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Read Ebook: Fifty Per Cent Prophet by Garrett Randall Schoenherr John Illustrator
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Ebook has 180 lines and 11422 words, and 4 pages
Illustrator: Schoenherr
Transcriber's Note:
FIFTY
PER CENT
PROPHET
Illustrated by Schoenherr
Dr. Joachim sat in the small room behind his reception hall and held his fingers poised above the keys of the rather creaky electrotyper on his desk. The hands seemed to hang there, long, slender, and pale, like two gulls frozen suddenly in their long swoop towards some precious tidbit floating on the writhing sea beneath, ready to begin their drop instantly, as soon as time began again.
All of Dr. Joachim's body seemed to be held in that same stasis. Only his lips moved as he silently framed the next sentence in his mind.
Physically, the good doctor could be called a big man: he was broad-shouldered and well-muscled, but, hidden as his body was beneath the folds of his blue, monkish robe, only his shortness of stature was noticeable. He was only fifty-four, but the pale face, the full, flowing beard, and the long white hair topped by a small blue skullcap gave him an ageless look, as though centuries of time had flowed over him to leave behind only the marks of experience and wisdom.
The timelessness of an idealized Methuselah as he approached his ninth centennial, the God-given wisdom engraved on the face of Moses as he came down from Sinai, the mystic power of mighty Merlin as he softly intoned a spell of albamancy, all these seemed to have been blended carefully together and infused into the man who sat behind the typer, composing sentences in his head.
Those gull-hands swooped suddenly to the keyboard, and the aged machine clattered rapidly for nearly a minute before Dr. Joachim paused again to consider his next words.
A bell tinkled softly.
Dr. Joachim's brown eyes glanced quickly at the image on the black-and-white TV screen set in the wall. It was connected to the hidden camera in his front room, and showed a woman entering his front door. He sighed and rose from his seat, adjusting his blue robes carefully before he went to the door that led into the outer room.
He'd rather hoped it was a client, but--
"Hello, Susan, my dear," he said in a soft baritone, as he stepped through the door. "What seems to be the trouble?"
It wasn't the same line that he'd have used with a client. You don't ask a mark questions; you tell him. To a mark, he'd have said: "Ah, you are troubled." It sounds much more authoritative and all-knowing.
"So how's everything been, Doc?" She smiled her best stage smile--every tooth perfect in that perfect face, her hair framing the whole like a perfect golden helmet. She looked like a girl in her early twenties, but Dr. Joachim knew for a fact that she'd been born in 1955, which made her thirty-two next January.
"Reasonably well, all things considered," Dr. Joachim admitted. "I'm not starving to death, at least."
She looked around at the room--the heavy drapes, the signs of the zodiac in gold and silver, the big, over-stuffed chairs, all designed to make the "clients" feel comfortable and yet slightly awed by the ancient atmosphere of mysticism. In the dim light, they looked fairly impressive, but she knew that if the lights were brighter the shabbiness would show.
"Maybe you could use a redecorating job, then, Doc," she said. With a gesture born of sudden impulse, she reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope and pressed it into the man's hands. He started to protest, but she cut him off. "No, Doc; I want you to have it. You earned it.
"That San Juan-New York flight, remember?" she went on hurriedly. "You said not to take it, remember? Well, I ... I sort of forgot about what you'd said. You know. Anyway, I got a ticket and was ready to go when the flight was suddenly delayed. Routine, they said. Checking the engines. But I'd never heard of any such routine as that. I remembered what you told me, Doc, and I got scared.
"After an hour, they put another plane into service; they were still working on the other one. I was still worried, so I decided to wait till the next day.
"I guess you read what happened."
He closed his eyes and nodded slowly. "I read."
"No, Susan; they weren't after you. No one was trying to kill you. Don't worry about it."
Relief washed over her face. "O.K., Doc; if you say so. Look, I've got to run now, but we've got to sit down and have a few drinks together, now that I'm back. And ... Doc--"
"Yes?"
"Anytime you need anything--if I can ever help you--you let me know, huh?"
"Certainly, my dear. And don't you worry about anything. The stars are all on your side right now."
She smiled, patted his hand, and then was gone in a flash of gold and honey. Dr. Joachim looked at the door that had closed behind her, then he looked down at the envelope in his hands. He opened it gently and took out the sheaf of bills. Fifteen hundred dollars!
He returned to the small back room, sat down again at the typer, and, after a minute, began typing again.
When he was finished, he addressed an envelope and put the letter inside.
It required less than two hours for that letter to end up at its destination in a six-floor brick building, a rather old-fashioned affair that stood among similar structures in a lower-middle-class section of Arlington, Virginia, hardly a hop-skip-and-jump from the Pentagon, and not much farther from the Capitol.
Even if he had been there, the letter wouldn't have reached him first. All mail was sent first to the office of the Executive Secretary, Mr. Brian Taggert. Most of it--somewhat better than ninety-nine per cent--went directly on to Mr. Balfour's desk, if it was so addressed; Brian Taggert would never have been so cruel as to deprive Mr. Balfour of the joy of sorting through the thousands of crackpot letters in search of those who had the true spark of mysticism which so fascinated Mr. Balfour.
These members constituted a very effective screen for the real work of the society, work carried on by the "core" members, most of whom weren't even listed on the membership rolls. And yet, it was this group of men and women who made the Society's title true.
Mr. Brian Taggert was a long way from being a crackpot. The big, dark-haired, dark-eyed, hawknosed man sat at his desk in his office on the fifth floor of the Society's building and checked over the mail. Normally, his big wrestler's body was to be found quietly relaxed on the couch that stood against a nearby wall. Not that he was in any way averse to action; he simply saw no virtue in purposeless action. Nor did he believe in the dictum of Miles Standish; if he wanted a thing done, he sent the man most qualified to do it, whether that was himself or someone else.
When he came to the letter from Coney Island, New York, he read it quickly and then jabbed at a button on the intercom switchboard in his desktop. He said three syllables which would have been meaningless to anyone except the few who understood that sort of verbal shorthand, released the button, and closed his eyes, putting himself in telepathic contact with certain of the Society's agents in New York.
Across the river, in the Senate Office Building, a telephone rang in the office of Senator Mikhail Kerotski, head of the Senate Committee on Space Exploration. It was an unlisted, visionless phone, and the number was known only to a very few important officials in the United States Government, so the senator didn't bother to identify himself; he simply said: "Hello." He listened for a moment, said, "O.K., fine," in a quiet voice, and cut the connection.
He sat behind his desk for a few minutes longer, a bearlike man with a round, pale face and eyes circled with dark rings and heavy pouches, all of which had the effect of making him look like a rather sleepy specimen of the giant panda. He finished the few papers he had been working on, stacked them together, rose, and went into the outer office, where he told his staff that he was going out for a short walk.
Kerotski read the letter, and a look of relief came over his round face. "Not the same typewriter or paper, but this is him, all right. What more do we know?"
Consider plutonium. Imagine someone dropping milligram-sized pellets of the metal into an ordinary Florence flask. More than two and a half million of those little pellets could be dropped into the flask without the operator having anything more to worry about than if he were dropping grains of lead or gold into the container. But after the five millionth, dropping them in by hand would only be done by the ignorant, the stupid, or the indestructible. A qualitative change takes place.
When understanding has passed the critical point, conversation as it is carried on by most human beings becomes unnecessarily redundant. Even in ordinary conversation, a single gesture--a shrug of the shoulders, a snap of the fingers, or a nose pinched between thumb and forefinger--can express an idea that would take many words and much more time. A single word--"slob," "nazi," "saint"--can be more descriptive than the dozens of words required to define it. All that is required is that the meanings of the symbols be understood.
Even without telepathy, it was possible for two S.M.M.R. agents to carry on a conversation above and around ordinary chit-chat. It took longer, naturally; when speaking without the chit-chat, it was possible to convey in seconds information that would have taken several minutes to get over in ordinary conversation.
Senator Kerotski only listened to a small part of the phone discussion. He knew most of the story.
The Big Bend Power Reactor, near Marfa, Texas, had been warned that their stellarator would blow. The letter was dismissed as "crackpot," and no precautions were taken. The explosion killed nine men and cut off the power in the area for three hours, causing other accidents due to lack of power.
The Prince Charles Dam in Central Africa had broken and thousands had drowned because those in charge had relegated a warning letter to the cylindrical file.
A mine cave-in in Canada had extinguished three lives because a similar letter had been ignored.
When the sixth warning had come to the offices of Caribbean Trans-Air, the S.M.M.R., working through the FBI, had persuaded the company's officials to take the regularly scheduled aircraft off the run and substitute another while the regular ship was carefully inspected. But it was the replacement ship that came to pieces in midair.
Then letter number seven had been received by the United States Department of Space. It predicted that a meteor would smash into America's Moonbase One, completely destroying it.
Putting two and two together only yields four, no matter how often it's done, but two to the eighth power gives a nice, round two hundred fifty-six, which is something one can sink one's teeth into.
Brian Taggert cut off the phone connection. "That's it, Mike," he said to the senator. "We've got him."
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