The oddly elusive brunette
Date: 2023-11-09T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Short stories

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Title: The oddly elusive brunette

Author: John Victor Peterson

Illustrator: Ed Emshwiller

Release date: November 9, 2023 [eBook #72078]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1958

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72078

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ODDLY ELUSIVE BRUNETTE ***

The ODDLY ELUSIVE BRUNETTE

By JOHN VICTOR PETERSON

It was love at first sight—all over the world!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity November 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Certainly a faithful representation of a male simian cast in brass would, granted reasoning powers, have felt unusual trepidation if exposed to the Wisconsin weather that fateful winter morning.

I myself was inordinately glad that I lived in the project's Bachelor Officers Quarters only a short block from the UNACMEA/WAGS installation and that my first experience with Wisconsin winter three years before had prompted the purchase of the thermo-parka I was then wearing.

UNACMEA/WAGS is, I realize, a formidable array of letters. Though quickly recognizable, of course, from constant stereonews repetition, it is usually not immediately decipherable except by the UN which spawned it and the eggheads who maintain it.

I help maintain it. I also maintain that I'm not an egghead. Literally, that is. I do have a bushy albeit greying head of hair and a reasonably handsome (Mom always said) face beneath; otherwise the brunette might have—but first I must translate UNACMEA/WAGS. It's important.

When the United Nations finally established worldwide atomic control three years ago—in '65—it created the Atomic Control Monitor Establishment at its New York Headquarters with an Alternate installation here near Racine. Piecing together most of the capitals, the alternate set-up comes out UNACMEA. The WAGS, of course, is easy. W for Wisconsin. AGS for Alternating Gradient Synchrotron.

Everyone knows what an AGS is from the publicity given to the 25-Bev unit which went in at Brookhaven National Laboratories back in the International Geophysical Year. Pix of that 700-foot diameter horizontal doughnut were in all papers, mags and fax when it started producing anti-protons, anti-neutrons and, among the Long Island neighbors, a few tremulous anti-science folk.

Despite the parka I was shivering like a displaced Hottentot on Pluto at aphelion as I approached the UNACMEA building next to the 1400-foot diameter rings of WAGS. Activating the Harlan sphincter, I stepped into the console room. I'd activated the parka's auto-open when I realized that the last man out the night before, taking some dimpled weather gal's prognostications as utter veracity, had apparently kicked off the thermostat; the room was only slightly less frigid than external Racine.

Re-zippering, I kicked over the master switch to activate WAGS (which had to be operating when the other physicists arrived); then I beelined for the thermostat.

"You'd think," I said to the room's emptiness, "that certain sad sapiens of the genus homo would think more of personal physical comfort than the saving of infinitesimal quantities of fuel—"

Which is when there came from behind me a chattering but pleasant feminine voice saying, "C-c-cut the rec-c-criminations and g-g-get some heat in here b-b-but fast, prof-f-fessor!"

I was startled but turned slowly none the less, rationalizing that the place had been deserted when I'd entered and that no one else could be physically present since I'd entered alone and the only door hadn't been opened since.

I fully expected to find one of the headquarters stenos grinning at me over the closed circuit stereo from the Ad Building and I wasn't about to begin to feed her ego by showing startlement.

I faced instead a very much present, very much alive and very lovely raven-haired young lady who was in that remarkably provocative state of nearly absolute deshabille that only the new Parisian sunsuits can provide. The young lady's excitingly rounded curves were, however, a rather curious blue and it had fleetingly occurred to me that she was an extra-terrestrial when my better sense came to the fore and I said rather inanely,

"You should be wearing more in Wisconsin this time of year!"

Her dark eyes flashed and she wriggled her shapely shoulders angrily with interesting shock waves.

"Since when is this Wisconsin?" she cried. "It's HOAGS' exploding that caused this cold!" She paused. "Isn't it?"

"HOAGS!" I echoed. Things started to add then that by logic couldn't. HOAGS is a new installation, an accelerator where two streams of particles orbiting in opposite directions were caused to meet head-on. Hence the HO.

HOAGS is at Cape Canaveral, Florida, whence American satellites have lanced spaceward since IGY. Cape Canaveral in February boasts the weather that permits if not cries for the abbreviated type of costume this gorgeous young damsel was wearing.

While I was thinking I was also listening and she was spluttering that her father was General Schoener of the Atomic Energy Commission and that he would have me suitably punished if I had kidnapped her—

"Now wait a sec," I said, throwing her my parka after a natural period of bug-eyed hesitation. "I wouldn't be about to kidnap anyone, least of all a flighty teenager."

"I'm twenty-one," she said, her eyes flashing with indignation, and proceeded to enfold the parka around everything save the tip of her cold-pink nose and her long curved legs. The elusive tip of her nose wasn't worth trying to follow as she buried her raven-haired head in the fur collar; there was more of the curvaceous lower extremities in view which merited and claimed my attention. Devoted attention.

"Well?" she said.

"Yes, thank you," I answered, glad the heat—the furnace's thermal radiation, that is—was coming up.

"I mean, what'll we do?"

"I hadn't given that much mature thought," I answered, "but now that you mention—"

"Stop the parrying!" she cut in sharply.

"Parrying was farthest from my mind," I said.

She spluttered; then asked, "Are you telling the truth?"

"About what?"

"That this is Wisconsin."

"Yes; it certainly is."

"Well, what day is it and time?"

"Wednesday, February 14th, 1968 and—and precisely 8:25 a.m."

She was silent for a moment, letting the parka fall away from her lovely face; then she said, "But it was only a few moments ago, considering the difference in time zones, that I was at Cape Canaveral. They were activating HOAGS today and I was there with Dad. How—how could I possibly be in Wisconsin now?"

"That," I said, "is the question. With a capital Q. How could you possibly—"

I stopped in shock. Those dark eyes had been looking directly at me—and the image of them was planted on my retinal patterns like a commercial symbol lingering on a stereo tube—but she, eyes and all—and I do mean all—was gone.

Just like that. Blinko. Not over and out. Just out.

I know I acted irrationally then. I scurried around the quickly warming room, searching behind the proton beam accelerator, the control and monitor consoles, the relay racks and equipment cabinets, feeling that she just had to be somewhere!

The door opened. I whirled around expectantly. It wasn't she; it was George Herrmann, my assistant.

George regarded me searchingly, his lean face lugubrious.

"What gives, Bob?" he asked. "You look as if you'd lost the world!"

"Maybe I have," I said, leaping to the visifone.

George watched me button Miami Exchange and said, "You realize what Jack Hagen thinks about long distance calls!"

I ignored him. I realized all right. Hagen's project boss and has laid the law down plenty on the question of what he considers unnecessary calls—but how can a scientist operate if he can't call up others in his specialty when he gets the glimmerings of a new idea?

Miami answered and I asked for General Schoener at Patrick Air Force Base. Priority. I've top secret clearance and I put my marked I.D. card on the pick-up, too.

Abruptly a brush-mustached frozen military face regarded me. "So you're Robert Mitchell of UNACMEA/WAGS," the face growled. "Well, make it short."

"It's about your daughter, General," I said.

The face became human.

"But what can you know about Elaine? You're in Wisconsin, aren't you?" And, at my nod, "Well, she vanished from here when we activated HOAGS. Don't—don't tell me—"

"Yes, she was here," I said. "Just a few minutes ago. Said that HOAGS exploded."

His twitching brows drew down. "It didn't explode. There was a defect in the ring and particles of anti-matter we haven't yet named escaped. That was just before we missed Elaine! Now, Mitchell, are you sure she was there? Can you describe her?"

I felt that my descriptive detail was rather good, coming as it did from a confirmed bachelor whose attention had theretofore been devoted to scientific tomes and atom-smashers.

He nodded perplexedly as I finished. "Well, how do you account for it?"

"General," I said slowly, "I'm a research physicist and I certainly won't admit for a moment that it might have been an induced psionic manifestation. There's an answer in relativity, I'm sure. A logical answer. Right now I'm far aspace. I thought I knew anti-nucleonics but HOAGS has apparently spawned something research physicists haven't anticipated."

"Well, where is Elaine now? Where did she go?"

"I don't know," I answered dumbly. "But she didn't go, General; she was here and then wasn't. But let me try to find her, General. God knows I'll do my best!"

He surveyed my face carefully.

"I'm sure you will," he said. "Call me when you find her."

I nodded wordlessly and rang off.

Despite George Herrmann's admonitions re long distance calls, I immediately visifoned every AGS installation in the States.

The last call did it. I raised Al Benson in Phoenix, Arizona. He'd seen Elaine briefly. He'd been first in the control room at the Phoenix synchrotron and had just activated same when, bingo! she was there.

He had in fact been just about to call me. She'd been wearing the parka which had stayed when she "left". He'd found my name stencilled on the parka's left breast. Said she'd said the "nicest" man had lent it to her.

Which was nice to hear.

"We've just got to find her," I said earnestly.

He looked at me quizzically. "Bob, my boy, is the old perennial bachelor's veneer cracking?"

I thought that one over. "I guess it is," I admitted. "Now, Al, any suggestions?"

"I'm essentially a computerman," he said. "Give me some data and I might come up with something."

I knew what HOAGS had been intended to do: guide streams of particles in a chainlike pattern through the influence of magnetic fields of alternating direction so that head-on collisions of particles would result. Theoretically this should yield energies as enormous as the satellites reported present in cosmic radiation in space. But what side effects might result from HOAGS' activation was difficult for even computers to conclude.

There were other data: times of vanishment; durations of presence here and at Phoenix; the fact that the parka had gone with Elaine from here to Phoenix but had remained at Phoenix upon her vanishment there—

"She's drawn to an AGS unit upon its activation," Benson said. That was already obvious to me but I didn't say so; Al Benson keeps his computer pretty high up on a throne. He went on, "Your parka came here with Elaine because it had picked up some manner of static charge from her. For some reason it was discharged—degaussed, maybe—while she was here and so it stayed when she—er—didn't."

I had looked at the wall clock as he was talking. "Look, Al," I cried, "cut for now. Hanford AGS should have been activated a few minutes ago. I'm going to call Ted Sosnowski there. Out, boy!"

I rang Hanford, Washington.

Yes, Elaine had been there. Briefly. Sosnowski started to go into a rather ecstatic description of her undeniable charms but since he obviously had no datum to add I cut him off and rang Berkeley, California. The Bevatron had not been activated since the time of the accident at HOAGS; Berkeley had nothing to report.

I had George Herrmann bring me the secret files then, and was scanning the list of all synchrotrons in the world, known either through publicity or downright espionage (a few were operating without UN sanction), when the visifone buzzed.

It was General Schoener.

I briefed him and told him I was about to try visifoning all known AGS installations.

"Hold it up," he said. "I want to call the Pentagon. I think I can pull strings and get UNACMEA/WAGS fully activated."

"That would do it, General!" I cried. "I didn't think I'd stand a chance if I asked—"

"Look, Bob," he cut in. "Elaine's my daughter and I'm not having her flitting around fraternizing with every Tom, Dick and Harry even if they are Ph. D's. She made one mistake and I'm not having her make another."

"Mistake?" I asked.

"A pilot," he said. "Nice enough guy but it turned out he was already married and intended to remain so. Incidentally, Bob, you resemble him to a considerable degree."

"I do?"

I recalled the data. Elaine had been here for about three minutes but at Phoenix and Hanford only about one minute apiece. Was I a stabilizing influence? No, I reasoned, it couldn't be me. It must be WAGS. It's an odd 40-Bev job. Maybe its magnetic field had a partially polarizing effect upon the anti-nucleonic factor.

"Please call the Pentagon, General—and, General, if—I mean when—we get Elaine back, would you consider me as a prospective son-in-law?"

"You get her back, Bob, and ask her the big question. If she says yes, well, fine! You look okay to me!"

"Thanks, General."

"Call me Mike," he said. "Out!"

It's a good thing Mike Schoener's a four-star general; if he'd been a second lieutenant, his daughter would have bounced around the then infinitely sadder earth to the end of her years, pursued by the vagrant day-dreams of a hundred bug-eyed physicists until gobbled benzedrine and tranquilizers took their toll of said dreaming BEP's.

As it was, it was afternoon here at Racine when Mike Schoener called back and told me to stand by for the activation of UNACMEA/WAGS.

I stood in the console room for half an hour while the monitor screens went on one by one until the five banks of them on the one wall were all aglow. The controller at UNACME in New York gave me the go-sign then and I said shakily, "This is Doctor Robert Mitchell at UNACMEA/WAGS, Wisconsin, U.S.A. A strange phenomenon occurred here at 0822 hours today."

I paused, disconcerted by background voices translating my words into dozens of foreign tongues; then, steeling myself, I went on, concluding with the question, "Is Miss Schoener present at this moment in any one of your installations?"

There were noes, nons, niets, neins—and then a hesitant oui followed almost immediately by a resounding da.

My eyes went to the Siberian monitor and Elaine was suddenly facing me on the screen, saying, "Doc, I'm in a lab in Russia and there's not a soul here who can speak English, just a bunch of leering old bearded men. I'm scared, doc, and—"

She wasn't there.

Sosnowski's voice came from Hanford, "She's here now, Bob. I cut the AGS out and then back in and bingo!"

Elaine was behind him, sporting a Cossack hat.

"Elaine, I would—" I started. And stopped. She wasn't there.

"Du bist wunderschon," a guttural voice proclaimed.

I swung to the Munich monitor. I didn't need a translation. Elaine was there and making an impression. She swapped the Cossack hat for a Tyrolean one which a grinning Bavarian had been wearing—and vanished.

"Elle est ici!" a nasal tenor said. "C'est la Sorbonne ou elle est. C'est DuBois qui parle. Ma foi! Elle est vraiment magnifique!—Mon dieu! Elle n'est plus!"

Though sadly neglected since college days, my "knowledge" of French told me that Elaine had arrived, conquered and departed, leaving Monsieur DuBois of the Paris AGS in a state of bemusement, indeed!

"Fellows!" I cried. "Someone's not playing fair! In the last few minutes, Miss Schoener has been in Siberia, in Hanford, Washington, U.S.A., in Munich, Germany, and in Paris. This—"

"She's back again!" Sosnowski cried from Hanford.

I swung to the Hanford screen. "Ted," I said, "stop switching the AGS off and on. It could be dangerous. The gauss level might even bring her to critical mass. You're playing with something we know little about."

Sosnowski rolled his eyes from the screen to Elaine. "Brother," he said, "this girl's always near critical mass! And I'm not playing. I'd be happy if she'd stay right here!"

But she wasn't there.

"Ona krasavitsa," a jubilant voice said.

The Siberia screen displayed a Russian doing the sabre dance before Elaine's eyes, and an interpreter somewhere in the vast UNACME network was helpfully murmuring, "She is beautiful."

At which point Monsieur DuBois said throatily to an abruptly materialized vision, "Tu es belle. Reste ici, ma chere!" And then swore with Gallic fluency as thin air alone vibrated to his impassioned words.

While Al Benson at Phoenix began a John Alden speech in my behalf.

I was silent, studying Elaine's lovely face as Al spoke to her. She was apparently enjoying every second of her fantastic flitting yet I could see perplexity deep in her dark eyes. I thought I could see a bewilderment, a lostness.

"Al," I said, "I've got to talk to her."

Was it wishful thinking or did I see a warmth leap into her face as she turned to see my image?

"Trust in me, Elaine," I said. "I'll bring you home."

"Home?" she asked.

"Yes, home—home to me," I said, naked longing in my voice—and, for all the world to hear, "I love you, darling."

"Moi, aussi!" Monsieur DuBois me-too'd in French.

"Ich auch!" came from Munich, plus, "Bitte komme doch bald zuruck!" which, I gathered, was asking her to come back but quickly!

"I mean it!" I cried through Babel.

My voice was lost in a storm of pleas, protestations, proposals, propositions, presentations and plain Ph. D. philanderings, during which Elaine's loveliness appeared briefly on the monitor screens for Paris, Leeds, Brussels, Hanford, Stockholm, Paris, Hanford, Phoenix, Munich, Hanford, Atomsk, Tokyo, Hanford, Madrid, Paris, Hanford, Paris, Hanford, Paris, Hanford—

"Sosnowski!" I cried, "and you, too, Monsieur DuBois! Stop! Arretez! Don't do it any more! Ne faites-le plus!"

The situation continued to pingpong. Hanford to Paris to Hanford to Paris.

Sosnowski said (while Monsieur DuBois was ardently proposing to Elaine at the Sorbonne), "I sincerely wish to marry the girl, Bob."

"So do I, Ted," I answered him. "May the better man—"

"The best man," he snapped back. "Don't forget DuBois!"

I cut my microphone and said quickly to Herrmann, "George, get the chaplain and get the mayor to bring over whatever personnel and forms it takes to get a marriage license. And, move!"

And a Russian roared from the Siberia monitor something that sounded like "Mogoo ya zhenitsa s vashey dochery?", which, promptly interpreted by a linguist on the network, resulted in "May I marry your daughter?"

I didn't burn; I blazed. My daughter, indeed! So my hair is greying. Prematurely, that is. I'm only twenty-nine.

I was in control of UNACMEA at that moment. Full control. I was vested with UN power and that's Power these days, despite the snide remarks you hear from certain quarters.

"Look," I said to the whole wide world. "You will all—repeat all—immediately deactivate every AGS unit. This is a direct order of the UN."

I was hopeful but—

Monsieur DuBois said it was an accident.

Sosnowski said he couldn't figure out how it happened that the Hanford AGS reactivated itself—

And a new and properly British voice said, "This is Gibraltar. I say, Miss Schoener is here. It was, I assure you, quite accidental. One of your flyboys is here to pick up a cargo of potables for your North African bases and mistook the AGS button for an intercom and—"

"This is Sosnowski. I'm sorry but—"

And an interpreter cut in, "Commissar Vladislaw indicates that he will allow Miss Schoener to return if monitoring of the Soviet AGS installations will be permanently discontinued—"

"Gibraltar here. I'm rather afraid your pilot is somewhat out of hand—"

"Mein liebling, kannst Du nicht langer hier bleiben?"

"Ma chere, reste avec moi et je te donnerai le monde!"

"Elaine," I cried, "wherever you are, answer me!"

At last, at long last, her voice said, "Yes, Bob?"

"Will you marry me?" I asked prayerfully and Munich got into the act with "Willst Du nicht mich heiraten?"

"Yes," she said so softly I barely heard.

I swung a frantic glance over my shoulder. His Honor the Mayor of Racine and sub-alterns were behind me.

"Elaine?" I yelled.

"Whoops!" she said; then, "I'm back at Hanford."

"Sosnowski," I said sharply. "You heard my order. You will not activate the AGS again!"

"I haven't been touching it for the last ten minutes," Sosnowski said. "There's something wrong with the activator; it's turning itself off and on at random."

"Then get a technician and damp the pile!"

"I'll do what I can," he said. "Anyway, Elaine's gone!"

Siberia was back in the act. Then Gibraltar. Then Munich.

"Elaine," I cried. "You're coming home—now!"

I cut the AGS; then reactivated it and she was here, oh! so wondrously close to me, and the mayor handed her a pen and she signed the marriage license and—

Sosnowski said he was sorry.

The chaplain arrived. I refuse to mention his name or faith; he asks for anonymity. Suffice it to say that he is a man of God and a man of science.

He looked at me questioningly and I nodded. The service began.

Elaine heard parts of the ceremony at sixteen different locations in the world. And my errant colleagues (bless them!), despite their playful reactivations of their AGS units, maintained a decent silence when the chaplain made the fateful invitation to that someone to speak now or forever hold his peace.

At last the chaplain said, "Do you, Robert, take this woman—there at Hanford on the monitor—to be thy lawful wedded wife?"

And I said, "I do," and hoped I didn't sound facetious as I added, "except that she's at Gibraltar now!"

"Do you, Elaine, take this man Robert—"

And Al Benson cut in from Phoenix saying, "The computer says to degauss her, Bob!"

And I snapped on WAGS, full power—and Elaine was here, here beside me saying, "I do, I do, I do!"

And George Herrmann (bless him!) had degaussing equipment ready—

That was eleven months ago.

Now I am at the UNACMEA/WAGS console again and I am asking all the physicists in charge of AGS units throughout the world to listen, to understand and to help.

Flitting between them this morning is our two-months-old daughter. She inherited a little instability and a high gauss tolerance. Her mother's had her here at WAGS too often, too, I guess.

The little one's particularly disturbed now because she needs a change. Will someone please do the necessaries fast?

Elaine's here and she's determined to go, too, figuring they'll wind up together and then, with your cooperation, I can bring them both back.

But, fellows, it would be easier if—

Elaine!

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ODDLY ELUSIVE BRUNETTE ***

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