Take best-quality synthetic protein. Bake it, break it up, steam it, steep it in sucrose, ferment it, add nut oil, piquant spices from the Indies, fruit juices, new flavors from the laboratory, homogenize it, hydrolize it, soak it in brine; pump in glutamic acid, balanced proportions of A, B-1, B-2, C, D, traces of calcium, copper and iron salts, an unadvertised drop of benzedrine; dehydrate, peptonize, irradiate, reheat in malt vapor under pressure compress, cut into mouth-sized chunks, pack in liquor from an earlier stage of process —
Miracle Meal.
Everything the Body Needs to Sustain Life and Bounding Vitality, in the Most DEEE LISHUSSS Food Ever Devised. It will Invigorate You, Build Muscle, Brain, Nerve. Better than the Banquets of Imperial Rome, Renaissance Italy, Eighteenth Century France — All in One Can. The Most Heavenly Taste Thrills You Have Ever Experienced. Gourmets' Dream and Housewives' Delight. You Can Live On It. Eat it for Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner. You'll Never Get Tired of MIRACLE MEAL.
Ad cuts of Zeus contemptuously tossing a bowl of ambrosia over the edge of Mount Olympus and making a goggle-eyed grab for a can of Miracle Meal.
Studio fake-ups of Lucretia Borgia dropping a phial of poison and crying piously: "It Would Be a Sin to Spoil Miracle Meal."
Posters and night-signs of John Doe — or Bill Smith, or Henri Brun, or Hans Schmitt or Wei Lung — balancing precariously on a pyramided pile of empty M.M. cans, eyes closed, mouth pursed in slighdy inane ecstasy as he finished the last mouthful of his hundred-thousandth can.
You could live on it, certainly.
The publicity co-ordinator of the Miracle Meal Corporation chose the victim himself — a young man named Arthur Adelaide from Greenwich Village.
For a year, under the closest medical supervision and observation, Arthur ate nothing but Miracle Meal.
From this Miracle Meal Marathon, as it was tagged by videoprint newssheets, he emerged smiling, twice the weight — publicity omitted to mention that he'd been half-starved to begin with — he'd been trying to live off pure art and was a bad artist — perfectly fit, and ten thousand dollars richer.
He was also given a commercial art job with M.M., designing new labels for the cans.
His abrupt death at the end of an eighty-story drop from his office window a week or two later received little attention.
It would be unreasonable to blame the cumulative effect of M.M., for Arthur was probably a little unbalanced to begin with, whereas M.M. was Perfectly Balanced — a Kitchen in a Can.
Maybe you could get tired of it. But not very quickly. The flavor was the secret. It was delicious yet strangely and tantalizingly indefinable. It seemed to react progressively on the taste-buds so that the tastes subtly changed with each mouthful.
One moment it might be omelette au fine herbes, the next, turkey and cranberry, then buckwheat and maple. You'd be through the can before you could make up your mind. So you'd buy another.
Even the can was an improvement on the usual plastic self-heater — shape of a small, shallow pie-dish, with a pre-impressed crystalline fracture in the plastic lid.
Press the inset button on the preheating unit at one side, and when the food was good and hot, a secondary chemical reaction in the unit released a fierce little plunger just inside the perimeter fracture. Slight steam pressure finished the job. The lip flipped off.
Come and get it. You eat right out of the can it comes in. Keep your fingers out, Johnny. Don't you see the hygiplast spoon in its moisture- and heat-repellent wrapper fixed under the lid?
The Rev. Malachi Pennyhorse did not eat Miracle Meal. Nor was he impressed when Mr. Stephen Samson, Site Advisor to the Corporation, spoke in large dollar signs of the indirect benefits a factory would bring to the district.
"Why here? You already have one factory in England. Why not extend it?"
"It's our policy, Reverend — "
"Not 'Reverend' young man. Call me Vicar. Or Mr. Pennyhorse. Or merely Pennyhorse — Go on."
"It's our policy, sir, to keep our factories comparatively small, site them in the countryside for the health of employees, and modify the buildings to harmonize with the prevailing architecture of the district. There is no interference with local amenities. All transport of employees, raw materials, finished product is by silent copter."
Samson laid a triphoto on the vicar's desk. "What would you say that was?"
Mr. Pennyhorse adjusted his pince-nez, looked closely. "Byzantine. Very fine. Around 500 A.D."
"And this — "
"Moorish. Quite typical. Fifteenth century."
Samson said: "They're our factories at Istanbul and Tunis respectively. At Allahabad, India, we had to put up big notices saying: 'This is not a temple or place of worship' because natives kept wandering in and offering-up prayers to the processing machines."
Mr. Pennyhorse glanced up quickly. Samson kept his face straight, added: "The report may have been exaggerated, but — you get the idea?"
The vicar said: "I do. What shape do you intend your factory to take in this village?"
"That's why I came to you. The rural district council suggested that you might advise us."
"My inclination, of course, is to advise you to go away and not return."
The vicar looked out of his study window at the sleepy, sun-washed village street, gables of the ancient Com Exchange, paved market-place, lichened spire of his own time-kissed church; and, beyond, rolling Wiltshire pastures cradling the peaceful community.
The vicar sighed: "We've held out here so long — I hoped we would remain inviolate in my time, at least. However, I suppose we must consider ourselves fortunate that your corporation has some respect for tradition and the feelings of the . . . uh . . . 'natives.'"
He pulled out a drawer in his desk. "It might help you to understand those feelings if I show you a passage from the very full diary of my predecessor here, who died fifty years ago at the age of ninety-five — we're a long-lived tribe, we clergy. It's an entry he made one hundred years ago — sitting at this very desk."
Stephen Samson took the opened volume.
The century-old handwriting was as readable as typescript.
May 3, 1943. Long, interesting discussion with young American soldier, one of those who are billeted in the village. They term themselves G.I.'s. Told me countryside near his home in Pennsylvania not unlike our Wiltshire downs. Showed him round church. Said he was leaving soon, and added: I love this place. Nothing like my home town in looks, but the atmosphere's the same — old, and kind of comfortable. And I guess if I came back here a hundred years from now, it wouldn't have changed one bit. An engaging young man. I trust he is right.
Samson looked up. Mr. Pennyhorse said: "That young man may have been one of your ancestors."
Samson gently replaced the old diary on the desk. "He wasn't. My family's Ohioan. But I see what you mean, and respect it. That's why I want you to help us. You will?"
"Do you fish?" asked the vicar, suddenly and irrelevantly.
"Yes, sir. Very fond of the sport."
"Thought so. You're the type. That's why I like you. Take a look at these flies. Seen anything like them? Make 'em myself. One of the finest trout streams in the country just outside the village. Help you? Of course I will."
"Presumption," said Brother James. He eased himself through a gray stone wall by twisting his subexistential plane slightly, and leaned reflectively against a moonbeam that slanted through the branches of an oak.
A second habited and cowled figure materialized beside him. "Perhaps so. But it does my age-wearied heart a strange good to see those familiar walls again casting their shadows, over the field."
"A mockery, Brother Gregory. A mere shell that simulates the outlines of our beloved Priory. Think you that even the stones are of that good, gray granite that we built with? Nay! As this cursed simulacrum was a-building, I warped two hands into the solid, laid hold of a mossy block, and by the saints, 'twas of such inconsequential weight I might have hurled it skyward with a finger. And within, is there aught which we may recognize? No chapel, no cloisters, no refectory — only long, geometrical rooms. And what devilries and unholy rites may not be centered about those strange mechanisms, with which the rooms are filled?"
At the tirade. Brother Gregory sighed and thrust back his cowl to let the gracious moonbeams play on his tonsured head. "For an Untranslated One of some thousand years' standing," he said, "you exhibit a mulish ignorance. Brother James. You would deny men all advancement. I remember well your curses when first we saw horseless carriages and flying machines."
"Idols!" James snapped. "Men worship them. Therefore are they evil."
"You are so good, Brother James," Gregory said, with the heaviest sarcasm. "So good, it is my constant wonderment that you have had to wait so long for Translation Upwards. Do you think that Dom Pennyhorse, the present incumbent of Selcor — a worthy man, with reverence for the past — would permit evil rites within his parish? You are a befuddled old anachronism, brother."
"That," said James, "is quite beyond sufferance. For you to speak thus of Translation, when it was your own self-indulgent pursuit of carnal pleasures that caused us to be bound here through the centuries!"
Brother Gregory said coldly: "It was not I who inveigled the daughter of Ronald the Wry-Neck into the kitchen garden, thus exposing the weak flesh of a brother to grievous temptation."
There was silence for a while, save for the whisper of a midnight breeze through the branches of the oak, and the muted call of a nightbird from the far woods.
Gregory extended a tentative hand and lightly touched the sleeve of James's habit. "The argument might proceed for yet another century and bring us no nearer Translation. Besides it is not such unbearable penance, my brother. Were we not both lovers of the earth, of this fair countryside?"
James shrugged. Another silence. Then he fingered his gaunt white cheeks. "What we do, Brother Gregory? Shall we — appear to them?"
Gregory said: "I doubt whether common warp manifestation would be efficacious. As dusk fell tonight, I overheard a conversation between Dom Pennyhorse and a tall, young-featured man who has been concerned in the building of this simulacrum. The latter spoke in one of the dialects of the Americas; and it was mentioned that several of the men who will superintend the working of the machines within will also be from the United States — for a time at least. It is not prudent to haunt Americans in the normal fashion. Their attitude towards such matters is notoriously — unseemly."
"We could polter," suggested Brother James.
Gregory replaced his cowl. "Let us review the possibilities, then," he said, "remembering that our subetheric energy is limited."
They walked slowly together over the meadow towards the resuscitated gray walls of the Selcor Prior. Blades of grass, positively charged by their passage, sprang suddenly upright, relaxed slowly into limpness as the charge leaked away.
They halted at the walls to adjust their planes of incidence and degree of tenuity, and passed inside.
The new Miracle Meal machines had had their first test run. The bearings on the dehydrator pumps were still warm as two black figures, who seemed to carry with them an air of vast and wistful loneliness, paced silently between rows of upright cylinders which shone dully in moonlight diffused through narrow windows.
"Here," said Gregory, the taller of the two, softly, "did we once walk the cloisters in evening meditation."
Brother James's broad features showed signs of unease. He felt more than mere nostalgia.
"Power — what are they using? Something upsets my bones. I am queasy, as when a thunderstom is about to break. Yet there is no static."
Gregory stopped, looked at his hand. There was a faint blue aura at his fingertips. "Slight neutron escape," he said. "They have a small thorium-into-233 pile somewhere. It needs better shielding."
"You speak riddles."
Gregory said, with a little impatience: "You have the entire science section of the village library at your disposal at nightfall for the effort of a trifling polter, yet for centuries you have read nothing but the Lives of the Saints. So, of course, I speak riddles — to you. You are even content to remain in ignorance of the basic principles of your own structure and functioning, doing everything by traditional thought-rote and rule of thumb. But I am not so content; and of my knowledge, I can assure you that the radiation will not harm you unless you warp to solid and sit atop the pile when it is in full operation." Gregory smiled. "And then, dear brother, you would doubtless be so uncomfortable that you would dewarp before any harm could be done beyond the loss of a little energy that would be replaced in time. Let us proceed."
They went through three departments before Brother Gregory divined the integrated purpose of the vats, driers, conveyor-tubes, belts and containers.
"The end product. I'm sure, is a food of sorts," he said, "and by some quirk of fate, it is stored in approximately the position that was once occupied by our kitchen store — if my sense of orientation has not been bemused by these strange internal surroundings."
The test run of the assembly had produced a few score cans of Miracle Food. They were stacked on metal shelves which would tilt and gravity-feed them into the shaft leading up to the crating machine. Crated, they would go from there to the copter-loading bay on the roof.
Brother James reached out to pick up a loose can. His hand went through it twice.
"Polt, you dolt!" said Brother Gregory. "Or are you trying to be miserly with your confounded energy? Here, let me do it."
The telekineticized can sprang into his solid hands. He turned it about slightly increasing his infrared receptivity to read the label, since the storeroom was in darkness.
"Miracle Meal. Press here."
He pressed, pressed again, and was closely examining the can when, after thirty seconds, the lid flipped off, narrowly missing his chin.
Born, and living, in more enlightened times, Brother Gregory's inquiring mind and insatiable appetite for facts would have made him a research worker. He did not drop the can. His hands were quite steady. He chuckled. He said: "Ingenious, very ingenious. See — the food is hot."
He warped his nose and back-palate into solid and delicately inhaled vapors. His eyes widened. He frowned, inhaled again. A beatific smile spread over his thin face.
"Brother James — warp your nose!"
The injunction, in other circumstances, might have been considered both impolite and unnecessary. Brother James was no beauty, and his big, blunt, snoutlike nose, which had been a flaring red in life, was the least prepossessing of his features.
But he warped it, and sniffed.
M.M. Sales Leaflet Number 14: It Will Sell By Its Smell Alone.
Gregory said hesitantly: "Do you think Brother James, that we might — "
James licked his lips, from side to side, slowly. "It would surely take a day's accumulation of energy to hold digestive and alimentary in solid for a sufficient period. But — "
"Don't be a miser,'' said Gregory. "There's a spoon beneath the lid. Get a can for yourself. And don't bother with digestive. Teeth, palate and throat are sufficient. It would not digest in any case. It remains virtually unchanged. But going down — ah, bliss!"
It went down. Two cans.
"Do you remember, brother," said James, in a weak, reminiscing voice, "what joy it was to eat and be strengthened. And now to eat is to be weakened."
Brother Gregory's voice was faint but happy. "Had there been food of this character available before our First Translation, I doubt whether other desires of the flesh would have appealed to me. But what was our daily fare set on the refectory table: peas; lentils; cabbage soup; hard, tasteless cheese. Year after year — ugh!"
"Health-giving foods,'' murmured Brother James, striving to be righteous even in his exhaustion. "Remember when we bribed the kitchener to get extra portions. Good trenchermen, we. Had we not died of the plague before our Priory became rich and powerful, then, by the Faith, our present bodies would be of greater girth."
"Forms, not bodies," said Gregory, insisting even in his exhaustion on scientific exactitudes. "Variable fields, consisting of open lattices of energy foci resolvable into charged particles — and thus solid matter — when they absorb energy beyond a certain stage. In other words, my dear ignorant brother, when we polt. The foci themselves — or rather the spaces between them — act as a limited-capacity storage battery for the slow accretion of this energy from cosmic sources, which may be controlled and concentrated in the foci by certain thought-patterns."
Talking was an increasing effort in his energy-low state.
"When we polt," he went on slowly, "we take up heat, air cools, live people get cold shivers; de-polt, give up heat, live people get clammy, cold-hot feeling; set up 'lectrostatic field, live peoples' hair stan's on end" — his voice was trailing into deep, blurred inaudibility, like a mechanical phonograph running down, but James wasn't listening anyway — "an' then when we get Translated Up'ards by The Power That Is, all the energy goes back where it came from an' we jus' become thought. Thassall. Thought. Thought, thought, thought, thought — "
The phonograph ran down, stopped. There was silence in the transit storeroom of the Selcor Priory Factory branch of the Miracle Meal Corporation.
For a while.
Then —
"THOUGHT!"
The shout brought Brother James from his uneasy, uncontrolled repose at the nadir of an energy balance.
"What is it?" he grumbled. "I'm too weak to listen to any of your theorizing."
"Theorizing! I have it!"
"Conserve your energies, brother, else will you be too weak even to twist yourself from this place."
Both monks had permitted their forms to relax into a corner of the storeroom, supine, replete in disrepletion.
Brother Gregory sat up with an effort.
"Listen, you attenuated conserve of very nothingness, I have a way to thwart, bemuse, mystify and irritate these crass philistines — and nothing so simple that a psychic investigator could put a thumb on us. What are we, Brother James?"
It was a rhetorical question, and Brother James had barely formulated his brief repy — "Ghosts" — before Brother Gregory, energized in a way beyond his own understanding by his own enthusiasm, went on: "Fields, in effect. Mere lines of force, in our un-polted state. What happens if we whirl? A star whirls. It has mass, rate of angular rotation, degree of compactness — therefore, gravity. Why? Because it has a field to start with. But we are our own fields. We need neither mass nor an excessive rate of rotation to achieve the same effect. Last week I grounded a high-flying wood-pigeon by whirling. It shot down to me through the air, and I'd have been buffeted by its pinions had I not stood aside. It hit the ground — not too heavily, by the grace of St. Barbara — recovered and flew away."
The great nose of Brother James glowed pinkly for a moment. "You fuddle and further weaken me by your prating. Get to your point, if you have such. And explain how we may do anything in our present unenergized state, beyond removing ourselves to a nexus point for recuperation."
Brother Gregory warped his own nose into solid in order to scratch its tip. He felt the need of this reversion to a life habit, which had once aided him in marshaling his thoughts.
"You think only of personal energy," he said scornfully. "We do need that, to whirl. It is an accumulative process, yet we gain nothing, lose nothing. Matter is not the only thing we can warp. If you will only listen, you woof of unregenerate and forgotten flesh, I will try to explain without mathematics."
He talked.
After a while. Brother James's puzzled frown gave way to a faint smile. "Perhaps I understand," he said.
"Then forgive me for implying you were a moron," said Gregory. "Stand up, Brother James."
Calls on transatlantic tight-beam cost heavy. Anson Dewberry, Miracle Meal Overseas Division head, pointed this out to Mr. Stephen Samson three times during their conversation.
"Listen," said Samson at last, desperately, "I'll take no more delegation of authority. In my contract, it says I'm site adviser. That means I'm architect and negotiator, not detective or scientist or occulist. I offered to stay on here to supervise building because I happen to like the place. I like the pubs. I like the people. I like the fishing. But it wasn't in my contract. And I'm now standing on that contract. Building is finished to schedule, plant installed — your tech men, incidentally, jetted out of here without waiting to catch snags after the first runoff — and now I'm through. The machines are running, the cans are coming off — and if the copters don't collect, that's for you and the London office to bat your brains out over. And the Lord forgive that mess of terminal propositions," he added in lower voice. Samson was a purist in the matter of grammar.
Anson Dewberry jerked his chair nearer the scanner in his New York office. His pink, round face loomed in Samson's screen like that of an avenging cherub.
"Don't you have no gendarmes around that place?" Mr. Dewberry was no purist, in moments of stress. "Get guards on, hire some militia, check employees. Ten thousand cans of M.M. don't just evaporate."
"They do," Samson replied sadly. "Maybe it's the climate. And for the seventh time, I tell you I've done all that. I've had men packed so tightly around the place that even an orphan neutron couldn't get by. This morning I had two men from Scotland Yard gumming around. They looked at the machines, followed the assembly through to the transit storeroom, examined the electrolocks and mauled their toe-caps trying to boot a dent in the door. Then the top one — that is, the one who only looked half-asleep — said, 'Mr. Samson, sir, do you think it's . . . uh . . . possible . . . that. . . uh . . . this machine of yours . . . uh . . . goes into reverse when your . . . uh . . . backs are turned and . . . uh . . . sucks the cans back again?'"
Grating noises that might have been an incipient death rattle slid over the tight-beam from New York.
Samson nodded, a smirk of mock sympathy on his tanned, humor-wrinkled young face.
The noises ended with a gulp. The image of Dewberry thrust up a hesitant forefinger in interrogation. "Hey! Maybe there's something to that, at that — would it be possible?"
Samson groaned a little. "I wouldn't really know or overmuch care. But I have doubts. Meantime — "
"Right." Dewberry receded on the screen. "I'll jet a man over tonight. The best. From Research. Full powers. Hand over to him. Take some of your vacation. Design some more blamed mosques or tabernacles. Go fishing."
"A sensible suggestion," Samson said. "Just what I was about to do. It's a glorious afternoon here, sun a little misted, grass green, stream flowing cool and deep, fish lazing in the pools where the willow-shadows fall — "
The screen blanked. Dewberry was no purist, and no poet either.
Samson made a schoolkid face. He switched off the fluor lamps that supplemented the illumination from a narrow window in the supervisor's office — which, after studying the ground-plan of the original Selcor Priory, he had sited in the space that was occupied centuries before by the business sanctum of the Prior — got up from his desk and walked through a Norman archway into the sunlight.
He breathed the meadow-sweet air deeply, with appreciation.
The Rev. Malachi Pennyhorse was squatting with loose-jointed ease against the wall. Two fishing rods in brown canvas covers lay across his lap. He was studying one of the trout-flies nicked into the band of his ancient hat. His balding, brown pate was bared to the sun. He looked up.
"What fortune, my dear Stephen?"
"I convinced him at last. He's jetting a man over tonight. He told me to go fishing."
"Injunction unnecessary, I should imagine. Let's go. We shan't touch a trout with the sky as clear as this, but I have some float tackle for lazier sport." They set off across a field. "Are you running the plant today?"
Samson nodded his head towards a faint hum. "Quarter-speed. That will give one copter-load for the seventeen hundred hours collection, and leave enough over to go in the transit store for the night and provide Dewberry's man with some data. Or rather, lack of it."
"Where do you think it's going?"
"I've given up guessing."
Mr. Pennyhorse paused astride a stile and looked back at the gray bulk of the Priory. "I could guess who's responsible," he said, and chuckled.
"Uh? Who?"
Mr. Pennyhorse shook his head. "Leave that to your investigator."
A few moments later he murmured as if to himself: "What a haunt! Ingenious devils."
But when Stephen Samson looked at him inquiringly, he added: "But I can't guess where your cans have been put."
And he would say nothing more on the subject.
Who would deny that the pure of heart are often simple-minded? (The obverse of the proposition need not be argued.) And that cause-effect relations are sometimes divined more readily by the intuition of simpletons than the logic of scholars?
Brother Simon Simplex — Simple Simon to later legends — looked open-mouthed at the array of strange objects on the stone shelves of the kitchen storeroom. He was not surprised — his mouth was always open, even in sleep.
He took down one of the objects and examined it with mild curiosity. He shook it, turned it round, thrust a forefinger into a small depression. Something gave slightly, but there was no other aperture. He replaced it on the shelf.
When his fellow-kitchener returned, he would ask him the purpose of the objects — if he could remember to do so. Simon's memory was poor. Each time the rota brought him onto kitchen duty for a week, he had to be instructed afresh in the business of serving meals in the refectory: platter so, napkin thus, spoon here, finger bowls half-filled, three water pitchers, one before the Prior, one in the center, one at the foot of the table — "and when you serve, tread softly and do not breathe down the necks of the brothers."
Even now could he hear the slight scrape of benches on stone as the monks, with bowed heads, freshly washed hands in the sleeves of their habits, filed slowly into the refectory and took their seats at the long, oak table. And still his fellow-kitchener had not returned from the errand. Food was prepared — dared he begin to serve alone?
It was a great problem for Simon, brother in the small House of Selcor, otherwise Selcor Priory, poor cell-relation to the rich monastery of the Cluniac Order at Battle, in the year 1139 A.D.
Steam pressure in the triggered can of Miracle Meal did its work. The lid flipped. The aroma issued.
Simon's mouth nearly shut as he sniffed.
The calm and unquestioning acceptance of the impossible is another concommitant of simplicity and purity of heart. To the good and simple Simon the rising of the sun each morning and the singing of birds were recurrent miracles. Compared with these, a laboratory miracle of the year 2143 A.D. was as nothing.
Here was a new style of platter, filled with hot food, ready to serve. Wiser minds than his had undoubtedly arranged matters. His fellow-kitchener, knowing the task was thus simplified, had left him to serve alone.
He had merely to remove the covers from these platters and carry them into the refectory. To remove the covers — cause — effect — the intuition of a simple mind.
Simon carried fourteen of the platters to the kitchen table, pressed buttons and waited.
He was gravely tempted to sample the food himself, but all-inclusive Benedictine rules forbade kitcheners to eat until their brothers had been served.
He carried a loaded tray into the refectory where the monks sat in patient silence except for the one voice of the Reader who stood at a raised lectern and intoned from the Lives of the Saints.
Pride that he had been thought fit to carry out the duty alone made Simon less clumsy than usual. He served the Prior, Dom Holland, first, almost deftly; then the other brothers, in two trips to the kitchen.
A spicy, rich, titillating fragrance filled the refectory. The intoning of the Lives of the Saints faltered for a moment as the mouth of the Reader filled with saliva, then he grimly continued.
At Dom Holland's signal, the monks ate.
The Prior spooned the last drops of gravy into his mouth. He sat back. A murmur arose. He raised a hand. The monks became quiet. The Reader closed his book.
Dom Holland was a man of faith; but he did not accept miracles or even the smallest departures from routine existence without questioning. He had sternly debated with himself whether he should question the new platters and the new food before or after eating. The aroma decided him. He ate first.
Now he got up, beckoned to a senior monk to follow him, and paced with unhurried calmness to the kitchen.
Simon had succumbed. He was halfway through his second tin.
He stood up, licking his fingers.
"Whence comes this food, my son?" asked Dom Holland, in sonorous Latin.
Simon's mouth opened wider. His knowledge of the tongue was confined to prayers.
Impatiently the Prior repeated the question in the English dialect of the district.
Simon pointed, and led them to the storeroom.
"I looked, and it was here," he said simply. The words were to become famed.
His fellow-kitchener was sought — he was found dozing in a warm corner of the kitchen garden — and questioned. He shook his head. The provisioner rather reluctantly disclaimed credit.
Dom Holland thought deeply, then gave instructions for a general assembly. The plastic "platters" and the hygiplast spoons were carefully examined. There were murmurs of wonderment at the workmanship. The discussion lasted two hours.
Simon's only contribution was to repeat with pathetic insistence: "I looked and it was there."
He realized dimly that he had become a person of some importance.
His face became a mask of puzzlement when the Prior summed up:
"Our simple but blessed brother, Simon Simplex, it seems to me, has become an instrument or vessel of some thaumaturgical manifestation. It would be wise, however, to await further demonstration before the matter is referred to higher authorities."
The storeroom was sealed and two monks were deputed as nightguards.
Even with the possibility of a miracle on his hands, Dom Holland was not prepared to abrogate the Benedictine rule of only one main meal a day. The storeroom wasn't opened until early afternoon of the following day.
It was opened by Simon, in the presence of the Prior, a scribe, the provisioned and two senior monks.
Released, a pile of Miracle Meal cans toppled forward like a crumbling cliff, slithering and clattering in noisy profusion around Simon's legs, sliding over the floor of the kitchen.
Simon didn't move. He was either too surprised or cunningly aware of the effectiveness of the scene. He stood calf-deep in cans, pointed at the jumbled stack inside the storeroom, sloping up nearly to the stone roof, and said his little piece:
"I look, and it is here."
"Kneel, my sons," said Dom Holland gravely, and knelt.
Manna.
And at a time when the Priory was hard-pressed to maintain even its own low standard of subsistence, without helping the scores of dispossessed refugees encamped in wattle shacks near its protecting walls.
The countryside was scourged by a combination of civil and foreign war. Stephen of Normandy against Matilda of Anjou for the British throne. Neither could control his own followers. When the Flemish mercenaries of King Stephen were not chasing Queen Matilda's Angevins back over the borders of Wiltshire, they were plundering the lands and possessions of nominal supporters of Stephen. The Angevins and the barons who supported Matilda's cause quite impartially did the same, then pillaged each other's property, castle against castle, baron against baron.
It was anarchy and free-for-all — but nothing for the ignored serfs, bondmen, villeins and general peasantry, who fled from stricken homes and roamed the countryside in bands of starving thousands. Some built shacks in the inviolate shadow of churches and monasteries.
Selcor Priory had its quota of barefoot, raggedly men, women and children — twelfth century Displaced Persons. They were a headache to the Prior, kindly Dom Holland — until Simple Simon's Miracle.
There were seventy recipients of the first hand-out of Miracle Meal cans from the small door in the Priory's walled kitchen garden.
The next day there were three hundred, and the day after that, four thousand. Good news doesn't need radio to get around fast.
Fourteen monks worked eight-hour shifts for twenty-four hours, hauling stocks from the capacious storeroom, pressing buttons, handing out steaming platters to orderly lines of refugees.
Two monks, shifting the last few cans from the store, were suddenly buried almost to their necks by the arrival of a fresh consignment, which piled up out of thin air.
Providence, it seemed, did not depend solely upon the intervention of Simon Simplex. The Priory itself and all its inhabitants were evidently blessed.
The Abbot of Battle, Dom Holland's superior, a man of great girth and great learning visited the Priory. He confirmed the miracle — by studying the label on the can.
After several hours' work in the Prior's office, he announced to Dom Holland:
"The script presented the greatest difficulty. It is an extreme simplification of letter-forms at present in use by Anglo-Saxon scholars. The pertinent text is a corruption — if I may be pardoned the use of such a term in the circumstances — of the Latin miraculum compounded with the word mael from our own barbarous tongue — so, clearly, Miracle Meal!"
Dom Holland murmured his awe of this learning.
The Abbot added, half to himself: "Although why the nature of the manifestation should be thus advertised in repetitive engraving, when it is self-evident — " He shrugged. "The ways of Providence are passing strange."
Brother Gregory, reclining in the starlight near his favorite oak, said:
"My only regret is that we cannot see the effect of our gift — the theoretical impact of a modem product — usually a weapon — on past ages is a well-tried topic of discussion and speculation among historians, scientists, economists and writers of fantasy."
Brother James, hunched in vague adumbration on a wall behind, said: "You are none of those things, else might you explain why it is that, if these cans have reached the period for which, according to your obtruse calculations, they were destined — an age in which we were both alive — we cannot remember such an event, or why it is not recorded in histories of the period."
"It was a time of anarchy, dear brother. Many records were destroyed. And as for your memories — well, great paradoxes of time are involved. One might as profitably ask how many angels may dance on the point of a pin. Now if you should wish to know how many atoms might be accommodated in a like position — "
Brother Gregory was adroit at changing the subject. He didn't wish to speculate aloud until he'd figured out all the paradox possibilities. He'd already discarded an infinity of time-streams as intellectually unsatisfying, and was toying with the concept of recurrent worlds —
"Dom Pennyhorse has guessed that it is our doing."
"What's that?"
Brother James repeated the information smugly.
Gregory said slowly: "Well, he is not — unsympathetic — to us."
"Assuredly, brother, we have naught to fear from him, nor from the pleasant young man with whom he goes fishing. But this young man was today in consultation with his superior, and an investigator is being sent from America."
"Psychic investigator, eh? Phooey. We'll tie him in knots," and Gregory complacently.
"I assume," said Brother James, with a touch of self-righteousness, "that these vulgar colloquialisms to which you sometimes have recourse are another result of your nocturnal reading. They offend my ear. 'Phooey', indeed — No, this investigator is one with whom you will undoubtedly find an affinity. I gather that he is from a laboratory — a scientist of sorts."
Brother Gregory sat up and rubbed his tonsure thoughtfully. "That," he admitted, "is different." There was a curious mixture of alarm and eagerness in his voice. "There are means of detecting the field we employ."
An elementary electroscope was one of the means. An ionization indicator and a thermometer were others. They were all bolted firmly on a bench just inside the storeroom. Wires led from them under the door to a jury-rigged panel outside.
Sandy-haired Sidney Meredith of M.M. Research sat in front of the panel on a folding stool, watching dials with intense blue eyes, chin propped in hands.
Guards had been cleared from the factory. He was alone, on the advice of Mr. Pennyhorse, who had told him: "If, as I suspect, it's the work of two of my . . . uh . . . flock . . . two very ancient parishioners . . . they are more likely to play their tricks in the absence of a crowd."
"I get it," Meredith had said. "Should be interesting."
It was.
He poured coffee from a thermos without taking his eyes from the panel. The thermometer reading was dropping slowly. Ionization was rising. From inside the store came the faint rasp of moving objects.
Meredith smiled, sighted a thumb-size camera, recorded the panel readings. "This," he said softly, "will make a top feature in the Journal : 'The most intensive psychic and poltergeist phenomena ever recorded. M.M.'s top tech trouble-shooter spikes spooks.' "
There was a faint snap beyond the door. Dials swooped back to Zero. Meredith quit smiling and daydreaming.
"Hey — play fair!" he called.
The whisper of a laugh answered him, and a soft, hollow whine, as of a wind cycloning into outer space.
He grabbed the door, pulled. It resisted. It was like trying to break a vacuum. He knelt, lit a cigarette, held it near the bottom of the nearly flush-fitting door. A thin streamer of smoke curled down and was drawn swiftly through the barely perceptible crack.
The soft whine continued for a few seconds, began to die away.
Meredith yanked at the door again. It gave, to a slight ingush of air. He thrust his foot in the opening, said calmly into the empty blackness: "When you fellers have quite finished — I'm coming in. Don't go away. Let's talk."
He slipped inside, closing the door, stood silent for a moment. He sniffed. Ozone. His scalp prickled. He scratched his head, felt the hairs standing upright. And it was cold.
He said: "Right. No point in playing dumb or covering-up, boys." He felt curiously ashamed of the platitudes as he uttered them. "I must apologize for breaking in," he added — and meant it. "But this has got to finish. And if you're not willing to — cooperate — I think I know now how to finish it."
Another whisper of a laugh. And two words, faint, gently mocking: "Do you?"
Meredith strained his eyes against the darkness. He saw only the nerve-patterns in his own eyes. He shrugged.
"If you won't play — " He switched on a blaze of fluor lamps. The long steel shelves were empty. There was only one can of Miracle Meal left in the store.
He felt it before he saw it. It dropped on his head, clattered to the plastocrete floor. When he'd retrieved his breath, he kicked it savagely to the far end of the store and turned to his instruments.
The main input lead had been pulled away. The terminal had been loosened first.
He unclamped a wide-angle infrared camera, waited impatiently for the developrinter to act, pulled out the print.
And laughed. It wasn't a good line-caricature of himself, but it was recognizable, chiefly by the shock of unruly hair.
The lines were slightly blurred, as though written by a needlepoint of light directly on the film. There was a jumble of writing over and under it.
"Old English, I suppose,'' he murmured. He looked closer. The writing above the caricature was a de Sitter version of the Reimann-Christoffel tensor, followed in crabbed but readable modem English by the words: "Why reverse the sign? Do we act like anti-particles?"
Underneath the drawing was an energy tensor and a comment: "You will notice that magnetic momenta contribute a negative density and pressure."
A string of symbols followed, ending with an equals sign and a query mark. And another comment: "You'll need to take time out to balance this one."
Meredith read the symbols, then sat down heavily on the edge of the instrument bench and groaned. Time out. But Time was already out, and there was neither matter nor radiation in a de Sitter universe.
Unless —
He pulled out a notebook, started to scribble.
An hour later Mr. Pennyhorse and Stephen Samson came in.
Mr. Pennyhorse said: "My dear young fellow, we were quite concerned. We thought — "
He stopped. Meredith's blue eyes were slightly out of focus. There were beads of sweat on his brow despite the coolness of the storeroom. Leaves from his notebook and cigarette stubs littered the floor around his feet.
He jumped like a pricked frog when the vicar gently tapped his shoulder, and uttered a vehement cuss-word that startled even the broad-minded cleric.
Samson tutted.
Meredith muttered: "Sorry, sir. But I think I nearly had it."
"What, my son?"
Meredith looked like a ruffle-haired schoolboy. His eyes came back into focus. "A crossword puzzle clue,'' he said. "Set by a spook with a super-I.Q. Two quite irreconcilable systems of mathematics lumped together, the signs in an extended energy tensor reversed, merry hell played with a temporal factor — and yet it was beginning to make sense."
He smiled wryly. "A ghost who unscrews terminals before he breaks connections and who can make my brain boil is a ghost worth meeting."
Mr. Pennyhorse eased his pince-nez. "Uh . . . yes. Now, don't you think it's time you came to bed? It's four a m. My housekeeper has made up a comfortable place on the divan in the sitting room." He took Meredith's arm and steered him from the store.
As they walked across the dewy meadows towards the vicarage, with the first pale streaks of dawn showing in the sky, Samson said: "How about the cans?"
"Time," replied Meredith vaguely, "will tell."
"And the guards?"
"Pay them off. Send them away. Keep the plant rolling. Fill the transit store tonight. And I want a freighter copter to take me to London University this afternoon."
Back in the transit store, the discarded leaves from Meredith's notebook fluttered gently upwards in the still air and disappeared.
Brother James said: "He is alone again."
They looked down on the sandy head of Sidney Meredith from the vantage point of a dehydrating tower.
"So I perceive. And I fear this may be our last uh . . . consignment to our erstwhile brothers," said Gregory thoughtfully.
"Why?"
"You will see. In giving him the clue to what we were doing, I gave him the clue to what we are, essentially."
They drifted down towards the transit store.
"After you, Brother James," said Brother Gregory with excessive politeness.
James adjusted his plane of incidence, started through the wall, and —
Shot backwards with a voiceless scream of agony.
Brother Gregory laughed. "I'm sorry. But that's why it will be our last consignment. Heterodyning is painful. He is a very intelligent fellow. The next time, he will take care to screen both his ultra-short generator and controls so that I cannot touch them."
Brother James recovered. "You . . . you use me as a confounded guinea pig! By the saints, you appear to have more sympathy with the man than with me!"
"Not more sympathy, my beloved brother, but certainly much more in common," Brother Gregory replied frankly. "Wait."
He drifted behind Meredith's back and poltered the tip of one finger to flick a lightly soldered wire from a terminal behind a switch. Meredith felt his scalp tingle. A pilot light on his panel blinked out.
Meredith got up from his stool, stretched lazily, grinned into the empty air. He said aloud: "Right. Help yourselves. But I warn you — once you're in, you don't come out until you agree to talk. I have a duplicate set and a built-in circuit-tester. The only way you can spike them is by busting tubes. And I've a hunch you wouldn't do that."
"No," James muttered. "You wouldn't. Let us go."
"No," Gregory answered. "Inside quickly — and whirl. Afterwards I shall speak with him. He is a youth of acute sensibilities and gentleness, whose word is his bond."
Gregory urged his fellow-monk to the wall. They passed within.
Meredith heard nothing, until a faint whine began in the store. He waited until it died away, then knocked on the door. It seemed, crazily, the correct thing to do.
He went into the darkness. "You there?"
A low and pleasant voice, directionless: "Yes. Why didn't you switch on your duplicate generator?"
Meredith breathed deep. "I didn't think it would be necessary. I feel we understand each other. My name is Sidney Meredith."
"Mine is Gregory of Ramsbury."
"And your — friend?"
"James Brasenose. I may say that he disapproves highly of this conversation."
"I can understand that. It is unusual. But then, you're a very unusual . . . um — "
"'Ghost' is the common term, Mr. Meredith. Rather inadequate, I think, for supranormal phenomena which are, nevertheless, subject to known laws. Most Untranslated spirits remain quite ignorant of their own powers before final Translation. It was only by intensive reading and thought that I determined the principles and potentialities of my construction."
"Anti-particles?"
"According to de Sitter," said Brother Gregory, "that is what we should be. But we are not mere mathematical experessions. I prefer the term 'energy foci.' From a perusal of the notes you left behind yesterday morning — and, of course, from your use of ultra-short waves tonight — it seems you struck the correct train of deduction immediately. Incidentally, where did you obtain the apparatus at such short notice?"
"London University."
Brother Gregory sighed. "I should like to visit their laboratories. But we are bound to this area by a form of moral compulsion that I cannot define or overcome. Only vicariously, through the achievements of others, may I experience the thrill of research."
"You don't do so badly," Meredith said. He was mildly surprised that he felt quite so sane and at ease, except for the daricness. "Would you mind if we had a light?"
"I must be semipolted — or warped — to speak with you. It's not a pleasant sight — floating lungs, larynx, palate, tongue and lips. I'd feel uncomfortable for you. We might appear for you later, if you wish."
"Right. But keep talking. Give me the how and the why. I want this for my professional journal."
"Will you see that the issue containing your paper is placed in the local library?"
"Surely," Meredith said. "Two copies."
"Brother James is not interested. Brother James, will you kindly stop whispering nonsense and remove yourself to a nexus point for a while. I intend to converse with Mr. Meredith. Thank you."
The voice of Brother Gregory came nearer, took on a slightly professorial tone. "Any massive and rotating body assumes the qualities of magnetism — or rather, gravitic, one-way flux — by virtue of its rotation, and the two quantities of magnetic momentum and angular momentum are always proportional to one another, as you doubtless know."
Meredith smiled inwardly. A lecture on elementary physics from a ghost. Well — maybe not so elementary. He remembered the figures that he'd sweated over. But he could almost envisage the voice of Brother Gregory emananting from a black-gowned instructor in front of a classroom board.
"Take a star," the voice continued. "Say 78 Virginis — from whose flaming promontories the effect was first deduced a hundred years ago — and put her against a counter-whirling star of similar mass. What happens? Energy warp, of the kind we use every time we polt. But something else happens — did you infer it from my incomplete expression?"
Meredith grinned. He said: "Yes. Temporal warp."
"Oh." There was a trace of disappointment in the voice.
Meredith added quickly: "But it certainly gave me a headache figuring it out."
Gregory was evidently mollified by the admission. "Solids through time," he went on. "Some weeks ago, calculating that my inherent field was as great in certain respects as that of 78 Virginis, I whirled against a longitudinal line, and forced a stone back a few days — the nearest I could get to laboratory confirmation. Knowing there would be a logical extension of the effect if I whirled against a field as strong as my own, I persuaded Brother James to co-operate with me — and you know the result."
"How far back?"
"According to my mathematics, the twelfth century, at a time when we were — alive. I would appreciate your views on the paradoxes involved."
Meredith said: "Certainly. Let's go over your math together first. If it fits in with what I've already figured, perhaps I'll have a suggestion to make. You appreciate, of course, that I can't let you have any more cans?"
"Quite. I must congratulate your company on manufacturing a most delicious comestible. If you will hand me the roll of infrared film from your camera, I can make my calculations visible to you on the emulsion in the darkness. Thank you. It is a pity,'' Gregory murmured, "that we could not see with our own eyes what disposal they made of your product in the days of our Priory."
When, on the morning of a certain bright summer day in 1139, the daily consignment of Miracle Meal failed to arrive at Selcor Priory, thousands of disappointed refugees went hungry.
The Prior, Dom Holland — who, fortunately for his sanity or at least his peace of mind, was not in a position to separate cause from effect — attributed the failure of supply to the lamentable departure from grace and moral standards of two of the monks.
By disgracing themselves in the kitchen garden with a female refugee, he said, they had obviously rendered the Priory unfit to receive any further miraculous bounty.
The abject monks, Brother Gregory and Brother James, were severely chastised and warned in drastic theological terms that it would probably be many centuries before they had sufficiently expiated their sins to attain blessedness.
On the morning of another bright summer day, the Rev. Malachi Pennyhorse and Stephen Samson were waiting for Sidney Meredith in the vicar's comfortable study.
Meredith came in, sank into a century-old leather easy-chair, stretched his shoes, damp with dew from the meadow grass, towards the flames. He accepted a glass of whiskey gratefully, sipped it.
He said: "The cans are there. And from now on, they stay in the transit store until the copters collect."
There was an odd note of regret in his voice.
Samson said: "Fine. Now maybe you'll tell us what happened yesterday."
Mr. Pennyhorse said: "You . . . uh . . . liked my parishioners, then?"
Meredith combined a smile and a sigh. "I surely did. That Brother Gregory had the most intense and dispassionate intellectual curiosity of anyone I ever met. He nearly grounded me on some aspects of energy mathematics. I could have used him in my department. He'd have made a great research man. Brother James wasn't a bad old guy, either. They appeared for me — "
"How did you get rid of them?" Samson interrupted.
"They got rid of themselves. Gregory told me how, by whirling against each other with gravitic fields cutting, they drew the cans into a vortex of negated time that threw them way back to the twelfth century. After we'd been through his math, I suggested they whirl together."
"What — and throw the cans ahead?"
"No. Themselves, in a sense, since they precipitated a future, hoped-for state. Gregory had an idea what would happen. So did I. He'd only discovered the effect recently. Curiosity got the better of him. He had to try it out straight away. They whirled together. The fields reinforced, instead of negated. Enough in-going energy was generated to whoop their own charges well above capacity and equilibrium. They just — went. As Gregory would put it — they were Translated."
"Upwards, I trust," said Mr. Pennyhorse gently.
"Amen to that," said Samson.
Upwards —
Pure thought, unbound, Earth-rid, roaming free amid the wild bright stars —
Thought to Thought, over galactic vastness, wordless, yet swift and clear, before egos faded —
"Why didn't I think of this before? We might have Translated ourselves centuries ago."
"But then we would never have tasted Miracle Meal."
"That is a consideration," agreed the Thought that had been Brother Gregory.
"Remember our third can?" came the Thought that had been Brother James.
But there was no reply. Something of far greater urgency and interest than memories of Miracle Meal had occurred to the Thought that had been Brother Gregory.
With eager curiosity, it was spiraling down into the heart of a star to observe the integration of helium at first hand.