Mr. Smith said, and it irritated the roof of his mouth. There was a certain reluctance on his part to allow Dr. Wilson to examine his mouth. This was understandable, because the interior of his mouth was blue. The gums were entirely edentulous, very hard, almost horny. The plate Itself—

“Here is the plate,” Dr. Danbourge said, placing it on the table. “Dr. Wilson supplied him with another. You will observe the perforations on the upper, or palatal, surface. They had been covered with a thin layer of gum arabic, which naturally soon wore almost entirely off, with the result that the roof of the mouth became irritated. Now this is so very unusual that Dr. Wilson — as soon as his patient, the so-called Mr. Smith, was gone — broke open the weirdly made plate to find why the perforations had been made. In my capacity as head of the Association’s Legal Department,” Dr. Danbourge stated, “I have come across some extraordinary occurrences, but nothing like this .”

This was a small piece of a white, flexible substance, covered with tiny black lines. Danbourge picked up a large magnifying glass.

“You may examine these objects, Doctors,” he said, “but it will save your eyesight if I read to you from an enlarged photostatic copy of this last one. The nature of the material, the method of writing, or of reducing the writing to such size all are unknown to us. It may be something on the order of microfilm. But that is not important. The important thing is the content of the writing — the portent of the writing.