Campbell, John W Jr - Blindness

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2024-11-24 0 0 27.87KB 8 页 5.9玖币

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Blindness

old db. malcolm mackay is dead, and, with more than usual truth, one may say he is at last at peace. His life was

hard and bit-ter, those last few years. He was blind, of course, blinded as every-one knew by the

three-year-long exposure to the intolerable light of the Sun.

And he was bitter, of course, as everyone knew. But somehow they could not understand that; a man so

great, so loved by the population of three worlds, it seemed there could be nothing in his life to embitter him,

nor in the respect and love of the worlds for him.

Some, rather unkindly, I feel, put it down to his blindness, and his age—he was eighty-seven when he

died—and in this they were unjust. The acclaim his great discovery brought him was the thing which

embittered him. You see, he didn't want acclaim for that; it was for the lesser invention he really wanted

praise.

That the "Grand Old Man" may be better understood, I genu-inely want people to understand better the

story of his work. And his blindness, but not as most people speak of it. The blindness struck him long

before the exposure to the Sun ruined his eyes. Per-haps I had better explain.

Malcolm Mackay was born in 1974, just one year after Cartwright finally succeeded in committing

suicide as he had al-ways wanted to—by dying of asphyxiation on the surface of the Moon, when his air

gave out. He was three when Garnall was drowned in Lake Erie, after returning from Luna, the first man

to reach Earth again, alive. He didn't go on living, of course, but he was alive when he reached Earth. That

we knew.

Mackay was eleven, and interested, when Randolph's expedition

returned with mineralogtcal specimens, and the records of a year's stay on the Moon.

Mackay went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology at seven-teen, and was graduated a member of

the class of 1995. But he took physics—atomic physics.

Mackay had seen that on atomic power rested the only real hope of really commercial, economically

sound, interplanetary travel. He was sure of that at seventeen when he entered M.I.T. He was con-vinced

when he was graduated, and went back for more, because about that same time old Douglas A. Mackay

died, and left him three quarters of a million.

Malcolm Mackay saw that the hand of Providence was stretched out to aid him. Money was the thing

that he'd needed. Douglas Mackay always claimed that money was a higher form of life; that it answered

the three tests of life. It was sensitive to stimulation. It was able to grow by accretion. And finally—the

most important, in Mackay's estimation—the old Scot pointed out it was capable of re-production. So

Malcolm Mackay put his in an incubator, a large trust company, and left it to reproduce as rapidly as

possible.

He lived in shabby quarters, and in shabby clothes most of the time, so he'd have money later on when

he started his work And he studied. Obviously, there is no question but that Mackay was one of the most

highly intelligent human beings that ever lived. He started with the basis of atomic knowledge of that day,

and he learned it all, too, and then he was ready to go ahead. He spent seventeen years at M.I.T. learning

and teaching, till he felt that he had learned enough to make the teaching more of a nuisance than a

worthwhile use of his time.

By that time, the money had followed the laws of money, and life, and had reproduced itself, not once,

but twice, for the Scot had picked a good company. He had two and a quarter millions.

There is no need to retell his early experiments. The story of the loss of three fingers on his left hand is

an old one. The countless minor and semi-major explosions he had, the radiation burns he collected. But,

perhaps those burns weren't so wholly injurious as was thought, for thirty-five years after he left M.I.T. he

was still working at an age when most men are resting—either in coffins or wheel chairs. The Grand Old

Man didn't put his final determi-nation into action until he was seventy-three.

John Burns was his laboratory assistant and mechanician then. Mackay's loss of his fingers had been

serious, because it made deli-cate instrument work difficult, and John Burns, thirty-two at the

time, was his mechanician, his hand, and his highly trained techni-cal assistant. In May, 2047, the latest

experiment having revealed only highly interesting but negative results, Malcolm Mackay looked at Burns.

"John, that settled it," he said slowly. "Something is missing, and we won't get it here in a pair of

lifetimes, even long ones. You know the only place we can find it."

"I suppose you mean the Sun," replied Burns sadly. "But since we can't get near enough to that, it

doesn't do us a bit of good. Houston's the only man who has come back alive, and his nearest approach was

41,743,560 miles. And it didn't do any good, anyway. The automatic rockets get nearer, but not very much

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Campbell, John W Jr - Blindness

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