even that would have been most unlikely. But of more than two or three of
them I knew I was not capable. I was forced, finally, to admit that I had
been the recipient of some sort of outside help.’
‘What kind of outside help?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Even now I don’t.’
‘But it didn’t stop you from using these ideas.’
‘I am a practical man,’ he said. ‘Intensely practical. I suppose some
people might even say hard-headed. But consider this: the business was gone.
Not my business, mind you, but the family business, the business my
grandfather had started and my father had handed on to me. It wasn’t my
business; it was a business I held in trust. There is a great distinction.
You could see a business you had built yourself go gurgling down the drain
and still stand the blow of it, telling yourself that you had been
successful once and you could start over and be successful once again. But
it’s different with a family business.
In the first place, there is the shame. And in the second place, you
can’t be sure that you can recoup. You were no success to start with.
Success had been handed to you and you’d merely carried on. You never could
be sure that you could start over and build the business back. In fact,
you’re so conditioned that you’re pretty sure you couldn’t.’
He quit speaking and in the silence I could hear the ticking of a
clock, faint and far off, but I couldn’t see the clock and I resisted the
temptation to turn my head to see if I could find it. For I had the feeling
that if I turned my head, if I stirred at all, I’d break something that lay
within the room. As if I stood in a crowded china shop, where all the pieces
were precarious and tilted, fearing to move, for if one piece were
dislodged, all of them would come crashing down.
‘What would you have done?’ asked Sherwood.
‘I’d have used anything I had,’ I said.
‘That’s what I did,’ said Sherwood. ‘I was desperate. There was the
business, this house, Nancy, the family name – all of it at stake. I took
all of those ideas and I wrote them down and I called in my engineers and
draughtsmen and production people and we got to work. I got the credit for
it all, of course. There was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t tell
them I wasn’t the one who’d dreamed up all those things. And you know,
strange as it may sound, that’s the hardest part of all. That I have to go
on taking credit for all those things I didn’t do.’
‘So that is that,’ I said. ‘The family business saved and everything is
fine. If I were you, I wouldn’t let a guilt complex bother me too much.’
‘But it didn’t stop,’ he said. ‘If it had, I’d have forgotten it. If
there’d just been this single spurt of help to save the company, it might
have been all right. But it kept right on. As if there might be two of me,
the real, apparent Gerald Sherwood, the one sitting at this desk, and
another one who did the thinking for me. The ideas kept on coming and some
of them made a lot of sense and some made no sense at all. Some of them, I
tell you, were out of this world, literally out of this world. They had no
point of reference, they didn’t seem to square with any situation. And while
one could sense that they had potential, while there was a feeling of great
importance in the very texture of them, they were entirely useless. And it
was not only the ideas; it was knowledge also. Bits and bursts of knowledge.
Knowledge about things in which I had no interest, things I had never
thought of. Knowledge about certain things I’m certain no man knows about.
As if someone took a handful of fragmented knowledge, a sort of grab-bag,
junk-heap pile of knowledge and dumped it in my brain.’
He reached out for the bottle and filled his glass. He gestured at me
with the bottle neck and I held out my glass. He filled it to the brim.
‘Drink up,’ he said. ‘You got me started and now you hear me out.
Tomorrow morning I’ll ask myself why I told you all of this. But tonight it
seems all right.’
‘If you don’t want to tell me. If it seems that I am prying…’
He waved a hand at me. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘if you don’t want to hear
it. Pick up your fifteen hundred.’
I shook my head. ‘Not yet. Not until I know how come you’re giving it
to me.’
‘It’s not my money. I’m just acting as an agent.’
‘For this other man? For this other you?’
He nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I wonder how you guessed.’
I gestured at the phone without a dial.
He grimaced. ‘I’ve never used the thing,’ he said. ‘Until you told me
about the one you found waiting in your office, I never knew anyone who had.
I make them by the hundreds…’
‘You make them!’
‘Yes, of course I do. Not for myself. For this second self. Although,’
he said, leaning across the desk and lowering his voice to a confidential
tone, ‘I’m beginning to suspect it’s not a second self.’
‘What do you think it is?’
He leaned slowly back in the chair. ‘Damned if I know,’ he said. ‘There
was a time I thought about it and wondered at it and worried over it, but
there was no way of knowing. I just don’t bother any more. I tell myself
there may be others like me. Maybe I am not alone – at least, it’s good to
think so.’
‘But the phone?’ I asked.
‘I designed the thing,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps this other person, if it
is a person, did. I found it in my mind and I put it down on paper. And I
did this, mind you, without knowing what it was or what it was supposed to
do. I knew it was a phone of some sort, naturally. But I couldn’t, for the
life of me, see how it could work. And neither could any of the others who
put it into production at the plant. By all the rules of reason, the damn
thing shouldn’t work.’
‘But you said there were a lot of other things that seemed to have no
purpose.’
‘A lot of them,’ he said, ‘but with them I never drew a blueprint, I
never tried to make them. But the phone, if that is what you want to call
it, was a different proposition. I knew that I should make them and how many
might be needed and what to do with them.’
‘What did you do with them?
‘I shipped them to an outfit in New Jersey.’
It was utterly insane.
‘Let me get this straight,’ I pleaded. ‘You found the blueprints in
your head and you knew you should make these phones and that you should send
them to some place in New Jersey. And you did it without question?’
‘Oh, certainly with question. I felt somewhat like a fool. But consider
this: this second self, this auxiliary brain, this contact with something
else had never let me down. It had saved my business, it had provided good
advice, it had never failed me. You can’t turn your back on something that
has played good fairy to you.’
‘I think I see,’ I said.
‘Of course you do,’ he told me. ‘A gambler rides his luck. An investor
plays his hunches. And neither luck nor hunch are as solid and consistent as
this thing I have.’
He reached out and picked up the dialless phone and looked at it, then
set it down again. ‘I brought this one home,’ he said, ‘and put it on the
desk. All these years I’ve waited for a call, but it never came.’
‘With you,’ I told him, ‘there is no need of any phone.’
‘You think that’s it?’ he asked.
‘I’m sure of it.’
‘I suppose it is,’ he said. ‘At times it’s confusing.’
‘This Jersey firm?’ I asked. ‘You corresponded with them?’
He shook his head. ‘Not a line. I just shipped the phones.’
‘There was no acknowledgement?’
‘No acknowledgement,’ he said. ‘No payment. I expected none. When you
do business with yourself…’
‘Yourself! You mean this second self runs that New Jersey firm?
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Christ, I don’t know anything. I’ve lived
with it all these years and I tried to understand, but I never understood.’
And now his face was haunted and I felt sorry for him.
He must have noticed that I felt sorry for him. He laughed and said.
‘Don’t let me get you down. I can take it. I can take anything. You must not