The Avram Davidson Treasury Page 5

  Rinse, please.

  HELP! I AM DR. MORRIS GOLDPEPPER

  ONE

  FOUR OF THE MEN, Weinroth, McAllister, Danbourge and Smith, sat at the table under the cold blue lighting tubes. One of them, Rorke, was in a corner speaking quietly into a telephone, and one, Fadderman, stood staring out the window at the lights of the city. One, Hansen, had yet to arrive.

  Fadderman spoke without turning his head. He was the oldest of those present—the Big Seven, as they were often called.

  “Lights,” he said. “So many lights. Down here.” He waved his hand toward the city. “Up there.” He gestured toward the sky. “Even with our much-vaunted knowledge, what,” he asked, “do we know?” He turned his head. “Perhaps this is too big for us. In the light of the problem, can we really hope to accomplish anything?”

  Heavy-set Danbourge frowned grimly. “We have received the suffrage of our fellow-scientists, Doctor. We can but try.”

  Lithe, handsome McAllister, the youngest officer of the Association, nodded. “The problem is certainly not worse than that which faced our late, great colleague, the immortal Morton.” He pointed to a picture on the panneled wall. “And we all know what he accomplished.”

  Fadderman went over and took his hand. “Your words fill me with courage.”

  McAllister flushed with pleasure.

  “I am an old man,” Fadderman added falteringly. “Forgive my lack of spirit, Doctor.” He sat down, sighed, shook his head slowly. Weinroth, burly and red-haired, patted him gently on the back. Natty, silvery-haired little Smith smiled at him consolingly.

  A buzzer sounded. Rorke hung up the telephone, flipped a switch on the wall intercom. “Headquarters here,” he said crisply.

  “Dr. Carl T. Hansen has arrived,” a voice informed him.

  “Bring him up at once,” he directed. “And, Nickerson—”

  “Yes, Dr. Rorke?”

  “Let no one else into the building. No one.”

  They sat in silence. After a moment or two, they heard the approach of the elevator, heard the doors slide open, slide shut, heard the elevator descend. Heavy, steady footsteps approached; knuckles rapped on the opaque glass door.

  Rorke went over to the door, said, “A conscientious and diligent scientist—”

  “—must remain a continual student,” a deep voice finished the quotation.

  Rorke unlocked the door, peered out into the corridor, admitted Hansen, locked the door.

  “I would have been here sooner, but another emergency interposed,” Hansen said. “A certain political figure—ethics prevent my being more specific—suffered an oral hemorrhage following an altercation with a woman who shall be nameless, but, boy, did she pack a wallop! A so-called Specialist, gentlemen, with offices on Park Avenue, had been, as he called it, ‘applying pressure’ with a gauze pad. I merely used a little Gelfoam as a coagulant agent and the hemorrhage stopped almost at once. When will the public learn, eh, gentlemen?”

  Faint smiles played upon the faces of the assembled scientists. Hansen took his seat. Rorke bent down and lifted two tape-recording devices to the table, set them both in motion. The faces of the men became serious, grim.

  “This is an emergency session of the Steering Committee of the Executive Committee of the American Dental Association,” Rorke said, “called to discuss measures of dealing with the case of Dr. Morris Goldpepper. One tape will be deposited in the vaults of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York; the other will be similarly secured in the vaults of the Wells Fargo and Union Trust Company Bank in San Francisco. Present at this session are Doctors Rorke, Weinroth and Smith—President, First and Second Vice-presidents, respectively—Fadderman, Past President, McAllister, Public Information, Danbourge, Legal, and Hansen, Policy.”

  He looked around at the set, tense faces.

  “Doctors,” he went on, “I think I may well say that humanity is, as of this moment, face to face with a great danger, and it is a bitter jest that it is not to the engineers or the astronomers, not to medicine nor yet to nuclear nor any other kind of physics, that humanity must now look for salvation—but to the members of the dental profession!”

  His voice rose. “Yes—to the practitioners of what has become perhaps the least regarded of all the learned sciences! It is indeed ironical. We may at this juncture consider the comments of the now deceased Professor Earnest Hooton, the Harvard anthropologist, who observed with a sorrow which did him credit that his famed University, instead of assisting its Dental School as it ought, treated it—and I quote his exact words—‘Like a yellow dog.’” His voice trembled.

  McAllister’s clean-cut face flushed an angry red. Weinroth growled. Danbourge’s fist hit the table and stayed there, clenched. Fadderman gave a soft, broken sigh.

  “But enough of this. We are not jealous, nor are we vindictive,” President Rorke went on. “We are confident that History, ‘with its long tomorrow,’ will show how, at this danger-fraught point, the humble and little thought-of followers of dental science recognized and sized up the situation and stood shoulder to shoulder on the ramparts!”

  He wiped his brow with a paper tissue. “And now I will call upon our beloved Past President, Dr. Samuel I. Fadderman, to begin our review of the incredible circumstances which have brought us here tonight. Dr. Fadderman? If you please …”

  The well-known Elder Statesman of the A.D.A. nodded his head slowly. He made a little cage of his fingers and pursed and then unpursed his lips. At length he spoke in a soft and gentle voice.

  “My first comment, brethren, is that I ask for compassion. Morris Goldpepper is not to blame!

  “Let me tell you a few words about him. Goldpepper the Scientist needs no introduction. Who has not read, for instance, his ‘The Bilateral Vertical Stroke and Its Influence on the Pattern of Occlusion’ or his ‘Treatment, Planning, Assemblage and Cementation of a 14-Unit Fixed Bridge’—to name only two? But I shall speak about Goldpepper the Man. He is forty-six years of age and served with honor in the United States Navy Dental Corps during the Second World War. He has been a widower since shortly after the conclusion of that conflict. Rae—the late Mrs. Goldpepper, may she rest in peace—often used to say, ‘Morry, if I go first, promise me you’ll marry again,’ but he passed it off with a joke; and, as you know, he never did.

  “They had one child, a daughter, Suzanne, a very sweet girl, now married to a Dr. Sheldon Fingerhut, D.D.S. I need not tell you, brethren, how proud our colleague was when his only child married this very fine young member of our profession. The Fingerhuts are now located on Unbalupi, one of the Micronesian islands forming part of the United States Trust Territory, where Dr. Sheldon is teaching dental hygiene, sanitation and prosthesis to the natives thereof.”

  Dr. Hansen asked, “Are they aware of—”

  “The son-in-law knows something of the matter,” the older man said. “He has not seen fit to inform his wife, who is in a delicate condition and expects shortly to be confined. At his suggestion, I have been writing—or, rather, typing—letters purporting to come from her father, on his stationery, with the excuse that he badly singed his fingers on a Bunsen burner whilst annealing a new-type hinge for dentures and consequently cannot hold his pen.” He sipped from a glass of water.

  “Despite his great scientific accomplishments,” Dr. Fadderman went on, “Morry had an impractical streak in him. Often I used to call on him at his bachelor apartment in the Hotel Davenport on West End Avenue, where he moved following his daughter’s marriage, and I would find him immersed in reading matter of an escapist kind—tales of crocodile hunters on the Malayan Peninsula, or magazines dealing with interplanetary warfare, or collections of short stories about vampires and werewolves and similar superstitious creations.

  “‘Morry,’ I said reproachfully, ‘what a way to spend your off-hours. Is it worth it? Is it healthy? You would do much better, believe me, to frequent the pool or the handball court at the Y. Or,’ I pointed out to him, ‘if you want to read, why i
gnore the rich treasures of literature: Shakespeare, Ruskin, Elbert Hubbard, Edna Ferber, and so on? Why retreat to these immature-type fantasies? ’ At first he only smiled and quoted the saying, ‘Each to his or her own taste.’”

  The silence which followed was broken by young Dr. McAllister. “You say,” he said, “‘at first.’”

  Old Dr. Fadderman snapped out of his revery. “Yes, yes. But eventually he confessed the truth to me. He withheld nothing.”

  The assembled dental scientists then learned that the same Dr. Morris Goldpepper, who had been awarded not once but three successive times the unique honor of the Dr. Alexander Peabody Medal for New Achievements in Dental Prosthesis, was obsessed with the idea that there was sentient life on other worlds—that it would shortly be possible to reach these other worlds—and that he himself desired to be among those who went.

  “‘Do you realize, Sam?’ he asked me,” reported Fadderman. “‘Do you realize that, in a very short time, it will no longer be a question of fuel or even of metallurgy? That submarines capable of cruising for weeks and months without surfacing foretell the possibility of traveling through airless space? The chief problem has now come down to finding how to build a take-off platform capable of withstanding a thrust of several million pounds.’ And his eyes glowed.”

  Dr. Fadderman had inquired, with good-natured sarcasm, how the other man expected this would involve him. The answer was as follows: Any interplanetary expedition would find it just as necessary to take along a dentist as to take along a physician, and that he—Dr. Goldpepper—intended to be that dentist!

  Dr. Weinroth’s hand slapped the table with a bang. “By thunder, I say the man had courage!”

  Dr. Rorke looked at him with icy reproof. “I should be obliged,” he said stiffly, “if there would be no further emotional outbursts.”

  Dr. Weinroth’s face fell. “I beg the Committee’s pardon, Mr. President,” he said.

  Dr. Rorke nodded graciously, indicated by a gesture of his hand that Dr. Fadderman had permission to continue speaking. The old man took a letter from his pocket and placed it on the table.

  “This came to me like a bolt from the blue beyond. It is dated November 8 of last year. Skipping the formal salutation, it reads: ‘At last I stand silent upon the peak in Darien’—a literary reference, gentlemen, to Cortez’s alleged discovery of the Pacific Ocean; actually it was Balboa—‘my great dream is about to be realized. Before long, I shall be back to tell you about it, but just exactly when, I am not able to say. History is being made! Long live Science! Very sincerely yours, Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S.’”

  He passed the letter around the table.

  Dr. Smith asked, “What did you do on receiving this communication, Doctor?”

  Dr. Fadderman had at once taken a taxi to West End Avenue. The desk clerk at the hotel courteously informed him that the man he sought had left on a vacation of short but not exactly specified duration. No further information was known. Dr. Fadderman’s first thought was that his younger friend had gotten some sort of position with a Government project which he was not free to discuss, and his own patriotism and sense of duty naturally prevented him from making inquiries.

  “But I began, for the first time,” the Elder Statesman of American Dentistry said, “to read up on the subject of space travel. I wondered how a man 46 years of age could possibly hope to be selected over younger men.”

  Dr. Danbourge spoke for the first time. “Size,” he said. “Every ounce would count in a spaceship and Morris was a pretty little guy.”

  “But with the heart of a lion,” Dr. Weinroth said softly. “Miles and miles and miles of heart.”

  The other men nodded their agreement to this tribute.

  But as time went on and the year drew to its close and he heard no word from his friend, Dr. Fadderman began to worry. Finally, when he received a letter from the Fingerhuts, saying that they had not been hearing either, he took action.

  He realized it was not likely that the Government would have made plans to include a dentist in this supposed project without communicating with the A.D.A. and he inquired of the current President, Dr. Rorke, if he had any knowledge of such a project, or of the whereabouts of the missing man. The answer to both questions was no. But on learning the reasons for Dr. Fadderman’s concern, he communicated with Col. Lemnel Coggins, head of the USAF’s Dental Corps.

  Col. Coggins informed him that no one of Dr. Goldpepper’s name or description was or had been affiliated with any such project, and that, in fact, any such project was still—as he put It—“still on the drawing-board.”

  Drs. Rorke and Fadderman, great as was their concern, hesitated to report Dr. Goldpepper missing. He had, after all, paid rent on apartment, office and laboratory, well in advance. He was a mature man, of very considerable intelligence, and one who presumably knew what he was doing.

  “It is at this point,” said Dr. Danbourge, “that I enter the picture. On the 11th of January, I had a call from a Dr. Milton Wilson, who has an office on East 19th Street, with a small laboratory adjoining, where he does prosthetic work. He told me, with a good deal of hesitation, that something exceedingly odd had come up, and he asked me if I knew where Dr. Morris Goldpepper was …”

  The morning of the 11th of January, an elderly man with a curious foreign accent came into Dr. Wilson’s office, gave the name of Smith and complained about an upper plate. It did not feel comfortable, Mr. Smith said, and it irritated the roof of his mouth. There was a certain reluctance on his part to allow Dr. Wilson to examine his mouth. This was understandable, because the interior of his mouth was blue. The gums were entirely edentulous, very hard, almost horny. The plate Itself—

  “Here is the plate,” Dr. Danbourge said, placing it on the table. “Dr. Wilson supplied him with another. You will observe the perforations on the upper, or palatal, surface. They had been covered with a thin layer of gum arabic, which naturally soon wore almost entirely off, with the result that the roof of the mouth became irritated. Now this is so very unusual that Dr. Wilson—as soon as his patient, the so-called Mr. Smith, was gone—broke open the weirdly made plate to find why the perforations had been made. In my capacity as head of the Association’s Legal Department,” Dr. Danbourge stated, “I have come across some extraordinary occurrences, but nothing like this.”

  This was a small piece of a white, flexible substance, covered with tiny black lines. Danbourge picked up a large magnifying glass.

  “You may examine these objects, Doctors,” he said, “but it will save your eyesight if I read to you from an enlarged photostatic copy of this last one. The nature of the material, the method of writing, or of reducing the writing to such size all are unknown to us. It may be something on the order of microfilm. But that is not important. The important thing is the content of the writing—the portent of the writing.

  “Not since Dr. Morton, the young Boston dentist, realized the uses of sulphuric ether as an anesthetic has any member of our noble profession discovered anything of even remotely similar importance; and perhaps not before, either.”

  He drew his spectacles from their case and began to read aloud.

  TWO

  Despite the fact that our great profession lacks the glamour and public adulation of the practice of medicine, and even the druggists—not having a Hippocratic Oath—can preen themselves on their so-called Oath of Maimonides (though, believe me, the great Maimonides had no more to do with it than Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S.), no one can charge us with not having as high a standard of ethics and professional conduct as physicians and surgeons, M.D. Nor do I hesitate for one single moment to include prostheticians not holding the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery or Doctor of Dental Medicine, whose work is so vital and essential.

  When the records of our civilization are balanced, then—but perhaps not before—the real importance of dental science will be appreciated. Now it is merely valued at the moment of toothache.

  It is only with a heavy heart
that I undertake deliberately to produce inferior work, and with the confidence that all those to whom the standards of oral surgery and dental prosthetics are dear will understand the very unusual circumstances which have prompted me to so to do. And, understanding, will forgive. No one can hold the standards of our profession higher or more sacred than I.

  It must be admitted that I was not very amused on a certain occasion when my cousin, Nathaniel Pomerance, introduced me to an engineering contractor with these words, “You two should have a lot in common—you both build bridges,” and uttered a foolish laugh. But I venture to say that this was one of the truest words ever spoken in questionable jest.

  Humility is one thing, false pride another. Those who know anything of modern dentistry at all know of the Goldpepper Bridge and the Goldpepper Crown. It is I, Dr. Morris Goldpepper, inventor of both, and perfector of the Semi-retractable Clasp which bears my name, who writes these words you see before you. Nothing further should be needful by way of identification. And now to my report.

  On the first of November, a day of evil import forever in the personal calendar of the unhappy wretch who writes these lines, not even knowing for sure if they will ever be read—but what else can I do?—shortly after 5:00 P.M., my laboratory door was knocked on. I found there a curious-looking man of shriveled and weazened appearance. He asked if I was Dr. Morris Goldpepper, “the famous perfector of the Semi-retractable Clasp,” and I pleaded guilty to the flattering impeachment.

  The man had a foreign-sounding accent, or—I thought—it may be that he had an impediment in his speech. Might he see me, was his next question. I hesitated.

  It has happened to me before, and to most other practitioners—a stranger comes and, before you know it, he is slandering some perfectly respectable D.D.S. or D.M.D. The dentist pulled a healthy tooth—the dentist took such and such a huge sum of money for new plates—they don’t fit him, he suffers great anguish—he’s a poor man, the dentist won’t do anything—et cetera, ad infinitum nauseamque. In short, a nut, a crank, a crackpot.