Harry Harrison - Mute Milton

With ponderous smoothness the big Greyhound bus braked to a stop at the platform and the door swung open.

"Springville," the driver called out. "Last stop!"

The passengers stirred in the aisle and climbed down the steps into the glare of the sun. Sam Morrison sat patiently, alone, on the wide rear seat, waiting until the last passengers were at the door before he put the cigar box under his arm, rose, and followed them.

The glare of the sunlight blinded him after the tinted-glass dimness of the bus, and the moist air held the breathless heat of Mississippi summer. Sam went carefully down the steps one-at-a-time, watching his feet, and wasn't aware of the man waiting there until something hard pushed at his stomach.

"What business yuh got in Springville, boy?"

Sam blinked through his steel-rimmed glasses at the big man in the gray uniform who stood before him, prodding him with a short, thick nightstick. He was fat as well as big, and the smooth melon of his stomach bulged out over his belt, worn low about his hips.

"Just passing through, sir," Sam Morrison said and took his hat off with his free hand, disclosing his cut-short grizzled hair.

He let his glance slide across the flushed reddened face and the gold badge on the shirt before him, then lowered his eyes.

"An just where yuh goin' to boy? Don't keep no secrets from me . . ." the voice rasped again.

"Carteret, sir, my bus leaves in an hour."

The only answer was an uncommunicative grunt. The leadweighted stick tapped on the cigar box under Sam's arm. "What yuh got in there - a gun?"

"No, sir, I wouldn't carry a gun."

Sam opened the cigar box and held it out: it contained a lump of metal, a number of small electronic components and a two-inch speaker, all neatly wired and soldered together. "It's a . . . a radio, sir."

"Turn it on."

Sam threw a switch and made one or two careful adjustments. The little speaker rattled and there was the squeak of tinny music barely audible above the rumble of bus motors. The red-faced man laughed.

"Now that's what Ah call a real nigger radio . . . piece uh trash."

His voice hardened again. "See that you're on that bus, hear?"

"Yes, sir," Sam said to the receding, sweat-stained back of the shirt, then carefully closed the box. He started toward the colored waiting room but when he passed the window and looked in he saw that it was empty. And there were no dark faces visible anywhere on the street. Without changing pace Sam passed the waiting room and threaded his way between the buses in the cinder parking lot and out of the rear gate.

He had lived all of his sixty-seven years in the State of Mississippi so he knew at once that there was trouble in the air - and the only thing to do about trouble was to stay away from it. The streets became narrower and dirtier and he trod their familiar sidewalks until he saw a field-worker in patched overalls turn in to a doorway ahead under the weathered BAR sign. Sam went in after him; he would wait here until a few minutes before the bus was due.

"Bottle of Jax, please."

He spread his coins on the damp, scratched bar and picked up the cold bottle.

There was no glass. The bartender said nothing. After ringing up the sale he retired to a chair at the far end of the bar with his head next to the murmuring radio and remained there, dark and impenetrable. The only light came from the street outside, and the high-backed booths in the rear looked cool and inviting.

There were only a few other customers here, each of them sitting separately with a bottle of beer on the table before him. Sam threaded his way through the close-spaced tables and had already started to slide into the booth near the rear door when he noticed that someone was already there, seated on the other side of the table.

"I'm sorry, I didn't see you," he said and started to get up, but the man waved him back onto the bench and took an airline bag with "TWA" on it from the table and put it down beside him.

"Plenty of room for both," he said and raised his bottle of beer. "Here's looking at you."

Sam took a sip from his own bottle, but the other man kept drinking until he had drained half of his before he lowered it with a relaxed sigh. "That's what I call foul beer," he said.

"You seem to be enjoying it," Sam told him, but his slight smile took the edge from his words.

"Just because it's cold and wet - but I'd trade a case of it for a bottle of Bud or a Ballentine."

"Then you're from the North, I imagine?"

Sam had thought so from the way he talked, sharp and clipped. Now that his eyes were getting used to the dimness he could see that the other was a young man in his twenties with medium-dark skin, wearing a white shirt with rolled up sleeves. His face was taut and the frown wrinkles on his forehead seemed etched there.

"You are damned right, I'm from the North and I'm going back . . :" He broke off suddenly and took another swig of beer. When he spoke again his voice was cautious. "Are you from these parts?"

"I was born not far from here, but right now I live in Carteret, just stopping off here between buses."

"Carteret - that's where the college is, isn't it?"

"That is correct. I teach there."

The younger man smiled for the first time. "That sort of puts us in the same boat. I go to NYU, majoring in economics."

He put his hand out. "Charles Wright - everyone but my mother calls me Charlie."

"Very pleased to meet you," Sam said in his slow old fashioned way. "I am Sam Morrison, and it is Sam on my birth certificate too."

"I'm interested in your college. I meant to stop in there but . . ."

Charles broke off suddenly at the sound of a car's engine in the street outside and leaned forward so that he could see out the front door, remaining there until the car ground into gear and moved away. When Charles dropped back onto the seat Sam could see that there were fine beads of sweat in the lines of his forehead. He took a quick drink from his bottle.

"When you were at the bus station you didn't happen to see a big cop with a big gut, red face all the time?"

"Yes, I met him, he talked to me when I got off the bus."

"The bastard!"

"Don't get worked up, Charles; he is just a policeman doing his job."

"Just a. . . !"

The young man spat a short, filthy word. "That's Brinkley, you must have heard of him, toughest man south of Bombingham. He's going to be elected sheriff next fall and he's already a Grand Knight of the Klan, a real pillar of the community."

"Talking like that's not going to do you any good," Sam said mildly.

"That's what Uncle Tom said - and as I remember he was still a slave when he died. Someone has got to speak up, you can't remain quiet forever."

"You talk like one of those Freedom Riders." Sam tried to look stern, but he had never been very good at it.

"Well, I am one, if you want to know the truth of it, but the ride ends right here. I'm going home. I'm scared and I'm not afraid to admit it. You people live in a jungle down here; I never realize how bad it could be until I came down. I've been working on the voter's committee and Brinkley got word of it and swore he was going to kill me or put me in jail for life. And you know what? I believe it. I'm leaving today, just waiting for the car to pick me up. I'm going back North where I belong."

"I understand that you have your problems up there, too ...."

"Problems!" Charlie finished his beer and stood up. "I wouldn't even call them problems after what I've seen down here. It's no paradise in New York - but you stand a chance of living a bit longer. Where I grew up in South Jamaica we had it, rough, but we had our own house in a good neighborhood and - you take another beer?"

"No, one is enough for me, thank you."

Charlie came back with a fresh beer and picked up where he had left off.

"Maybe we're second-class citizens in the North but at least we're citizens of some kind and can get some measurement of happiness and fulfillment. Down here a man is a beast of burden and that's all he is ever going to be-if he has the wrong color skin."

"I wouldn't say that, things get better all the time. My father was a field hand, a son of a slave - and I'm a college teacher. That's progress of a sort."

"What sort?"

Charlie pounded the table, yet kept his voice in an angry whisper. "So one-hundredth of one percent of the Negroes get a little education and pass it on at some backwater college. Look, I'm not running you down; I know you do your best. But for every man like you there must be a thousand who are born and live and die in filthy poverty, year after year, without hope. Millions of people. Is that progress? And even yourself-are you sure you wouldn't be doing better if you were teaching in a decent university?"

"Not me," Sam laughed. "I'm just an ordinary teacher and I have enough trouble getting geometry and algebra across to my students without trying to explain topology or Boolean algebra or anything like that."

"What on earth is that Bool . . . thing? I never heard of it."

"It's, well, an uninterpreted logical calculus, a special discipline. I warned you, I'm not very good at explaining these things though I can work them out well enough on paper. That is my hobby, really, what some people call higher mathematics; and I know that if I were working at a big school I would have no time to devote to it."

"How do you know? Maybe they would have one of those big computers - wouldn't that help you?"

"Perhaps, of course, but I've worked out ways of getting around the need for one. It takes a little more time, that's all."

"And how much time do you have left?"

Charlie asked quietly, then was instantly sorry he had said it when he saw the older man lower his head without answering. "I take that back, I've got a big mouth, I'm sorry. But I get so angry. How do you know what you might have done if you had had the training, the facilities. . ."

He shut up, realizing that he was getting in deeper every second.

There was only the murmur of distant traffic in the hot, dark silence, the faint sound of music from the radio behind the bar. The bartender stood, switched the radio off, and opened the trap behind the bar to bring in another case of beer. From nearby the sound of the music continued like a remembered echo. Charlie realized that it was coming from the cigar box on the table before them.

"Do you have a radio in that?" he asked, happy to change the subject.

"Yes - well really no, though there is an RF stage."

"If you think you're making sense - you're not. I told you, I'm majoring in economics."

Sam smiled and opened the box, pointing to the precisely wired circuits inside. "My nephew made this, he has a little I fix it' shop, but he learned a lot about electronics in the air force. I brought him the equations and we worked out the circuit together."

Charlie thought about a man with electronic training who was forced to run a handyman's shop, but he had the sense not to mention it. "Just what is it supposed to do?"

"It's not really supposed to do anything. I just built it to see if my equations would work out in practice. I suppose you don't know much about Einstein's unified field theory... ?"

Charlie smiled ruefully and raised his hands in surrender. "It's difficult to talk about. Putting it the simplest way, there is supposed to be a relation between all phenomena, all forms of energy and matter. You are acquainted with the simpler interchanges, heat energy to mechanical energy as in an engine, electrical energy to light . . . ."

"The light bulb!"

"Correct. To go further, the postulation has been made that time is related to light energy, as is gravity to light, which has been proved, and gravity to electrical energy. That is the field I have been exploring. I have made certain suppositions that there is an interchange of energy within a gravitic field, a measurable interchange, such as the lines of force that are revealed about a magnetic field by iron particles - no, that's not a good simile - perhaps the ability of a wire to carry a current endlessly under the chilled condition of superconductivity."

"Professor, you have lost me, I'm not ashamed to admit it. Could you maybe give me an example-like what is happening in this little radio here?"

Sam made a careful adjustment and the music gained the tiniest amount of volume. "It's not the radio part that is interesting, that stage really just demonstrates that I have detected the leakage - no, we should call it the differential - between the Earth's gravitic field and that of the lump of lead there in the corner of the box."

"Where is the battery?"

Sam smiled proudly. "That is the point- there is no battery. The input current is derived . . . ."

"Do you mean you are running the radio off gravity? Getting electricity for nothing?"

"Yes . . . really, I should say no. It is not quite like that . . . ."

"It sure looks like that!"

Charlie was excited now, crouching half across the table so he could look into the cigar box. "I may not know anything about electronics but in economics we learn a lot about power sources. Couldn't this gadget of yours be developed to generate electricity at little or no cost?"

"No, not at once, this is just a first attempt . . . ."

"But it could eventually and that means-" Sam thought that the young man had suddenly become sick. His face, just inches away, became shades lighter as the blood drained from it, his eyes were staring in horror as he slowly dropped back and down into his seat. Before Sam could ask him what was the matter a grating voice bellowed through the room.

"Anyone here seen a boy by name of Charlie Wright? C'mon now, speak up, ain't no one gonna get hurt for tellin' me the truth."

"Holy Jesus . . ."

Charlie whispered, sinking deeper in the seat. Brinkley stamped into the bar, hand resting on his gun butt, squinting around in the darkness. No one answered him.

"Anybody try to hide him gonna be in trouble!" he shouted angrily. "I'm gonna find that black granny dodger!"

He started toward the rear of the room and Charlie, with his airline bag in one hand, vaulted the back of the booth and crashed against the rear door.

"Come back here, you son of a bitch!"

The table rocked when Charlie's flying heel caught it and the cigar box slid off to the floor. Heavy boots thundered and the door squealed open and Charlie pushed out through it. Sam bent over to retrieve the box.

"I'll kill yuh, so help me!"

The circuit hadn't been damaged; Sam sighed in relief and stood, the tinny music between his fingers.

He may have heard the first shot but he could not have heard the second because the .38 slug caught him in the back of the head and killed him instantly. He crumpled to the floor.

Patrolman Marger ran in from the patrol car outside, his gun ready, and saw Brinkley come back into the room through the door in the rear.

"He got away, damn it, got clear away."

"What happened here?"

Marger asked, slipping his gun back into the holster and looking down at the slight, crumpled body at his feet.

"I dunno. He must have jumped up in the way when I let fly at the other one what was running away. Must be another one of them commonists anyway, he was sittin' at the same table."

"There's gonna be trouble about this . . . ."

"Why trouble?"

Brinkley asked indignantly. "It's just anutha ol' dead nigger .... "

One of his boots was on the cigar box and it crumpled and fractured when he turned away.