Four-Sided Triangle Read online

  Four-Sided Triangle

  William F. Temple

  THE FOUR-SIDED

  TRIANGLE

  Amazing Stories, November 1939

  by William F. Temple (1914-)

  Three people peered through a quartz window.

  The girl was squashed uncomfortably between the two men, but at the moment neither she nor they cared. The ob-ject they were watching was too interesting. The girl was Joan Leeton. Her hair was an indeterminate brown, and owed its curls to tongs, not to nature. Her eyes were certainly brown, and bright with unquenchable good hu-mour. In repose her face was undistinguished, though far from plain; when she smiled, it was beautiful.

  Her greatest attraction (and it was part of her attraction that she did not realise it) lay in her character. She was soothingly sympathetic without becoming mushy, she was very level-headed (a rare thing in a woman) and completely unselfish. She refused to lose her temper over anything, or take offence, or enlarge upon the truth in her favour, and yet she was tolerant of such lapses in others. She possessed a brain that was unusually able in its dealing with science, and yet her tastes and pleasures were simple.

  William Fredericks (called ‘Will’) had much in common with Joan, but his sympathy was a little more disinterested, his humour less spontaneous, and he had certain prejudices. His tastes were reserved for what he considered the more worthy things. But he was calm and good-tempered, and his steadiness of purpose was reassuring. He was black-haired, with an expression of quiet content. William Josephs (called ‘Bill’) was different. He was completely unstable. Fiery of hair, he was alternately fiery and depressed of spirit. Impulsive, generous, highly emotional about art and music, he was given to periods of gaiety and moods of black melancholia. He reached, at his best, heights of mental brilliance far beyond the other two, but long bouts of lethargy prevented him from making the best of them. Nevertheless, his sense of humour was keen, and he was often amused at his own absurdly over-sensitive character; but he could not change it. Both these men were deeply in love with Joan, and both tried hard to conceal it. If Joan had any preference, she concealed it just as ably, although they were aware that she was fond of both of them.

  The quartz window, through which the three were looking, was set in a tall metal container, and just a few feet away was another container, identical even to the thickness of the window-glass.

  Overhead was a complex assemblage of apparatus: bulbous, silvered tubes, small electric motors that hummed in various unexpected places, makeshift screens of zinc, roughly soldered, coils upon coils of wire, and a network of slung cables that made the place look like a creeper-tangled tropical jungle. A large dynamo churned out a steady roar in the corner, and a pair of wide sparkgaps crackled continuously, filling the laboratory with a weird, jumping blue light as the day waned outside the windows and the dusk crept in.

  An intruder in the laboratory might have looked through the window of the other container and seen, standing on a steel frame in a cubical chamber, an oil painting of

  ‘Madame Croignette’ by Boucher, delicately illuminated by concealed lights. He would not have known it, but the painting was standing in a vacuum. If he had squeezed behind the trio at the other container and gazed through their window he would have seen an apparently identical sight: an oil painting of ‘Madame Croignette’ by Boucher, standing on a steel frame in a vacuum, delicately illuminated by concealed lights.

  From which he would probably not gather much.

  The catch was that the painting at which the three were gazing so intently was not quite the same as the one in the first container—not yet. There were minute differences in colour and proportion.

  But gradually these differences were righting themselves, for the whole of the second canvas was being built up atom by atom, molecule by molecule, into an exactly identical twin of the one which had felt the brush of Francis Boucher. The marvellously intricate apparatus, using an adaption of a newly-discovered magnetic principle, consumed only a moderate amount of power in arranging the lines of sympathetic fields of force which brought every proton into position and every electron into its respective balancing orbit. It was a machine which could divert the flow of great forces without the ability to tap their energy.

  “Any minute now!” breathed Will.

  Bill rubbed his breath off the glass impatiently.

  “Don’t do that!” he said, and promptly fogged the glass over again. Not ungently, he attempted to rub a clear patch with Joan’s own pretty nose. She exploded into laughter, fogging the glass hopelessly, and in the temporary confusion of this they missed seeing the event they had been waiting days for—the completion of the duplicate painting to the ultimate atom.

  The spark-gaps died with a final snap, a lamp sprang into being on the indicator panel, and the dynamo began to run whirringly down to a stop. They cleaned out the window, and there stood ‘Madame Croignette’ looking rather blankly out at them with wide brown eyes that exactly matched the sepia from Boucher’s palette, and both beauty spots and every hair of her powdered wig in place to a millionth of a millimetre.

  Will turned a valve, and there was the hiss of air rushing into the chamber. He opened the window, and lifted the painting out gingerly, as if he half-expected it to crumble in his hands.

  “Perfect—a beauty!” he murmured. He looked up at Joan with shining eyes. Bill caught that look, and unaccountably checked the impulsive whoop of joy he was on the point of letting loose. He coughed instead, and leaned over Joan’s shoulder to inspect ‘Madame Croignette’ more closely.

  “The gamble’s come off,” went on Will. “We’ve sunk every cent into this, but it won’t be long before we have enough money to do anything we want to do-anything.”

  “Anything—except to get Bill out of bed on Sunday mornings,” smiled Joan. and they laughed.

  “No sensible millionaire would get out of bed any morning,” said Bill. The steel and glass factory of Art Replicas, Limited, shone like a diamond up in the green hills of Surrey. In a financial sense, it had actually sprung from a diamond—the sale of a replica of the Koh-i-noor. That had been the one and only product of Precious Stones, Limited, an earlier company which was closed down by the government when they saw that it would destroy the world’s diamond market. A sister company, Radium Products, was going strong up in the north because its scientific necessity was recognised. But the heart of the three company directors lay in Art Replicas, and there they spent their time.

  Famous works of art from all over the world passed through the factory’s portals, and gave birth to innumerable replicas of themselves for distribution and sale at quite reasonable prices.

  Families of only moderate means found it pleasing to have a Constable or Turner in the dining room and a Rodin statuette in the hall. And this widely-flung ownership of objets d’art, which were to all intents and purposes the genuine articles, strengthened interest in art enormously. When people had lived with these things for a little while, they began to perceive the beauty in them—for real beauty is not always obvious at a glance—and to become greedy for more knowledge of them and the men who originally conceived and shaped them.

  So the three directors—Will, Bill, and Joan—put all their energy into satisfying the demands of the world for art, and conscious of their part in furthering civilisation, were deeply content.

  For a time.

  Then Bill, the impatient and easily-bored, broke out one day in the middle of a Directors’ Meeting.

  “Oh to hell with the Ming estimates!” he cried, sweeping a pile of orders from the table.

  Joan and Will, recognising the symptoms, exchanged wry glances of amusement.

  “Look here,” went on Bill, “I don’t know what
you two think, but I’m fed up!

  We’ve become nothing but dull business people now. It isn’t our sort of life. Repetition, repetition, repetition! I’m going crazy! We’re research workers, not darned piece-workers. For heaven’s sake, let’s start out in some new line!”

  This little storm relieved him, and almost immediately he smiled too.

  “But, really, aren’t we?” he appealed.

  “Yes,” responded Joan and Will in duet.

  “Well, what about it?”

  Will coughed, and prepared himself.

  “Joan and I were talking about that this morning, as a matter of fact,” he said.

  “We were going to suggest that we sell the factory, and retire to our old laboratory and re-equip it.”

  Bill picked up the ink-pot and emptied it solemnly over the Ming estimates. The ink made a shining lake in the centre of the antique and valuable table.

  “At last we’re sane again,” he said. “Now you know the line of investigation I want to open up. I’m perfectly convinced that the reason for our failure to create a living duplicate of any living creature was because the quotiety we assumed for the xy action—”

  “Just a moment, Bill,” interrupted Will. “Before we get on with that work, I—I mean, one of the reasons Joan and me wanted to retire was because—well—”

  “What he’s trying to say,” said Joan quietly, “is that we plan to get married and settle down for a bit before we resume research work.”

  Bill stared at them. He was aware that his cheeks were slowly reddening. He felt numb.

  “Well!” he said. “Well!” (He could think of nothing else. This was unbelievable!

  He must postpone consideration of it until he was alone, else his utter mortification would show.)

  He put out his hand automatically, and they both clasped it.

  “You know I wish you every possible happiness,” he said, rather huskily. His mind seemed empty. He tried to form some comment, but somehow he could not compose one sentence that made sense.

  “I think we’ll get on all right,” said Will, smiling at Joan. She smiled back at him, and unknowingly cut Bill to the heart.

  With an effort, Bill pulled himself together and rang for wine to celebrate. He ordered some of the modern reconstruction of an exceedingly rare ’94. The night was moonless and cloudless, and the myriads of glittering pale blue points of the Milky Way sprawled across the sky as if someone had cast a handful of brilliants upon a black velvet cloth. But they twinkled steadily, for strong air currents were in motion in the upper atmosphere.

  The Surrey lane was dark and silent. The only signs of life were the occasional distant glares of automobile headlights passing on the main highway nearly a mile away, and the red dot of a burning cigarette in a gap between the hedgerows. The cigarette was Bill’s. He sat there on a gate staring up at the array in the heavens and wondering what to do with his life.

  He felt completely at sea, purposeless, and unutterably depressed. He had thought the word ‘heartache’ just a vague descriptive term. Now he knew what it meant. It was a solid physical feeling, an ache that tore him inside, unceasingly. He yearned to see Joan, to be with Joan, with his whole being. This longing would not let him rest. He could have cried out for a respite.

  He tried to argue himself to a more rational viewpoint.

  “I am a man of science,” he told himself. “Why should I allow old Mother Nature to torture and badger me like this? I can see through all the tricks of that old twister. These feelings are purely chemical reactions, the secretions of the glands mixing with the bloodstream. My mind is surely strong enough to conquer that? Else I have a third-rate brain, not the scientific instrument I’ve prided myself on.”

  He stared up at the stars glittering in their seeming calm stability, age-old and unchanging. But were they? They may look just the same when all mankind and its loves and hates had departed from this planet, and left it frozen and dark. But he knew that even as he watched, they were changing position at a frightful speed, receeding from him at thousands of miles a second.

  “Nature is a twister, full of illusions,” he repeated…

  There started a train of thought, a merciful anaesthetic in which he lost himself for some minutes.

  Somewhere down in the deeps of his subconscious an idea which had, unknown to him, been evolving itself for weeks, was stirred, and emerged suddenly into the light. He started, dropped his cigarette, and left it on the ground. He sat there stiffly on the gate and considered the idea. It was wild—incredibly wild. But if he worked hard and long at it, there was a chance that it might come off. It would provide a reason for living, anyway, so long as there was any hope at all of success.

  He jumped down from the gate and started walking quickly and excitedly along the lane back to the factory. His mind was already turning over possibilities, planning eagerly. In the promise of this new adventure, the heartache was temporarily submerged.

  Six months passed.

  Bill had retired to the old laboratory, and spent much of that time enlarging and reequipping it. He added a rabbit pen, and turned an adjacent patch of ground into a burial-ground to dispose of those who died under his knife. This cemetery was like no cemetery in the world, for it was also full of dead things that had never died—because they had never lived.

  His research got nowhere. He could build up, atom by atom, the exact physical counterpart of any living animal, but all such duplicates remained obstinately inanimate. They assumed an extraordinary life-like appearance, but it was frozen life. They were no more alive than waxwork images even though they were as soft and pliable as the original animals in sleep.

  Bill thought he had hit upon the trouble in a certain equation, but re-checking confirmed that the equation had been right in the first place. There was no flaw in either theory or practice as far as he could see.

  Yet somehow he could not duplicate the force of life in action. Must he apply that force himself? How?

  He applied various degrees of electrical impulses to the nerve centers of the rabbits, tried rapid alternations of temperatures, miniature ‘iron lungs’; vigorous massage—both external and internal—intra-venous and spinal injections of everything from adrenalin to even more powerful stimulants which his agile mind concocted. And still the artificial rabbits remained limp bundles of fur. Joan and Will returned from their honeymoon and settled down in a roomy, comfortable old house a few miles away. They sometimes dropped in to see how the research was going. Bill always seemed bright and cheerful enough when they came, and joked about his setbacks.

  “I think I’ll scour the world for the hottest thing in female bunnies and teach her to do a hula-hula on the lab bench,” he said. “That ought to make some of these stiffs sit up!”

  Joan said she was seriously thinking of starting an eating-house specialising in rabbit pie, if Bill could keep up the supply of dead rabbits. He replied that he’d already buried enough to feed an army.

  Their conversation was generally pitched in this bantering key, save when they really got down to technicalities. But when they had gone, Bill would sit and brood, thinking constantly of Joan. And he could concentrate on nothing else for the rest of that day.

  Finally, more or less by accident, he found the press-button which awoke life in the rabbits. He was experimenting with a blood solution he had prepared, thinking that it might remain more constant than the natural rabbit’s blood, which became thin and useless too quickly. He had constructed a little pump to force the natural blood from a rabbit’s veins and fill them instead with his artificial solution. The pump had not been going for more than a few seconds before the rabbit stirred weakly and opened its eyes. It twitched its nose, and lay quite still for a moment, save for one foot which continued to quiver. Then suddenly it roused up and made a prodigious bound from the bench. The thin rubber tubes which tethered it by the neck parted in midair, and it fell awkwardly with a heavy thump on the floor. The blood continued to run fr
om one of the broken tubes, but the pump which forced it out was the rabbit’s own heart—beating at last. The animal seemed to have used all its energy in that one powerful jump, and lay still on the floor and quietly expired.

  Bill stood regarding it, his fingers still on the wheel of the pump. Then, when he realised what it meant, he recaptured some of his old exuberance, and danced around the laboratory carrying a carboy of acid as though it were a Grecian urn.

  Further experiments convinced him that he had set foot within the portals of Nature’s most carefully guarded citadel. Admittedly he could not himself create anything original or unique in Life. But he could create a living image of any living creature under the sun.

  A hot summer afternoon, a cool green lawn shaded by elms and on it two white-clad figures, Joan and Will, putting through their miniature nine-hole course. A bright-striped awning by the hedge, and below it, two comfortable canvas chairs and a little Moorish table with soft drinks. An ivy-covered wall of an old red-brick mansion showing between the trees. The indefinable smell of new-cut grass in the air. The gentle but triumphant laughter of Joan as Will foozled his shot. That was the atmosphere Bill entered at the end of his duty tramp along the lane from the laboratory-it was his first outdoor excursion for weeks-and he could not help comparing it with the sort of world he had been living in: the benches and bottles and sinks, the eye-tiring field of the microscope, the sheets of calculations under the glare of electric light in the dark hours of the night, the smell of blood and chemicals and rabbits.

  And he realised completely that science wasn’t the greatest thing in life. Personal happiness was. That was the goal of all men, whatever way they strove to reach it. Joan caught sight of him standing on the edge of the lawn, and came hurrying across to greet him.

  “Where have you been all this time?” she asked. “We’ve been dying to hear how you’ve been getting on.”

  “I’ve done it,” said Bill.

  “Done it? Have you really?” Her voice mounted excitedly almost to a squeak. She grabbed him by the wrist and hauled him across to Will. ”He’s done it!” she announced, and stood between them, watching both their faces eagerly. Will took the news with his usual calmness, and smilingly gripped Bill’s hand.