Fantastic Stories Presents the Imagination (Stories of Science and Fantasy) Super Pack. Edmond Hamilton
and, well—the likes of it is rarely seen anywhere.
The lines seemed to come out of the actors’ hearts, not their mouths. Cue-lines blended with the dialogue interplay, the artificiality of stage-sets, costumery and make-up disappeared, and the simple, yet profound drama unreeled like a bolt of vividly printed silk, flowing smoothly, strongly, absorbingly to the tragic-comical climax that left the emotions reeling from the suspense and warm with relief.
Two days later I looked at the figures on advance ticket sales and could find only one conceivable complaint. Parodisiac would make Hillary Hardy so much money that not even taxes could force him to produce another for a great while.
What promised to be a major irritation, fending off the press from Hardy and protecting his anonymity, was converted into a master publicity-stroke by Hec Blankenship. He swore the few of us who knew about Hardy’s youth and whereabouts, to complete secrecy, then he proceeded to build his publicity around the “mystery-author.”
“But he’s got a past!” I objected when Hec first presented the scheme. “Old friends and relatives will spill the beans.”
“Have you really looked into Hillary’s past?” Hec asked.
I confessed I hadn’t. Hec said that he had. It developed that Hillary Hardy was not our boy’s real name. In his passion for anonymity he had been changing his name every time he changed locations, which was often. Hec had traced his background through three moves that brought the author across the country, but the trail petered out at a ranch in Wyoming where Hillary had worked a month as a cow-hand.
The mystery-author gag worked. Inside of two weeks our promotion expense dwindled to almost nothing. Columnists were fighting for the privilege of pouring out free copy on both plays. Some of their speculations as to Hardy’s real identity were pretty fabulous—Winston Churchill, Noel Coward and even a certain, witty ex-presidential candidate for the Democratic party—but no one found him out, and the advance sellout began gaining a week every day.
Now, I have made and lost my share of theater fortunes, and I have learned a certain caution. At the moment I was quite content to ride with my two smash-hits and leave Hardy to his experiments. Strangely, it was he who called upon me for action.
A month after launching Parodisiac he showed up at my office, looking leaner and more intense than ever. His crew-cut was growing out, but it was from neglect rather than a sudden artistic temperament, I was sure.
After locking the doors and cancelling my morning appointments, I said, “Well, golden boy, what brings you to civilization?”
His smile was still strong and warm, but it was no longer youthful. There was a look of deep wisdom in his blue eyes that finally justified the magnificent play he had written.
“Money,” he answered briefly.
“Haven’t my checks been reaching you?” I asked in amazement.
“Oh, yes. Very gratifying,” he said pacing a groove in the deep carpet pile. “But I’m moving into prenatal memory now, and I accomplished it by administrations of a new B vitamin derivative. I have a staff of biochemists working for me producing this substance, but it’s fearfully expensive. I need more of it, larger lab facilities to produce it secretly. I want to buy the sanitarium.”
“Buy the—”
“Lock, stock and personnel,” he nodded. “I’m three months before birth, already. My goal is conception.”
A big, brassy gong chimed in my brain. “That sounds like this dianetics business that was going the rounds awhile back.”
Hardy nodded. “In some respects, yes. But I have a single goal, total recall, and I’m taking a more comprehensive approach. Psycho-therapy helped a great deal, but I have traced-out every angle of mnemonics, improved on most and invented some new ones. The final problem is one of improving synaptic potentials and actual tissue tone in the brain. Biochemistry is giving me the answers. With enough of the new B vitamin derivative I’m confident I can reach conception—and a totality of recall.”
“But Hardy, what have you got when you get there? I still say, what’s the percentage?”
*
The look he gave me was puzzled but completely tolerant. “You raved to me about my last play, yet you don’t see what I’m getting at?” He stopped pacing and sat opposite me with his muscular hands knotted into fists on my desk.
“George,” he said with quiet intentness, “I will be the first man since creation to have the full potential of his brain at his creative disposal.”
“How do you figure that?”
“The brain has three principal functions. It can store information for recall, it can analyze and correlate this information and finally it can synthesize creatively. Now the latter two functions are inherently dependent upon the quality of the first, or memory recall. As a truly thinking animal, man considers he has reached some acme of perfection because his brain is so superior to the lower animals. Actually, the real gulf is between what man has achieved and what he can achieve with his brain.
“The key lies in perfecting his recall. What good does it do to keep pouring in information when most of us are forgetting old things almost as rapidly as we are learning new ones? Of course, we don’t really ever forget anything, but our power of exact recall grows fuzzy through disuse. Then when we need a certain name or factual bit of information we can’t quite dig it up, or it comes up in distorted approximations.
“The same holds for calling on experience to help us with new problems. We may grasp the general lesson of experience, but most of the specific incidents of our lives are dulled in time. The lessons we paid dearly to learn are largely useless. So we go on making the same mistakes, paying the same penalties over and over again.”
I shrugged. “Everybody would like a better memory, I suppose, but I’ve never known anyone to go off the deep end over it like you have. What more can you gain?”
“Can’t you visualize what it would be like to have even a short life-time of knowledge and experience laid out in sharp detail of recall? Think of the new associations of thoughts and concepts that would be possible! Consider the potential for creating drama, alone! Every word ever read or spoken, every emotion ever conveyed, every gesture of anger, love, jealousy, pain, pleasure—all this raw material glittering brightly, ready to pour out in new conflicts, dramatic situations, sharp pungent dialogue—”
He made me sense his enthusiasm, but I couldn’t quite feel it. Would such a tremendous ability necessarily be good? Something about its immensity frightened me, and I didn’t care to consider it for my own use at all.
I said, “Don’t get me wrong. If this is what’s going into your playwriting, I’m all for it. And what you do with your money is your own business. What do you propose?”
“Can you absorb more of my work?” he asked abruptly.
“I’m your agent, aren’t I? I’ll peddle it if I can’t use it myself,” I told him, not that I was so eager for the broker’s 10% so much as I wanted to have the pick of his output for my own productions.
I didn’t know what I was taking on. He turned out his third play in just ten days. Ten days, I said. I read to the bottom of page two and decided to hell with peddling this one. I’d produce it myself.
Before I got into second gear on Beach Boy, however, Hillary sends a messenger over with Madame President, a satire so sharp I knew it would make Call Me Madame look like Little Women.
What do you do? There are just so many legitimate theaters in the city.
While I’m pondering this and negotiating with a Hollywood agent to maybe take Beach Boy off my hands, along comes Red Rice, an epic novel of Communist China that out-Bucked Pearl a hundred heart-wrenches to one.
One phone call sold that one to McMullin, and when they got