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THE FOUR-SIDED

TRIANGLE

Amazing Stories, November 1939

by William F. Temple (1914- )

Three people peered through a quartz window.

The girl was squashed uncomfortably between the two men, but at the moment

neither she nor they cared. The ob-ject they were watching was too interesting.

The girl was Joan Leeton. Her hair was an indeterminate brown, and owed its

curls to tongs, not to nature. Her eyes were certainly brown, and bright with

unquenchable good hu-mour. In repose her face was undistinguished, though far

from plain; when she smiled, it was beautiful.

Her greatest attraction (and it was part of her attraction that she did not realise it)

lay in her character. She was soothingly sympathetic without becoming mushy, she

was very level-headed (a rare thing in a woman) and completely unselfish. She

refused to lose her temper over anything, or take offence, or enlarge upon the truth in

her favour, and yet she was tolerant of such lapses in others. She possessed a brain

that was unusually able in its dealing with science, and yet her tastes and pleasures

were simple.

William Fredericks (called ‘Will’) had much in common with Joan, but his

sympathy was a little more disinterested, his humour less spontaneous, and he had

certain prejudices. His tastes were reserved for what he considered the more worthy

things. But he was calm and good-tempered, and his steadiness of purpose was

reassuring. He was black-haired, with an expression of quiet content.

William Josephs (called ‘Bill’) was different. He was completely unstable. Fiery

of hair, he was alternately fiery and depressed of spirit. Impulsive, generous, highly

emotional about art and music, he was given to periods of gaiety and moods of

black melancholia. He reached, at his best, heights of mental brilliance far beyond the

other two, but long bouts of lethargy prevented him from making the best of them.

Nevertheless, his sense of humour was keen, and he was often amused at his own

absurdly over-sensitive character; but he could not change it.

Both these men were deeply in love with Joan, and both tried hard to conceal it. If

Joan had any preference, she concealed it just as ably, although they were aware that

she was fond of both of them.

The quartz window, through which the three were looking, was set in a tall metal

container, and just a few feet away was another container, identical even to the

thickness of the window-glass.

Overhead was a complex assemblage of apparatus: bulbous, silvered tubes, small

electric motors that hummed in various unexpected places, makeshift screens of

zinc, roughly soldered, coils upon coils of wire, and a network of slung cables that

made the place look like a creeper-tangled tropical jungle. A large dynamo churned

out a steady roar in the corner, and a pair of wide sparkgaps crackled continuously,

filling the laboratory with a weird, jumping blue light as the day waned outside the

windows and the dusk crept in.

An intruder in the laboratory might have looked through the window of the other

container and seen, standing on a steel frame in a cubical chamber, an oil painting of

‘Madame Croignette’ by Boucher, delicately illuminated by concealed lights. He

would not have known it, but the painting was standing in a vacuum.

If he had squeezed behind the trio at the other container and gazed through their

window he would have seen an apparently identical sight: an oil painting of ‘Madame

Croignette’ by Boucher, standing on a steel frame in a vacuum, delicately illuminated

by concealed lights.

From which he would probably not gather much.

The catch was that the painting at which the three were gazing so intently was not

quite the same as the one in the first container—not yet. There were minute

differences in colour and proportion.

But gradually these differences were righting themselves, for the whole of the

second canvas was being built up atom by atom, molecule by molecule, into an

exactly identical twin of the one which had felt the brush of Francis Boucher.

The marvellously intricate apparatus, using an adaption of a newly-discovered

magnetic principle, consumed only a moderate amount of power in arranging the

lines of sympathetic fields of force which brought every proton into position and

every electron into its respective balancing orbit. It was a machine which could divert

the flow of great forces without the ability to tap their energy.

“Any minute now!” breathed Will.

Bill rubbed his breath off the glass impatiently.

“Don’t do that!” he said, and promptly fogged the glass over again. Not ungently,

he attempted to rub a clear patch with Joan’s own pretty nose. She exploded into

laughter, fogging the glass hopelessly, and in the temporary confusion of this they

missed seeing the event they had been waiting days for—the completion of the

duplicate painting to the ultimate atom.

The spark-gaps died with a final snap, a lamp sprang into being on the indicator

panel, and the dynamo began to run whirringly down to a stop.

They cleaned out the window, and there stood ‘Madame Croignette’ looking

rather blankly out at them with wide brown eyes that exactly matched the sepia from

Boucher’s palette, and both beauty spots and every hair of her powdered wig in

place to a millionth of a millimetre.

Will turned a valve, and there was the hiss of air rushing into the chamber. He

opened the window, and lifted the painting out gingerly, as if he half-expected it to

crumble in his hands.

“Perfect—a beauty!” he murmured. He looked up at Joan with shining eyes. Bill

caught that look, and unaccountably checked the impulsive whoop of joy he was on

the point of letting loose. He coughed instead, and leaned over Joan’s shoulder to

inspect ‘Madame Croignette’ more closely.

“The gamble’s come off,” went on Will. “We’ve sunk every cent into this, but it

won’t be long before we have enough money to do anything we want to

do-anything.”

“Anything—except to get Bill out of bed on Sunday mornings,” smiled Joan. and

they laughed.

“No sensible millionaire would get out of bed any morning,” said Bill.

The steel and glass factory of Art Replicas, Limited, shone like a diamond up in

the green hills of Surrey. In a financial sense, it had actually sprung from a

diamond—the sale of a replica of the Koh-i-noor. That had been the one and only

product of Precious Stones, Limited, an earlier company which was closed down by

the government when they saw that it would destroy the world’s diamond market.

A sister company, Radium Products, was going strong up in the north because its

scientific necessity was recognised. But the heart of the three company directors lay

in Art Replicas, and there they spent their time.

Famous works of art from all over the world passed through the factory’s

portals, and gave birth to innumerable replicas of themselves for distribution and sale

at quite reasonable prices.

Families of only moderate means found it pleasing to have a Constable or Turner

in the dining room and a Rodin statuette in the hall. And this widely-flung ownership

of objets d’art, which were to all intents and purposes the genuine articles,

strengthened interest in art enormously. When people had lived with these things for

a little while, they began to perceive the beauty in them—for real beauty is not always

obvious at a glance—and to become greedy for more knowledge of them and the

men who originally conceived and shaped them.

So the three directors—Will, Bill, and Joan—put all their energy into satisfying the

demands of the world for art, and conscious of their part in furthering civilisation,

were deeply content.

For a time.

Then Bill, the impatient and easily-bored, broke out one day in the middle of a

Directors’ Meeting.

“Oh to hell with the Ming estimates!” he cried, sweeping a pile of orders from the

table.

Joan and Will, recognising the symptoms, exchanged wry glances of amusement.

“Look here,” went on Bill, “I don’t know what you two think, but I’m fed up!

We’ve become nothing but dull business people now. It isn’t our sort of life.

Repetition, repetition, repetition! I’m going crazy! We’re research workers, not

darned piece-workers. For heaven’s sake, let’s start out in some new line!”

This little storm relieved him, and almost immediately he smiled too.

“But, really, aren’t we?” he appealed.

“Yes,” responded Joan and Will in duet.

“Well, what about it?”

Will coughed, and prepared himself.

“Joan and I were talking about that this morning, as a matter of fact,” he said.

“We were going to suggest that we sell the factory, and retire to our old laboratory

and re-equip it.”

Bill picked up the ink-pot and emptied it solemnly over the Ming estimates. The

ink made a shining lake in the centre of the antique and valuable table.

“At last we’re sane again,” he said. “Now you know the line of investigation I

want to open up. I’m perfectly convinced that the reason for our failure to create a

living duplicate of any living creature was because the quotiety we assumed for the

xy action—”

“Just a moment, Bill,” interrupted Will. “Before we get on with that work, I—I

mean, one of the reasons Joan and me wanted to retire was because—well—”

“What he’s trying to say,” said Joan quietly, “is that we plan to get married and

settle down for a bit before we resume research work.”

Bill stared at them. He was aware that his cheeks were slowly reddening. He felt

numb.

“Well!” he said. “Well!” (He could think of nothing else. This was unbelievable!

He must postpone consideration of it until he was alone, else his utter mortification

would show.)

He put out his hand automatically, and they both clasped it.

“You know I wish you every possible happiness,” he said, rather huskily. His

mind seemed empty. He tried to form some comment, but somehow he could not

compose one sentence that made sense.

“I think we’ll get on all right,” said Will, smiling at Joan. She smiled back at him,

and unknowingly cut Bill to the heart.

With an effort, Bill pulled himself together and rang for wine to celebrate. He

ordered some of the modern reconstruction of an exceedingly rare ’94.

The night was moonless and cloudless, and the myriads of glittering pale blue

points of the Milky Way sprawled across the sky as if someone had cast a handful

of brilliants upon a black velvet cloth. But they twinkled steadily, for strong air

currents were in motion in the upper atmosphere.

The Surrey lane was dark and silent. The only signs of life were the occasional

distant glares of automobile headlights passing on the main highway nearly a mile

away, and the red dot of a burning cigarette in a gap between the hedgerows.

The cigarette was Bill’s. He sat there on a gate staring up at the array in the

heavens and wondering what to do with his life.

He felt completely at sea, purposeless, and unutterably depressed. He had thought

the word ‘heartache’ just a vague descriptive term. Now he knew what it meant. It

was a solid physical feeling, an ache that tore him inside, unceasingly. He yearned to

see Joan, to be with Joan, with his whole being. This longing would not let him rest.

He could have cried out for a respite.

He tried to argue himself to a more rational viewpoint.

“I am a man of science,” he told himself. “Why should I allow old Mother Nature

to torture and badger me like this? I can see through all the tricks of that old twister.

These feelings are purely chemical reactions, the secretions of the glands mixing with

the bloodstream. My mind is surely strong enough to conquer that? Else I have a

third-rate brain, not the scientific instrument I’ve prided myself on.”

He stared up at the stars glittering in their seeming calm stability, age-old and

unchanging. But were they? They may look just the same when all mankind and its

loves and hates had departed from this planet, and left it frozen and dark. But he

knew that even as he watched, they were changing position at a frightful speed,

receeding from him at thousands of miles a second.

“Nature is a twister, full of illusions,” he repeated…

There started a train of thought, a merciful anaesthetic in which he lost himself for

some minutes.

Somewhere down in the deeps of his subconscious an idea which had, unknown

to him, been evolving itself for weeks, was stirred, and emerged suddenly into the

light. He started, dropped his cigarette, and left it on the ground.

He sat there stiffly on the gate and considered the idea.

It was wild—incredibly wild. But if he worked hard and long at it, there was a

chance that it might come off. It would provide a reason for living, anyway, so long

as there was any hope at all of success.

He jumped down from the gate and started walking quickly and excitedly along

the lane back to the factory. His mind was already turning over possibilities, planning

eagerly. In the promise of this new adventure, the heartache was temporarily

submerged.

Six months passed.

Bill had retired to the old laboratory, and spent much of that time enlarging and

reequipping it. He added a rabbit pen, and turned an adjacent patch of ground into a

burial-ground to dispose of those who died under his knife. This cemetery was like

no cemetery in the world, for it was also full of dead things that had never

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