“THE FACT remains, Dr. McEvoy, that you’re going to have to close it down.” The little man with the red face tamped his pipe and applied a match to it. Across the small office room pale afternoon sunlight was filtering in the window. McEvoy felt as bleak as the South Jersey barrens he could see outside. The little man with the pipe stared at him and the Hoffman Center doctor from behind the wide desk. He didn’t look like much, this little man, but he was power — the final word at Telcom Laboratories, the co-ordinator of all the research projects under way in this whole great communications-equipment organization. What this little man decided was what was going to happen; McEvoy knew that.
“We just can’t have any more accidents of this sort on that project,” the little man went on quietly. “Telcom has given you free sanction in your work here so far; we don’t believe in hiring good men and then handcuffing them. But if you don’t clamp down on this now, we will. Already we have a committee of the International Joint Conference on our necks. Did you know that I’ve spent all day on the Washington line beating off bureaucrats who want to know what on earth you’re doing up here that’s taken three lives already and put two other good men into a Hoffman Center lock-ward for the mentally deranged? Next thing, we’ll be facing a full-fledged government inquiry, with an injunction slapped on everything we’re doing here, and Telcom Laboratories doesn’t care to have that happen.” The red-faced co-ordinator paused. “To say nothing of the moral questions involved.”
McEvoy was silent for a moment. The three of them had been hashing it out for over an hour; now McEvoy was tired, more tired than he could ever remember. Finally he spread his hands. “Sir, I’ve considered all these points very carefully, and I’ve come to some definite conclusions. I’d like at least to present them.”
“Conclusions! Dr. McEvoy, the record shows that since you started this thing back on — ” he glanced at a note sheet — “on November 3, 1978, that’s just two months ago, you’ve killed or incapacitated five of the best investigators Telcom had on the payroll, and you have nothing, absolutely nothing, in the way of a solution to offer. Those men would better be alive and working. The only definite conclusion I can reach is that you’re fooling with something you can’t manage, and I think the time has come to stop you.”
McEvoy squirmed. “I can’t deny the record. And I wouldn’t care to be the next man, either. But we do have a solution to offer.” He motioned to the man from the Hoffman Medical Center. “Tell him what we talked about this morning, Doc.”
The doctor shuffled his feet and cleared his throat. “We’ve been in close contact with Dr. McEvoy ever since he got involved in this … this business,” he said carefully. “Particularly when abnormal behavior patterns began to develop among the investigators. As you know, the Hoffman Center is acutely interested in problems of human behavior, adaptability, adjustment … normal or abnormal. In fact, we have a very promising young psychologist named Benedict who is working right now with a team of high-adaptive youngsters, trying to learn more about mental adaptation to physical and emotional stress — ”
“Yes, yes,” the co-ordinator broke in impatiently. “Telcom has worked with your people on any number of projects, I know that. After all, communication involves people as well as electrons.”
“Yes, sir. Well, we think we may have a lead to Dr. McEvoy’s problem. At least a way to go about investigating it without any more tragedies. There’s a pattern to what has happened, and it makes sense. In each case a man has gone into the vault after the … the cube, or whatever it is … has materialized. In each case the man was alone, and instructed as well as possible in techniques of observation. Since we aren’t entirely sure just what we’re dealing with, it’s been hard to tell a man exactly what to look for, your understand. Each one was instructed to observe the phenomenon any way he could.” The doctor shrugged. “You know the results.”
“Yes,” the co-ordinator said. “Deranged minds and dead men.”
“The question is why,” the doctor went on. “Each of these men was a perfectly ordinary lab person picked at random, trained in physics or electronics but not much else. We think now we’re dealing mainly with a problem of adjustment — mental adjustment. These men apparently have been faced with something they have never encountered before, something so completely foreign to their experience that their nervous systems couldn’t cope with it. They ran into something so frightening, or startling, or stupendous that their minds saw no escape but total and immediate breakdown. And in three cases the shock brought on physical collapse as well. It was a matter of adjust or crumble. They couldn’t adjust, so they crumbled.”
The co-ordinator blinked at the doctor. “The theory sounds reasonable enough. I’m no physician, I have to take your word. But what do you suggest, gentlemen? That we just keep feeding good men to this thing?”
Dr. John McEvoy stirred. “Not quite,” he said. “Believe me, I don’t want any more bodies in the laboratory. But as the doctor says, it may be a matter of adjustment. He claims this man Benedict has proven that people differ greatly in what they can adjust to mentally. He has taken some natural high-adaptives, tested them stage by stage to find the most adaptable ones, and has been training them to adapt even better … right, Doc? What we need is a man with a high adjustment threshold. A very high threshold. Somebody with a cast-iron nervous system who can adapt to anything, regardless of how strange or shocking it may be. And if I could find a man like that, I’d agree to one more stab at it.”
The co-ordinator knocked out his pipe and looked from McEvoy to the Hoffman Center man and back. “In other words, what you’re saying is that somebody who is specially skilled and gifted at adapting to strange situations might — just might be able to investigate where the others have failed.”
“Exactly,” John McEvoy said.
“But there are no guarantees of that.”
“None,” McEvoy said flatly.
For a long time the co-ordinator stared out the window at the gloomy countryside. He filled his pipe again, lit it, put it down, picked it up and puffed on it. “John,” he said finally, “I’ve known you and your work for a long time. You’re a big man and a tough one; when you get onto something you don’t like to let it go. But I’ve always counted on your judgment. Do you really think that this thing is so important?”
“It’s something no scientist in history has ever encountered before,” McEvoy said. “It’s important.”
“And if this new approach of yours fails, you’d drop it?”
The big man hesitated just an instant. “I’d drop it, yes. Until I could find some better way to define it, or something. Yes, I’d close it down.”
There was another moment of silence. Then the co-ordinator nodded. “Very well, John. If you can find the kind of investigator you’ve described, I’ll accept your word that you’ll stop if he fails. Even though I don’t believe you for a moment.”