WINMX Assorted Textfiles/Ebooks.tar/Text - Fiction - Pohl, Frederik - Wapshot's Demon.txt

Text File | 2003-06-30 | 21KB | 434 lines

Wapshot's Demon
HE KEPT ME WAITING on a hard wooden bench for
three-quarters of an hour before his secretary came wan-
dering out, glanced casually at me, stopped to chat with
the switchboard girl, drifted in my direction again, paused
to straighten out the magazines on the waiting-room table,
and finally came over to tell me that the Postal Inspector
would see me now.
I was in no mood to be polite, but I was very good. I
marched in and put my briefcase on his desk and said,
"Sir, I must protest this high-handed behavior. I assure
yon, I have no client whose activities would bring him
in conflict in any way with the Post Office Department. I
said as much to one of your staff on the phone, after I
received your letter ordering me to appear here, but
they"
He stood up, smiling amiably, and shook my hand be-
fore I could get it out of the way. "That's all right," he
said cheerfully. "That's perfectly all right. We'll straighten
it out right away. What did you say your name was?"
I told him my name and started to go on with what I
had to say, but he wasn't listening. "Roger Barclay," he
repeated, looking at a pile of folders on his desk. "Bar-
clay, Barclay, Barclay. Oh, yes." He picked up one of
the folders and opened it. "The Wapshot business," he
said.
The folder seemed to contain mostly large, bright-
colored, flimsy-looking magazines entitled Secret, Most
Secret, Top Secret and Shush! He opened one of them
where a paper clip marked a place and handed it to me.
There was a small ad circled in red crayon. "That's it," he
said. "Your boy Wapshot."
The ad was of no conceivable interest to me; I barely
glanced at it, something about fortune-telling, it looked
like, signed by somebody named Cleon Wapshot at an
address in one of those little towns in Maine. I handed
it back to the Postal Inspector.  "I have already mformed
you," I said, "that I have no client involved in difficulties
with the Post Office Department; that is not my sort of
practice at all. And I most certainly have no client named
aeon Wapshot."
That took some of the wind out of his sails. He looked
at me suspiciously, then took a scrawly piece of paper out
of the folder and read it over, then looked at me suspi-
ciously again. He handed over the piece of paper. "What
about this, then?" he demanded.
It was a penciled letter, addressed to the Postal In-
spector in Eastport, Maine; it said:
Dear Sir:
Please send all further communications to my Attorney,
Roger Barclay, Esq., of 404 Fifth Avenue, New York,
and oblige,
Yours sincerely,
Clean Wapshot
Naturally, that was a puzzler to me. But I finally con-
vinced the Postal Inspector that I'd never heard of this
Wapshot. You could see he thought there was something
funny about the whole thing and wasn't quite sure
whether I had anything to do with it or not. But, after all,
the Post Office Department is used to cranks and he
finally let me go, and even apologized for taking my time,
after I had assured him for the tenth time that I had
nothing to do with Wapshot.
That shows how wrong you can be. I hurried back to
my office and went in through the private door down the
hall. When I rang for Phoebe I had already put the affair
out of my mind, as the sort of ridiculous time-waster that
makes it so difficult to run a law office on schedule. Phoebe
was bursting with messages; Frankel had called on the
Harry's Hideaway lease, call him back; Mr. Zimmer had
called three times, wouldn't leave a message; the process
server had been unable to find the defendants in the Her-
lihy suit; one of the operatives from the Splendid Detec-
tive Agency was bringing in a confidential report at 3:30.
"And there's a man to see you," she finished up. "He's
been here over an hour; his name's, uh, WapShot, Cleon
Wapshot."
He was a plump little man with a crew cut. Not very
much like any Down-East lobsterman I ever had imagined,
but his voice was authentic of the area. I said, "Sir, you
have caused me a great deal of embarrassment. What in
heaven's name possessed you to give the Post Office my
name?"
He biinked at me mildly. "You're my lawyer."
"Nonsense! My good man, there are some formalities
to go through before"
"Pshaw," he said, "here's your retainer, Mr. Barclay."
He pushed a manila envelope toward me across the desk.
I said, "But I haven't taken your case"
"You will."
"But the retainer1 scarcely know what the figure
should be. I don't even know what law you brwhat
allegations were made."
"Oh, postal fraud, swindling, fortune-telling, that kind
of thing," he said. "Nothing to it. How much you figure
you ought to have just to get started?"
I sat back and looked him over. Fortune-telling! Postal
fraud! But he had a round-faced honesty, you know, the
kind of expression jurymen respect and trust. He didn't
look rich and he didn't look poor; he had a suit on that
was very far from new, but the overcoat was new, brand-
new, and not cheap. And besides he had come right out
and said what his business was; none of this fake air of
"I don't need a lawyer, but if you want to pick up a
couple bucks for saving me the trouble of writing a letter,
you're on" that I see coming in to my office thirty times
a week.
I said briskly, "Five hundred dollars for a starter, Mr.
Wapshot."
He grinned and tapped the envelope. "Count 'er up,"
he said.
I stared at him, but I did what he said. I dumped the
contents of the manila envelope on my desk.
There was a thick packet of U. S. Postal Money Orders
a hundred and forty-one of them, according to a neatly
penciled slip attached to them, made out variously to
"aeon Wapshot," "Clion Wopshatt," "C. Wapshut" and
a dozen other alternate forms, each neatly endorsed on
the back by my new client, each in the amount of $1.98.
There was a packet, not quite so thick, of checks, all
colors and sizes; ninety-six of these, all in the same
amount of $1.98.
There was a still thinner packet of one-dollar bills
thirty of them; and finally there were stamps amounting
to 74c. I took a pencil and added them up:
$279.18
190.08
30.00
.74

$500.00

Wapshot said anxiously, "That's all right, isn't it? I'm
sorry about the stamps, but that's the way the orders come
in and there's nothing I can do about it1 tried and tried
to turn them in, but they won't give me but half the value
for them in the post office, and that's not right. That's
wasteful. You can use them around here, can't you?"
I said with an effort, "Sit down, Mr. Wapshot. Tell me
what this is all about."
Well, he told me. But whether I understood or didn't
understand I can't exactly say. Parts of it made sense, and
parts of it were obviously crazy.
But what it all came to was that, with five appointments
and a heavy day's mail untouched, I found myself in a cab
with this deon Wapshot, beetling across town to a little
fleabag hotel on the West Side. I didn't think the elevator
was going to make it, but I have to admit I was wrong. It
got us to the fifth floor, and Wapshot led the way down
a hall where all the doors seemed to be ajar and the
guests peeping impassively out at us, and we went into a
room with an unmade bed and a marble-topped bureau
and a dripping shower in the pint-sized bath, and a lug-
gage rack andon the luggage rack, a washing machine.
Or anyway, it looked like a washing machine.
Wapshot put his hand on it with simple pride.
"My Semantic Polarizer," he explained.
I followed him into the room, holding my breath. There
was a fine, greasy film of grit on the gadgetWapshot had
not been clever enough to close the window to the air-
shaft, which appeared to double as a garbage chute for the
guests on the upper stories. Under the gritas I say, a
washing machine. One of the small light-housekeeping
kinds: a drawn aluminum pail, a head with some sort of
electric business inside. And a couple of things that didn't
seem connected with washing clothestwo traps, one on
either side of the pail. The traps were covered with wire
mesh, and both of them were filled with white cards.
"Here," said Wapshot, and picked one of the cards out
of the nearest trap. It was a tiny snapshot, like the V-mail
letters, photographically diminished, soldiers overseas used
to send. I read it without difficulty:
Dear Mr. Wapshat,
My Husband was always a good Husband to me, not
counting the Drink, but when his Cousin moved in up-
stairs he cooled off to me. He is always buying her Candy
and Flowers because he promised her Mother he would
take care of her after the Mother, who was my Husband's
Aunt, died. Her Television is always getting broken and
he has to go up to fix it, sometimes until four o'clock in
the Morning. Also, he never told me he had an Aunt until
she moved in. I enclose $1 Dollar and .98 Cents as it says
in your ad. in SHUT UP!, please tell me, is she really
his Cousin?
I looked up from the letter. Wapshot took it from me,
glanced at it, shrugged. "I get a lot of that kind," he said.
"Mr. Wapshot, are you confessing that you are telling
fortunes by mail?"
"No!" He looked upset. "Didn't I make you under-
stand? It hasn't got anything to do with fortunes. Ques-
tions that have a yes or no answer, that's allif I can
give them a definite yes or a definite no, I do it and keep
the dollar ninety-eight. If I can't I give back the money."
I stared at him, trying to tell if he was joking. He didn't
look as though he was joking. In the airshaft something
went whiz-pop; a fine spray of grit blew in off the window
sill.
Wapshot shook his head reproachfully. "Throwing their
trash down again. Mr. Barclay, I've told the desk clerk a
dozen times"
"Forget the desk clerk! What's the difference between
what you said and fortune-telling?"
He took a deep breath. "I swear, Mr. Barclay," he said
sadly, "I don't think you listen. I went all through this in
your office."
"Do it again."
He shrugged. "Well," he said, "you start with Clerk
Maxwell. He was a man who discovered a lot of things,
and one of the things he discovered he never knew about"
I yelled, "Now, how could he"
"Just listen, Mr. Barclay. It was something that they
call 'Maxwell's Demon.' You know what hot air is?"
I said, meaning it to hurt, "I'm learning."
"No, no, not that kind of hot air. I mean just plain
hot air, like you might get out of a radiator. It's hot be-
cause the molecules in it are moving fast. Understand?
Heat is fast molecules, cold is slow molecules. That's the
only difference." He was getting warmed up. "Now,
ordinary air," he went on, "is a mixture of molecules at
different speeds. Some move fast, some move slow; it's
the average that gives you your temperature. What Clerk
Maxwell said, and he said it kind of as a joke, you know
except a genius never really jokes, and never really
makes a mistake; even the things he doesn't really mean
sometimes turn out to be true Anyway, what Clerk
Maxwell said was, 'Wouldn't it be nice if we could train
a little demon to  stand in the window of a house.  He
could direct the fast-moving molecules inside, giving us
heat,  and direct the slow-moving ones into, say, the
kitchen refrigeratorgiving us cold.' You follow me so
far?"
I laughed. "Ha-ha. But I'm not a fool, Mr. Wapshot,
and I have had a certain amount of education. I am
aware that there is a law of entropy that"
"Ha-ha," he interrupted. "Hold on for a minute, Mr.
Barclay. I heard all about the law of entropy, which says
that high and low temperatures tend to merge and average
out, instead of separating. I heard about it, you heard
about it, and even Maxwell heard about it. But there was
a German fellow name of Hilsch, and he didn't hear about
it. Because what he did, Mr. Barclay, was to invent some-
thing called the 'Hilsch Tube,' and all the Hilsch tube is
is Maxwell's demon come to life. Honest. It really works.
You blow into itit's a kind of little pipe with a joint
sticking out of it, the simplest-looking little thing you ever
sawand hot air comes out of one end, cold air comes
out of the other. Don't take my word for it," he said hur-
riedly, holding up his hand. "Don't argue with me. After
World War II, they brought back a couple of those things
from Germany, and they're all over the country now. They
work."
I said patiently, "Mr. Wapshot, what has this got to
do with fortune-telling?"
He scowled. "It isn't fortune Well, never mind that.
So we take my Semantic Polarizer. I put into it a large
sample of particleswhat we call a 'universe.' These par-
ticles are microfilmed copies of letters people have sent
me, along with their checks for a dollar ninety-eight, just
like I told them to do in my ads. I run the Polarizer for a
while, until the particles in the 'universe' are thoroughly
randomed, and then I start tapping off the questions. The
ones that come out at this end, the answer is 'yes.' The
ones that come out at the other, 'no.' I have to admit," he
confessed, a little embarrassed, "that I can only pull about
sixty per cent out before the results begin getting un-
reliablethe ones that come off slowly are evidently less
highly charged than the ones that come off right away, and
so there's a chance of error. But the ones that come off
early, Mr. Barclay, they're for sure. After all," he de-
manded, "what else can they be but definite? Don't for-
get, the particles are exactly alike in every respectshape,
color, weight, size, texture, appearance, feel, everything
every respect but one. The only difference is, for some the
answer is 'yes,' for some the answer is 'no.' "
I stood looking at him silently.
A bottle whizzed and splintered in the airshaft; we both
ducked.
I said, "It works?"
"It works," he said solemnly.
"You've tried it out?"
He grinnedalmost for the first time. "You took my
case, didn't you? That was a yes. Your price was five
hundred? That was a yes. It works, Mr. Barclay. As I
see it, that ends the discussion."
And so it did, of coursepermanently.
The Semantic Polarizer was remarkably easy to run. I
played with it for a while, and then I sent the white-haired
bellboy down for the Sunday papers. He looked at me as
if I was  some kind of  an idiot.  "Excuse me," he said,
scratching his head, "but isn't today Wednes"
"I want the Sunday papers," I told him. "Here." Well,
the five-dollar bill got the papers for me, but obviously
he still thought I was crazy. He said:
"Excuse me, but did the gemmun in this room go out?"
"You mean Mr. Wapshot?" I asked him. "Yes. That's
right. He went out. And now, if you will kindly do the
same...."
I locked the door behind him. Oh, Wapshot had gone
out, all right. I pulled the papers apartthey were a stack
nearly a foot highand crumpled them section by section,
and when I had dumped them down the airshaft piece by
piece, stare how I might, lean as far out as I would, I
could see nothing at the bottom of the shaft but paper.
So much for Cleon Wapshot, gone early to join the
immortals.
I checked the room over carefully. There was one small
blood spot on the floor, but in that room it hardly mat-
tered. I pulled the leg of the chair over to cover it, put
the Semantic Analyzer in its crate, turned off the light and
rang for the elevator. The blasted thing weighed a ton, but
I managed it.
The elevator starter at my office gave me a lot of
trouble, but I finally got the thing into a freight elevator
andfor another five bucks to the porterin the private
door to my office. Phoebe heard me moving around and
came trotting in with a face like cataclysm. "Mr. Barclay,"
she cried, "they're here! They've been waiting ever since
you left with Mr. Wapshot."
"God rest him," I said. "Who are yon talking about?"
"Why, the men from the Bar Association," she ex-
plained. It had completely slipped my mind.
I patted her hand. "There," I said. "Show them in, my
dear."
The two men from the Bar Association came in like
corpse robbers. "Mr. Barclay," the fat one said, "speaking
for the Committee, we cannot accept your explanation
that $11,577.16 of the Hoskins Estate was expended for
'miscellany.' Lacking a more detailed accounting, we have
no choice but to"
"I understand perfectly," I told him, bowing. "You
wish me to pay backto make up the deficit out of my
own pocket."
He scowled at me. "Whyyes, that for a starter," he
said sternly. "But there is also the matter of the Annie
Sprayragen Trust Fund, where the item of $9,754.08 for
'general expense' has been challenged by"
"That too," I said. "Gentlemen, I shall pauperize my-
self to make good these sums. My whole fortune will go
to it, if necessary."
"Fortune!" squawked the short, thin one. "That's the
trouble, Barclay! We've talked to your bank, and they say
you haven't two dimes to rub together!"
"Disbarment!" snarled the fat one. "That's why we're
here, Barclay!"
It was time to make an end. I gave up the pretense of
politeness. "Gentlemen," I said crisply, "I think not."
They stared. "Barclay," snapped the fat one, "bluff will
get you"
"There's no bluff." I walked over to my desk, patting
the crate of the Semantic Polarizer on the way. I pre-
tended to consult my calendar. "Be good enough to return
on Monday next," I told them. "I shall have certified
checks for the full amounts ready at that time."
The short, thin one said uncertainly, "Why should we
let you stall?"
"What else can you do? The money's gone, gentlemen.
If you want it back,  be here on Monday.  And now,
good-day."
Phoebe appeared to show them out.
And I got down to work.
Busy, busy, busy.
Phoebe was busier than I, at thatafter the first day.
I spent the rest of that day printing out yes-or-no ques-
tions on little squares of paper, microfilming them and
bouncing them through the hopper of the Semantic Polar-
izer. While the drum of the machine spun and bounced, I
stood and gloated.
Wapshot's Demon! And all he could think to use it for
was a simple mail-order business, drudgery instead of
wealth beyond dreaming. With a brain that could create
the Semantic Polarizer, he was unable to see beyond the
cash value of a fortune-telling service. Well, it was an easy
way to pay his bills, and obviously he wasn't much in-
terested in wealth.
But I, however, was.
And that was why I ran poor Phoebe ragged. To the
bookmakers; to the bank; to the stockbrokers; to the
track; to the numbers runners; back to the office. I loaned
her my pigskin case, and when that wasn't big enough
the numbers bank, for instance, paid off in fives and tens
she took a hundred dollars out of the bottom file
drawer and bought a suitcase. Because it was, after all,
simple enough to get rich in a hurry. Take a race at Aque-
duct; there are eight horses entered, maybe; write a slip
for each one: Will  win the first at Aqueduct
today? Repeat for the second race, the third race, all the
races to the end of the day; run them through the Polar-
izer, pick out the cards that come through the "yes"
hopper
And place your bets.
Numbers? You need thirty slips. Will the first digit of
the winning number be 1, 2, 3, 4etc. Ten slips for the
first digit, ten for the second, ten for the third; pick out
the three that come out "yes," put them together, and
A bet on the numbers pays odds of 600 to one.
It took me thirty-six hours to work out the winners of
the next three weeks' races, fights, ball games and tennis
matches; the stock quotations of a hundred selected issues,
and the numbers that would come up on the policy wheel.
And, I say this, they were the happiest thirty-six hours of
my life.
Of all my life.
It was a perfectly marvelous time, and too bad that it
couldn't go on. I had everything ready: My suitcase of
currency, my lists of the bets to place in the immediate
future, my felt-lined wardrobe trunk for transporting the
Polarizer, my anonymous letter to the manager of the late
Cleon Wapshot's hotel, directing his attention to the air-
shaft; even my insulting note to the Committee on Dis-
barments of the Bar Association. My passport was in
order, my reservation by Air France to New Guinea was
confirmed, and I was only waiting for Phoebe to come
back with the tickets. I had time to kill.
And Curiosity is a famed killer. Of cats. Of time. And
of other things.
When Phoebe came back she pounded on the door for
nearly an hour, knowing I was in there, knowing I would
miss my plane, begging me to come out, to answer, to
speak to her. But what was the use? I took my list of bets
and tore it in shreds. I took the Polarizer and smashed it
to jangling bits. And then I waited.
Good-by, Wall Street! good-by, Kentucky Derby. Good-
by, a million dollars a month. I suppose they'll find Wap-
shot's body sooner or later, and there isn't a doubt that
they'll trace it back to methe bellboy, the postal inspec-
tor, even Phoebe might provide the link. Say, a week to
find the body; another week, at the most, to put the finger
on me. Two months for the trial, and sentence of execu-
tion a month or two after. Call it four months from date
until they would put me in the chair.
I wish I hadn't asked the Polarizer one certain question.
I wish I were going still to be alive, four months from
date.