Trucks were coming up the side of the mountain again. The electric motors were quiet enough, but these were heavy-duty trucks and the reduction gears could be heard a mile off. A mile by air; that was 18 miles by the blacktop road that snaked up the side of the mountain, all hairpin curves with banks that fell away to sheer cliffs.
The old man didn't mind the noise. The trucks woke him up when he was dozing, as he so often was these days.
"You didn't drink your orange juice, Doctor."
The old man wheeled himself around in his chair. He liked the nurse. There were three who took care of him, on shifts, but Maureen Wrather was his personal favorite. She always seemed to be around when he needed her. He protested: "I drank most of it." The nurse waited. "All right." He drank it, noting that the flavor had changed again. What was it this time? Stimulants, tranquilizers, sedatives, euphoriants. They played him up and down like a yo-yo. "Do I get coffee this morning, Maureen?"
"Cocoa." She put the mug and a plate with two arrowroot cookies down on the table, avoiding the central space where he laid out his endless hands of solitaire; that was one of the things the old man liked about her. "I have to get you dressed in half an hour," she announced, "because you've got company coming."
"Company? Who would be coming to see me?" But he could see from the look in her light, cheerful eyes, even before she spoke, that it was a surprise. Well, thought the old man with dutiful pleasure, that was progress; only a few weeks ago they wouldn't have permitted him any surprises at all. Weeks? He frowned. Maybe months. All the days were like all the other days. He could count one, yesterday; two, the day before; three, last week—he could count a few simple intervals with confidence, but the ancient era of a month ago was a wash of gray confusion. He sighed. That was the price you paid for being crazy, he thought with amusement. They made it that way on purpose, to help him "get well." But it had all been gray and bland enough anyhow. Back very far ago there had been a time of terror, but then it was bland for a long, long time.
"Drink your cocoa, young fellow," the nurse winked, cheerfully flirting. "Do you want any music?"
That was a good game. "I want a lot of music," he said immediately. "Stravinsky—that Sac thing, I think. And Al-ban Berg. And—I know. Do you have that old one, 'The Three Itta Fishes?'" He had been very pleased with the completeness of the tape library in the house on the Hill, until he found out that there was something in that orange juice too. Every request of his was carefully noted and analyzed. Like the tiny microphones taped to throat and heart at night, his tastes in music were data in building up a picture of his condition. Well, that took some of the joy out of it, so the old man had added some other joy of his own.
The nurse turned solemnly to the tape player. There was a pause, a faint marking beep and then the quick running opening bars of the wonderful Mendelssohn concerto, which he had always loved. He looked at the nurse. "You shouldn't tease us, Doctor," she said lightly as she left.
Dr. Noah Sidorenko had changed the world. His Hypothesis of Congruent Values, later expanded to his Theory of General Congruences, was the basis for a technology fully as complex and even more important than the nucleonics that had come from Einstein's energy-mass equation. This morning the brain that had enunciated the principle of congruence was occupied in a harder problem: What were the noises from the courtyard?
He was going to have his picture taken, he guessed, taking his evidence from the white soft shirt the nurse had laid out for him, the gray jacket and, above all, from the tie. He almost never wore a tie. (The nurse seldom gave him one. He didn't like to speculate about the reasons for this.) While he was dressing, the trucks ground into the courtyard and stopped, and men's voices came clearly.
'1 don't know who they are," he said aloud, abandoning the attempt to figure it out.
"They're the television crew," said the nurse from the next room. "Hush. Don't spoil your surprise."
He dressed quickly then, with excitement; why, it was a big surprise. There had never been a television crew on the mountain before. When he came out of the dressing room the nurse frowned and reached for his tie. "Sloppy! Why can't you large-domes learn how to do a simple knot?" She was a very sweet girl, the old man thought, lifting his chin to help. She could have been his daughter-—even his granddaughter. She was hardly 25; yes, that would have been about right. His granddaughter would have been about that now—
The old man frowned and turned his head away. That was very wrong. He didn't have a grandchild. He had had one son, no more, and the boy had died, so they had told the old man, in the implosion of the Haaroldsen Free Trawl in the Mindanao Deep. The boy had been 19 years old, and certainly without children; and there had been something about his death, something that the old man didn't like to remember. He squinted. Worse than that, he thought, something he couldn't remember any more.
The nurse said: "Doctor, this is for you. It isn't much, but Happy Birthday."
She took a small pink-ribboned box out of the pocket of her uniform and handed it to him. He was touched. He saw his fingers trembling as he unwrapped the little package. That distracted him for a moment but then he dismissed it. It was honest emotion, that was all—well, and age too, of course. He was 95. But it wasn't the worrying intention tremor that had disfigured the few episodes he could remember clearly, in his first days here on the Hill. It was only gratitude and sentiment.
And that was what the box held for him, sentiment. "Thank you, Maureen. You're good to an old man." His eyes stung. It was only a little plastic picture-globe, with Maureen's young face captured smiling inside it, but it was for him.
She patted his shoulder and said firmly: "You're a good man. And a beautiful one, too, so come on and let's show you off to your company."
She helped him into the wheelchair. It had its motors, but he liked to have her push him and she humored him. They went out the door, down the long sunlit corridors that divided the guest rooms in the front of the building from the broad high terrace behind. Sam Krabbe, Ernest Atkinson, and a couple of the others from the Group came to the doors of their rooms to nod, and to wish the old man a happy birthday. Sidorenko nodded back, tired and pleased. He listened critically to the thumping of his heart—excitement was a risk, he knew—and then grinned. He was getting as bad as the doctors.
Maureen wheeled the old man onto the little open elevator platform. They dropped, quickly and smoothly on magnetic cushions, to the lower floor. The old man leaned far over the side of his chair, studying what he could see of the elevator, because he had a direct and personal interest in it. Somebody had told him that the application of magnetic fields to nonferrous substances was a trick that had been learned from his General Congruences. Well, there was this much to it: Congruence showed that all fields were related and interchangeable, and there was, of course, no reason why what was possible should not be made what is so. But the old man laughed silently inside himself. He was thinking of Albert Einstein confronted with a photo of Enola Gay. Or himself trying to build the communications equipment that Congruence had made possible.