THE EXALTED

L. Sprague de Camp

THE STORKLIKE MAN WITH THE GRAY GOATEE SHUFFLED THE TWELVE black billets about on the table top. “Try it again,” he said.

The undergraduate sighed. “O. K., Professor Methuen.” He looked apprehensively at Johnny Black, sitting across the table with one claw on the button of the stop clock. Johnny returned the look impassively through the spectacles perched on his yellowish muzzle.

“Go,” said Ira Methuen.

Johnny depressed the button. The undergraduate started the second run of his wiggly-block test. The twelve billets formed a kind of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle; when assembled they would make a cube. But the block had originally been sawn apart on wavy, irregular lines, so that the twelve billets had to be put together just so.

The undergraduate fiddled with the billets, trying this one and that one against one he held in his hand. The clock ticked round. In four minutes he had all but one in place. This one, a corner piece, simply would not fit. The undergraduate wiggled it and pushed it. He looked at it closely and tried again. But its maladjustment remained.

The undergraduate gave up. “What’s the trick?” he asked.

Methuen reversed the billet end for end. It fitted.

“Oh, heck,” said the undergraduate. “I could have gotten it if it hadn’t been for Johnny.”

Instead of being annoyed, Johnny Black twitched his mouth in a bear’s equivalent of a grin. Methuen asked the student why.

“He distracts me somehow. I know he’s friendly and all that, but… it’s this way, sort of. Here I come to Yale to get to be a psychologist. I hear all about testing animals, chimps and bears and such. And when I get here I find a bear testing me. It’s kind of upsetting.”

“That’s all right,” said Methuen. “Just what we wanted. We’re after, not your wiggly-block score by itself, but the effect of Johnny’s presence on people taking the test. We’re getting Johnny’s distraction factor—his ability to distract people. We’re also getting the distraction factor of a lot of other things, such as various sounds and smells. I didn’t tell you sooner because the knowledge might have affected your performance.”

“I see. Do I still get my five bucks?”

“Of course. Good day, Kitchell. Come on, Johnny; we’ve just got time to make Psychobiology 100. We’ll clean up the stuff later.”

On the way out of Methuen’s office, Johnny asked: “Hey, boss! Do you feer any effec’ yet?”

“Not a bit,” said Methuen. “I think my original theory was right: that the electrical resistance of the gaps between human neurons is already as low as it can be, so the Methuen injections won’t have any appreciable effect on a human being. Sorry, Johnny, but I’m afraid your boss won’t become any great genius as a result of trying a dose of his own medicine.”

The Methuen treatment had raised Johnny’s intelligence from that of a normal black bear to that of—or more exactly to the equivalent of that of—a human being. It had enabled him to carry out those spectacular coups in the Virgin Islands and the Central Park Zoo. It had also worked on a number of other animals in the said zoo, with regrettable results.

Johnny grumbled in his urso-American accent: “Stirr, I don’t sink it is smart to teach a crass when you are furr of zat stuff. You never know—”

But they had arrived. The class comprised a handful of grave graduate students, on whom Johnny’s distraction factor had little effect.

Ira Methuen was not a good lecturer. He put in too many uh’s and er’s, and tended to mumble. Besides, Psychobiology 100 was an elementary survey, and Johnny was pretty well up in the field himself. So he settled himself to a view of the Grove Street Cemetery across the street, and to melancholy reflections on the short life span of his species compared with that of men.

“Ouch!”

R. H. Wimpus, B.S., ‘68, jerked his backbone from its normally nonchalant arc into a quivering reflex curve. His eyes were wide with mute indignation.

Methuen was saying: “—whereupon it was discovered that the… uh… paralysis of the pes resulting from excision of the corresponding motor area of the cortex was much more lasting among the Simiidae than among the other catarrhine primates; that it was more lasting among these than among the platyrrhines—Mr. Wimpus?”

“Nothing,” said Wimpus. “I’m sorry.”

“And that the platyrrhines, in turn, suffered more than the lemuroids and tarsioids. When—”

“Unh!” Another graduate student jerked upright. While Methuen paused with his mouth open, a third man picked a small object off the floor and held it up.

“Really, gentlemen,” said Methuen, “I thought you’d outgrown such amusements as shooting rubber bands at each other. As I was saying when—”

Wimpus gave another grunt and jerk. He glared about him. Methuen tried to get his lecture going again. But, as rubber bands from nowhere continued to sting the necks and ears of the listeners, the classroom organization visibly disintegrated like a lump of sugar in a cup of weak tea.

Johnny had put on his spectacles and was peering about the room. But he was no more successful than the others in locating the source of the bombardment.

He slid off his chair and shuffled over to the light switch. The daylight through the windows left the rear end of the classroom dark. As soon as the lights went on, the source of the elastics was obvious. A couple of the graduates pounced on a small wooden box on the shelf beside the projector.

The box gave out a faint whir, and spat rubber bands through a slit, one every few seconds. They brought it up and opened it on Methuen’s lecture table. Inside was a mass of machinery apparently made of the parts of a couple of alarm clocks and a lot of hand-whittled wooden cams and things.

“My, my,” said Methuen. “A most ingenious contraption, isn’t it?”

The machine ran down with a click. While they were still examining it, the bell rang.

Methuen looked out the window. A September rain was coming up. Ira Methuen pulled on his topcoat and his rubbers and took his umbrella from the corner. He never wore a hat. He went out and headed down Prospect Street, Johnny padding behind.

“Hi!” said a young man, a fat young man in need of a haircut. “Got any news for us, Professor Methuen?”

“I’m afraid not, Bruce,” replied Methuen. “Unless you call Ford’s giant mouse news.”

“What? What giant mouse?”

“Dr. Ford has produced a three-hundred-pound mouse by orthogonal mutation. He had to alter its morphological characteristics—”

“Its what?”

“Its shape, to you. He had to alter it to make it possible for it to live—”

“Where? Where is it?”

“Osborn Labs. If—” But Bruce Inglehart was gone up the hill toward the science buildings. Methuen continued: “With no war on, and New Haven as dead a town as it always has been, they have to come to us for news, I suppose. Come on, Johnny. Getting garrulous in my old age.”

A passing dog went crazy at the sight of Johnny, snarling and yelping. Johnny ignored it. They entered Woodbridge Hall.

Dr. Wendell Cook, president of Yale University, had Methuen sent in at once. Johnny, excluded from the sanctum, went up to the president’s secretary. He stood up and put his paws on her desk. He leered—you have to see a bear leer to know how it is done—and said: “How about it, kid?”

Miss Prescott, an unmistakable Boston spinster, smiled at him. “Suttinly, Johnny. Just a moment.” She finished typing a letter, opened a drawer, and took out a copy of Hecht’s “Fantazius Mallare.” This she gave Johnny. He curled up on the floor, adjusted his glasses, and read.

After a while he looked up, saying: “Miss Prescott, I am halfway srough zis, and I stirr don’t see why zey cawr it obscene. I sink it is just durr. Can’t you get me a rearry dirty book?”

“Well, really, Johnny, I don’t run a pornography shop, you know. Most people find that quite strong enough.”

Johnny sighed. “Peopre get excited over ze funnies’ sings.”

Meanwhile, Methuen was closeted with Cook and Dalrymple, the prospective endower, in another of those interminable and indecisive conferences. R. Hanscom Dalrymple looked like a statue that the sculptor had never gotten around to finishing. The only expression the steel chairman ever allowed himself was a canny, secretive smile. Cook and Methuen had a feeling he was playing them on the end of a long and well-knit fish line made of U. S. Federal Reserve notes. It was not because he wasn’t willing to part with the damned endowment, but because he enjoyed the sensation of power over these oh-so-educated men. And in the actual world, one doesn’t lose one’s temper and tell Croesus what to do with his loot. One says: “Yes, Mr. Dalrymple. My, my, that is a brilliant suggestion, Mr. Dalrymple! Why didn’t we think of it ourselves?” Cook and Methuen were both old hands at this game. Methuen, though otherwise he considered Wendell Cook a pompous ass, admired the president’s endowment-snagging ability. After all, wasn’t Yale University named after a retired merchant on the basis of a gift of five hundred and sixty-two pounds twelve shillings?

“Say, Dr. Cook,” said Dalrymple, “why don’t you come over to the Taft and have lunch on me for a change? You, too, Professor Methuen.”

The academics murmured their delight and pulled on their rubbers. On the way out Dalrymple paused to scratch Johnny behind the ears. Johnny put his book away, keeping the title on the cover out of sight, and restrained himself from snapping at the steel man’s hand. Dalrymple meant well enough, but Johnny did not like people to take such liberties with his person.

So three men and a bear slopped down College Street. Cook paused now and then, ignoring the sprinkle, to make studied gestures toward one or another of the units of the great soufflé of Georgian and Collegiate Gothic architecture. He explained this and that. Dalrymple merely smiled his blank little smile.

Johnny, plodding behind, was the first to notice that passing undergraduates were pausing to stare at the president’s feet. The word “feet” is meant literally. For Cook’s rubbers were rapidly changing into a pair of enormous pink bare feet.

Cook himself was quite unconscious of it, until quite a group of undergraduates had collected. These gave forth the catarrhal snorts of men trying unsuccessfully not to laugh. By the time Cook had followed their stares and looked down, the metamorphosis was complete. That he should be startled was only natural. The feet were startling enough. His face gradually matched the feet in redness, making a cheerful note of color in the gray landscape.

R. Hanscom Dalrymple lost his reserve for once. His howls did nothing to save prexy’s now-apoplectic face. Cook finally stooped and pulled off the rubbers. It transpired that the feet had been painted on the outside of the rubbers and covered over with lampblack. The rain had washed the lampblack off.

Wendell Cook resumed his walk to the Hotel Taft in gloomy silence. He held the offensive rubbers between thumb and finger as if they were something unclean and loathsome. He wondered who had done this dastardly deed. There hadn’t been any undergraduates in his office for some days, but you never wanted to underestimate the ingenuity of undergraduates. He noticed that Ira Methuen was wearing rubbers of the same size and make as his own. But he put suspicion in that direction out of his mind before it had fully formed. Certainly Methuen wouldn’t play practical jokes with Dalrymple around, when he’d be the head of the new Department of Biophysics when—if—Dalrymple came through with the endowment.

The next man to suspect that the Yale campus was undergoing a severe pixilation was John Dugan, the tall thin one of the two campus cops. He was passing Christ Church—which is so veddy high-church Episcopal that they refer to Charles I of England as St. Charles the Martyr—on his way to his lair in Phelps Tower. A still small voice spoke in his ear: “Beware, John Dugan! Your sins will find you out!”

Dugan jumped and looked around. The voice repeated its message. There was nobody within fifty feet of Dugan. Moreover, he could not think of any really serious sins he had committed lately. The only people in sight were a few undergraduates and Professor Methuen’s educated black bear, trailing after his boss as usual. There was nothing for John Dugan to suspect but his own sanity.

R. Hanscom Dalrymple was a bit surprised at the grim earnestness of the professors in putting away their respective shares of the James Pierpont dinner. They were staying the eternal gnaw of hunger that afflicts those who depend on a college commissary for sustenance. Many of them suspected a conspiracy among college cooks to see that the razor edge wasn’t taken off students’ and instructors’ intellects by overfeeding. They knew that conditions were much the same in most colleges.

Dalrymple sipped his coffee and looked at his notes. Presently Cook would get up and say a few pleasant nothings. Then he would announce Dalrymple’s endowment, which was to be spent in building a Dalrymple Biophysical Laboratory and setting up a new department. Everybody would applaud and agree that biophysics had floated in the void between the domains of the departments of zoology, psychology, and the physiological sciences long enough. Then Dalrymple would get up and clear his throat and say—though in much more dignified language: “Shucks, fellas, it really isn’t nothing.”

Dr. Wendell Cook duly got up, beamed out over the ranked shirt fronts, and said his pleasant nothings. The professors exchanged nervous looks when he showed signs of going off into his favorite oration, there-is-no-conflict-between-science-and-religion. They had heard it before.

He was well launched into Version 3A of this homily, when he began to turn blue in the face. It was not the dark purplish-gray called loosely “blue” that appears on the faces of stranglees, but a bright, cheerful cobalt. Now, such a color is all very well in a painting of a ship sailing under a clear blue sky, or in the uniform of a movie-theater doorman. But it is distinctly out of place in the face of a college president. Or so felt the professors. They leaned this way and that, their boiled shirts bulging, popping and gaping as they did so, and whispered.

Cook frowned and continued. He was observed to sniff the air as if he smelled something. Those at the speakers’ table detected a slight smell of acetone. But that seemed hardly an adequate explanation of the robin’s-egg hue of their prexy’s face. The color was now quite solid on the face proper. It ran up into the area where Cook’s hair would have been if he had had some. His collar showed a trace of it, too.

Cook, on his part, had no idea of why the members of his audience were swaying in their seats like saplings in a gale and whispering. He thought it very rude of them. But his frowns had no effect. So presently he cut Version 3A short. He announced the endowment in concise, businesslike terms, and paused for the expected thunder of applause.

There was none. To be exact, there was a feeble patter that nobody in his right mind would call a thunder of anything.

Cook looked at R. Hanscom Dalrymple, hoping that the steel man would not be insulted. Dalrymple’s face showed nothing. Cook assumed that this was part of his general reserve. The truth was that Dalrymple was too curious about the blue face to notice the lack of applause. When Cook introduced him to the audience, it took him some seconds to pull himself together.

He started rather lamely: “Gentlemen and members of the Yale faculty… uh… I mean, of course, you’re all gentlemen… I am reminded of a story about the poultry farmer who got married—I mean, I’m not reminded of that story, but the one about the divinity student who died and went to—” Here Dalrymple caught the eye of the dean of the divinity school. He tacked again: “Maybe I’d… uh… better tell the one about the Scotchman who got lost on his way home and—”

It was not a bad story, as such things go. But it got practically no laughter. Instead, the professors began swaying, like a roomful of boiled-shirted Eastern ascetics at their prayers, and whispering again.

Dalrymple could put two and two together. He leaned over and hissed into Cook’s ear: “Is there anything wrong with me?”

“Yes, your face has turned green.”

“Green?”

“Bright green. Like grass. Nice young grass.”

“Well, you might like to know that yours is blue.”

Both men felt their faces. There was no doubt; they were masked with coatings of some sort of paint, still wet.

Dalrymple whispered: “What kind of gag is this?”

“I don’t know. Better finish your speech.”

Dalrymple tried. But his thoughts were scattered beyond recovery. He made a few remarks about how glad he was to be there amid the elms and ivy and traditions of old Eli, and sat down. His face looked rougher-hewn than ever. If a joke had been played on him—well, he hadn’t signed any checks yet.

The lieutenant governor of the State of Connecticut was next on the list. Cook shot a question at him. He mumbled: “But if I’m going to turn a funny color when I get up—”

The question of whether his honor should speak was never satisfactorily settled. For at that moment a thing appeared on one end of the speakers’ table. It was a beast the size of a St. Bernard. It looked rather the way a common bat would look if, instead of wings, it had arms with disk-shaped pads on the ends of the fingers. Its eyes were as big around as luncheon plates.

There was commotion. The speaker sitting nearest the thing fell over backward. The lieutenant governor crossed himself. An English zoologist put on his glasses and said: “By Jove, a spectral tarsier! But a bit large, what?”

A natural-sized tarsier would fit in your hand comfortably, and is rather cute if a bit spooky. But a tarsier the size of this one is not the kind of thing one can glance at and then go on reading the adventures of Alley Oop. It breaks one’s train of thought. It disconcerts one. It may give one the screaming meemies.

This tarsier walked gravely down the twenty feet of table. The diners were too busy going away from there to observe that it upset no tumblers and kicked no ashtrays about; that it was, in fact, slightly transparent. At the other end of the table it vanished.

Johnny Black’s curiosity wrestled with his better judgment. His curiosity told him that all these odd happenings had taken place in the presence of Ira Methuen. Therefore, Ira Methuen was at least a promising suspect. “So what?” said his better judgment. “He’s the only man you have a real affection for. If you learned that he was the pixie in the case, you wouldn’t expose him, would you? Better keep your muzzle out of this.”

But in the end his curiosity won, as usual. The wonder was that his better judgment kept on trying.

He got hold of Bruce Inglehart. The young reporter had a reputation for discretion.

Johnny explained: “He gave himserf ze Messuen treatment—you know, ze spinar injection—to see what it would do to a man. Zat was a week ago. Should have worked by now. But he says it had no effec’. Maybe not. But day after ze dose, awr zese sings start happening. Very eraborate jokes. Kind a crazy scientific genius would do. If it’s him, I mus’ stop him before he makes rear troubre. You wirr he’p me?”

“Sure, Johnny. Shake on it.” Johnny extended his paw.

It was two nights later that Durfee Hall caught fire. Yale had been discussing the erasure of this singularly ugly and useless building for forty years. It had been vacant for some time, except for the bursar’s office in the basement.

About ten o’clock an undergraduate noticed little red tongues of flame crawling up the roof. He gave the alarm at once. The New Haven fire department was not to be blamed for the fact that the fire spread as fast as if the building had been soaked in kerosene. By the time they, and about a thousand spectators, had arrived, the whole center of the building was going up with a fine roar and crackle. The assistant bursar bravely dashed into the building and reappeared with an armful of papers, which later turned out to be a pile of quite useless examination forms. The fire department squirted enough water onto the burning section to put out Mount Vesuvius. Some of them climbed ladders at the ends of the building to chop holes in the roof.

The water seemed to have no effect. So the fire department called for some more apparatus, connected up more hoses, and squirted more water. The undergraduates yelled:

“Rah, rah, fire department! Rah, rah, fire! Go get ‘em, department! Hold that line, fire!”

Johnny Black bumped into Bruce Inglehart, who was dodging about in the crowd with a pad and pencil, trying to get information for his New Haven Courier. Inglehart asked Johnny whether he knew anything.

Johnny, in his deliberate manner, said: “I know one sing. Zat is ze firs’ hetress fire I have seen.”

Inglehart looked at Johnny, then at the conflagration. “My gosh!” he said. “We ought to feel the radiation here, oughtn’t we? Heatless fire is right. Another superscientific joke, you suppose?”

“We can rook around,” said Johnny. Turning their backs on the conflagration, they began searching among the shrubbery and railings along Elm Street.

“Woof!” said Johnny. “Come here, Bruce!”

In a patch of shadow stood Professor Ira Methuen and a tripod whereon was mounted a motion-picture projector. It took Johnny a second to distinguish which was which.

Methuen seemed uneasily poised on the verge of flight. He said: “Why, hello, Johnny, why aren’t you asleep? I just found this… uh… this projector—”

Johnny, thinking fast, slapped the projector with his paw. Methuen caught it as it toppled. Its whir ceased. At the same instant the fire went out, vanished utterly. The roar and crackle still came from the place where the fire had been. But there was no fire. There was not even a burned place in the roof, off which gallons of water were still pouring. The fire department looked at one another foolishly.

While Johnny’s and Inglehart’s pupils were still expanding in the sudden darkness, Methuen and his projector vanished. They got a glimpse of him galloping around the College Street comer, lugging the tripod. They ran after him. A few undergraduates ran after Johnny and Inglehart, being moved by the instinct that makes dogs chase automobiles.

They caught sight of Methuen, lost him, and caught sight of him again. Inglehart was not built for running, and Johnny’s eyesight was an affair of limited objectives. Johnny opened up when it became evident that Methuen was heading for the old Phelps mansion, where he, Johnny, and several unmarried instructors lived. Everybody in the house had gone to see the fire. Methuen dashed in the front door three jumps ahead of Johnny and slammed it in the bear’s face.

Johnny padded around in the dark with the idea of attacking a window. But while he was making up his mind, something happened to the front steps under him. They became slicker than the smoothest ice. Down the steps went Johnny, bump-bump-bump.

Johnny picked himself up in no pleasant mood. So this was the sort of treatment he got from the one man—But then, he reflected, if Methuen was really crazy, you couldn’t blame him.

Some of the undergraduates caught up with them. These crowded toward the mansion—until their feet went out from under them as if they were wearing invisible roller skates. They tried to get up, and fell again, sliding down the slight grade of the crown of the road into heaps in the gutter. They retired on hands and knees, their clothes showing large holes.

A police car drove up and tried to stop. Apparently neither brakes nor tires would hold. It skidded about, banged against the curb once, and finally stopped down the street beyond the slippery zone. The cop—he was a fairly important cop, a captain—got out and charged the mansion.

He fell down, too. He tried to keep going on hands and knees. But every time he applied a horizontal component of force to a hand or knee, the hand or knee simply slid backward. The sight reminded Johnny of the efforts of those garter snakes to crawl on the smooth concrete floor of the Central Park Zoo monkey house.

When the police captain gave up and tried to retreat, the laws of friction came back on. But when he stood up, all his clothes below the waist, except his shoes, disintegrated into a cloud of textile fibers.

“My word!” said the English zoologist, who had just arrived. “Just like one of those Etruscan statues, don’t you know!”

The police captain bawled at Bruce Inglehart: “Hey, you, for gossakes gimmie a handkerchief!”

“What’s the matter; got a cold?” asked Inglehart innocently.

“No, you dope! You know what I want it for!”

Inglehart suggested that a better idea would be for the captain to use his coat as an apron. While the captain was knotting the sleeves behind his back, Inglehart and Johnny explained their version of the situation to him.

“Hm-m-m,” said the captain. “We don’t want nobody to get hurt, or the place to get damaged. But suppose he’s got a death ray or sumpm?”

“I don’t sink so,” said Johnny. “He has not hurt anybody. Jus’ prayed jokes.”

The captain thought for a few seconds of ringing up headquarters and having them send an emergency truck. But the credit for overpowering a dangerous maniac singlehanded was too tempting. He said: “How’ll we get into the place, if he can make everything so slippery?”

They thought. Johnny said: “Can you get one of zose sings wiss a wood stick and a rubber cup on end?”

The captain frowned. Johnny made motions. Inglehart said: “Oh, you mean the plumber’s friend! Sure. You wait. I’ll get one. See if you can find a key to the place.”

The assault on Methuen’s stronghold was made on all fours. The captain, in front, jammed the end of the plumber’s friend against the rise of the lowest front step. If Methuen could abolish friction, he had not discovered how to get rid of barometric pressure. The rubber cup held, and the cop pulled himself, Inglehart and Johnny after him. By using the instrument on successive steps, they mounted them. Then the captain anchored them to the front door and pulled them up to it. He hauled himself to his feet by the door handle, and opened the door with a key borrowed from Dr. Wendell Cook.

At one window, Methuen crouched behind a thing like a surveyor’s transit. He swiveled the thing toward them, and made adjustments. The captain and Inglehart, feeling their shoes grip the floor, gathered themselves to jump. But Methuen got the contraption going, and their feet went out from under them.

Johnny used his head. He was standing next to the door. He lay down, braced his hind feet against the door frame, and kicked out. His body whizzed across the frictionless floor and bowled over Methuen and his contraption.

The professor offered no more resistance. He seemed more amused than anything, despite the lump that was growing on his forehead. He said: “My, my, you fellows are persistent. I suppose you’re going to take me off to some asylum. I thought you and you”—he indicated Inglehart and Johnny—“were friends of mine. Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”

The captain growled: “What did you do to my pants?”

“Simple. My telelubricator here neutralizes the interatomic bonds on the surface of any solid on which the beam falls. So the surface, to a depth of a few molecules, is put in the condition of a supercooled liquid as long as the beam is focused on it. Since the liquid form of any compound will wet the solid form, you have perfect lubrication.”

“But my pants—”

“They were held together by friction between the fibers, weren’t they? And I have a lot more inventions like that. My soft-speaker and my three-dimensional projector, for instance, are—”

Inglehart interrupted: “Is that how you made that phony fire, and that whatchamacallit that scared the people at the dinner? With a three-dimensional projector?”

“Yes, of course, though, to be exact, it took two projectors at right angles, and a phonograph and amplifier to give the sound effect. It was amusing, wasn’t it?”

“But,” wailed Johnny, “why do you do zese sings? You trying to ruin your career?”

Methuen shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Johnny, as you’d know if you were in my… uh… condition. And now, gentlemen, where do you want me to go? Wherever it is, I’ll find something amusing there.”

Dr. Wendell Cook visited Ira Methuen on the first day of his incarceration in the New Haven Hospital. In ordinary conversation Methuen seemed sane enough, and quite agreeable. He readily admitted that he had been the one responsible for the jokes. He explained: “I painted your and Dalrymple’s face with a high-powered needle sprayer I invented. It’s a most amusing little thing. Fits in your hand and discharges through a ring on your finger. With your thumb you can regulate the amount of acetone mixed in with the water, which in turn controls the surface tension and therefore the point at which the needle spray breaks up into droplets. I made the spray break up just before it reached your face. You were a sight, Cook, especially when you found out what was wrong with you. You looked almost as funny as the day I painted those feet on my rubbers and substituted them for yours. You react so beautifully to having your dignity pricked. You always were a pompous ass, you know.”

Cook puffed out his cheeks and controlled himself. After all, the poor man was mad. These absurd outbursts about Cook’s pompousness proved it. He said sadly: “Dalrymple’s leaving tomorrow night. He was most displeased about the face-painting episode, and when he found that you were under observation, he told me that no useful purpose would be served by his remaining here. I’m afraid that’s the end of our endowment. Unless you can pull yourself together and tell us what’s happened to you and how to cure it.”

Ira Methuen laughed. “Pull myself together? I am all in one piece, I assure you. And I’ve told you what’s the matter with me, as you put it. I gave myself my own treatment. As for curing it, I wouldn’t tell you how even if I knew. I wouldn’t give up my present condition for anything. I at last realize that nothing really matters, including endowments. I shall be taken care of, and I will devote myself to amusing myself as I see fit.”

Johnny had been haunting Cook’s office all day. He waylaid the president when the latter returned from the hospital.

Cook told Johnny what had happened. He said: “He seems to be completely irresponsible. We’ll have to get in touch with his son, and have a guardian appointed. And we’ll have to do something about you, Johnny.”

Johnny didn’t relish the prospect of the “something.” He knew he had no legal status other than that of a tamed wild animal. The fact that Methuen technically owned him was his only protection if somebody took a notion to shoot him during bear-hunting season. And he was not enthusiastic about Ralph Methuen. Ralph was a very average young schoolteacher without his father’s scientific acumen or whimsical humor. Finding Johnny on his hands, his reaction would be to give Johnny to a zoo or something.

He put his paws on Miss Prescott’s desk and asked: “Hey, good-rooking, wirr you cawr up Bruce Ingrehart at ze Courier?”

“Johnny,” said the president’s secretary, “you get fresher every day.”

“Ze bad infruence of ze undergraduates. Wirr you cawr Mr. Ingrehart, beautifur?” Miss Prescott, who was not, did so.

Bruce Inglehart arrived at the Phelps mansion to find Johnny taking a shower. Johnny was also making a horrible bawling noise. “Waaaaai” he howled. “Hoooooooo! Yrmrrr! Waaaaaaa!”

“Whatcha doing?” yelled Inglehart.

“Taking a bass,” replied Johnny. “Wuuummh!”

“Are you sick?”

“No. Jus’ singing in bass. People sing whire taking bass; why shouldn’t I? Yaaaaawaaa!”

“Well, for Pete’s sake don’t. It sounds like you were having your throat cut. What’s the idea of these bath towels spread all over the floor?”

“I show you.” Johnny came out of the shower, lay down on the bath towels and rolled. When he was more or less dry, he scooped the towels up in his forepaws and hove them into a corner. Neatness was not one of Johnny’s strong points.

He told Inglehart about the Methuen situation. “Rook here, Bruce,” he said, “I sink I can fix him, but you wirr have to he’p me.”

“O.K. Count me in.”

Pop!

The orderly looked up from his paper. But none of the buttons showed a light. So, presumably, none of the patients, wanted attention. He went back to his reading.

Pop!

It sounded a little like a breaking light bulb. The orderly sighed, put away his paper, and began prowling. As he approached the room of the mad professor, No. 14, he noticed a smell of limburger.

Pop!

There was no doubt that the noise came from No. 14. The orderly stuck his head in.

At one side of the room sat Ira Methuen. He held a contraption made of a length of glass rod and assorted wires. At the other side of the room, on the floor, lay a number of crumbs of cheese. A cockroach scuttled out of the shadows and made for the crumbs. Methuen sighted along his glass rod and pressed a button. Pop! A flash, and there was no more cockroach.

Methuen swung the rod toward the orderly. “Stand back, sir! I’m Buck Rogers, and this is my disintegrator!”

“Hey,” said the orderly feebly. The old goof might be crazy, but after what happened to the roach—He ducked out and summoned a squad of interns.

But the interns had no trouble with Methuen. He tossed the contraption on the bed, saying: “If I thought it mattered, I’d raise a hell of a stink about cockroaches in a supposedly sanitary hospital.”

One of the interns protested: “But I’m sure there aren’t any here.”

“What do you call that?” asked Methuen dryly, pointing at the shattered remains of one of his victims.

“It must have been attracted in from the outside by the smell of that cheese. Phew! Judson, clean up the floor. What is this, professor?” He picked up the rod and the flashlight battery attached to it.

Methuen waved a deprecating hand. “Nothing important. Just a little gadget I thought up. By applying the right e.m.f. to pure crown glass, it’s possible to raise its index of refraction to a remarkable degree. The result is that light striking the glass is so slowed up that it takes weeks to pass through it in the ordinary manner. The light that is thus trapped can be released by making a small spark near the glass. So I simply lay the rod on the window sill all afternoon to soak up sunlight, a part of which is released by making a spark with that button. Thus I can shoot an hour’s accumulated light-energy out the front end of the rod in a very small fraction of a second. Naturally when this beam hits an opaque object, it raises its temperature. So I’ve been amusing myself by luring the roaches in here and exploding them. You may have the thing; its charge is about exhausted.”

The intern was stern. “That’s a dangerous weapon. We can’t let you play with things like that.”

“Oh, can’t you? Not that it matters, but I’m only staying here because I’m taken care of. I can walk out any time I like.”

“No you can’t, professor. You’re under a temporary commitment for observation.”

“That’s all right, son. I still say I can walk out whenever I feel like it. I just don’t care much whether I do or not.” With which Methuen began tuning the radio by his bed, ignoring the interns.

Exactly twelve hours later, at 10 a.m., Ira Methuen’s room in the hospital was found to be vacant. A search of the hospital failed to locate him. The only clue to his disappearance was the fact that his radio had been disemboweled. Tubes, wires, and condensers lay in untidy heaps on the floor.

The New Haven police cars received instructions to look for a tall, thin man with gray hair and goatee, probably armed with death rays, disintegrators, and all the other advanced weapons of fact and fiction.

For hours they scoured the city with screaming sirens. They finally located the menacing madman, sitting placidly on a park bench three blocks from the hospital and reading a newspaper. Far from resisting, he grinned at them and looked at his watch. “Three hours and forty-eight minutes. Not bad, boys, not bad, considering how carefully I hid myself.”

One of the cops pounced on a bulge in Methuen’s pocket. The bulge was made by another wire contraption. Methuen shrugged. “My hyperbolic solenoid. Gives you a conical magnetic field, and enables you to manipulate ferrous objects at a distance. I picked the lock of the door to the elevators with it.”

When Bruce Inglehart arrived at the hospital about four, he was told Methuen was asleep. That was amended to the statement that Methuen was getting up, and could see a visitor in a few minutes. He found Methuen in a dressing gown.

Methuen said: “Hello, Bruce. They had me wrapped up in a wet sheet, like a mummy. It’s swell for naps; relaxes you. I told ‘em they could do it whenever they liked. I think they were annoyed about my getting out.”

Inglehart was slightly embarrassed.

Methuen said: “Don’t worry; I’m not mad at you. I realize that nothing matters, including resentments. And I’ve had a most amusing time here. Just watch them fizz the next time I escape.”

“But don’t you care about your future?” said Inglehart. “They’ll transfer you to a padded cell at Middletown—”

Methuen waved a hand. “That doesn’t bother me. I’ll have fun there, too.”

“But how about Johnny Black, and Dalrymple’s endowment?”

“I don’t give a damn what happens to them.”

Here the orderly stuck his head in the door briefly to check up on this unpredictable patient. The hospital, being short-handed, was unable to keep a continuous watch on him.

Methuen continued: “Not that I don’t like Johnny. But when you get a real sense of proportion, like mine, you realize that humanity is nothing but a sort of skin disease on a ball of dirt, and that no effort beyond subsistence, shelter, and casual amusement is worth while. The State of Connecticut is willing to provide the first two for me, so I shall devote myself to the third. What’s that you have there?”

Inglehart thought, “They’re right; he’s become a childishly irresponsible scientific genius.” Keeping his back to the door, the reporter brought out his family heirloom: a big silver pocket flask dating back to the fabulous prohibition period. His aunt Martha had left it to him, and he himself expected to will it to a museum.

“Apricot brandy,” he murmured. Johnny had tipped him off to Methuen’s tastes.

“Now, Bruce, that’s something sensible. Why didn’t you bring it out sooner, instead of making futile appeals to my sense of duty?”

The flask was empty. Ira Methuen sprawled in his chair. Now and then he passed a hand across his forehead. He said: “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that I felt that way half an hour ago. O Lord, what have I done?”

“Plenty,” said Inglehart.

Methuen was not acting at all drunk. He was full of sober remorse.

“I remember everything—those inventions that popped out of my mind, everything. But I didn’t care. How did you know alcohol would counteract the Methuen injection?”

“Johnny figured it out. He looked up its effects, and discovered that in massive doses it coagulates the proteins in the nerve cells. He guessed it would lower their conductivity to counteract the increased conductivity through the gaps between them that your treatment causes.”

“So,” said Methuen, “when I’m sober I’m drunk, and when I’m drunk I’m sober. But what’ll we do about the endowment—my new department and the laboratory and everything?”

“I don’t know. Dalrymple’s leaving tonight; he had to stay over a day on account of some trustee business. And they won’t let you out for a while yet, even when they know about the alcohol counter-treatment. Better think of something quick, because the visiting period is pretty near up.”

Methuen thought. He said: “I remember how all those inventions work, though I couldn’t possibly invent any more of them unless I went back to the other condition.” He shuddered. “There’s the soft-speaker, for instance—”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like a loud-speaker, only it doesn’t speak loudly. It throws a supersonic beam, modulated by the human voice to give the effect of audible sound-frequencies when it hits the human ear. Since you can throw a supersonic beam almost as accurately as you can throw a light beam, you can turn the soft-speaker on a person, who will then hear a still small voice in his ear apparently coming from nowhere. I tried it on Dugan one day. It worked. Could you do anything with that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I hope you can. This is terrible. I thought I was perfectly sane and rational. Maybe I was—Maybe nothing is important. But I don’t feel that way now, and I don’t want to feel that way again—”

The omnipresent ivy, of which Yale is so proud, affords splendid handholds for climbing. Bruce Inglehart, keeping an eye peeled for campus cops, swarmed up the big tower at the corner of Bingham Hall. Below, in the dark, Johnny waited.

Presently the end of a clothesline came dangling down. Johnny inserted the hook in the end of the rope ladder into the loop in the end of the line. Inglehart hauled the ladder up and secured it, wishing that he and Johnny could change bodies for a while. That climb up the ivy had scared him and winded him badly. But he could climb ivy and Johnny couldn’t.

The ladder creaked under Johnny’s five hundred pounds. A few minutes later it slid slowly, jerkily up the wall, like a giant centipede. Then Inglehart, Johnny, ladder, and all were on top of the tower.

Inglehart got out the soft-speaker and trained the telescopic sight on the window of Dalrymple’s room in the Taft, across the intersection of College and Chapel Streets. He found the yellow rectangle of light. He could see into about half the room. His heart skipped a few beats until a stocky figure moved into his field of vision. Dalrymple had not yet left. But he was packing a couple of suitcases.

Inglehart slipped the transmitter clip around his neck, so that the transmitter nestled against his larynx. The next time Dalrymple appeared, Inglehart focused the crosshairs on the steel man’s head. He spoke: “Hanscom Dalrymple!” He saw the man stop suddenly. He repeated: “Hanscom Dalrymple!”

“Huh?” said Dalrymple. “Who the hell are you? Where the hell are you?” Inglehart could not hear him, of course, but he could guess.

Inglehart said, in solemn tones: “I am your conscience.”

By now Dalrymple’s agitation was evident even at that distance. Inglehart continued: “Who squeezed out all the common stockholders of Hephaestus Steel in that phony reorganization?” Pause. “You did, Hanscom Dalrymple!

“Who bribed a United States senator to swing the vote for a higher steel tariff, with fifty thousand dollars and a promise of fifty thousand more, which was never paid?” Pause. “You did, Hanscom Dalrymple!

“Who promised Wendell Cook the money for a new biophysics building, and then let his greed get the better of him and backed out on the thin excuse that the man who was to have headed the new department had had a nervous breakdown?” Pause, while Inglehart reflected that “nervous breakdown” was merely a nice way of saying “gone nuts.” “You did, Hanscom Dalrymple!

“Do you know what’ll happen to you if you don’t atone, Dalrymple? You’ll be reincarnated as a spider, and probably caught by a wasp and used as live fodder for her larvæ. How will you like that, heh-heh?

“What can you do to atone? Don’t be a sap. Call up Cook. Tell him you’ve changed your mind, and are renewing your offer!” Pause. “Well, what are you waiting for? Tell him you’re not only renewing it, but doubling it!” Pause. “Tell him—”

But at this point Dalrymple moved swiftly to the telephone. Inglehart said, “Ah, that’s better, Dalrymple,” and shut off the machine.

Johnny asked: “How did you know awr zose sings about him?”

“I got his belief in reincarnation out of his obit down at the shop. And one of our rewrite men who used to work in Washington says everybody down there knows about the other things. Only you can’t print a thing like that unless you have evidence to back it up.”

They lowered the rope ladder and reversed the process by which they had come up. They gathered up their stuff and started for the Phelps mansion. But as they rounded the corner of Bingham they almost ran into a familiar storklike figure. Methuen was just setting up another contraption at the corner of Welch.

“Hello,” he said.

Man and bear gaped at him. Inglehart asked: “Did you escape again?”

“Uh-huh. When I sobered up and got my point of view back. It was easy, even though they’d taken my radio away. I invented a hypnotizer, using a light bulb and a rheostat made of wire from my mattress, and hypnotized the orderly into giving me his uniform and opening the doors for me. My, my, that was amusing.”

“What are you doing now?” Inglehart became aware that Johnny’s black pelt had melted off into the darkness.

“This? Oh, I dropped around home and knocked together an improved soft-speaker. This one’ll work through masonry walls. I’m going to put all the undergraduates to sleep and tell ‘em they’re monkeys. When they wake up, it will be most amusing to see them running around on all fours and scratching and climbing the chandeliers. They’re practically monkeys to begin with, so it shouldn’t be difficult.”

“But you can’t, professor! Johnny and I just went to a lot of trouble getting Dalrymple to renew his offer. You don’t want to let us down, do you?”

“What you and Johnny do doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. Nothing matters. I’m going to have my fun. And don’t try to interfere, Bruce.” Methuen pointed another glass rod at Inglehart’s middle. “You’re a nice young fellow, and it would be too bad if I had to let you have three hours’ accumulation of sun-ray energy all at once.”

“But this afternoon you said—”

“I know what I said this afternoon. I was drunk and back in my old state of mind, full of responsibility and conscientiousness and such bunk. I’ll never touch the stuff again if it has that effect on me. Only a man who has received the Methuen treatment can appreciate the futility of all human effort.”

Methuen shrank back into the shadows as a couple of undergraduates passed. Then he resumed work on his contraption, using one hand and keeping Inglehart covered with the other. Inglehart, not knowing what else to do, asked him questions about the machine. Methuen responded with a string of technical jargon. Inglehart wondered desperately what to do. He was not an outstandingly brave young man, especially in the face of a gun or its equivalent. Methuen’s bony hand never wavered. He made the adjustments on his machine mostly by feel.

“Now,” he said, “that ought to be about right. This contains a tonic metronome that will send them a note of frequency of 349 cycles a second, with 68.4 pulses of sound a minute. This, for various technical reasons, has the maximum hypnotic effect. From here I can rake the colleges along College Street—” He made a final adjustment. “This will be the most amusing joke yet. And the cream of it is that, since Connecticut is determined to consider me insane, they can’t do anything to me for it! Here goes, Bruce—Phew, has somebody started a still here, or what? I’ve been smelling and tasting alcohol for the last five minutes—ouch!”

The glass rod gave one dazzling flash, and then Johnny’s hairy black body catapulted out of the darkness. Down went Ira Methuen, all the wind knocked out of him.

“Quick, Bruce!” barked Johnny. “Pick up zat needre sprayer I dropped. Unscrew ze container on ze bottom. Don’t spirr it. Zen come here and pour it down his sroat!”

This was done, with Johnny holding Methuen’s jaws apart with his claws, like Sampson slaying the lion, only conversely.

They waited a few minutes for the alcohol to take effect, listening for sounds that they had been discovered. But the colleges were silent save for the occasional tick of a typewriter.

Johnny explained: “I ran home and got ze needre sprayer from his room. Zen I got Webb, ze research assistant in biophysics, to ret me in ze raboratory for ze arcohor. Zen I try to sneak up and squirf a spray in his mouse whire he talks. I get some in, but I don’t get ze sprayer adjusted right, and ze spray hit him before it breaks up, and stings him. I don’t have fingers, you know. So we have to use what ze books cawr brute force.”

Methuen began to show signs of normalcy. As without his glass rod he was just a harmless old professor, Johnny let him up. His words tumbled out: “I’m so glad you did, Johnny—you saved my reputation, maybe my life. Those fatheads at the hospital wouldn’t believe I had to be kept full of alcohol, so, of course, I sobered up and went crazy again—maybe they’ll believe now. Come on; let’s get back there quickly. If they haven’t discovered my absence, they might be willing to keep this last escape quiet. When they let me out, I’ll work on a permanent cure for the Methuen treatment. I’ll find it, if I don’t die of stomach ulcers from all the alcohol I’ll have to drink.”

Johnny waddled up Temple Street to his home, feeling rather smug about his ability as a fixer. Maybe Methuen, sober, was right about the futility of it all. But if such a philosophy led to the upsetting of Johnny’s pleasant existence, Johnny preferred Methuen drunk.

He was glad Methuen would soon be well and coming home. Methuen was the only man he had any sentimental regard for. But as long as Methuen was shut up, Johnny was going to take advantage of that fact. When he reached the Phelps mansion, instead of going directly in, he thrust a foreleg around behind the hedge next to the wall. It came out with a huge slab of chewing tobacco. Johnny bit off about half the slab, thrust the rest back in its cache, and went in, drooling happily a little at each step. Why not?

Content

THE EXALTED
L. Sprague de Camp