His was not the sole satellite still circling Earth, but it was the sole one with life aboard. Everyone else had long since perished. But they had not been outfitted as he and Lydia had been, f or a decade of life on another world. He was lucky: besides food and water and air he had a million miles of video and audio tape to keep him amused. And now, with it, he kept them amused, the remnants of the civilization which had shot him up here in the first place. They had botched the job of getting him to Mars—fortunately for them. Their failure had paid them vital dividends ever since.
“Hoode hoode hoo,” Walt Dangerfield chanted into his microphone, using the transmitter which should have carried his voice back from millions of miles, not merely a couple hundred. “Things you can do with the timer out of an old R.C.A. washer-dryer combination. This item arrives from a handy in the Geneva area; thanks to you, Georg Schilper—I know everyone will be pleased to hear you give this timely tip in your own words.” He played into his transmitter the tape recording of the handyman himself speaking; the entire Great Lakes region of the United States would now know Georg Schilper’s bit of lore, and would no doubt wisely apply it at once. The world hungered for the knowledge tucked away in pockets here and there, knowledge which—without Dangerfield—would be confined to its point of origin, perhaps forever.
After the tape of Georg Schilper he put on his canned reading from Of Human Bondage and rose stiffly from his seat.
There was a pain in his chest which worried him; it had appeared one day, located beneath his breastbone, and now for the hundredth time he got down one of the microfilms of medical information and began scanning the section dealing with the heart. Does it feel like the heel of a hand squeezing my breath out of me? he asked himself. Someone pushing down with all his weight? It was difficult to recall what “weight” felt like in the first place. Or does it merely burn … and if so, when? Before meals or alter?
Last week he had made contact with a hospital in Tokyo, had described his symptoms. The doctors were not sure what to tell him. What you need, they had said, is an electrocardiogram, but how could he give himself a test like that up here? How could anyone, any more? The Japanese doctors Were living in the past, or else there had been more of a revival in Japan than he realized; than anyone realized.
Amazing, he thought suddenly, that I’ve survived so long. It did not seem long, though, because his time-sense had become faulty. And he was a busy man; at this moment, six of his tape recorders monitored six much-used frequencies, and before the reading from the Maugham book had ended he would be obliged to play them back. They might contain nothing or they might contain hours of meaningful talk. One never knew. If only, he thought, I had been able to make use of the high-speed transmission … but the proper decoders were no longer in existence, below. Hours could have been compressed into seconds, and he could have given each area in turn a complete account. As it was, he had to dole it out in small clusters, with much repetition. Sometimes it took months to read through a single novel, this way.
But at least he had been able to lower the frequency on which the satellite’s transmitter broadcast to a band which the people below could receive on a common AM radio. That had been his one big achievement; that, by itself, had made him into what he was.
The reading of the Maugham book ended, then automatically restarted itself; it droned from the start once more for the next area below. Walt Dangerfield ignored it and continued to consult his medical reference microfilms. I think it’s only spasms of the pyloric valve, he decided. If I had phenobarbital here … but it had been used up several years ago; his wife, in her last great suicidal depression, had consumed it all—consumed it and then taken her life anyhow. It had been the abrupt silence of the Soviet space station, oddly enough, that had started her depression; up until then she had believed that they would all be reached and brought safely back down to the surface. The Russians have starved to death, all ten of them, but no one had foreseen it because they had kept up their duty-oriented line of scientific patter right into the last few hours.
“Hoode hoode hoo,” Dangerfield said to himself as he read about the pyloric valve and its spasms. “Folks,” he murmured. “I have this funny pain brought on by over-indulgence … what I need is four-way relief, don’t you agree?” He snapped on his microphone, cutting out the tape-in-progress. “Remember those old ads?” he asked his darkened, unseen audience below. “Before the war—let’s see, how did they go? Are you building more H-bombs but enjoying it less?” He chuckled. “Has thermonuclear war got you down? New York, can you pick me up, yet? I want every one of you within the reach of my voice, all sixty-five of you, to quick light up a match so I’ll know you’re there.”
In his earphones a loud signal came in. “Dangerfield, this is the New York Port Authority; can you give us any idea of the weather?”
“Oh,” Dangerfield said, “we’ve got fine weather coming. You can put out to sea in those little boats and catch those little radioactive fish; nothing to worry about.”
Another voice, fainter, came in now. “Mr. Dangerfield, could you possibly please play some of those opera arias you have? We’d especially appreciate ‘Thy Tiny Hand is Frozen’ from La Boheme.”
“Heck, I can sing that,” Dangerfield said, reaching for the tape as he hummed tenorishly into the microphone.
Returning to Bolinas that night, Eldon Blaine fed the first of the antibiotics to his child and then quickly drew his wife aside. “Listen, they have a top-notch handy up in West Marin which they’ve been keeping quiet about, and only twenty miles from here. I think we should send a delegation up there to nap him and bring him down here.” He added, “He’s a phoce and you should see the ‘mobile he built for himself; none of the handies we’ve had could do anything half that good.” Putting his wool jacket back on he went to the door of their room. “I’m going to ask the Committee to vote on it.”
“But our ordinance against funny people,” Patricia protested. “And Mrs. Wallace is Chairman of the Committee this month; you know how she feels, she’d never let any more phoces come here and settle. I mean, we have four as it is and she’s always complaining about them.”
“That ordinance refers only to funny people who could become a financial burden to the community,” Eldon said, “I ought to know; I helped draft it. Hoppy Harrington is no burden; he’s an asset—the ordinance doesn’t cover him, and I’m going to stand up to Mrs, Wallace and fight it out. I know I can get official permission; I’ve got it all worked Out how we’ll do the napping. They invited us to come up to their area and listen to the satellite, and we’ll do that; we’ll show up but not just to listen to Dangerfield. While they’re involved in that we’ll nap Happy; we’ll put his phocomobile out of action and haul him down here, and they’ll never know what happened. Finders keepers, losers weepers. And our police force will protect us.”
Patricia said, “I’m scared of phoces. They have peculiar powers, not natural ones; everybody knows it. He probably built his ‘mobile by means of magic.”
Laughing with derision, Eldon Blaine said, “So much the better. Maybe that’s what we need: magic spells, a community magician. I’m all for it.”
“I’m going to see how Gwen is,” Patricia said, starting toward the screened-off portion of the room where their child lay on her cot. “I won’t have any pant of this; I think it’s dreadful, what you’re doing.”
Eldon Blaine stepped from the room, out into the night darkness. In a moment he was striding down the path toward the Wallaces’ house.
As the citizens of West Marin County one by one entered the Foresters’ Hall and seated themselves, June Raub adjusted the variable condenser of the twelve-volt car radio and noticed that once again Hoppy Harrington had not shown up to hear the satellite. What was it he had said? “_I don’t like to listen to sick people_.” A strange thing to say, she thought to herself.
From the speaker of the radio static issued and then first faint beepings from the satellite. In a few more minutes they would be picking it up clearly … unless the wet-cell battery powering the radio chose to give out again, as it had briefly the other day.