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Read Ebook: Don't Look Now by Rubin Leonard Wood Wallace Illustrator
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Ebook has 312 lines and 12501 words, and 7 pages
Bringing his drawn face so close that they could smell the wine, he gave both women a look of scorn. Then he backed away and leaned his padded shoulder against the lion.
"Boney, she's sorry," said Miss Erwin.
"I am not," said Miss Knox.
He glowered at her and walked away into the dark, his spider legs dissolving sooner than expected. Then he marched back.
"Sorry," he said. "Ha. I won't tell you. I'm going to tell it to the Director himself."
"Forget it, Boney. He'd throw you out again. You'd better just tell us."
His skeleton hand stretched toward the water. "You see that radio presser?"
"You mean the new radiocompressor on the Silvertongue factory?"
"Anything," Miss Knox said. "Our patient, Mr. Barger, builds them. He told us all about it the moment he came. In Greek."
He glowered.
"I'm sorry, Boney."
"Radiocompressors can do things--any things--without touching. Like rolling cigarettes or chopping up tobacco. The radio waves are so small they--push things." He pushed the air with his left hand. "Not just go through them." He wiggled the brittle fingers of his right.
"Everyone knows that," said Miss Knox. "What you mean is that the supra-short wave has an intense direct effect on matter. It was in all the papers."
"All right, go on." Miss Knox struck a cigarette, which blew out. She threw it down and succeeded in lighting another.
"You can fool people, also, with the same radio waves," said Boney.
"You mean hide behind the door with a wave compressor and push chairs around? Like that?"
"Can it jump off?" asked Miss Knox.
"Can it jump off? Did you ever see a cat that couldn't jump? And that's not all--"
"Quite a trick," she said.
"No trick. You could rule the world with that, ladies. Think about it. Rule the world. Got a cigarette? After all, I always get you coffee."
She handed him one.
Miss Erwin stared across the river. "I hope it isn't a new kind of bomb," she said.
Boney pulled out a stick match and struck it on the stone lion. Cupping his hands around the flame, he lit up and walked away.
"But, Dr. Brooks, when you tell Boney things like that," said Miss Knox, "he believes them, and he quotes you like mad. Don't you care about your reputation at all?"
"My dear woman," Dr. Brooks replied, "I've been interested in many things in my years, but getting my portrait in the Mushroom has never been one of them--"
Mr. Barger's legs spasmed suddenly and shot straight out, jerking the covers from his fat-layered neck. But the pink shut eyelids hadn't quivered.
"--and, anyway, Boney is right," Dr. Brooks finished. "Why do you think the Royalties want government control of the whole invention?"
Miss Knox was tucking the covers around his warm, sticky jowls. "But he said you said--"
"I said she said we said." Brooks grabbed her chin between his thumb and forefinger. "Did you know that machine on the Silvertongue roof could get at us inside our own homes?"
She shook her head, swinging his arm from side to side.
"If you know nothing about it, girlie, let me explain." He squeezed her chin tighter. "You saw those two men from the Christian E. Lodge Corporation--Silvertongue, that is--who came this afternoon to see Barger? The ones on motorskates?"
"No, but the Silvertongue men love him like a brother. Barger designed their radiocompressor--the one in all the newspapers. Here, you can see it from the window if you--"
"I know, Dr. Brooks."
"Do you know what that machine can really do, girlie?"
"When I was your age--" Miss Knox began.
"You mean float visitors through the air?"
"No. You'd need the power of ten maritime atomic piles in series just to lift Dr. Gesner to the height of--"
"Very funny!"
"How is it done?"
"Only Barger Electronics really knows," said Dr. Brooks, "and the Christian E. Lodge engineers. It's something to do with compressing the wave length to approximate that of light, so that images are canceled out. This leaves a clear field for subliminal techniques. If there are subvisual images projected on the walls, for instance, that's what the observers will see inside the room."
"Oh, my God!" exclaimed Miss Knox.
"The only other thing I know is that it has to be done with intersecting spheres. The machine has two portable secondary transmitters--or projectors, or whatever they call them--each emitting in all directions to form a wave-sphere. Where the two spheres overlap, you get your possible interference with light."
"Frankly, I just don't understand it."
"Any radio waves go out in all directions to form spheres." His voice had become a mutter. "You know that."
"No, I didn't."
He gave a false sigh. "Well, take an ordinary weak phone transmitter very high up in a whirlybird. That's the simplest case. You know what sound a whirlybird makes, don't you?"
"Of course," said Miss Knox.
"What?" Dr. Brooks challenged, moving at her. "How does it sound?"
"Oh, clatter-clatter chug-chug," she said, moving back.
"Now compressed waves travel a certain number of feet--theoretically, the number of foot-pounds of work the power input could perform modified by a constant value called 'e'--and at that point they revert to ordinary radio waves. This forms a sphere of compressed or supra-short waves. Do you understand that?"
"No," said Miss Knox.
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