In
the shifting sands of the future these authors have foreseen such imaginative
situations as—
The
age of the giant barnacles, when the insects have inherited the land, enormous,
intelligent barnacles rule the sea, and man's descendants are slaves to both.
The
visitors from deep outer space who crash-land on earth after mankind has long
since disappeared—and the startling things they found.
The first man to land on Mars and the terrible surprise that awaited him
there.
The escape of the last of the Wild Ones into the Magellanic
Cloud and how he eventually met his downfall.
All
these and other fascinating and compelling tales guarantee you hours of reading
pleasure in the pages of this book.
WORLDS of TOMORROW
Edited by AUGUST
DERLETH
A BERKLEY BOOK Published
by BERKLEY PUBLISHING CORP.
Copyright
© 1953, by August
Derleth
Published by arrangement with Parrar, Straus and Cudahy, Inc.
berkley
edition, october, 1958
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE
FIRES WITHIN, by Arthur C. Clarke, copyright 1949, by Better Publications,
Inc., for Startling
Stories, September
1949.
McILVATNE'S STAR, by August Derleth, copyright 1952, by Quinn Publishing Company, for If, July 19S2.
BROTHERS BEYOND THE VOID, by Paul W. Fairman. copyright 19S2, by
Ziff Davis Publishing Company, for Fantastic Adventures, March 1952.
THE DEAD PLANET, by Edmond Hamilton, copyright 1946, by Better
Publications, Inc., for Worlds
Beyond, February
1951.'
THE ENCHANTED FOREST, by Fritz Leiber, copyright 1950, by Street & Smith Publishers,
Inc., for Astounding
Science-Fiction, October
1950.
THE GREAT COLD, by Frank Belknap Long,
copyright 1935, by Street & Smith Publishers, Inc., for Astounding Stories, February 1935.
THE
BUSINESS, AS USUAL, by Mack Reynolds, copyright 1952, by Fantasy House, Inc.,
for Fantasy and
Science-Fiction, June
1952.
THE MARTIAN AND THE MORON,
by Theodore Sturgeon, copyright 1948, by Weird Tales, for Weird Tales, March 1949.
NULL-P,
by William Tenn, copyright 1950, by Hillman
Periodicals, Inc* for Worlds
Beyond, January
1951.
This edition of Worlds of Tomorrow contains 10
of the 19
stories that appeared in
the hard-bound edition.
BERKLEY
BOOKS are published by Berkley Publishing Corp. 145 West 57th Street, New York
19, N. Y.
printed in canada
Contents
THE DEAD PLANET . Edmond Hamilton 5
McILVAINE'S STAR . . August Derleth 21
THE
GREAT COLD . Frank Belknap Long 35
THE FIRES WITHIN . Arthur C. Clarke 56
BROTHERS
BEYOND THE VOID
.................................... PaulW.Fairman 68
THE GENTLEMAN IS AN EP WA
............................................. Carl jacobi 78
THE ENCHANTED FOREST .
FritzLeiber 97
THE BUSINESS. AS USUAL
......................................... Mack Reynolds 122
THE
MARTIAN AND THE MORON
............................... Theodore Sturgeon 127
NULL-P............................... William Tenn 158
The Dead Planet
BY EDMOND HAMILTON
It
didn't look like
such a forbidding little world at first. It looked dark, icy, and lifeless, but
there was no hint of what brooded there. The only question in our minds then
was whether we would die when our crippled ship crashed on it.
Tlinrn was
at the controls. All three of us had put on our pressure suits in the hope that
they might save us if the crash was bad. In the massive metal suits we looked
like three queer, fat robots, like three metal globes with jointed mechanical
arms and legs.
"If
it hadn't happened here!" came Dril's hopeless voice through the intercom. "Here in the most desolate and unknown part of the whole
galaxy!"
"We're
lucky we were within reaching distance of a star system when the generators let
go," I murmured.
"Lucky,
Oroc?" repeated Dril
bitterly. "Lucky, to postpone our end by a few days of
agony? It's all we can look forward to on that."
The system ahead did look discouraging for
wrecked star explorers. Here in a thin region at the very edge of the galaxy,
it centered around a sun that was somber dark red,
ancient, dying.
Six
worlds circled that smoldering star. We were dropping toward the innermost of
the six planets, as the
most
possibly habitable. But now, we could clearly see that life could not exist on
it. It was an airless sphere, sheathed in eternal snow and ice.
The
other five planets were even more hopeless. And we could not change course now,
anyway. It was a question of whether the two strained generators that still
functioned would be able to furnish enough power to slow down our landing speed
and save us from total destruction.
Death
was close, and we knew it, yet we remained unshaken. Not that we were heroes.
But we belonged to the Star Service, and while the Star Service yields glory,
its members always have the shadow of death over them and so grow accustomed to
it.
Many
in the Star Service had died in the vast, endless task of mapping the galaxy.
Of the little exploring ships that went out like ours to chart the farther
reaches of stars, only two-thirds or less ever came back. Accidents accounted
for the rest—accidents like the blowing of our generators from overload in
attempting to claw our way quickly out of a mass of interstellar debris.
Tharn's voice came to us calmly.
"We'll
soon hit it. I'll try to crabtail in, but the chances
are poor. Better strap in."
Using
the metal arms of our suits clumsily, we hooked into the resilient harnesses
that might give us a chance of survival.
Dril peered at the largening
white globe below.
"There
look to be deep snows at places. It would be a little softer there."
"Yes,"
Tharn replied quietly. "But our ship would remain
buried in the snow. On the ice, even if wrecked it could be seen. When another
ship comes, they'll find us, and our charts won't be lost."
Well, for a moment that
made me so proud of the Star
Service that I was almost contemptuous of the danger rushing upon us.
It
is that wonderful spirit that has made the Service what it is, that has enabled
our race to push out from our little world to the farthest parts of the galaxy.
Individual explorers might die, but the Service's conquest of the universe
would go on.
"Here we go, muttered Dril, still peering downward.
The
icy white face of the desolate world was rushing up at us with nightmare speed.
I waited tensely for Tharn to act.
He
delayed until the last moment. Then he moved the power bar, and the two
remaining generators came on with a roar of power.
They
could not stand that overload for more than a few moments before they too blew
out. But it was enough for Thnrn to swing the falling
ship around and use the blast of propulsive vibrations as a brake.
Making
a crabtail landing is more a matter of luck than
skill. The mind isn't capable of estimating the infinitesimal differences that
mean disaster or survival. Use a shade too much power, and you're bounced away
from your goal. A shade too little, and you smash to bits.
Tharn was lucky. Or maybe it wasn't luck as much
as pilot's instinct. Anyway, it was all over in a moment. The ship fell the
generators screamed, there was a bumping crash, then
silence.
The
ship lay on its side on the ice. Its stern had crumpled and split open at one
place, and its air had puffed out, though in our suits we didn't mind that.
Also the last two generators had blown out, as expected, from the overload in
cushioning our fall.
"We
made it!" Dril bounded from despair to hope.
"I never thought we had a real chance. Tharn,
you're the ace of all pilots."
But Tharn himself seemed to suffer reaction from tension. He
unstrapped like ourselves and stood, a bulky figure in
his globular suit, looking out through the quartz portholes.
"We've
saved our necks for the time being," he muttered. "But we're in a
bad fix."
The
truth of that sank in as we looked out with him. This little planet out on the
edge of the galaxy was one of the most desolate I had ever seen. There was
nothing but ice and darkness and cold.
The ice stretched in all directions, a
rolling white plain. There was no air—the deep snows we had seen were frozen
air, no doubt. Over the gelid plain brooded a dark sky, two-thirds of which was
black emptiness. Across the lower third glittered the
great drift of the galaxy stars, of which this system was a borderland outpost.
"Our
generators are shot, and we haven't enough power-loy
to wind new coils for all of them," Tharn
pointed out. "We can't call a tenth the distance home with our little
communicator. And our air will eventually run out."
"Our
only chance," he continued decisively, is to find on this planet enough
tantalum and terbium and the other metals we need, to make powerloy
and wind new coils. Dril, get out the radio sonde."
The
radio sonde was the instrument used in our star
mapping to explore the metallic resources of unknown planets. It worked by
projecting broad beams of vibrations that could be tuned to reflect from any
desired elements, the ingenious device detecting and computing position thus.
Dril got out the compact instrument and tuned its
frequencies to the half dozen rare metals we needed. Then we waited while he
swung the projector tubes along their quadrants, closely watching the
indicators.
"This is incredible luck!" he
exclaimed finally. "The sonde shows terbium,
tantalum, and the other metals we need all together in appreciable quantities.
They're just under the fce and not far from
here!"
"It's
almost too good to be true," I said wonderingly. "Those metals are
never found all together."
Tharn planned quickly.
"We'll
fit a rough sledge and on it we can haul an auxiliary power unit and the big dis-beam, to cut through the ice. We'll also have to take
cables and tackle for a hoist."
We
soon had everything ready and started across the ice, hauling our improvised
sledge and its heavy load of equipment.
The
frozen world, brooding beneath the sky that looked out into the emptiness or
extra-galactic space, was oppressive. Wc
had hit queer worlds before, but this was the most gloomy we had ever
encountered.
The
drift of stars that was our galaxy sank behind the horizon as we went on, and
it grew even darker. Our krypton lamps cut a white path through the somber
gloom as we stumbled on, the metal feet of our heavy suits slipping frequently
on the ice.
Dril stopped frequently to make further checks
with the radio sonde. Finally, after several hours of
toilsome progress, he looked up from the instrument and made a quick signal.
"This
is the position," he declared. "There should be deposits of the
metals we need only a hundred feet or so beneath us."
It
didn't look encouraging. We were standing on the crest of a low hill of ice,
and it was not the sort of topography where you would expect to find a deposit
of those metals.
But we did not argue with Dril's findings. We hauled the auxiliary power unit off the
sledge, got its little ato-turbine going, and hooked
its leads to the big dis-beam projector which we had
dismounted from the bows of our ship.
Tharn
played the dis-beam on the ice with expert skill.
Rapidly it cut a ten-foot shaft down through the solid ice. It went down for a
hundred feet like a knife through cheese and then there was a sudden backlash
of sparks and flame. He quickly cut the power.
"That
must be the metal-bearing rock we just hit," he said.
Dril's voice was puzzled.
"It
should be seventy or eighty feet lower to the metal deposits, by the sonde readings."
We'll go down and see," Tharn declared.
"Help me set up the winch."
We
had brought heavy girders and soon had them forming a massive tripod over the
shaft. Strong cables ran through pulleys suspended from that tripod and were
fastened to a big metal bucket in which we could descend by paying out cable
through the tackle.
Only
two of us should have gone down, really. But somehow, none of us wanted to wait
alone up on the dark ice, nor did any of us want to go down alone into the
shaft So we all three crowded into the big bucket.
"Acting
like children instead of veteran star explorers," grunted Tharn. "I shall make a note for our psychos on the
upsetting effect of conditions on these worlds at the galaxy edge."
"Did you bring your
beam guns" Dril asked suddenly.
We
had, all of us. Yet we didn't know quite why. Some obscure apprehension had
made us arm ourselves when there was no conceivable need of it.
"Let's
go," said Tharn. "Hang on to the cable and
help me pay it out, Oroc."
I did as he bade, and we started dropping
smoothly down into the shaft in the ice. The only light was the krypton whose
rays Dril directed downward.
We wentNJown a hundred feet, and then we all cried out. For we
saw now the nature of the resistance which the dis-beam
had met Here under the ice there was a thick stratum
of transparent metal, and the dis-beam had had to
burn its ay through that.
Underneath
the burned-out hole in that metal stratum there was—nothing. Just empty space,
a great hollow of some kind here beneath the ice.
Tharn's voice throbbed with excitement
"I'd already begun to
suspect it. Look down there!"
The
krypton beam, angling downward into the emptiness below us, revealed a
spectacle which stunned us.
Here, boncnth
the ice, was a city. It was a great metro-
E |
oIIk of white cement structures, dimly revealed by
our ttle light. And this whole city was shielded by
an immense dome of transparent metal which withstood the weight of the ice
that ages had piled upon it.
"Our
dis-beam cut down through the ice and then through
the dome itself," Tharn was saying excitedly.
"This dead city may have been lying hidden here for ages."
Dead city?
Yes, it was dead. We could see no trace of movement in the dim streets as we
dropped toward it.
The
white avenues, the vague facades and galleries and spires of the metropolis,
were silent and empty. There was no air here. There could be no inhabitants.
Our
bucket bumped down onto the street We fastened the
cables and climbed out, stood staring numbly about us. Then we uttered
simultaneous cries of astonishment
An
incredible thing was happening. Light was beginning to grow around us. Like
the first rosy flush of dawn it came at first, burgeoning into a soft glow that
bathed all the far-flung city.
"This
place can't be dead!" exclaimed Dril. "That
light-"
"Automatic
trips could start the light going," said Tharn.
"These people had a great science, great enough for that,"
"I
don't like it," Dril murmured. "I feel that
the place is haunted."
I had that feeling, too. I am not ordinarily
sensitive to alien influences. If you are, you don't get accepted by the Star
Service.
But
a dark, oppressive premonition such as I had never felt before now weighed upon
my spirits. Deep in my consciousness stirred vague awareness of horror brooding
in this silent city beneath the ice.
"We
came here for metal, and we're going to get it," Tharn
said determinedly. "The light won't hurt us, it will help us."
Dril set
up the radio sonde and took bearings again. They
showed strongest indications of the presence of the metals we needed at a point
some halfway across the city from us.
There was a towering building there, an
enormous pile whose spire almost touched the dome. We took it as our goal and
started.
The
metal soles of our pressure suits clanked on the smooth cement paving as we
walked. We must have made a strange picture—we three in our grotesque metal
armor tramping through that eerily illuminated metropolis of silence and death.
"This
city is old indeed," Tharn said in a low voice.
"You notice that the buildings have roofs? That means they're older
than—"
"Tharn! Orocr yelled Dril
suddenly, swerving around and grabbing for his beam pistol.
We
saw it at the same moment. It was rushing toward us from a side street we had
just passed.
I
can't describe it. It was like no normal form of life. It was a gibbering
monstrosity of black flesh that changed from one hideous shape to another with
protean rapidity as it flowed
toward us.
The
horror and hatred that assaulted our minds were not needed to tell us that this
thing was inimical. We fired our beams at it simultaneously.
The
creature sucked back with unbelievable rapidity and disappeared in a flashing
movement between two buildings. We ran forward. But it was gone.
"By all the devils of space!" Dril, his voice badly shaken. "What was that?'*
Tharn Nccmcd as stunned as we.
"I don't know. It was living, you saw
that. And its swift retreat when we fired argues intelligence and volition."
"Ordinary flesh couldn't exist in this
cold vacuum—" I began.
"There
are perhaps more forms of life and flesh than we know," muttered Tharn. "Yet such things surely wouldn't build a city
like this—"
"There's
another!" I interrupted, pointing wildly.
The
second of the black horrors advanced like a huge, unreared
worm. But even as we raised our pistols, it darted away.
"We've
got to go on," Tharn declared, though his own
voice was a little unsteady. "The metals we need are in or near that big
tower, and unless we get them we'll simply perish on the ice above."
"There may be worse deaths than freezing
to death up there on the ice," said Dril huskily.
But he came on with us.
Our
progress through the shining streets of that magically beautiful white city
was one of increasing horror.
The
black monstrosities seemed to be swarming in the dead metropolis. We glimpsed
and fired at dozens of them. Then we stopped beaming them, for we didn't seem
able to hit them.
They
didn't come to close quarters to attack us. They seemed rather to follow us and
tuatch us, and their numbers and menacing appearance became more pronounced
with every step we took toward the tower.
More
daunting than the inexplicable creatures were the waves of horror and
foreboding that were now crushing our spirits. I have spoken of the oppression
we had felt since entering the city. It was becoming worse by the minute.
"We
are definitely being subjected to psychological attack from some hostile
source," muttered Tharn. "All this seems to
be because we are approaching that tower."
"This
system is on the edge of the galaxy," I reminded. "Some undreamed-of
creature or creatures from the black outside could have come from there and
laired up ón this dead world."
I
believe we would at that point have turned and retreated had not Tharn steadied us with a reminder.
"Whatever
is here that is going to such lengths to force us to retreat is doing so
because it's afraid of us! That argues that we can at least meet it on equal
terms."
We
were approaching the wide flight of steps that led up to the vaulted entrance
of the great tower. We moved by now in a kind of daze, crushed as we were by
the terrific psychic attack that was rapidly conquering our courage.
Then came the
climax. The lofty doors of the tower swung slowly open. And from within the
building there lurched and shambled out a thing, the sight of which froze us
where we stood.
"That
never came from any part of
our on galaxy!" Dril cried hoarsely.
It
was black, mountainous in bulk, and of a shape that tore the brain with horror.
It w%f something like a monstrous, squatting toad,
its flesh a heaving black slime from which protruded sticky black limbs that
were not quite either tentacles or arms.
Its triangle of eyes were three slits of cold green fire that watched us with hypnotic intensity.
Beneath that hideous chinless face, its breathing pouch
swelled in and out painfully as it lurched, slobbering, down the steps toward
us.
Our beams lashed frantically at that looming
horror. And they had not the slightest effect on it. It continued to lurch down
the steps. And, most ghastly of alL there was in its
outlines a subtly hideous suggestion that it was parent, somehow, to the
smaller horrors that swarmed in the city behind us.
Dril uttered a cry and turned to flee, and I
stumbled around to join him. But from Tharn came a
sharp exclamation.
"Wait! Look at the thing! It's breathing?'
For
a moment, we couldn't understand." And then dimly, I did. The thing was
obviously breathing. Yet there was no air here!
Tharn suddenly stepped forward. It was the bravest
thing I have ever seen done by a member of the Star Service. He strode right
toward the towering, slobbering horror.
And abruptly, as he reached it, the
mountainous black obscenity vanished. It disappeared like a clicked-orf televisor scene. And the
black swarm in the city behind us disappeared at the same moment.
"Then it wasn't real?"
Dril exclaimed.
"It
was only a projected hypnotic illusion," Tharn
declared. "Like the others we saw back there. The fact that it was
breathing here where there is no air, gave me the clue to its unreality."
"But
then," I said slowly, "whatever projected those hypnotic attacks is
inside this building?
Yes,
and so are the metals we want," Tharn said
grimly. "We're going in."
The
ceaseless waves of horror-charged thought beat upon us even more strongly as we
went up the steps. Gibbering madness seemed to shriek in my brain as we opened
the high doors.
And
then, as we stepped into the vast, gleaming white nave of the building, all
that oppressive mental assault suddenly ceased.
Our
reeling minds were free of horror for the first time since we had entered this
dead city. It was like bursting out of one of the great darkness clouds of the
galaxy into clear space again.
"Listen!" said Tharn in a whisper. "I hear—"
I
heard, too. We didn't really hear, of course, It was
not sound, but mental waves that brought the sensation of sound to our brains.
It
was music we heard. Faint and distant at first, but swelling
in a great crescendo of singing instruments and voices.
The
music was alien, like none we had ever heard before. But it gripped our minds
as its triumphant strains rose and rose.
There
was in those thunderous chords the titanic struggles and hopes and despairs of
a race. It held us rigid and breathless as we listened to that supernal
symphony of glory and defeat,
"They
are coming," said Tharn in a low voice, looking
across the white immensity of the great nave.
I
saw them. Yet oddly, I was not afraiu now, though
this was by far the strangest thing that had yet befallen us.
Out
into the nave toward us was filing a long procession of moving figures. They
were the people of this long-dead world, the people of the past.
They
were not like ourselves, though they were bipedal, erect figures with a
general resemblance to us in bodily structure. I cannot particularize them, they were so alien to our eyes.
As
the music swelled to its final crescendo and then died away, the marching
figures stopped a little away from us and looked at us. The foremost,
apparently their leader, spoke, and his voice reached our minds.
"Whoever
you are, you have nothing more to fear," he said. "There is no life
in this city. All the creatures you have seen, all the horror that has attacked
you, yes, even we ourselves who speak to you, are but phantoms of the mind
projected from telepathic records that are set to start functioning
automatically when anyone enters this city."
"I
thought so," whispered Tham. "They could be
nothing else."
The leader of the aliens
spoke on.
"We
are a people who perished long ago, by your reckoning. We originated on this
planet"—he called it by an almost unpronounceable alien name—"far
back in your past. We rose to power and wisdom and then to glory. Our science
bore us out to other worlds, to other stars, finally to exploration and
colonization of most of the galaxy.
"And then came
disaster. From the abyss of extra-galactic space came invaders so alien that
they could never live in amity with us. It was inevitable war between us and
them, we to hold our galaxy, they to conquer it.
"They
were not creatures of matter. They were creatures made up of photons,
particles of force—shifting clouds capable of unimaginable cooperation between
themselves and of almost unlimited activities. They swept us from star after star, they destroyed us on a thousand worlds.
"We
were finally hemmed in on this star system of our origin, our last citadel. Had
there been hope for the future in the photon race, had they been creatures capable
of creating a future civilization, we would have accepted defeat and
destruction and would have abdicated thus in their favor. But their limitations
of intelligence made that impossible. They would never rise to civilization
themselves nor allow any other race in the galaxy to do so.
"So
we determined that, before we perished, we would destroy them. They were
creatures of force who could only be destroyed by
force. We converted our sun into a gigantic generator, hurling some of our
planets and moons into it to cause the cataclysm we desired. From our sun
generator sprang a colossal wave of force that swept out and annihilated the
photon race in one cosmic surge of energy.
'It
annihilated the last of us also. But we had already prepared this buried city,
and in it had gathered all that we knew of science and wisdom to be garnered by
future ages. Some day new forms of life will rise to civilization in the
galaxy, some day explorers from other stars will come here.
"If
they are not intelligent enough to make benign use of the powers we have
gathered here, our telepathic attacks should frighten them away. But if they
are intelligent enough to discern the clues we leave for them, they will
understand that all is but hypnotic illusion and will press forward into this
tower or our secrets.
"You, who listen to me, have done this.
To you, who-
ever and of whatever future race you may be, we be-
queath our wisdom and our power. In this building,
and
in others throughout the city, you will find all that we
have left. Use it wisely for the good of the galaxy and
all of its races. And now, from we
of the past to you of
the future—farewell." ^
The
figures that stood before us vanished. And we three remained standing alone in
the silent, shimmering white building.
"Space,
what a race they must have been!" breathed Tharn.
"To do all that, to die destroying a menace that would
have blighted the galaxy forever, and still to contrive to leave all that they
had gained to the future!"
"Let's
see if we can find the metals," begged Dril, his
voice shaky. "All I want now is to get out of here and take a long drink
of sanqua."
We
found more than the metals we needed. In that wonderful storehouse of alien
science we found whole wave generators of a type far superior to ours, which
could easily be installed in our crippled ship.
I
shall not tell of all else we found. The Star Service is already carefully
exploring that great treasury of ancient science, and in time its findings will
be known to all the galaxy.
It
took labor to get the generators back up to our Ship, but when that was done,
it was not hard to install them. And when we had fused a patch on our punctured
hull, we were ready to depart.
As
our ship arrowed up through the eternal dusk of that ice clad world and darted past
its smoldering dying
sun on our homeward voyage, Dril
took down the bottle of sanqua.
"Let's
get these cursed suits off, and then I'm going to have the longest drink I ever
took!" he vowed.
We
divested ourselves of the heavy suits at last. It was a wonderful relief to
step out of them, to unfold our cramped wings and smooth our ruffled feathers.
We
looked at each other, we three tall bird-men of RigeL,
as Dril handed us the glasses of pink sanqua. On Tharn's beaked face, in his green eyes, was
an expression that told me we all were thinking of the same thing.
He raised the glass that he
held in his talons.
"To
that great dead race to whom our galaxy owes
all," he said. "We will drink to their world by their own name for
it. We will drink to Earth."
Mcllvaine's Star
BY AUGUST DERLETH
"Call
them what you like,"
said Tex Harrigan. "Lost people or strayed,
crackpots or warped geniuses— I know enough of them to fill an entire
department of queer people. I've been a reporter long enough to have run into
quite a few of them."
"For example?" I said, recognizing Harrigan's mellowness.
"Take Thaddeus Mcllvaine,"
said Harrigan. "I never heard of him."
"I suppose not," said Harrigan. "But I knew him. He was an eccentric old
fellow who had a modest income-enough to keep up his hobbies, which were three:
he played cards and chess at a tavern called Bixby's on North Clark Street; he
was an amateur astronomer; and he had the fixed idea that there was life
somewhere outside this
E |
lanet and that it was possible to communicate
with other eings—but unlike most others, he tried it
constantly with the queer machinery he had rigged up.
"Well,
now, this old fellow had a trio of cronies with whom he played on occasion down
at Bixby's. He had no one else to confide in. He kept them up with his progress
among the stars and his communication with other life in the cosmos beyond our
own, and they made a great joke out of it, from all I could gather. I suppose,
because
he had
no one eke to talk to, Mcllvaine took it without
complaint. Well, as I said, I never heard of him until one morning the city
editor—it was old Bill Henderson then-called me in and said, 'Harrigan, we just got a lead on a fellow named Thaddeus Mcllvaine who claims to have discovered a new star. Amateur astronomer up North Clark. Find him and get a
story.' So I set out to track him down...."
It
was a great moment for Thaddeus Mcllvaine. He sat
down among his friends almost portentously, adjusted his spectacles, and peered
over them in his usual manner, half-way between being a querulous oldster and a
reproachful schoolmaster.
"I've done it,"
he said quietly.
"Aye, and what?"
asked Alexander testily.
"I discovered a new
star."
"Oh," said
Leopold flatly. "A cinder in your eye."
"It
lies just off Arcturus," Mcllvaine
went on, "and it would appear to be coming closer."
"Give
it my love," said Richardson with a wry smile. "Have you named it
yet? Or don't the discoverers of new stars name them any
more? Mcllvaine's Star—that's a good name for it. Hard a
port of Arcturus, with special displays on windy
nights."
Mcllvaine
only smiled. "It's a dark star," he said presently. "It doesn't
have light." He spoke almost apologetically, as if somehow he had
disappointed his friends. "I'm going to try to communicate with it."
"That's the
ticket," said Alexander.
"Cut for deal," said Leopold.
That .was how the news about Mcllvaine's Star
was received by his cronies. Afterward, after Mcllvaine had dutifully
played several games of euchre, Richardson conceived the idea of telephoning
the Globe to announce Mcilvaine's
discovery.
"The old fellow took himself
seriously," Harrigan went on. "And yet he
was so damned mousy about it. I mean, you got the impression that he had been
trying for so long that now he hardly believed in his star himself any longer.
But there it was. He had a long, detailed story of its discovery, which was an
accident, as those things usually are. They happen all the time, and his story
sounded convincing enough. Just the same, you didn t
feel that he really had anything. I took down notes, of course; that was
routine. I got a picture of the old man, with never an idea we'd be using it.
"To
tell the truth, I carried my notes ardund with me for
a day or so before it occurred to me that it wouldn't do any harm to put a call
in to Yerkes Observatory up in Wisconsin. So I did, and they confirmed Mcllvaine s Star. The Globe had the story, did it up in fine style.
"It
was two weeks before we heard from Mcllvaine
again...." '
That night Mcllvaine
was more than usually diffident. He was not like a man bearing a message of
considerable importance to himself. He slipped into Bixby's, got a glass of
beer, and approached the table where his friends sat, almost with trepidation,
"It's a nice evening
for May," he said quietly.
Richardson grunted.
Leopold
said, "By the way, Mac, whatever became of that star of yours? The one the
papers wrote up."
"I
think," said Mcllvaine cautiously, "I'm
quite sure— I have got in touch with them. Only, his brow wrinkled and
furrowed, "I can't understand their language."
"Ah," said Richardson with an edge
to his voice, "the thing for you to do is to tell them that's
your star, and they'll have to speak English from now on, so you can understand
them. Why, next thing we know, you'll be getting yourself a rocket or a
space-ship and going over to that star to set yourself up as king or
something."
"King
Thaddeus the First,'' said Alexander loftily. "All
you star-dwellers may kiss the royal foot."
"That
would be unsanitary, I think," said Mcllvaine,
frowning.
Poor
Mcllvaine! They made him the butt of their jests for
over an hour before he took himself off to his quarters, where he sat himself
down before his telescope and found his star once more, almost huge enough to
blot out Arcturus, but not quite, since it was moving
away from that amber star now.
Mcllvaine's star was certainly much closer to the earth
than it had been.
He
tried once again to contact it with his homemade radio, and once again he
received a succession of strange, rhythmic noises which he could not doubt were
speech of some kind or other—a rasping, grating speech, to be sure, utterly
unlike the speech of Mcllvaine's own kind. It rose
and fell, became impatient, urgent, despairing— Mcllvaine
sensed all this and strove mightily to understand.
He
sat there for perhaps two hours when he received the distinct impression that
someone was talking to him in his own language. But there was no longer any
sound on the radio. He could not understand what had taken place, but in a few
moments he received the clear conviction that the inhabitants of his star had
managed to discover the basic elements of his language by the simple process of
reading his mind, and were now prepared to talk with him.
What manner of creatures inhabited Earth? they wished to know.
Mcllvaine told them. He visualized one of his own kind and tried to put him into words. It was difficult, since
he could not rid himself of the conviction that his interlocutors might be
utterly alien.
They
had no conception of man and doubted man's existence on any other star. There
were plant-people on Venus, ant-people on Andromeda, six-legged and four-armed
beings which were equal parts mineral and vegetable on Betelguese—but
nothing resembling man. "You are evidently alone of your kind in the
cosmos," said his interstellar correspondent,
"And
what about you?" cried Mcllvaine with unaccustomed
heat.
Silence
was his only answer, but presently he conceived a mental image which was
remarkable for its' vividness. But the image as of
nothing he had ever seen before— of thousands upon thousands of miniature
beings, utterly alien to man; they resembled amphibious insects, with thin,
elongated heads, large eyes, and antennae set upon a scaled, four-legged body,
with rudimentary beetle-like wings. Curiously, they seemed ageless; he could
detect no difference among them—all appeared to be the same age.
"We
are not, but we rejuvenate regularly," said the creature with whom he corresponded in this strange manner.
Did they have names? Mcllvaine
wondered. "I am Guru," said the star's inhabitant. "You are Mcllvaine."
And
the civilization of their star?
Instantly
he saw in his mind's eye vast cities, which rose from beneath a surface which
appeared to bear no vegetation recognizable to any human eye, in a terrain
which seemed to be desert, of monolithic buildings, which were windowless and
had openings only of sufficient size to permit the free passage of its dwarfed
dwellers. Within the buildings was evidence of a great and. old civilization. ...
"You see, Mcllvaine
really believed all this. What an imagination the man had! Of course, the boys
at Bixby's gave him a bad time; I don't know how he stood it, but he did. And
he always came back. Richardson called the story in; he took a special delight
in devilling Mcllvaine, and I was sent out to see the
old fellow again.
"You
couldn't doubt his sincerity. And yet he didn't sound touched."
"But,
of course, that part about the insect-like dwellers of the star comes straight
out of Wells, doesn't it?" I put in.
"Wells
and scores of others," agreed Harrigan.
"Wells was probably the first writer to suggest insectivorous inhabitants
on Mars; his were considerably larger, though."
"Go on."
"Well, I talked with Mcllvaine
for quite a while. He told me all about their civilization and about his
friend, Guru. You might have thought he was talking about a neighbor of his I had
only to step outside to meet.
"Later
on, I dropped around at Bixby's and had a talk with the boys there. Richardson
let me in on a secret. He had decided to rig up a connection to Mcllvaine's machine and do a little talking to the old
fellow, making him believe Guru was coming through in English. He meant to give
Mcllvaine a harder time than ever, and once he had
him believing everything he planned to say, they would wait for him at Bixby's
and let him make a fool of himself.
"It didn't work out
quite that way, however. . . ."
"Mcllvaine,
can you hear me?"
Mcllvaine started with astonishment. His mental im-
E |
ression
of Guru became confused; the voice speaking nglish
came clear as a bell, as if from no distance at all "Yes," he said
hesitantly.
"Well,
then, listen to me, listen to Guru. We have now had enough information from you
to suit our ends. Within twenty-four hours, we, the inhabitants of Ahli, will begin a war of extermination against Earth. . .
."
"But why?" cried Mcllvaine, astounded.
The
image before his mind's eye cleared. The cold, precise features of Guru
betrayed anger.
"There
is interference," the thought-image informed him. "Leave the machine
for a few moments, while we use the disintegrators."
Before
he left the machine, Mcllvaine had the impression of
a greater machine being attached to the means of communication which the
inhabitants of his star were using to communicate with him.
"McIIvaine's
story was that a few moments later there was a blinding flash just outside his
window," continued Harrigan. "There was
also a run of instantaneous fire from the window to his machine. When he had
collected his wits sufficiently, he ran outside to look. There was nothing
there but a kind of grayish dust in a little mound —as if, as he put it,
'somebody had cleaned out a vacuum bag.' He went back in and examined the space
from the window to the machine; there were to thin
lines of dust there, hardly perceptible, just as if something had been attached
to the machine and led outside.
"Now
the obvious supposition is naturally that it was Richardson out there, and that
the lines of dust from the window to the machine represented the wires he had
attached to his microphone while Mcllvaine was at
Bixby's entertaining his other two cronies, but this is fact, not fiction, and
the point of the episode is that Richardson disappeared from that night
on."
"You investigated, of
course?" I asked.
Harrigan
nodded. "Quite a lot of us investigated. The police might have done
better. There was a gang war on in Chicago just at that time, and Richardson
was nobody with any connections. His nearest relatives weren't anxious about
anything but what they might inherit; to tell the truth, his cronies at Bixby's
were the only people who worried about him. Mcllvaine as much as the rest of
them.
"Oh,
they gave the old man a hard time, all right. They went through his house with
a fine-toothed comb. They dug up his yard, his cellar, and generally put him
through it, figuring he was a natural to hang a murder rap on. But there was
just nothing to be found, and they couldn't manufacture evidence when there was
nothing to show that Mcllvaine ever knew that
Richardson planned to have a little fun with him.
"And
no one had seen Richardson there. There was nothing but Mcllvaine's
word that he had heard what he said he heard. He needn't have volunteered that,
but he did. After the police had finished with him, they wrote him off as a
harmless nut. But the question of what happened to Richardson wasn't solved
from that day to this."
"People
have been known to walk out of their lives," I said. "And never come bact."
"Oh,
sometimes they do. Richardson didn't. Besides, if he walked out of his life
here, he did so without more than the clothing he had on. So much was missing
from his effects, nothing more."
"And
Mcllvaine?"
Harrigan smiled thinly. "He carried on. You
couldn't expect him to do anything less. After all he had worked most of his
life trying to communicate with the worlds outside, and he had no intention of
resigning his contact, no matter how much Richardson's disappearance upset him.
For a while he believed that Guru had actually disintegrated Richardson; he
offered that explanation, but by that time the dust had vanished, and he was
laughed out of face. So he went back to the machine and Guru and the little
excursions to Bixby's. . . ."
"What's the latest word from that star
of yours?" asked Leopold, when Mcllvaine came
in.
"They
want to rejuvenate me," Said Mcllvaine, with a
certain shy pleasure. "What's that?" asked Alexander sourly.
"They say they can make me young again. Like them up there. They never
die. They just live so long, then they rejuvenate, and they begin all over.
It's some kind of process they have."
"And
I suppose they're planning to come down and fetch you up there and give you the
works, is that it?" asked Alexander.
|
"Well,
no," answered Mcllvaine. "Guru says there's
no need for that—it can be done through the machine; they can work it like the
disintegrators; it puts you back to or twenty or wherever you like." ell,
I'd like to be twenty-five again myself," admitted Leopold.
"I'll tell you what, Mac," said
Alexander. "You go ahead and try it; then come back and let us know how it
works. If it does, we'll all sit in." "Better make your will first,
though, just in case." "Oh, I did. This
afternoon."
Leopold choked back a
snicker. "Don't take this thing too seriously, Mac. After alL we're short one of us now. We'd hate to lose you,
too."
Mcllvaine was touched. "Oh, I wouldn't
change," he hastened to assure his friends. "I'd just be younger,
that's all. They'll just work on me through the machine, and overnight I'll be
rejuvenated."
"That's
certainly a little trick that's got it all over monkey glands," conceded
Alexander, grinning.
"Those
little bugs on that star of yours have made scientific progress, I'd say,"
said Leopold.
"They're
not bugs," said Mcllvaine with faint indignation.
"They're people, maybe not just like you and me, but they're people just
the same."
He
went home that night filled with anticipation. He had done just what he had
promised himself he would do, arranging everything for his rejuvenation. Guru
had been astonished to learn that people on Earth simply died when there was no
necessity to do so; he had made the offer to rejuvenate Mcllvaine
himself.
Mcllvaine sat down to his machine and turned the complex
knobs until he was en
rapport with
his dark star. He waited for a long time, it seemed, before he knew his contact
had been closed. Guru came through.
"Are you ready, Mcllvaine?" he asked soundlessly.
"Yes.
All ready," said Mcllvaine, trembling with eagerness.
"Don't
be alarmed now. It will take several hours," said Guru.
"I'm not
alarmed," answered Mcllvaine.
And
indeed he was not; he was filled with an exhilaration
akin to mysticism, and he sat waiting for what he was certain must be the
experience above all others in his prosaic existence.
"Mcllvaine's disappearance coming so close on Richardson's
gave us a beautiful story," said Harrigan.
"The only trouble was, it wasn't new when the Globe got around to it. We had lost our informant in Richardson; it never
occurred to Alexander or Leopold to telephone us or anyone about Mcllvaine's unaccountable absence from Bixby's. Finally,
Leopold went over to Mcllvaine's house to find out
whether the old fellow was sick.
"A young fellow opened
up.
"'Where^
Mcllvaine?' Leopold asked.
"
'I'm Mcllvaine,' the young fellow answered.
'"Thaddeus Mcllvaine,' Leopold explained.
"
'That's my
name,' was the only answer he got,
" 'I
mean the Thaddeus Mcllvaine who used to play cards
with us over at Bixby's,' said Leopold.
"He
shook his head. 'Sorry, you must be looking for
someone else.'
"
'What're you
doing here?' Leopold asked then.
" 'Why, I inherited what my uncle left,' said the young fellow.
"And,
sure enough, when Leopold talked to me and persuaded me to go around with him
to Mcllvaine's law-
J |
rer, we found that the old fellow had made a will and
eft everything to his nephew, a namesake. The stipula-
tions were clear enough; among them was the express
wish that if anything happened to him, the elder Thad-
deus Mcllvaine, of no
matter what nature, but particu-
larly something allowing a reasonable doubt of his death,
the nephew was still to be permitted to take immediate
possession of the property and effects." j
"Of
course, you called on the nephew," I said. '
Harrigan nodded. "Sure. That was the indicated
course, in any event. It was routine for both the press and the police. There
was nothing suspicious about his story; it was straightforward enough, except
for one or two little details. He never did give us any precise address; he
just mentioned Detroit once. I called up a friend on one of the papers there and
put him up to looking up Thaddeus Mcllvaine; the only
young man of that name he could find appeared to be the same man as the present
inhabitant's uncle, though the description fit pretty well"
"There was a
resemblance, then?"
"Oh, sure. One could have imagined that old Thaddeus Mcllvaine
had looked somewhat like his nephew when he himself was a young man. But don't
let the old man's rigmarole about rejuvenation make too deep an impression on
you. The first thing the young fellow did was to get rid of that machine of his
uncle's. Can you imagine his uncle having done something like that?"
I
shook my head, but I could not help thinking what an ironic thing it would have
been if there had been something to Mcllvaine's
story, and in the process to which he had been subjected from out of space he
had not been rejuvenated so much as just sent back in time, ;
in which case he would have no memory of the machine nor of the use to which it
had been put. It would have been as ironic for the inhabitants of Mcllvaine's star, too; they would doubtless have looked
forward to keeping this contact with Earth open and failed to realize that Mcllvaine's construction differed appreciably from theirs.
"He
virtually junked it. Said he had no idea what it could be used for, and didn't
know how to operate it."
"And
the telescope?"
"Oh,
he kept that. He said he had some interest in astronomy and meant to develop
that if time permitted."
"So much ran in the
family, then."
"Yes.
More than that. Old Mcllvaine
had a trick of seeming shy and self-conscious. So did this nephew of his.
Wherever he came from, his origins must have been backward. I suspect that he
was ashamed of them, and if I had to guess, I'd put him in the Kentucky
hill-country or the Ozarks. Modern concepts seemed to be pretty well too much
for him, and his thinking would have been considerably" more natural at
the turn of the century.
"I
had to see him several
times. The police chivvied him a little, but not much; he was so obviously
innocent of everything that there was nothing for them in him. And the search
for the old man didn't last long; no one had seen him after that last night at
Bixby's, and, since everyone had already long since concluded that he was mentally
a little off center, it was easy to conclude that he had wandered away
somewhere, probably an amnesiac. That he might have anticipated that is
indicated in the hasty preparation of his will, which came out of the blue,
said Barnevall, who drew it up for him.
"I felt sorry for him."
'Tor
whom?"
"The nephew. He seemed so lost, you know—like a man who wanted to remember
something, but couldn't. I noticed that several times when I tried to talk to
him; I had the feeling each time that there was something he wanted desperately
to say, it hovered always on the rim of his awareness, but somehow there was no
bridge to it, no clue to put it into words. He tried so hard for something he
couldn't put his finger on."
"What became of
him?"
"Oh, he's still around. I think he found
a job somewhere. As a matter of fact, I saw him just the other evening. He
had apparently just come from work and he was standing in. front of Bixby's
with his face pressed to the window looking in. I came up nearby and watched
him. Leopold and Alexander were sitting inside—a couple of lonely old men
looking out. And a lonely young man looking in. There
was something in Mcllvaine*s face—that same thing I
had noticed so often before, a kind of expression that seemed to say there was
something he ought to know, something he ought to remember, to do, to say,
but there was no way in which he could reach
back to it."
"Or forward," I said with a wry
smile. "As you like," said Harrigan. Pour
me another, will you?" I did and he took it,
"That
poor devil!" he muttered. "He'd be happier if he could only go back
where he came from."
"Wouldn't
we all?" I asked. "But nobody ever goes home again. Perhaps Mcllvaine never had a home like that."
"You'd
have thought so if you could have seen his face looking in at Leopold and
Alexander. Oh, it may have been a trick of the street-light there,
it may have been my imagination. But it sticks to my memory, and I keep
thinking how alike the two were—old Mcllvaine trying
so desperately to find someone who could believe him, and his nephew now trying
just as hard to find someone to accept him or a puce he could accept on the
only terms he knows."
The
Great Cold
BY FRANK BELKNAP LONG
The
little web-footed man swam
slowly through the dark sea. With chest forward and lungs distended he
breasted the wide current, gliding evenly between iridescent jellies and
parrot-beaked fish. As he swam, enormous eyes stared at him, and dangling tentacles
caressed his limbs.
He
swam without fear, for he was in a charted area of harmless food-giving plants
and animals, and his mission was a pleasant one. Altering his course, he
descended in a straight line toward a cluster of spongy shellfish. As he
floated gracefully above it he turned swiftly on his back, and thrust downward
with his legs. The sharp cutter attached to his heel went deeply into the soft
mass. Again and again he thrust.
The
dislodged mass ascended, and he seized it in his teeth. Turning about in the
water he swam slowly to the surface. The water was black with human heads as he
broke the golden surface film. All about him others.of
his kind moved siftly shoreward, with clusters of
soft foodstuffs dangling from their J:hin lips. ~
Far
ahead black rocks towered. Centuries of erosion had worn and compressed them,
and the great sun now bathed them in an amber radiance as it declined slowly in
a circle of fire. At the base of the mile-high cliffs the
summits of
the Barnacle Masters glistened with a luster as of wind-glazed sandstone.
The
summits protruded slightly above the water, and luminous shadows moved behind
their yawning Valves. To the web-footed man these shadows were more omniscient
than the mysterious forces which had created him, for the swollen bodies of the
majestic lords of the sea, and the enormous complex minds in their capitulums, had set stern limits to his willing, and
relentlessly conditioned his behavior.
Beside
him in the warm sea another man was swimming. His body was feeble, his mind
fearless. In his persistent human way he strove to pierce the heavy dark veil
which concealed the future. As he swam cliffward he
spoke in a sibilant whisper:
"Clulan, they intend to shrink us. They
have decided
that we are less alert than our mates; that our fingers are
clumsy, our bodies uncouth. They admire the slim grace-
ful bodies and agile minds of our mates. To diminish
our
ugliness they will shrivel our bodies and minds, as the
forces of nature have shriveled the males of their own
kind. *
Clulan shuddered, and a feeling of dread pervaded
his little being. He turned slowly upon his back, said:
"Ten
million years ago, Sla, when the glory of terrestrial dominance enveloped our
little race, the Tall Ones had minute, complementary mates. It was always so,
and they have grown indifferent to the shame and humiliation. But if they
shrink us, our mates will despise us."
"That is true, Clulan," agreed Sla, in a grim tone.
Sla,
being weak of body, was seldom sent forth on food-gathering missions. As a wise
and able servitor of the Barnacle Masters in the chemical caverns he was privileged
to glimpse the future dimly, to behold vaguely prefigured the vast, stupendous
dreams of perfection which were continually taking shape in the minds of the
crustacean overlords.
He
knew that the Barnacle Masters dreamed hideously of world dominion in their
white shell towers. For millions of years they had contended with the great
land invertebrates for terrestrial supremacy, working secretly with obscure
chemicals and vegetable ferments to transform their on
bodies, and the bodies of their tiny human serfs. Their ultimate aim was the
complete destruction of the insect hordes which held the continents in servile
bondage.
More
relentless than the insects, they moved grimly toward appalling ends. Their
dream of perfection was immediate, personal. Lacking the selfless minds of the
ants and bees they dreamed of glutinous absorption, of sense-channeled
delights. Swaying immense in their tall shells they sought to surround
themselves with purely nutritive pleasures. It was the females who dreamed
thus. The little shrunken males were mere complementary mockeries which
scuttled ignominiously about in the vicinity of their mates.
The
sense of contempt tinged with mockery which the female barnacles experienced in
the presence of their complements flowed outward and enveloped their little
human servitors. With a kind of malignant cosmic irony they dreamed of
restoring the balance in a lowly sphere of being by making the women of the
human race as relatively enormous as themselves, and reducing the males to
physical and mental insignificance. It was an utterly malicious dream, evoked
by enforced idleness, the product of immense power seeking to sate itself in trivial cruelties.
The
two little swimmers were now abreast of the great circular summits of the
barnacle shells. Seizing hold of a ladder-shaped polyp, they ascended the
rounded eminence, and flicked the water from their bodies. The surface which
supported them was vibrant with the slow, rhythmic movements of the Barnacle
Masters in their sea-immersed houses.
Through
tiny slits in the summits of the domed shells they could glimpse the great
forms within as they floated upright in slothful majesty.
Clulan
sighed in bitter foreboding, gazed downward and outward at the jasper sea
beneath, and the tiny human forms that flecked it. Thousands of little figures
were disporting themselves in the cliffward curving
swells, some still diving for foodstuffs, and others merely swinuning
for recreation.
Clulan looked
at Sla. "Will you return at once to the laboratories?" he asked.
Sla nodded. "Yes, Clulan. All is in readiness there. The new glandular
secretion will be poured from its immense vat before the sun grows bright
again."
Clulan's face was taut with apprehension. "And
it is this gland substance which they will inject into our veins, to shrivel,
and perhaps destroy us?"
"Yes,"
assented Sla. "They have wrought such incredible
technical miracles in the last sun-cycle, Clulan,
that they are mad with impatience to release their slumbering ereativeness on some one or
something. In another cycle they will subdue the continents as they have
subdued the sea, but they are still unprepared for that awful and titanic
conflict. The hive and tunnel hordes are still too wary, too powerful. But the
chemical caverns hold much that is terrible even now—immense troughs of
corrosive plants, body transforming chemicals. In another cycle they will
enwrap the terrestrial sphere in flame and carnage."
A shudder convulsed Clulan's
small body. He looked downward through a dark, sun-baked slit in the shell at
the wavering bulk beneath. It seemed almost unbelievable to him that a form so
majestic and omniscient could harbor such malice. Awe and adoration contended
with rebellious resentment in his mind. If they did that to him, could he still loyally serve them?
Sla
said: "I must go now, Clulan. Perhaps they will
pity us in the end. All of us who have selnessly
served will prostrate ourselves in humble supplication when the great vat turns
and the gland substance streams forth. We will plead for you—and for ourselves.
But chiefly for you who swim in the depths, and have mates who love you. We are
feeble of body, and if they shrink us —he shrugged—"it will not matter so
much.
He
turned then, and moved swiftly toward a round dark aperture in the cliff wall.
Hundreds of similar vents dotted the immense stone surface behind the summits
of the barnacle shells, some leading to the laboratory caverns in the sunless
depths of subterranean arteries cut in the cliffs spacious interior; others to
dark food chambers where the garnerings of the little
servitors rested in frigid containers against moisture-dripping walls. Still
other apertures led to the rectangular dwelling chambers of the servitors and
their mates.
In pitying sorrow Clulan
watched the stooped and emaciated form of the laboratory worker advance toward
the vent, and disappear. He sighed, took one last somber look at the
sun-reddened sea far beneath, and walked swiftly toward the only aperture which
led to peace and serenity and momentary forgetfulness in the blue depths of the
tall cliff.
He
walked slowly along a low, damp passage, stooping from time to time to avoid
grazing his scalp against low-hanging stalactites and sharp projections in the
solid rock. For an interminable distance he repeated these stoopings,
passing farther and farther into the cliff, his little human mind shedding its
grim fears and growing more serene as he advanced.
Presently
light burst upon his vision, and he emerged into a rectangular chamber with
burnished stone walls, and a sloping floor of veined feldspar. As he emerged
from the tunnel a slim, white form arose from a recumbent position, and
advanced toward him. She was a creature of unusual loveliness, with large dark
eyes, and wondrously curving lashes. Her pale skin and long silvery hair which
descended fanwise to her waist endowed her with an elusive, almost ghostly, beauty
as she stood waiting expectantly in the center of the chamber.
With
joyfoul exclamation he advanced and clasped her. Her
lips softly caressed his bearded face as he pressed her to him. Gently he
twined his fingers in her hair and turned them slowly about, inflicting a
slight, tender pain. For an instant their cheeks met in sudden ecstasy. Then,
slowly, reluctantly, he released her.
She
stood looking at him with glowing eyes. "You look tired," she
murmured. "My sweet, little one."
It
was a term of endearment which she had used a thousand times in the course of
their life together. But now the adjective sent a cold chill to the core of his
being. He trembled, turned pale.
Her
eyes widened in surprise. "Why, what is the matter, my little one—"
He
uttered a muffled groan and stopped her mouth with his hand. Then he led her
firmly to a repose slab in the wall and settled down beside her.
Her
eyes met his in a troubled stare. "What is it, Clu-lan?"
she pleaded. "I await the truth without fear. Have you met some one who—"
Clulan
shook his head, ran his palm tenderly over her cheeks and forehead. "There
will never be another," he said. "You know that, Mutal. We are one body, one mind
forever." "Then what is it?"
"I swam shoreward with the laboratory
worker, Sla. He knows many things which have been concealed from the food
gatherers. The Tall Ones intend to—"
He bit his lips.
"Yes,
Clulan."
"They intend to shrink us."
Horror
flared in the woman's eyes. She sat bolt upright, in tremulous apprehension.
"You mean, they will shrivel our bodies, Clulan?"
"They will not shrivel your body, Mutal," replied Clulan.
"They will shrivel mine. They have found no adequate outlet for the
immense energies which consume them. They are too feeble as yet to wage war on
the tunnel and hive hordes, but they can amuse themselves by tormenting us. The
pitiful smallness of their own mates has taught them contempt for all males. We
are ridiculous in their sight, and they intend to torture and humiliate
us."
The
woman's lips were trembling. "But can they do it, Clulan?
Have they discovered a way?"
"They
can easily alter our bodies, MutaL" said the little
food gatherer. "A million years ago we had no webs between our toes. In
the dim ages of the comet's dust, when changes in the earth's atmosphere
immeasurably aided their development, and the development of the tunnel
hordes, and our little kind nearly perished beneath the weight of the antarctic glaciations, there were no web-footed men. The
men who now serve the tunnel and hive hordes are not web-footed. In their deep
dark tunnels they walk with primitive toes. Then the Tall Ones injected
glandular secretions from web-footed mammals into the veins of our ancestors,
and by slow stages we developed these hideous appendages. There is still something
in us, a deeply buried instinctive loathing, which will not down. That is why
we experience shame when we gaze upon our feet, which are so abnormal, so
monstrous.
He
made a curious sobbing sound in his throat, "Our feet are ugly, but more
hideous still will be this new change, which will destroy what we treasure
most—the tie that unites us, the sense of wonder and release which we
experience when we are together. You will despise me, Mutal—"
"If
they shrivel your body, Clulan," said Mutal, in a grim, tortured tone, "I will swim deeply
into the water and die. I will never—"
Her
speech was arrested by a sudden flare of prismatic light. Clulan's
gaze leaped upward.
The
circular visual transmitter in the chamber's roof was streaked with rapidly
alternating banners of green and orange light. Across its glazed surface the
signals wavered in ominous sequence.
Mutal
gripped her mate's wrist with her thin fingers, sinking her nails into his
flesh till he cried out in pain.
"Clulan," she murmured. "It is for you, your
colors. One of the Tall Ones has gone mad?'
The
blood drained from the little food gatherer's face as he stared. More terrible
than any threat of shrinkage was the task to which he had been summoned; the
hideous ordeal beneath the sea which would tax his energies beyond endurance
and perhaps destroy him.
With
a choking cry Mutal seized his head and drew it to
her bosom. Tenderly she wept over him, swaying as she gazed deep into his
tortured eyes.
She
was familiar with the grim menace that lurked in the depths of the tall
barnacle shell and as her terrified mind envisioned the nerve-racking descent
to the poisoned capitulum and the glaring mania in
the eyes of the afflicted Tall One she clutched Clulan
more firmly, and refused to release him.
Wallowing
in their tall houses the female barnacles were not immune to disease. Weakened
by slothful living, and the slaking of pernicious emotional urges, the huge,
complicated minds in their capitulums occasionally
cracked beneath the strain. So horrible was the ensuing disharmony that the mad
forms became a menace to the entire community which only the little human
servitors could surmount.
So
tiny that they could slip with ease between the deadly lashing tentacles of the
mad ones they were privileged to attack the great bodies with poisoned cutters,
becoming for a moment in that strange reversion of function more powerful than
the titan shapes they served. But the penalty of that brief usurpation of power
was usually an appalling one, death lurking in every flick of the wildly
weaving tentacles.
Gently
but with grim tenacity Clulan untwined Mural's arms
and drew himself up. His eyes were aglow with social
consecration and the horrible caprices of the barnacles, their cold and
arbitrary cruelties, were, for the instant forgotten. Once in a sun-cyle a barnacle went mad, and once in twenty sun-cycles one
of the little food gatherers was summoned by the visual transmitter to contend
with that awful horror in the depths.
The
task fell alternately on laboratory workers, valve tenders, storehouse guards,
and food gatherers, but it was now the food gatherers' turn, and among a
hundred thousand potential saviors Clulan was the
elected one; the tiny, consecrated purger of the
community of barnacles, more powerful and omniscient in his little hour of
dedication than the twenty thousand Tall Ones who majestically in their
fathom-deep houses usurped the continental coast.
Mutal cried out to him in hysterical dismay, and
attempted to restrain him as he moved toward the tunnel entrance by twining
her arms about his legs. Tenderly, but with firmness, he released himself,
pressed his nose to her forehead, and stepped into the tunnel.
Swiftly
he sped along it, dodging the stalactites with agile dexterity. As he neared
the cliff opening a shrill ululation impinged on his hearing and grew quickly
louder as he pounded onward. It was a grimly ominous sound, and in his haste to
emerge he nearly stumbled on the slippery stones beneath. His heart was
thudding furiously, and his breath came in spasmodic jerks.
There
were no longer any tiny human swimmers in the cliffward
surging waves when he emerged and descended with incredible speed to the
nearest domed shell. He stood for an instant on the summit of the dome, staring
downward at the immense stretch of glistening water beneath him. The sun was
very low now, and the waves were the hue of the blood in his veins.
A
few gulls skimmed the unruffled surface far out, swooping, shrieking. To steady
himself he gazed at the immense purplish arc of the heavens. His swift visual
appraisement had imbued him with a sickening vertigo; a diffuse and queer kind
of agony. It was as though a sharp cutter had rasped the edges of every nerve
in his body.
Directly
beneath him, about the sea-laved circumference of the great shell, the water
was black with the dead of his kind. Thousands of little men and women floated
there in the churning current. The great barnacle in its madness had sucked in
all of the happy swimmers and spewed them forth with delirious rage.
It was the barnacle directly beneath him
which had gone mad. Through the long cracks in the shell's summit he caught
furtive glimpses of something huge and wet moving loathsomely about with an
unnatural animation, and as he stared the uluation
arose suddenly to intensify his terror, swelling till it deafened him, and
then subsiding, and rising again. And when it fell to a thin, hideous wailing a
churning sound from below usurped its function, and Clulan
knew that the bodies of the crushed and mangled swimmers were flowing once more
into the deep shell, drawn inward in the wake of a relentless suction.
A
hand fastened on Clulan's shoulder. He turned about
in swift affright. Then, slowly, the startled look faded from his countenance.
"Come
with me quickly, Clulan," said the little laboratory
worker. He was standing shivering on the dome, his
thin body bent cliffward in urgent entreaty.
Without
a word Clulan followed him. They entered the
laboratory aperture, and passed swiftly between long tiers of low-hanging
stalactites. Presently the passage widened, and they emerged into a cavern so
enormous that its sloping roof was lost in swirling vapors five hundred feet
above their heads.
In
grim awe Clulan followed his guide across the great
chamber, passing unbelievable marvels as he progressed—enormous metallic vats
a hundred feet in height, with luminous dials, and slowly revolving crystal
wheels shining and flashing in the half-light; translucent, spore-breeding
cylinders filled with many-hued growths so brilliant in hue that they cast a
spell upon his senses, causing his eyes to smart and his Drain to reel with a
sick revulsion; cyclopean tiers of loathsome fungus tubes containing in their
blue-lighted interiors growths more malignant than the virulent plants of the
ant hordes; a thousand contrivances and repositories, cyclopean and hideous,
glowing with technical menace, the fruit of milleniums
of experimentation in the depths of the tall cliff.
Clulan followed Sla to the base of a thin inverted
funnel of startling transparency which arose from a square, elevated base and
spiraled upward in the uncertain light till it was lost in the mists above.
Behind the bright surface a dark liquid rose and fell in the center of the
funnel
Sla
swiftly thrust out his little hand and turned a metallic control mechanism at
the base of the structure. The darkness deep within seemed to deepen and settle
down in circular folds.
The
laboratory worker said "Give me your cutters, Clulan."
Clulan sat down and drew the cutters from his heeL He handed the sharp implements to Sla without a word.
The muscles in his jaw were twitching. Sla held the cutters firmly, and
advanced upon the funneL With
steady aim he hurled both cutters directly at the dark fluid. There as a
tinkling murmur as of little bells ajangle as the
thin, protective coating tore across.
The
cutters were enveloped by the dark fluid. For an instant Sla stood in silence
waiting for them to grow cold with a frigidity that was beyond anything known
to his little race in the days of its supremacy.
Presently
from his loose body covering of translucent shill Sla drew a thin, sharp
metallic instrument, and two soft pads of cold-resisting ditunite.
Stooping, he enwrapped Clulan's little webbed feet
in the pads. Then he drew forth a pair of ditunite
hand coverings and twined them about his fingers. Holding the thin instrument
securely he stepped forward, pierced the transparent surface skin of the
funnel, and drew out the two cutters.
He slipped them quickly and
securely over Clulan's ditunite-incased
heels. "We must hurry," he whispered, in a tense tone.
The
two tiny forms moved.rapidly across the chamber. As Clulan's feet glided over the floor there" arose a low hissing sound, and a thin blue vapor curled upward
and enveloped his little person.
"If
the cutters touch your flesh you will die in agony," warned Sla.
They
passed between towering vats and tubes and horizontal disks slowly revolving.
A look of terror was stenciled on Clulan's
countenance as he progressed. He looked fearfully upward at the most menacing
of the enormous vats—a rectangular bulk with burnished surface, flecked with
immense luminous eyes that seemed to glare malignly down at him in the gloom.
He sensed, however, that the eyes were in reality pouring vents through which
the interior substance would descend in glutinous streams when the great lever
at the base of the container moved downward.
"The
gland vat?" he asked, clutching Sla's arm, and pointing. His voice was
tremulous with foreboding.
"No,
said Sla. "The gland vat is over there!" He
turned slightly, and gestured toward the shadows behind him.
"But what—what is that then?"
"The Great Cold is resting there," replied Sla, in a grim tone.
Qui an was near the dark inner
entrance of the cliff-piercing tunnel; but at Sla's words he stopped abruptly,
although the cold in the cutters had penetrated his body, his mind. The Great
Cold! Rumors, legends of it had penetrated even to the little abode chambers of
the food gatherers in the cliffs.
"It
would freeze all the seas between the continents," murmured Clulan, parroting statements he had heard, as his own
ancestors had once mechanically repeated the names of mighty deities without
form or substance as they squatted in terror on lonely, fire-etched hills in
the early Pleistocene dawn. "It would destroy all life in the oceans. It
would shrivel and kill every living thing."
Sla
was gripping his arm, urging him onward. "We must hurry," he
entreated.
Clulan
shivered; threw off with an effort his panicky inertia. He passed into the
tunnel, and sped swiftly along it, Sla followed, murmuring feverish advice in
his thin, tremulous voice.
"When
you strike, thrust deeply. Avoid the soft parts-strike directly at the base of
the capitulum."
The
hideous ululations of the mad barnacle increased ominously in volume as they
neared the outer world. Clulan was the first to
emerge. He ran swiftly alone a sloping ledge of rock on the cliff's face and
leaped downward to the rounded summit of the great shell.
Sla
followed. For an instant the two little figures swayed unsteadily in the
twilight. Then Clulan raised his palm and pressed it
to the other's forehead in comradely salute.
"Farewell,
Sla," he said. "You have been a loyal and generous friend."
Speedily
he divested himself of his outer body-covering of translucent shilL His little frame gleamed ruddily as he stood for an
instant on the extremity of the sloping summit,
"Strike
boldly, and avoid the lashing tentacles," warned Sla, with tears in his
voice.
Grimly
Clulan nodded. Raising his arms, he leaped vigorously
outward and descended in a swift, graceful arc to the darkling water beneath.
His
tiny body cleaved the surface film, and descended deeply. The water was no
longer warm. As he righted himself in the purple depths something cold and
rigid collided with his extremities. For an instant he stared through a
wavering film into white, sightless eyes set in a pain-racked countenance. Tiny
luminous crustaceans had clustered thickly about the hair of the submerged
corpse, casting a ghostly radiance on its swollen features.
With
reluctance Clulan raised his leg, and lashed at the
gruesome obstruction with the cutter attached to his heel. The dead man divided
as the cutter pierced him. The awful cold seared his flesh in an instant, and
his body fell apart, and descended in two fragments.
Clulan knew then that he was armed with a technical
weapon more deadly and effective than death ray or fungus spore, and a renewed
confidence surged up within him.
He swam
slowly toward the towering shell. The water grew brighter as he drew near to
it, and presently through a murky film he saw the square mouth of a fathom-deep
valve. His little countenance set in tense lines as he turned slowly about far
under the sea and swam with even strokes toward the immense mad shape in the
interior of the shell.
The
water within was a churning maelstrom. As he passed through the valve an
ascending current caught him up, and drew him swiftly in the direction of the
demented Tall One's great crested capitulum. The capitu-lum quivered with purblind squirmings
and lashings, and the attached elastic peduncle, a hundred feet in width, was
distended in fury.
Nearer
and nearer to the great form he swirled. Two long tentacular
legs ascended from their rigid sheaths and shot toward him. He turned swiftly,
and lashed at them with his feet. One divided and fell away in the depths. The
other knotted itself in swift menace. He plunged frantically downward as the
circle of death shot past him, missing his little form by the fraction of a
foot.
He
turned over and over in the water. The current carried him swiftly upward
again, in a straight line toward the barnacle's capitulum.
A hundred feet it towered in the dark brine, its hooded summit glued to the
great shell far above, its blood-red lower segments
quivering meanacingly in the tides.
It
swelled as he shot toward it. Straight into it he plunged, keeping his little
body poised with swift and frenzied arm lashings and manipulating the cutters
with deadly accuracy. Twice the unearthly cold seared the great form's swollen
bulk as Clulan's heels cut across it.
For
an instant the little food gatherer swirled about in the unimpeded current.
Then two more tentacles arose, churning the dark water as they darted toward
him. He plunged between their noosehke coils and returned
to the swollen head.
Again
and again he jabbed at it with his heels. The entire capitulum
quivered as the cutters pierced it. Then, horribly, the lower segments divided
and fell away, descending into the black depths beneath. Quiveringly
downward they sank, carrying their hideous seeds of madness, until nothing
remained of the great shape but a drained and empty hood that swayed sluggishly
in the tides.
Relief
and joy flooded Clulan's tiny being. He turned
exultantly about in the darkness, and swam with robust strokes to the surface
of the water.
As
he emerged beneath the dome a small black shape scuttled quickly toward him.
From its lair beneath the summit of the great shell the little male barnacle
had watched the glare slowly fade from the hood of its mate; had heard the
frenzied ululations diminish and subside.
It
hung suspended from a rock ledge immediately above the swimming form of the
little food gatherer and watched him intently as he cleaved the black water. A
kind of bestial joy, degraded and mirthless, was stamped on every lineament of
its small wrinkled head.
As Clulan floundered it stretched forth a thin leg and lifted
him from the water. Setting him firmly on the ledge it retreated
a pace with a shrill cry. Clulan knew then that he
was safe; that the little form would not harm him.
In
its degenerate, nearly mindless fashion it was convulsed with gratitude.
As Clulan rested on the ledge staring at the little creature's
joy-contorted head his exaltation vanished, and a great wave of horror and
loathing flooded his being. He remembered; he understood. With relentless
clarity the menace that overhung the males of his own little race returned
hideously to his mind and assumed a sickening imminence.
He
had contended in vain in the dark water. His reward would be eternal shame and
ignominy, and there could be no peace for him beneath the glimmering constellations.
The little barnacle felt no sorrow. It was consumed with a cold and hellish
joy; a degenerate gratitude. Its long bondage was over. It was free now to
starve slowly beside its slain mate, and even the wet rot which would soon
consume its shriveled body-segments would be less difficult to bear than the
shame it had endured in life.
It
was to Clulan's credit that he was incapable of
self-deception. He perceived with realistic clarity that he would hate his dear
little one with a consuming hate if they shriveled him. And when she died—his
brain grew cold with the horror of the image that loomed.
He
got up, stared for an instant at the little barnacle with a consuming pity.
Then he turned, and ascended swiftly to the surface of the dome. Dexterously he
heaved himself up over wet and glistening rock projections, and emerged through
a crevice on the surface of the great shelL
Hundreds
of tiny white forms came flocking about him with joyous cries. Foremost in the
throng was his little mate, and as his gaze enveloped her a
brief, fierce joy surged up in him again. He took her with avid huggings to his bosom.
The encircling men and women prostrated
themselves before him, clung to his wet legs, embraced
his shoulders with worshipful cries. It was his little hour of victory.
For
a brief moment Clulan towered godlike beneath the
gleaming net of stars that spanned the luminous skyway above him. Sla touched
his arm, whispered in awe:
"A
moment such as this is worth all the years of tedious striving, Clulan. All these people would die for you in an instant.
They would hurl themselves into the waves below at your command. It is the
intoxication of power, Clulan, the intoxication of
glory. Your heroism flows out to them. They identify themselves with you, share
in your triumphs. As I stand here beside you I can feel the current flowing
outward. It envelops me, and I share in the glory and power. Great deeds
ennoble, Clulan. They seem to exist in themselves, as
sentient realities, and when their aura descends upon us we become
transfigured, transformed. Are you not proud, Clulan?"
Gently
Clulan set Mutal down,
turned about till he was staring directly into the worshipful eyes of the
little laboratory worker.
"I
am not proud, Sla. I am ashamed, ashamed. We are the heirs of a mean destiny.
Yet if I should dare boldly now—"
Madly
the little figures continued to press about him, shouting, chanting, extolling
his heroism in a frenzy of adoration. He swayed for an instant in the press,
holding
Mutal grimly to him with his vigorous right arm,
as though reluctant to relinquish her precious, slender form —to relinquish all
the sweetness and wonder that had sustained his little life for so long.
Mutal
murmured: "You are tired, my dear little one. Let us go quickly into the
rock."
Clulan
drew her swiftly to him, welded his countenance to hers. For
an instant tears stung his eyelids. Then he freed himself, stood erect.
"Come!" he
shouted.
The throng divided in wonder as he advanced
across the domed shell, and entered the laboratory vent. In the dark entrance
he paused an instant, raised his hand in fervent appeal.
"Follow me!" he
cried.
Down
the wide tunnel he sped. Beneath the uneven stone roof his little form leaped
forward, with chest out-thrust and head thrown back in exultant triumph.
A
sense of godlike power flooded his midget being. Five thousand of his land
followed swiftly at his heels. Sla ran beside him, clutching at his arm in
sudden apprehension.
"Go
with Mutal into the rock," he panted. "You
are tired, distraught. You are violating the sanctity of the cavern. Give heed
to me, Clulan. You are courting disaster—"
But Clulan was deaf to advice. He sped onward, turning from
time to time to beckon and shout. And presently he was in the great cavern
itself, and the little forms that obeyed him blindly were all about him,
awaiting his commands.
With
a kind of oracular majesty he flung up his arm, and pointed into the shadows
toward the towering receptacle of the Great Cold.
Climb up, all of you. Pull
down the lever."
Exclamations
of terror and amazement burst from the throats of the little servitors who
adored him. Some fell prone in supplication and entreaty, torn between reluctance
and desire. Others turned and fled, with paling cheeks. But the majority obeyed
his grim command.
They
ascended with shrill cries, clustering upon the immense metallic lever till it
was completely covered their small white bodies. For a moment the midget shapes
twisted and turned in the dim, blue-lighted cavern, high in the air above Qulan's swaying form. Then slowly, terribly the squirming
human mass descended, and the great vat turned.
As
the lever moved downward the vat slanted, and the luminous eyes far above
opened automatically in its cyclopean bulk. The glow vanished and a dark
opacity usurped the pouring vents and—
Enwrapped in the white flame of a superhuman daring Qulan
gazed swiftly about him. He was not alone on the ground. Several of the little men and women had
ignored his command, and were standing entwined in one another's arms,
oblivious of the horror that loomed.
As
his gaze swept the unheeding forms all the exaltation and power seemed to ebb
from him, to flow away in a dark, remorseless tide. He swayed backward in mute
agony.
As
he did so a slender woman emerged from the shadows and ran swiftly toward him.
Encircling him with her arms, she pressed her cheek fervently to his, and
stared fearlessly upward. Her silver hair descended fan-wise to her waist,
giving her a spectral look in the vast, dim cavern. From somewhere near at hand
the voice of the little laboratory worker said:
"Farewell,
Qulan. Death is a dark, bitter fruit. But the
core—the core is luminous, Qulan. When the rind is
gone all the darkness will vanish forever."
Clulan felt suddenly godlike again. Enwrapped in a
sustaining aura of love and friendship he stared upward with unwavering vision
into the dark drooping face of the Great Cold.
"You
are wrong, Sla," he said, quietly. "The entire fruit is luminous
now."
As
he spoke the Great Cold descended upon him in a black, engulfing wave and
spread slowly outward, ending forever his rebellious human dream and the long
bright noon of the barnacles.
The
Fires Within
BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Supposing
creatures actually existed in conditions which would seem to us quite inimical
to life—wouldn't they think the same of our world? For instance, a few miles
beneath our feet . .
.
"This,"
said Karn very smugly, "will interest you. Just
take a look at it!" He pushed across the file he had been reading, and for
the nth time I decided to ask for his transfer or,
failing that, my own.
"What's it
about?" I asked wearily.
"It's
a long report from a Dr. Matthews to the Minister of Science." He waved it
in front of me. "Just read it!"
Without
much enthusiasm, I began to go through the file. A few minutes later I looked
up and admitted grudgingly: "Maybe you're right—this time." I didn't
speak again until I'd finished... .
My
dear Minister: (the letter began). As you requested, here is my special report
on Professor Hancock's experiments which have had such unexpected and extraordinary
results. I have not had time to cast it into a more orthodox form, but am
sending you the dictation just as it stands.
Since you have many matters engaging your
attention,
f |
erhaps I should briefly summarize our
dealings with rofessor Hancock. Until 1955, the
Professor held the
Kelvin
Chair of Electrical Engineering at Brendon University, from which he was
granted indefinite leave of absence to carry out his researches. In these he
was joined by the late Dr. Clayton, sometime Chief Geologist to the Ministry of
Fuel and Power. Their joint research was financed by grants from the Paul Fund
and the Royal Society.
The
Professor hoped to develop sonar as a means of precise geological surveying.
Sonar, as you will know, is the acoustic equivalent of radar, and although less
familiar, is older by some millions of years, since bats use it very
effectively to detect insects and obstacles at night.
Professor
Hancock intended to send high-powered, supersonic pulses into the ground and to
build up from the returning echoes, an image of what lay beneath. The picture
would be displayed on a cathode ray tube and the whole system would be exactly
analogous to the type of radar used in aircraft to show the ground through
clouds.
In
1957 the two scientists had achieved partial success but had exhausted their
funds. Early in 1958 they applied directly to the Government for a block grant.
Dr. Clayton pointed out the immense value of a device which would enable us to
take a kind of X-ray photo or the Earth's crust, and the Minister of Fuel gave
it his strongest approval before passing on the application to us. At that time
the report of the Bernal Committee had just been published and we were very
anxious that deserving cases should be dealt with quickly to avoid further
criticisms.
I
went to see the Professor at once and submitted a favourable
report. The first payment of our grant (S/543A/68) was made a few days later.
From that time on I have been continually in touch with the research and have
assisted to some extent with technical advice.
The
equipment used in the experiments is complex, but its principles are simple.
Very short but extremely powerful pulses of supersonic waves are generated by
a special transmitter which revolves continuously in a pool of heavy organic
liquid. The beam produced passes into the ground and "scans" like a
radar beam searching for echoes. By a very ingenious time delay circuit which I
will resist the temptation to describe, echoes from any depth can be selected.
So a picture of the strata under investigation can be built up on a cathode ray
screen in the normal way.
When
I first met Professor Hancock, his apparatus was rather primitive, but he was
able to show me the distribution or rock down to a depth of several hundred
feet and we could see quite clearly a part of the Bakerloo
which passed very near his laboratory.
Much
of the Professor's success was due to the great intensity of his supersonic
bursts. Almost from the beginning he was able to generate peak powers of
several hundred kilowatts, nearly all of which was radiated into the ground. It
was unsafe to remain near the transmitter, and I noticed that the soil became
quite warm around it, I was rather surprised to see large numbers of birds in
the vicinity, but soon discovered that they were attracted by the hundreds of
dead worms lying on the ground.
At
the time of Dr. Clayton's death in 1960, the equipment was working at a power
level of over a megawatt. Quite good pictures of strata a mile down could be obtained.
Dr. Clayton had correlated the results with known geographical surveys and had
proved beyond doubt the value of the information obtained.
Dr.
Clayton's death in a motor accident was a great tragedy. He had always exerted
a stabilizing influence on the Professor, who had never been much interested in
the practical applications of his work.
Soon
afterwards I noticed a distinct change in the Professor's outlook, and a few
months later he confided his new ambitions to me. I had been trying to persuade
him to publish his results (he had already spent over 50,000 pounds and the
Public Accounts Committee was being difficult again), but he asked for a little
more time. I think I can best explain his attitude by his own words, which I
remember very vividly, for they were expressed with peculiar emphasis.
"Have
you ever wondered," he said, "what the Earth
really is like inside? We've only scratched the surface with our mines and
wells. What lies beneath is as unknown as the other side of the Moon.
"We know that the Earth is unnaturally dense—far
denser than the rocks and soil of its crust would indicate.
The core may be solid metal, but until now there's been
no way of telling. Even ten miles down the pressure must
be thirty or more tons to the square inch and the tem-
perature is several hundred degrees. What it's like
at the
center staggers the imagination: the pressure must be
thousands of tons to the square inch. It's strange to think
that in two or three years we may reach the Moon—but
when we've got to the stars we'll still be no nearer that
inferno four thousand miles beneath our feet. .
"I can now get recognizable echoes from
two miles down, but I hope to step up the transmitter to ten megawatts in a
few months. With that power, I believe the range will be increased to ten
miles—and I don't mean to stop there."
I
was impressed, but at the same time I felt a little sceptical.
"That's
all very well," I said, "but surely the deeper you go the less
there'll be to see. The pressure will make any cavities impossible. And after a
few miles there will simply be a homogeneous mass getting denser and
denser."
"Quite likely," agreed the
Professor. "But I can still learn a lot from the transmission
characteristics. Anyway, we'll see when we get there!"
That
was four months ago and yesterday I saw the results of that research. When I
answered his invitation the Professor was clearly excited, but he gave me no
hint of what, if anything, he had discovered.
He
showed me his improved equipment and raised the new receiver from its bath. The
sensitivity of the pickups had been greatly improved, and this alone had effectively
doubled the range, apart from the increased transmitter power. It was strange
to watch the steel framework slowly turning and to realize that it was exploring
regions which, in spite of their nearness, man might never reach.
When
we entered the hut containing the display equipment, the Professor was
strangely silent. He switched on the transmitter, and even though it was a
hundred yards away I could feel an uncomfortable tingling. Then the cathode ray
tube lit up and the slowly revolving time-base drew the picture I had seen so
often before. Now however, the definition was much improved owing to the
increased power and sensitivity of the equipment.
I adjusted
the depth control and focussed on the Underground,
which was clearly visible as a dark lane across the faintly luminous screen.
While I was watching, it suddenly seemed to fill with mist and I knew that a
train was going through.
Presently
I continued the descent. Although I had watched this picture many times before,
it was always uncanny to see great luminous masses floating towards me and to
know that they were buried rocks—perhaps the debris from the glaciers of fifty
thousand years ago.
Dr.
Clayton had worked out a chart so that we could identify the various strata as
they passed. Presently I saw that I was through the alluvial soil and was
entering the great clay saucer which traps and holds the city's artesian water.
Soon that too was past, and I was dropping down through bedrock almost a mile
below the surface.
The
picture was still clear and bright, though there were now few changes in the
ground structure. The pressure as already rising to a thousand atmospheres;
soon it would be impossible for any cavity to remain open, for the rock itself
would begin to flow. Mile after mile I sank, but only a pale mist floated on
the screen, broken sometimes when echoes were returned from pockets or lodes of
denser material. They became fewer and fewer as the depth increased—or else
they were now so small that they could no longer be seen.
The
scale of the picture was, of course, continually expanding. It was now many
miles from side to side, and I felt like an airman looking down upon an
unbroken cloud ceiling from an enormous height. For a moment a sejnse of vertigo seized me as I thought of the abyss into
which I was gazing. I do not think that the world will ever seem quite solid to
me again.
At a
depth of nearly ten miles I stopped and looked at the Professor. There had been
no alteration for some time, and I knew that the rock must now be compressed
into a featureless homogeneous mass. I did a quick mental calculation and
shuddered as I realized that the pressure must be at least thirty tons to the
square inch. The scanner was revolving very slowly now, for the feeble echoes
were taking many seconds to struggle back from the depths.
"Well,
Professor," I said, "I congratulate you. It's a wonderful
achievement. But we seem to have reached the core now. I don't suppose there'll
be any change from here to the center."
He
smiled a little wryly. "Go on," he said. "You haven't finished
yet"
There
was something in his voice that puzzled and alarmed me. I looked at him
intently for a moment; his features were just visible in the blue-green glow of
the cathode ray tube.
"How
far down can this thing go?" I asked, as the interminable descent started
again.
"Fifteen miles,"
he said shortly.
I
wondered how he knew for the last feature I had seen at all clearly was only
eight miles down. But I continued the long fall through the rock, the scanner
turning more and more slowly now, until it took almost five minutes to make a
complete revolution. Behind me I could hear the Professor breathing heavily,
and once the back of my chair gave a crack as hisi
fingers gripped it
Then
suddenly, very faint markings began to reappear on the screen. I leaned forward
eagerly, wondering if this was the first glimpse of the world's iron core. With
agonizing slowness the scanner turned through a right angle, then another. And
then—
I
leaped suddenly out of my chair, cried out, and turned to face the Professor.
Only once before in my life had I received such a shock—fifteen years ago, when
I had accidentally turned on the radio and heard of the fall of the first
atomic bomb. That had been unexpected, but this was inconceivable. For on the
screen had appeared a grid of faint lines, crossing and recrossing
to form a perfectly symmetrical lattice.
I
know that I said nothing for many minutes, for the scanner made a complete
revolution while I stood frozen with surprise. Then the Professor spoke in a
soft, unnaturally calm voice.
"I wanted you to see it for yourself
before I said anything. That picture is now thirty miles in diameter, and
those squares are two or three miles on a side. You'll notice that the vertical
lines converge and the horizontal ones are bent into arcs. We're looking at
part of an enormous structure of concentric rings. The center must lie many
miles to the north, probably in the region of Cambridge. How much further it
extends in the other direction we can only guess."
"But what is it, for heaven's sake?"
"Well, it's clearly
artificial."
"That's ridiculous!
Fifteen miles down!"
The Professor pointed to the screen again.
"God knows I've done my best," he said, "but I can't convince
myself that Nature could make anything like that."
I
had nothing to say, and presently he continued: "I discovered it three
days ago, when I was trying to find the maximum range of the equipment. I can
go no deeper than this, and I rather think that the structure we can see is so
dense that it won't transmit my radiations any further.
"I've
tried a dozen theories, but in the end I keep returning to one. We know that
the pressure down there must be eight or nine thousand atmospheres, and the temperature
must be high enough to melt rock. But normal matter is still almost empty
space. Suppose that there is life down there—not organic life, of course, but
life based on partially condensed matter, matter in which the electron shells
are few or altogether missing. Do you see what I mean? To such creatures, even
the rock fifteen miles down would offer no more resistance than water—and we
and all our world would be as tenuous as ghosts."
"Then that thing we
can see—"
"Is a city, or its equivalent. You've seen its size, so you can judge for
yourself the civilization that must have built it. All the
world we know—our oceans and continents and mountains—is nothing more than a
film of mist surrounding something beyond our comprehension."
Neither
of us said anything for a while. I remember feeling a foolish surprise at being
one of the first men in the world to learn the appalling truth; for somehow I
never doubted that it was the truth. And I wondered how the rest of humanity
would react when the revelation came.
Presently
I broke into the silence. "If you're right," I said, "why have
they—whatever they are—never made contact with us?"
The
Professor looked at me rather pityingly. "We think we're good
engineers," he said, 'Tjut how could we reach
them? Besides, I'm not at all sure that there haven't been contacts. Think of
all the underground creatures of mythology—trolls and cobalds
and the rest. No, it's quite impossible—I take it back. Still, the idea is rather suggestive."
All
the while the pattern on the screen had never changed: the dim network still
glowed there, challenging our sanity. I tried to imagine streets and buildings
and the creatures going among them—creatures who could
make their way through the incandescent rock as a fish swims through water.
It
was fantastic—and then I remembered the incredibly narrow range of temperatures
and pressures under which the human race existed. We, not they, were the freaks; for almost all the matter in the universe is
at temperatures of thousands or even millions of degrees.
"Well,"
I said lamely, "what do we do now?"
The
Professor leaned forward eagerly. "First, we must learn a great deal more,
and we must keep this an absolute secret until we are sure of the facts. Can
you imagine the panic there would be if this information leaked out? Of
course, the truth's inevitable sooner or later, but we
may be able to break it slowly.
"You'll
realize that the geological surveying side of my work is now utterly
unimportant. The first thing we have to do is to build a chain of stations to
find the extent of the structure. I visualize them at ten-mile intervals
towards the north, but I'd like to build the first one somewhere in South
London to see how extensive the thing is. The whole job will have to be kept as
secret as the building of the first radar chain in the late thirties.
"At
the same time, I'm going to push up my transmitter power again. I hope to be
able to beam the output much more narrowly, and so greatly increase the energy
and concentration. But this will involve all sorts of mechanical difficulties,
and I will need more assistance."
I promised to do my utmost to get further
aid, and the Professor hopes that you will soon be able to visit his laboratory
yourself. In the meantime I am attaching a photograph of the vision screen,
which although not as clear as the original will, I hope, prove beyond dc^ubt that our observations are not mistaken.
I am well aware that our grant to the
Interplanetary Society has brought us dangerously near the total estimate for
the year, but surely even the crossing of space is less important than the
immediate investigation of this discovery which may have the most profound
effects on the philosophy and the future of the whole human race. ...
I sat back and looked at Karn.
There was much in the document I had not understood, but the main outlines were
clear enough. "Yes," I said, "this is it. Where's that
photograph?"
He handed it over. The quality was poor, for
it had been copied many times before reaching us. But the pattern was
unmistakable and I recognized it at once.
"They
were good scientists," I sddadrniringly.
"That's Callastheon, all right. So we've found
the truth at last, even if it has taken us three hundred years to do it."
"Is
that surprising," asked Karn, "when you
consider the mountain of stun we've had to translate and the difficulty of
copying it before it evaporates?"
I
sat in silence for a while, thinking of the strange race whose relics we were
examining. Only once—never again!—had I gone up the great vent our engineers
had opened into the Shadow World. It had been a frightening and unforgettable
experience. The multiple layers of my pressure suit had made movement very
difficult, and despite their insulation, I could sense the unbelievable cola
that was all around me.
"What
a pity it was," I mused, "that our emergence destroyed them so
completely. They were a clever race, and we might have learned a lot from
them."
"I
don't think we can be blamed," said Karn.
"We never really believed that anything could exist under those awful
conditions of near vacuum and almost absolute zero. It couldn't be
helped."
I
did not agree. "I think it proves that they were the more intelligent
race. After all, they
discovered us first.
Everyone laughed at my grandfather when he said that the radiation he'd
detected from the Shadow World must be artificial."
Karn ran one of his tentacles over the
manuscript.
"We've
certainly discovered the cause of that radiation," he said. "Notice
that date—it's just a year before your grandfather's discovery. The Professor
must have got his grant all right!" He laughed unpleasantly. "It must
have given him a shock when he saw us coming up to the surface, right
underneath him."
I scarcely heard his words, for a most
uncomfortable feeling had suddenly come over me. I thought of the thousands of
miles of rock lying below the great city of Callestheon,
growing hotter and denser all the way to the Earth's unknown core.
And so I turned to Kara.
"That
isn't very funny," I said quietly. "It may be our turn next."
Brothers
Beyond the Void
BY PAUL W. FAIRMAN
It
was a matter of great
satisfaction to Marcus-son that he could be with Sam Conrad upon the eve of his
great adventure. Marcusson's day had been full; the
final briefing during the morning hours at the Foundation headquarters; the
many handshakes and well-wishes —these carried over into the afternoon cocktail
party given in his honor.
The
party had been a boring affair because Marcusson did
not care for liquor, the fevered enthusiasm which always went with it, nor the
brittle garden variety of compliment:
"Oh, Mr. Marcusson! You've no idea how thrilled I am to shake
your hand!"
"You'll
make it, boy—make it and come back again. A little thing like space won't stop
you!"
"Would you just give me one little old autograph, Mr. Marcusson? Here on my scarf. I'd be so thrilled."
Boring.
So Marcusson had left at the earliest
opportunity and hastened away to spend his last evening on earth—for a time at
least—with Sam Conrad. They sat on Conrad's vine-covered porch and there was lemonade in a
pitcher filled with tinkling cubes of ice; that, the fragrant night, and the
quiet restful aura of a true friend.
Wonderful.
Marcusson lay back in his chair and closed his eyes.
"I'll remember this," he said.
Sam
Conrad puffed on his pipe. "I'm honored. The world's most currently famous
man comes to visit me."
"Cut
it out. My head's crammed full with that kind of rot. It's also full of exact
science and cold mathematical calculations. Facts and figures haunt my dreams.
I want some good steadying conjecture—some of your tobacco-stained philosophy
to wet down the indigestible mass."
"Are you afraid,
Charles?"
"No—no,
I don't think so." Marcusson leaned suddenly
forward in his chair. "Sam—what do you think I'll find?"
Conrad
shrugged. "Your men at the Foundation would know more about that than I.
Mars is really beyond the abstract and restful philosophies—"
"Let's
not kid ourselves. They know nothing at all—I know nothing."
"Nor
do I. But let's project a bit from what solid^ ground
we have. We'll look at it this way: you are a lone Earthman hoping to set your
feet on the planet Mars. Therefore, your instinctive interest is in your own
safety. What sort of people will you find there—if any? Will they haul you from
your ship and kick the life out of you? Will they find pleasure in tearing you
to pieces?"
"What do you think,
Sam?"
The
older man poured two leisurely glasses of lemonade. "We can project with
a fair chance of being right. Mars is an old planet. There will certainly be no
newly evolved life-forms there. So, if you find living creatures, they will
certainly have every right to be called people."
'Til go along with that."
"Ana people, Charles, are the same everywhere."
"I don't know-"
"There is absolutely no reason why they
shouldn't be. In constructing humankind, Nature invented a fixed formula—a
pattern of behavior built upon basic instincts to meet certain physical needs
and spiritual conditions. Those conditions, so far as a humanoid is concerned, are the same here on Earth as
they would be in the furthest reaches of space. Physical characteristics, of
course, are changeable to meet changed geographical and geological conditions.
But such things are only trappings; outer garments, so to speak. The spiritual
and emotional care of the humanoid is
as fixed as the stars."
"Then you believe
people are the same everywhere?"
"People—wherever
they are able to exist—are all the same."
Marcusson left an hour later. He shook hands with
Conrad at the gate and pointed to a certain spot in the heavens. "Tomorrow
night about this time, look just-there. You may not see me, but don't forget to
look."
"I certainly shall.
Good luck."
As Marcusson drove home, he thought again of Conrad's words
and found a comfort in them. Not that he was afraid, he assured himself.
Then
he refuted that assertion and admitted the truth. Of course he was afraid. Any
man in his position would know fear whether he admitted it or not. So the words
of his friend were a comfort.
People—wherever
they are able to exist—are all the same. And as he went to sleep, the thought was still there: People are all the same.
Everything went off as scheduled—as smoothly
and efficiently as Foundation know-how and money could make it. And Marcusson was struck, later, by how swiftly it all
slithered into the past and found a storage-niche in his memory. He thought of
this when he was far out in space and there was time to think.
He also thought of Sam
Conrad.
But
the schedule ran true, and before too long there were other things to think
about. A planet rearing up out of the void to seemingly snatch at his little
craft and bring it into strange port.
Here,
the mathematics failed to some extent. Marcus-son was supposed to have set down
in daylight, but as he arced in out of his orbit, the
moons of Mars were racing through the sky. This was a bit disappointing, but he
set down safely, so the mathematics could not really be charged with failure.
He left the ship, cautiously removed his oxygen mask, and found he could
breathe. Also, that he was exhausted to a point of physical weakness. He sat
down on the cool ground for a moment's rest. He slept.
He awakened. Daylight was
blazing down. He blinked.
And saw the Martians.
There
were two of them—males, Marcusson decided. One was
about three inches shorter than the other and the taller stood roughly four
feet five inches. They wore clothing of a loose, comfortable sort. The garments
were dyed in the brightest hues imaginable and, while they hung to body
contour, they seemed to be starched or impregnated with some similar substance.
The
Martians were not ugly or especially beautiful from the standpoint of an Eartnman's eye. Nor was the land striking in any manner
whatsoever. There was a gray spired city off to the
left, but the only Martians in sight were the two males who stood at a safe
distance regarding him.
One
of them was obviously armed. He carried a small stick with a butt set into it
at right angles. He gripped the butt lightly in his small fist, but made ho
motion to use the weapon.
But Marcusson paid scant attention to all this. These were
merely the outer trappings—the superficial structure-work in which these
people existed.
He
was interested basically and tensely in—the Martians.
He got slowly to his feet, careful to make no
sudden movements. They were alert, wary, but not afraid. They had eyes of a
particularly clear sea-green, and behind these eyes was intelligence. They paid
no attention to the ship, having evidently inspected it to their satisfaction
while he slept. They watched Marcusson and discussed
him between themselves in a musical language— a pleasant, bird-like warble that
gave off most ably the nuances of mood, thought, and inflection for which
anyone unfamiliar with a language always listens.
Marcusson tentatively extended a hand, thinking, with
elation, that all was well. People were the same everywhere. These could be
two Earthmen inspecting an interplanetary arrival on Terra. Their reactions,
their natural caution, their instincts, were of the same pattern exactly.
One
of them was eyeing the gun on Marcusson's hip. Quite
obviously, the Martian knew what it was. Marcusson
made no motion toward it. Rather, he smiled and raised his hand, palm outward.
"I
am Charles Marcusson. I come from Earth. I come in
peace and with a spirit of brotherhood." He didn't expect them to
understand, but he had invented that speech during the long hours in void and
wanted to get it off his chest.
The
Martians glanced at each other with bright interest. They did not speak to Marcusson but discussed something between themselves,
glancing now and again at the spires of the city beyond the rolling hills.
It was obvious to Marcusson
that they were attempting to arrive at some decision. A moment later he knew
this had been accomplished because they nodded in agreement and turned their
attention to the Earthman.
But cautiously and with ever-present alertness. The one with the weapon motioned—a beckoning
motion—after which he pointed across the hills toward a spot somewhat to the
right of the city.
Then,
both Martians invited Marcusson to walk in that
direction by doing so themselves. They stopped, glanced back expectantly, and
both of them smiled.
Marcusson chuckled inwardly at these hospitable and
kindly gestures. Without hesitation, he moved in the indicated direction. The
Martians registered, between themselves, a marked satisfaction. An almost
childlike elation, Marcusson thought, at getting
their simple ideas across to him. They did not come close, but moved to a point
on either side of him and well out of harm's way if he made a quick movement.
The armed one kept^his weapon ever at ready, but his
smile mirrored the friendliness in his mind.
Marcusson estimated they had traveled about four miles
when they moved over a low hill and came to the house. Obviously it was a
house, but it was like nothing Marcusson had ever
seen in the way of a dwelling.
It
was a perfect square and no attempt had been made to achieve beauty. Each side
ran about twenty feet, and beside it was a smaller square, identical in every
respect except size. Grayish windowless walls about ten feet
high. Marcusson got the impression of a
stockade with a roof, and a tool shed hard by.
The
door was merely a section of the wall that pushed inward. Marcusson
would have had trouble locating it. One of the Martians opened the door and
then both of them stepped back, a careful distance away, and indicated. Marcusson was being invited to precede them.
This
he did and was struck immediately by the lighting system inside; or rather, by
the apparent absence of a lighting system. He could not discover from whence
came the iUumination; yet, through some indirect
means, there was shadowless light throughout the
single room of the house.
Swiftly
he took the place in, and marveled at the entirely different manner in which
another race on another planet could arrive at the same objective as the inhabitants
of Earth. While the contents of the great room bore no similarity to the
furnishings of a Terran home, yet there was doubt
that people could live here comfortably and adequately.
They'll
be surprised, he
thought, when
I tell them about this back in New York.
The Martians entered behind him, closed the
door and looked at each other in complete understanding.
Never
in his life had Marcusson had such a feeling of
contentment, well-being, and achievement. At times he thought to marvel at how
smoothly everything had gone. Time slipped by and he felt no sense of urgency,
because each day brought accomplishment in increased knowledge of these
people.
He
did not see any Martians other than the two in whose house he lived. And he got
the idea he was being jealously guarded by these two; sort of an honored guest
they didn t care to share with their world.
This
amused him and he made no protest because he felt all that could be taken care
of in due time. Besides, he was learning a great deal about the Martians. He
discovered they were far ahead of Earthlings in many facets of science. The lighting, for instance. He was never able to discover
from whence it came. Yet he knew that it was artificial.
The small shed next to the house seemed to
contain a great many things they needed. He was never invited to enter it and
did not press the point, but he felt sure the lighting, the refrigeration, the
water supply, and all the Martian's conveniences of living originated in that
small building.
He
was somewhat surprised that, while the two Martians were unfailingly attentive
and courteous, they continued to mistrust him. They never came close to him in
a pair. Always one stood back on the alert, ready to use the small weapon if
necessary.
He
discarded his own weapon the first night, as a gesture of friendship. He was disappointed,
but not discouraged, when they did not reciprocate.
Yet
he had no complaint. It was a little like having two excellent servants to do
his bidding night and day.
And
he was puzzled at the continual air of anticipation between them. They had long
discussions in the soft liquid language and, though he couldn't understand it,
he felt it was all of a tenor, always relative to the same subject.
Then
came the day he'd hoped for—the day they definitely became more intimate with
him. The taller of the two took the initiative in the missionary work, and
after a little time Maracusson found out what he was
driving at. He wanted to know about the place Marcus-son had come from.
Their
intercourse took on varied forms. Marcusson printed
the word Earth
on a metal writing plate
and the Martian swiftly understood. He put down some spidery hieroglyphics of
his own and Marcusson picked up a smattering of the
language. But not much. It was very difficult.
Most of the communications were by way of
drawings. When Marcusson indicated the Martian
domicile with a wave of his arm and then sketched a Terran
cottage, the
Martian
was highly elated and went into conference with his partner.
The
Martian evinced a tremendous interest in the sketch and Marcusson
elaborated upon it greatly, sketching out the rooms, the furnishings, and
several outside angles until the Martian appeared satisfied.
On
the day following the final sketching of a Terran
dwelling place, Marcusson awoke to find what he rated
as almost a miracle. The Martians alertly invited him outside and over the
brow of the nearest hilL Marcusson
gasped.
They had built him a house.
They
watched him closely for his reaction, and were pleased when it was favorable. Marcusson moved forward in a daze, entered the cottage and
felt himself to be back on Earth. Every detail of his sketches had been carried
out with amazing accuracy. The furniture, the floor coverings, the
wallpaper—even the light fixtures were in place. And when Marcusson
snapped a wall switch, the bulbs gave forth the yellow radiance he had known on
Terra.
He
was astounded. They
are far ahead of us, he
thought. Beside
them, we are children. Here advance science is commonplace. Science
of which we have not even dreamed.
But
Conrad was right, he
thought warmly. They
are people. Basically they are no different from us.
Marcusson
moved into his new home that night, much to the delight of the Martians. He ate
his dinner at a table which could have come from any Terran
furniture store. He lay down in a bed any Terran
would have been proud to own.
The
Martians did not dine with him. Instead they stood by, conversing in their
soothing musical language, happiness mirrored in every syllable.
When darkness felL they left him alone in his house.
Marcusson filled the early evening hours studying the
written Martian language. He had made quite a little progress with the words
and could now pick out phrases and whole sentences from the long, narrow books
the two Martians had given him.
It was
about time, he decided, to widen his areas of research. Tomorrow he would
insist upon visiting the gray city across the hills.
But
the people of the city came to visit him. He arose the next morning and found
breakfast awaiting him. But as he sat down to the table, something caught his
eye through the window. He arose and went outside.
The
Martians were there—hundreds of them—and more coming over the hills from the spired city. ^_.
A
chill such as he had never known swept through Marcusson.
He saw the bars in which he was imprisoned— the cage erected around his
house—the sign in Martian lettering he interpreted into his own language and
read with horror:
EARTH
CREATURE—IN ITS NATURAL HABITAT
He saw the staring eyes of the Martians and
realized the full, ghastly truth of Conrad's words: People are the same everywhere.
He gripped the cage bars in
his fists.
And
screamed.
The
Gentleman Is an Epwa
BY CARL JACOBI
Whatever
you might say about
Grayson, he was a good colonial official. He was forty, which is a bit old for
an Earthman to hold down an incountry post on Venus,
but he had been in the Service eighteen years and his record as controlleur was unimpeachable.
In
eighteen years he had banged about quite a bit, yet one would never guess it to
hear him talk. Personal reminiscences were rare with him; he much preferred a
game of chess or simply his pipe and a chair on the veranda, the last an
architectural addition he had insisted on before taking over the Residency here
at Blue Mold.
It
had made the post odd looking, to say the least. There was the white walled
dome, fashioned of steel-bound concrete, set down in the midst of that swamp
wilderness like a half-submerged baseball. There were the latticed antenna
towers for the radio that somehow never worked. And clapped
on to one side of the dome, incongruous and unsightly, a veranda of Venusian bamboo and nipa thatch.
Grayson
was sitting there, enjoying the comparative cool of the evening after an
unusually humid day when his ear caught the rhythmic purr of an electric launch
somewhere beyond the screening wall of lathea trees.
"That
will be Parkhurst," he said to himself, rising.
"It's about time."
Five
weeks he had been alone, and more than anything he wanted company. It was just
five weeks to the day that young Oberlin, his assistant, had been taken sick
with fever. Grayson had packed him off in the post gig while he was still able
to get about.
"Tell
Parkhurst to send me another as good
as you," he had said not unkindly. "You deserve a better place than
this anyway."
Grayson
opened the screen door and made his way down the catwalk to the jetty. The last
glimmers of daylight were just passing. In the gloom, silhouetted against the
lighter glow of open water, he saw the launch turn inshore and head for a
landing.
A
moment later he caught a line and secured it to the bollards as a tall gangly
man leaped onto the jetty.
"Hullo,
Grayson, the man said. "How's every little'
thing?"
Grayson
shook hands warmly but cast a surprised eye down into the launch.
"Everything's fine sir, he said, "but where's my new assistant?"
Parkhurst
smiled. "We'll discuss that later. Right now I could do with a drink and a
chance to stretch my legs. I would have taken a copter, but you know how those
things act up over this infernal bog. . . ."
In
puzzled silence, Grayson led the way back to the veranda, switched on a lamp
and an insect repellant tube and got out glasses and a bottle of Earthside whiskey. Parkhurst
lingered over his drink luxuriously. He was a big man, almost completely bald
save for a fringe of reddish hair just above the ears, and there was an air of
efficiency about him in spite of his bulk.
"It
was a good idea, sending Oberlin back when you did," he said. "The
medics at the base found he had incipient mold fever. That can be pretty
nasty, but fortunately they caught it before it got a start. I read your
report too. You're doing a good job here, Grayson. I don't mind telling you that this post is
better managed than any in Venus South."
He
went on, discussing the weather, giving the idle gossip of the base which under
ordinary circumstances would have held Grayson in rapt attention. Tonight,
however, the controlleur writhed
under the delay. At length he could stand it no longer.
"In
my report, sir, I asked for another assistant. I don't mind the swamp, though
it can bepretty bad at
times, but it's no place for a man alone. The psychos said that when they laid out this place and . . ."
Parkhurst
smiled like a man withholding something until the last possible moment.
"Oh I brought you your
assistant all right,"
"You
did?' said Grayson, looking bewildered. "Then where. . .
. ?"
"He's
in the launch," chuckled Parkhurst,
"Under the hatch."
"Under the hatch . . .
!"
"Perhaps
I'd better explain," said Parkhurst,
"Your assistant—his name is Rafael, by the way—comes directly from the
Ensenada Production Works at Madrid on Earth. He represents the latest
electronic development and scientific research of the present day. He . .
."
"Just a minute, sir." A horribly chilling thought had suddenly
struck Grayson. "Are you telling me that you've brought a robot?"
Parkhurst got a cheroot out of his pocket and lit it
slowly. "Not exactly," he said. "Wait, I'll go down to the
launch and get him."
Grayson's
fists clenched as his superior went out the screen door and disappeared into
the blackness. Parkhurst was gone only a moment. When
he reappeared, a second figure was at his heels. As they entered the ellipse
of light, Grayson stared, then felt his misgivings
pass.
The newcomer was tall and erect, a man who appeared to be about
thirty-five, with strong aquiline features, clad in a suit of whites, plastic
insect boots and a mold-protector helmet.
"This
is Rafael, your new assistant," Parkhurst said.
"He's an Epwa."
Grayson
grinned. "Glad to know you," he said cordially. Then: "Pardon
my ignorance, but what the devil's an Epwa?"
The
shock was quick in coming. The hand he stretched out
closed over fingers that gave resiliently but were cold as metal to the touch.
A voice said flat and tone-lessly, "How do you
do. Yes, I am an Epwa. The word is derived from the
names, Ensenada Production Works Assembly, where I was created. I hope our
relationship will be a mutually favorable one."
So
they had sent him a mechanical contrivance in place of an assistant! Grayson
could feel the indignation rise like a hot flush within him. And after eighteen
years! That's what came of giving the best part of one's life to this damned
colonial service. Probably thought he was getting old, and this was a polite
way of telling him he'd better look to his retirement, Grayson remembered with
a pang the days of his youth on Earth. He had been something then. He had
graduated from Western Hemisphere College but he had pushed his way through
school by his own bootstraps. His father had been nothing more than Third Engineer
on a space freighter. Grayson gloried in the fact that he had been accepted by
the new post atomic aristocracy on the basis or intelligence alone. Out here on
Venus South he had managed to preserve his mental superiority by his dealings
with the
Venusians,
who were, according to the Mokart anthropological
scale, a decidely inferior race.
He
looked again at Rafael, and he was astonished at the life-like qualities of the
new assistant. Save for a frozen immobility of countenance—the eyes did not wink
and there was no movement of the features except when he spoke—the impression
that he was facing a human was overpowering.
Parkhurst smiled as he witnessed Grayson's astonishment.
"You're behind the times, old man. Wonders have been done in electronics during
the last decade. Rafael here can do everything a man can do and is a damned
sight more efficient. He requires no food or sleep. He will obey commands as
far as his powers of visibility are concerned. Moreover, he records all those
commands on an internal chart for future reference. He can talk and answer
questions, though naturally his abilities' in that field are somewhat limited.
But he can hold up his end of the conversation just so he isn't required to do
so too often. A background of personal memoirs has been recorded into the
mechanism of his brain. His outer covering, which as you see has been tinted
to resemble flesh, is formed of the new transluk plastic which permits his entire inner workings to be visible when an
inner light is switched on. He's as good as and probably better than any
assistant you could possibly get,
Grayson
sank back in bis chair with a look of awe. "Are
there a lot of these . . . these Epwas . . . back on
Earth?"
"No."
Parkhurst shook his head slowly. "Not yet at any
rate. Public reaction has been somewhat antagonistic to them so far. That's why
we're trying them out here in the colonies first."
Two
hours later Parkhurst shook hands, re-entered the
launch and disappeared into the swamp darkness. As he paced back down the
catwalk, Grayson's first emotion was one of embarrassment. How to treat Rafael?
Like any other mechanical contrivance with which the post was equipped—the
automatic ventilators and air filters, the storm warning gadgets, the radar screen
which kept him appeaised of the movements and
activities of the neighboring Venusian tribes? Or
should he treat him with a quasi-human relationship as one would an uneducated
native or a child?
Upon
reaching the veranda, Grayson said self-consciously, "If you'll follow
me, I'll show you to your quarters."
Rafael
nodded and rose jerkily from the chair. Passing through the central quarters
of the dome, lit now by a soft glow of hidden lights, Grayson noted with some
irritation that the assistant was so light on his feet no sound of his steps
would be heard. He opened the door of the spare bedroom, and Rafael stepped
inside.
"I
get up at seven," the Earthman said. You will go down to the spring and
bring back a bucket of fresh water some time before that. The water system here
is temporarily out of- order, and I haven't got around
to repairing it yet."
Rafael said, "I
understand. Where is the spring?"
The
question was fiat and toneless but clear and distinct. Then Grayson
remembered: the assistant could obey commands only as far as his visibility or
detailed directions went,
"The
spring is approximately fifty yards from the dome," he explained. You go
down the catwalk as far as the jetty, then turn right
on the path there." He added, "Be careful not to stray off the path.
Quicksand, you know."
Rafael
said, "I understand. Spring, fifty yards, path,
quicksand."
Grayson
went across to his room, undressed, and lay down on his bed. He tried to court
sleep but lay there wide awake while troubled thoughts milled in his brain.
What the devil was wrong with them at the base? It was companionship he needed
here at Blue Mold. One man could easily take care of the duties, but one man
would go quite mad if left in this swamp alone for any length of tune. It
wasn't so much the silence or the incredible isolation, though they were bad
enough. It was the subtle, insidious alien quality of the marsh that worked
slowly into a man's mind and took hold there like a bulbous thing alive.
Wherever one went there was mold, blue parasitical mold that came drifting down
from the thick sky like balls of indigo cotton. Where they landed, they adhered
with leech-like tenacity, developing rootlets, growing, spreading with a
loathsome fecundity. The roily water was blue, the cat-tail trees were blue,
the marsh grass, the Venusian bamboo, the very air had a bluish cast to it. And the damnable color
was endemic; already Grayson had detected bluish spots at his fingertips,
along the under side of his arms.
The Venusian tribes who looked to, him as their magistrate
alone seemed to thrive in these surroundings. But they were a low caliber lot,
semi-nomadic, too shiftless to build decent permanent habitations.
About
midnight Grayson finally fell into a restless sleep. He dreamed unpleasant dreams
of pulling a launch through the shore ooze of the great swamp—like a boatman
on the Volga—while four Epwas, each identical to the
others, cracked whips and urged him on. When he finally awoke, it was with the
enervating sensation that no time at all had elapsed He felt better, however,
after he had showered and dressed, and when he went into central-quarters an
agreeable sight met his gaze. On the table was a flagon of cold water. Rafael
stood in the center of the room, motionless, apparently awaiting commands.
Breakfast
over, Grayson crossed to his desk at the far side of the room to lay out his
work for the day. This was the part of the morning he enjoyed best. Here he
could sit amid the pleasant disorderhness of piled
papers, pencils, pipes, and his books on Venusian lepidopters and
C |
lan
briefly his work for the next seven or eight hours, 'he fact that he never
followed through on these plans troubled him not at all. Grayson wasn t a tidy man; he did things hit or miss fashion,
although in the end he usually managed to accomplish what he had set out to do.
Two
feet away from his desk, he stopped staring. Gone were the familiar piles of
paper. In their place was a naked expanse of desk surface, the dark ivonwon wood/ polished to the nines. His pipes were neatly arrayed in the rack
on the wall; his books, three of which he had left* open to passages he wanted
to reread, were closed and stacked, bindings out, on the desk top.
Grayson's
face slowly drained of color. Like all untidy men he hated to have his personal
possessions disturbed. He swung and called Rafael. The assistant approached
quietly. "After this," Grayson said, controlling his anger with an
effort, "you will touch nothing on this desk at all. Do you understand, nothing at all. As far as you're concerned,
this desk is tabu, . . . verboten."
The assistant said, "Desk . . . not
touch ... I understand."
It
was a full week before Grayson adjusted himself to the presence of his new
companion, but never, he told himself, could be quite accept the fact that
Rafael was not human. Several times he had ordered the assistant to stand still
while he switched on the light that lit up his intenor.
Then he stood there and marveled at the world of wires, electronic tubes, and
resistors, which made up the assistant's inner man.
But
as Parkhurst had said, Rafael was efficient. He
performed every duty expertly and completely. His memory was prodigious; he
needed to be told only once to do a task. It was this very efficiency that
began to eat away, like drops of falling water, at Grayson's usual aplomb.
Unconsciously
he fell to watching the assistant in his various performances for something to
criticize. He found nothing. Moreover, Rafael was at all times a gentleman
which Grayson was not. It infuriated the Earthman to receive a quiet spoken
genteel reply in answer to one of his own that was barbed with profanity.
"Rafael, get me my meerschaum pipe. *
"Meerschaum ... I do not understand the word, sir."
"You idiot! It's the white one on the desk." "Desk . . . desk. I am not to touch anything on the
desk, sir."
"Damn you, you're to do as I say. Get
the pipe."
But
Grayson remembered one detail of Rafael's construction very well and he took
pains to act accordingly. The assistant's internal chart upon which were
recorded all the commands given him. It would not do to send him about on false
missions.
It was the last day of January when Rafael
had been brought to the post. Now it was getting on to the middle of February
and on the fifteenth certain as clockwork, the rainy-mold season would begin.
That meant for exactly thirty days they would be confined to the dome. Weather
changes went off with machine precision here in Venus South, and during the rm days an Earthman's life wasn't worth a single credit if exposed to the
elements in the great swamp.
On
the fourteenth he said to Rafael, "You will leave at once for Village Xanon, see the headman and find out why the regular tax
payment has not been made. Village Xanon is
approximately ten kilometers from here. It lies inland
due East, and there is a trail of plastic discs mounted on trees at regular
intervals. Be back here by tomorrow noon at the latest."
A
slight whirring issued from the assistant's head as he mulled over this
information.
After
Rafael had gone, Grayson settled in a chair, lit his pipe and felt extremely
satisfied. He had given the assistant a metal umbrella to fend off the falling mold
X |
ores,
but during the rm days that was scant protection, id rm started tomorrow. Although he would not admit it to himself, Grayson
hoped Rafael would not return. Then when Parkhurst
came for his regular inspection trip in March, he could say, "Send me down
another assistant, will you. And make it an Earthman this rime. That last
contraption of yours wasn't very . .. durable."
But
Rafael did come back. He came back with his new insect boots stained and
plastered with mud, with his suit of whites ripped and torn and his face mottled
from contact with mold spores. He brought not only the overdue tax payment but
also a small bag woven of blue ipso grass.
"What's
this, Rafael?" "A personal gift, sir." "A gift?"
"From the Venusians,
sir.
They . . . like me."
It was the evenings that Grayson always
disliked. Where the average Earthman finds this a time to relax and review the
events of the day, Grayson always saw himself a day older with another period
of frustration ticked off in a life that had been one large disappointment. He
was tired then too, even though the day's activities had been light, but
weariness was a feeling unknown to Rafael.
Grayson began to hate the sight of the
assistant, always so fresh, so composed, always so ready to respond to his
every command. The fact that Rafael needed no sleep to revitalize his energy
led the Earthman to wonder what occupied the assistant's thoughts during the
lonely hours of the night. That was absurd, of course. An Epwa
couldn't think in the abstract sense. Yet as if to refute this, Rafael was
always ready to launch into a series of personal reminiscences whenever the
silence hung heavy in the dome. Grayson knew those tales and anecdotes were
part of a fabricated past skillfully woven into Rafael's brain by his ingenious
manufacturer, but the effect of reality was always there.
"Did
I ever tell you of the time I was lost on Mars' red desert?"
"Yes, you did, Rafael. Keep your
machine-made recollections to yourself."
As
the days of his enforced stay in the dome dragged past a land of tension began
to build up in the Earthman. Grayson sought to fight this tension by making
himself physically slack. He neglected the first rule of a colonial on any of
the backward planets, that of dressing for dinner and shaving every day. Yet
although a disregard for these habits helped to alleviate the nervous strain,
he was acutely aware that the assistant needed no such indulgences.
And
then, as suddenly as it had begun, the rain and the mold ended. But with a
richer luxuriance than before caused by the excessive moisture, the blue
vegetation now took on a purplish hue that spread itself voluptuously across
the great marsh. Grayson felt the tension within him increase rather than
lessen.
To
make matters worse, the Indigo birds—Ornithop-tera-azure—changed their migration habits and came down
from Venus North, nesting in vast numbers about the post. A repulsive scavenger
species with razor-sharp beaks and long saurian tails, they had an unpleasant
trick of directing their attack against the eyes. Grayson found it necessary to
carry a weapon with him whenever he left the dome. The birds stayed two weeks.
They gave way to the Lyzata, equally horrible, who
were fur-bearing serpents of python size and who, though harmless, crawled
over everything like enormous caterpillars.
In
the early part of April Grayson realized quite suddenly that native conditions
here in his sector of Venus South had gone from bad to worse. Neither Village Xanon nor any of the other pahongs had followed up on their regular monthly tax payments. Furthermore, when
he occasionally met a Venusian on the jungle trail,
the native stared at him impudently and made no move to bow, a recognition
which the controlleur always
insisted upon. Grayson had only contempt for these swamp creatures, and his
dealings with them, as overlord, were touched with cruelty and arrogance. Two
years ago he had found it necessary to whip a Venusian
arcolat, within an inch of his life, all because the scoundrel had failed to wash
his filthy hands before preparing food that had been presented to the Earthman.
When
Grayson went to Village Xanon to see about the tax,
he was met with open resentment. The grizzled old chief replied he could not
pay for five days and no amount of threatening could alter his stand.
"Great sir, why do you not send the
man-who-cannot-smile to our pahong? He is kind and considerate and speaks to us softly."
Grayson
stiffened. The man-who-cannot-smile! You mean Rafael?"
"That is his name.
Yes."
The Earthman controlled his
rage with difficulty.
"Get
this through your head," he replied. "It makes no difference who comes to collect, you'll pay. Understand?"
Then
he had done something he regretted because it violated one of the most
stringent rules of a Venus colonial. He had struck the chief across the mouth
with the flat of his hand. All too well Grayson knew that to a Venusian the body of a chief was considered inviolable.
Retarning the
back trail to the dome, the controlleur told himself it was time indeed to get rid of his Epwa
assistant. Not only was Rafael a calculating errorless machine who could offer
no normal companionship, he was disturbing the morale of the entire native
organization. Let him stay on here with his equality treatment of the Venusians
and Blue Mold would shortly become unbearable.
Grayson mulled this over after he had reached
the post.
He
knew he could get rid of Rafael by no regular channels. Parkhurst
was a straight-laced fool to whom rules and regulations were gods to be obeyed
at all costs. He would never consent to replace the assistant unless he were given a logical reason. Moreover Rafael's internal
chart effectually blocked any move by which the assistant might be made to do
harm to himself.
The controlleur set about devising plans and putting them into action.
He carefully changed the plastic discs trail markings so that instead of
leading to Xanon village they wound deeper into a
remote section of the swamp.
But
although he was gone a day longer, Rafael came back from his mission, bringing
the overdue tax payment plus more gifts the Venusians had given him.
Grayson
next dispatched Rafael via the spare gig in-country some eighteen kilometers to
investigate a report that a saurian beast had been seen in that area. Before
the assistant left Grayson drilled several holes in the gig below the water
line and plugged them with quick melting cozar, a kind of beeswax found in the swamp.
But
again the assistant returned and placidly made his report. There was no beast
but only an odd shaped rock outcropping which the natives had mistaken at a distance.
Grayson nodded silently and this time asked no questions.
Instead
he went out the screen door, paced into the compound and halted a short
distance from the dome, staring up into the thick sky. Moments passed, and he
glanced at his watch impatiently.
Abruptly
a high pitched scream of air sounded. An instant later the aluminum shell
landed, half burying itself in the spongy soil.
Someday
the men back at the base who figured the trajectory of this cartridge were
going to miscalculate and hit the dome. Grayson picked up the shell, unscrewed
its cap and dumped out its contents; mostly magazines and newspapers, a few
letters.
The
Earthman always went over his mail thoroughly. There were several copies of Colonial Spaceways,
one of which contained an
article, The
Future of the Epwa, which he read with a good deal of interest.
There were also two decks of playing cards sent by a thoughtful friend in Venus
City.
One passage in the Epwa
article he read several times:
Under average conditions the Epwa is a highly developed mechanism that is practically
indestructible. Care should be taken, however, not to subject its mental powers
to sustained strain over a long period of time. Failure to heed this warning by
the manufacturer may result in a complete breakdown of the device's electronic
brain.
The controlleur rose and called to Rafael. When the assistant appeared, Grayson took one
of the decks of cards and tossed it upon the table.
"I'll
show you a game," he said, "a game that will test your powers of
concentration. It's called Solitaire."
He
explained carefully. This wasn't ordinary Canfield solitaire. It was a better
game, less ruled by chance.
"In
the first part you need a partner," Grayson said, "although it isn't
required. This partner goes through the deck, drawing a card at a time,
concentrating on its suit and numerical value, but permitting only the backs to
be visible to you. Now here is where parapsychology or cryptesthesia
comes into play. Some persons call it E. S. P.—or Extra Sensory Perception. As
the partner concentrates on each card, you attempt to receive his thought wave
and "guess" what the card is. In this fashion you divide the deck
into four packs of what you assume to be four complete suits. Of course if you
rely on chance alone, the odds against you would be pretty heavy. But since
mental action probably sets off a radiation and since your electronic brain
has been devised to receive such stimuli, you should score fairly high.
"The
rest is simple. Drawing one card at a time from any of the four packs, you form
a cross of five cards face up on the table. You play upon this cross in reverse
rotation, paying no attention to suit. In other words, on a nine you can play
any eight, on a queen any knave. When you have played as far as you can, the
next card you draw goes in the corner, thus filling out the cross into a
square. Let us suppose this card is a five spot. Then into each corner must go
one of the other three fives and on these corner cards you build up in regular
rotation: six, seven, eight, et cetera, according to suit.
"The
object of the game is to form each corner into a complete run of one suit, but
the method is far more than a simple matter of luck. It goes back to E. S. P.
and your mental division of the pack by thought-concentration. Is all that
clear?"
Rafael
nodded and Grayson fancied he saw interest light up that plastic face. They
began to play and when the controlleur had gone through the deck for the initial selection, he left the table,
crossed to a chair, lit his pipe, and sat down to watch.
It
was worth watching. With his head bent slightly forward and his body erect in
the chair, the assistant was the picture of concentration. He formed the cross
of five cards. Moving slowly, slurring to the discard pile only after long
thought, he began to build up three corners. But the fourth corner was
stubborn and as the pile began to grow, it soon became evident that he was
going to lose. At length he swept the cards together impatiently.
"Again!" he said
to Grayson.
So
again Grayson went through the deck while the assistant mentally sorted and
evaluated them. Rafael was playing hurriedly now, almost as if a high stake had
been placed on the game.
For
an hour Grayson watched as Rafael lost game after game. The controlleur yawned then and headed for his room. But halfway he checked on impulse
and slid into the chair before the.radar panel. For
several moments he sat there, turning dials and making adjustments. Then he
leaned back, a scowl darkening his features.
The
screen told a disturbing story. The Venusians were on the move; large parties
from three neighboring villages were apparently converging on Village Xanon. And that could mean only one thing: the grievance
ceremony, a council held by the men of the tribes to discuss an alleged wrong
brought against them by an officer of the government. That's what came of
having a mealy mouthed mechanical parrot for an assistant.
Grayson shrugged and went
to bed.
When
he emerged into central quarters the next morning Rafael was still at the table,
playing cards. The Earth-man smiled crookedly but said nothing.
He
went about his duties at the post and in the afternoon set out into the swamp
to inspect his traps. He was bending over one of the snares when a spiked thorn
dart whispered by his head and plunged into a nearby bole of a tree. In a fury
Grayson wheeled in time to see a Venusian thrust his
head above a fern frond, leer at him defiantly, and then disappear.
That
settled it. It was time to put these damned aliens in their place. Grayson
swung into the back trail and headed rapidly for the post. Back at the dome he
went to his room, took down a heat pistol and nipped the chamber to see that it
had a full charge. He dropped it into his pocket and strode into central
quarters.
Rafael was seated at the
table, playing cards.
Grayson
smiled as he observed the partial fruition of his plans. If it were possible
for an Epwa to do so, the assistant already looked
wan and haggard. There was a dull reddish glow about his eyes and his plastic
hands as he manipulated the cards, moved nervously and jerkily.
"I'm
going to Village Xanbn," Grayson said, striding
to the door. "You will stay here and take care of the post."
Rafael looked up from the
cards.
"Village Xanon
is dangerous now, sir," he said. "If I don't hear from you within a
reasonable length of time, I'll follow."
"You'll
do nothing of the sort," Grayson said. "You'll stay here and play the
cards. That's an order."
Parkhurst's regular inspection visit was three days
late, and the colonial official was somewhat concerned as he nudged the
electric launch to the landing stage at Blue Mold. Brooding silence hung over
the post and no light was visible through the ports of the dome. Parkhurst climbed the veranda steps.
"Hullo!" he
called. "Anyone here?"
A
darker shadow roused itself then from a wing-back chair as Rafael, the
assistant, came forward, switching on a lamp.
"I
give you greetings," he said formally. "Grayson has not yet
returned."
Parkhurst
surveyed Rafael closely. The Epwa, he was glad to
see, appeared in good shape. His clothing, although showing signs of wear, was
clean and neatly pressed, and his plastic face and hands seemed in perfect
condition.
"WelL how've you
two been getting on?" Parkhurst queried,
lighting a cheroot. "Where is Grayson, by the way?"
,!He's at Village Xanon,"
Rafael replied. "He told me to stay here and play the game."
Parkhurst's eyes lifted. "Game?"
"A game called
Solitaire. It is played with these cards."
The
colonial official moved across to the table and while he watched, Rafael swept
the deck together and began to explain the game as Grayson had explained it to
him. Listening, Parkhurst showed impatience at first;
then his brow furrowed in a deep frown.
"Grayson preferred to go himself. He
went to see about a grievance council the Venusians are holding."
"Grievance
co—!" Alarm sounded in Pargkhurst's voice.
"Great thunder, what's wrong?"
"I don't know exactly. Except that Grayson struck their chief when he became
insubordinate." Parkhurst slumped slowly
into a chair. A muscle
3 |
uivered on his cheek. "When was he due
back?" he emanded hoarsely.
"He
has been gone five days. Do you wish to play the game with me?"
Five
days! And the fool had struck a chief. Parkhurst
turned and stared out into the silent blackness that was the great swamp. Five
days! A controlleur had
implicit orders never under any circumstances to remain away from his post more
than forty-eight hours. Suddenly the colonial official's throat went dry and a
feeling of nausea entered his stomach. The cheroot slipped from his fingers to
the floor.
With
a queer inner horror he realized that Grayson was not going to return.
Parkhurst sat there in a stupor, cold sweat breaking
out upon his body while Rafael continued to babel
about the card game. His words seemed to come from far off. Something about the
deck Grayson had given him containing only fifty-one cards, an error which the
Epwa had discovered and taken care of soon after the
Earth-man's departure.
The
Enchanted Forest
BY FRITZ LEIBER
The
darkness was
fusty as Formalhautian Aa leaves, acrid as a Rigelian
brush fire, and it still shook faintly, like one of the dancing houses of the
Wild Ones. It was filled with a petulant, low humming, like nothing so much as a wounded Earth-wasp.
Machinery
whirred limpingly, briefly. An oval door opened in
the darkness. Soft green light filtered in—and the unique scent, aromatic in
this case yet with a grassy sourness, of a new planet.
The
green was imparted to the light by the thorny boughs or creepers crisscrossing
the doorway. To eyes dreary from deep sub-space the oval of interlaced, wnst-thick tendrils was a throat-lumping sight.
A
human hand moved delicately from the darkness toward the green barrier. The
finger-long, translucent thorns quivered, curved back ever so slowly, then struck —a hair-breadth short, for the hand had stopped.
The
hand did not withdraw, but lingered just in range, caressing danger. A sharp
gay laugh etched itself against the woundedly-humming
dark.
Have
to dust those devilish little green daggers to get out of the wreck, Elven thought. Lucky they were here though. The thorn
forest's cushioning-effect may have been the straw that saved the spaceboafs back—or at least mine.
Then Elven
stiffened. The humming behind him shaped itself into faint English speech
altered by centuries of slurring, but still essentially the same.
"You fly fast, Elven."
"Faster
than any of your hunters," Elven agreed softly
without looking around, and added, "FTL"—meaning Faster Than Light.
"You
fly far, Elven. Tens of light-years," the
wounded voice continued.
"Scores," Elven corrected.
"Yet I speak to you, Elven."
"But
you don't know where I am. I came on a blind reach through deep sub-space. And
your FTL radio can take no fix. You are shouting at infinity, Fedris."
"And
fly you ever so fast and far, Elven," the
wounded voice persisted, "you must finally go to ground, and then we will
search you out,"
Again
Elven laughed gayly. His
eyes were still on the green doorway. "You will search me out! Where will
you search me out, Fedris? On which of the million
planets of the sos? On which of the hundred million planets not
of the sos?"
The wounded voice grew weaker. "Your
home planet is dead, Elven. Of all the Wild Ones,
only you supped through our cordon."
This
time Elven did not comment vocally. He felt at his
throat and carefully took from a gleaming locket there a tiny white sphere no
bigger than a lady beetle. Holding it treasuringly in
his cupped palm, he studied it with a brooding mockery. Then, still handling it
as if it were an awesome object, he replaced it in the locket.
The wounded voice had sunk
to a ghostly whisper.
"You
are alone, Elven. Alone with the
mystery and terror of the universe. The unknown will find you,
Elven, even before we do. Time and space and fate
will all conspire againstyou.
Chance itself will—"
The
spectral FTL-radio voice died as the residual power in the wrecked- machinery
exhausted itself utterly. Silence filled the broken gut of the spaceboat.
Silence that was gayly shattered when Elven laughed a last time. Fedris the
Psychologist! Fedris the Fool! Did Fedris think to sap his nerve with witch-doctor threats and
the power of suggestion? As if a man—or woman— of the Wild Ones could ever be
brought to believe in the supernatural!
Not
that there wasn't an unearthliness loose in the universe, Elven
reminded himself somberly—an unearthly beauty born of danger and ultimate
self-expression. But only the Wild Ones knew that unearthliness. It could never be known to the poor tame hordes of the sos, who would always revere safety and timidity as most
members of the human sos—or society—have revered
them—and hate all lovers of beauty and danger.
Just
as they had hated the Wild Ones and so destroyed them.
All save one.
One,
had Fedris said? Elven
smiled cryptically, touched the locket at his neck, and leaped lightly to his
feet.
A short time later he had what he needed from
the wreck.
"And now, Fedris,"
he murmured, "I have a work of creation to perform." He smiled.
"Or should I say recreation?"
He directed at the green doorway the blunt
muzzle of a dustgun. There was no sound or flash, but
the green boughs shook, blackened—the thorns vanishing—and turned to a drifting
powder fine and dark as the ashes carpeting Earth's Moon. Elven
sprang to the doorway and for a moment he was poised there, yellow-haired,
cool-lipped, kughing-eyed, handsome as a young god—or
adolescent devil—in his black tunic embroidered with platinum. Then he leaned
out and directed the dustgun's ultrasonic downward
until he had cleared a patch of ground in the thorn forest. When this moment's
work was over, he dropped lightly down, the fine dust
puffing up to his knees at the impact.
Elven snapped off his dustgun,
flirted sweat from his face, laughed at his growing exasperation, and looked
around at the thorn forest, ft had not changed an iota
in the miles he'd made. Just the glassy thorns and the
lance-shaped leaves and the boughs rising from the bare, reddish earth.
Not another planet to be seen. Nor had he caught the tiniest glimpse of moving
life, large or small—save the thorns themselves, which "noticed him
whenever he came too close. As an experiment he'd let a baby one prick him and
it had stung abominably.
Such
an environment! What did it suggest, anyhow? Cultivation?
Or a plant that permeated its environs with poison, as
Earth's redwood its woody body. He grinned at the chill that flashed along his
spine.
And,
if there were no animal life, what the devil were the thorns for?
A
ridiculous forest! In its simplicity suggesting the enchanted
forests of ancient Earthly fairy tales. That idea should please witch
doctor Fedris!
If
only he had some notion of the general location of the planet he was on, he
might be able to make better guesses about its other life forms. Life spores
did drift about in space, so that solar systems and even star regions tended to
have biological similarities. But he'd come too fast and too curiously, too
fast even to see stars, in the Wild Ones' fastest and most curious boat, to
know where he was.
Or for Fedris to
know where he was, he reminded himself.
Or
for any deep-space approach-warning system, if there were one on this planet,
to have spotted his arrival. For that matter he hadn't foreseen his arrival
himself. There had been just the dip up from sub-space, the sinister black
confetti of the meteorite swarm, the collision, the wrecked spaceboat's desperate fall, clutching at the nearest
planet.
He
should be able to judge his location when night came and he could see the
stars. That is, if night ever came on this planet. Or if that
high fog ever dispersed.
He
consulted his compass. The needle of the primitive but useful instrument held
true. At least this planet had magnetic poles.
And
it probably had night and day, to support vegetable life and such a balmy
temperature.
Once
he got out of this forest, he'd be able to plan. Just give him cities! One
city!
He
tucked the compass in his tunic, patting the locket at his neck in a strangely
affectionate, almost reverent way.
He
looked at the laced boughs ahead. Yes, it was exactly like those fairy forests
that cost fairy-book knights so much hackwork with their two-handed swords.
Easier
with a dustgun—and he had scores of miles of cleared
path in his store of ultrasonic refills.
He
glanced back at the slightly curving tunnel he'd made.
Through the slaty
ashes on its floor, wicked green shoots were already rising. He snapped on the
duster.
The
boughs were so thick at its. edge that the clearing
took Elven by surprise. One moment he was watching a
tangled green mat blacken under the duster's invisible beam. The next, he had
stepped out—not into fairyland, but into the sort of place where fairy tales
were first told.
The clearing was about a half mile in
diameter. Round it the thorn forest made a circle. A little stream bubbled out
of the poisonous greenery a hundred paces to his right and crossed the clearing
through a shallow valley. Beyond the stream rose a small hill.
On
the hillside was a ragged cluster of gray buildings. From one of them rose a
pencil of smoke. Outside were a couple of carts and some primitive agricultural
implements.
Save
for the space occupied by the buildings, the valley was under intensive
cultivation. The hill was planted at regular intervals with small trees bearing
clusters of red and yellow fruit. Elsewhere were rows of bushy plants and
fields of grain rippling in the breeze. All vegetation,
however, seemed to stop about a yard from the thorn forest.
There
was a mournful lowing. Around the hillside came a half
dozen cattle. A man in a plain tunic was leisurely driving them toward the
buildings. A tiny animal, perhaps a cat, came out of the building with the
smoke and walked with the cattle, rubbing against their legs. A young woman
came to the door after the cat and stood watching with folded arms.
Elven drank in the atmosphere of peace and rich
earth, feeling like a man in an ancient room. Such idyllic scenes as this must
have been Earth's in olden times. He felt his taut muscles relaxing.
A
second young woman stepped out of a copse of trees just ahead and stood facing
him, wide-eyed. She was dressed in a greenish tunic of softened, spun, and
woven vegetable fibers. Elven sensed in her a certain
charm, half sophisticated, half primitive. She was like one of the girls of the
Wild Ones in a rustic play suit. But her face was that of an awestruck child.
He
walked toward her through the rustling grain. She dropped to her knees.
"You
. . . you—"' she murmured with difficulty. Then, more swiftly, in perfect
English speech, "Do not harm me, lord. Accept my reverence."
"I
will not harm you, if you answer my questions well," Elven
replied, accepting the advantage in status he seemed to have been given.
"What place is this?"
"It is the
Place," she replied simply.
"Yes, but what
place?"
"It
is the Place, she repeated quakingly. "There are no others."
"Then where did I come
from?" he asked.
Her
eyes widened a little with terror. "I da not
know." She was redhaired and really quite
beautiful.
Elven frowned. "What planet is this?"
She looked at him
doubtfully. "What is planet?"
Perhaps
there were going to be language difficulties after all, Elven thought. "What sun?" he asked.
"What is sun?"
He pointed upward impatiently. "Doesn't
that stuff ever go away?"
"You
mean," she faltered fearfully, "does the sky ever go away?"
"The sky is always the
same?"
"Sometimes it
brightens. Now comes night."
"How
far to the end of the thorn forest?"
"I do not understand." Then her
gaze slipped beyond him, to the ragged doorway made by his duster. Her look of
awe was intensified, became touched with horror. "You have conquered the
poison needles," she whispered. Then she abased herself until her loose,
red hair touched the russet shoots of the grain. "Do not hurt me,
all-powerful one," she gasped.
"I
cannot promise that," Elven told her curtly.
"What is your name?"
Sefora," she whispered.
"Very well, Sefora.
Lead me to your people." She sprang up and fled like a doe back to the
farm buildings.
When
Elven reached the roo.f
from which the smoke rose, taking the leisurely pace befitting his dignity as god
or overlord or whatever the girl had taken him for, the welcoming committee had
already formed. Two young men bent their knees to him, and the young woman he
had seen standing at the doorway held out to him a platter of orange and purple
fruit The Con-
3 |
ueror of the Poison Needles sampled this
refreshment, len waved it aside with a curt nod of
approval although he found it delicious.
When
he entered the rude farmhouse he was met by a blushing Sefora
who carried cloths and a steaming bowl. She timidly indicated his boots. He
showed her the trick of the fastenings and in a few moments he was sprawled on
a couch of hides stuffed with aromatic leaves, while she reverently washed his
feet
She
was about twenty, he discovered talking to her idly, not worrying about
important information for the moment. Her life was one of farm work and rustic
play. One of the young men—Alfors—had recently become
her mate.
Outside the gray sky was swiftly darkening.
The other young man, whom Elven had first seen
driving the cattle and who answered to the name of Kors,
now brought armfuls of knotty wood, which he fed to the meager fire, so that it
crackled up in rich yellows and reds. While Tub/a—Kors'
girl—busied herself nearby with work that involved mouth-watering odors.
The
atmosphere was homey, though somewhat stiff. After all, Elven
reminded himself, one doesn't have a god to dinner every night. But after a meal
of meat stew, fresh-baked bread, fruit conserves, and a thin wine, he smiled
his approval and the atmosphere quickly became more celebratory, in fact quite
gay. Alfors took a harp strung with gut and sang
simple praises of nature, while later Sefora and Tulya danced. Kors kept the fire
roaring and Elven's wine cup full though once he
disappeared for some time, evidently to care for the animals.
Elven brightened. These rustic folk faintly
resembled his own Wild Ones. They seemed to have a
touch of that reckless, ecstatic spirit so hated by the tame folk of the sos. (Though after a while the
resemblance grew too painfully strong, and with an imperious gesture he
moderated their gaiety.)
Meanwhile,
by observation and question, he was swiftly learning, though what he learned
was astonishing rather than helpful. These four young people were the sole
inhabitants of their community. They knew nothing of any culture other than
their own.
They
had never seen the sun or the stars. Evidently this was a planet whose axes of
rotation and of revolution around its sun were the same, so that the climate
was always unvarying at each latitude, the present
locality being under a cloud belt. Later he might check this; he told himself,
by detennining if the days and nights were always of
equal length.
Strangest
of all, the two couples had never been beyond the clearing. The thorn forest,
which they conceived of as extending to infinity, was a barrier beyond their
power to break. Fires, they told him, sizzled out against it. It swiftly dulled
their sharpest axes. And they had a healthy awe of its diabolically sentient
thorns.
All this suggested an
obvious line of questioning.
"Where are you
parents?" Elven asked Kors.
"Parents?" Kors" Wow wrinkled.
"You
mean the shining ones?" Tulya broke in.
She looked sad. "They are gone."
"Shining
ones?" Elven quizzed. "People like ourselves?"
"Oh no. Beings of metal with wheels for feet and long, clever
arms that bent anywhere."
"I
have always wished I were made of lovely, bright metal," Sefora commented wistfully, "with wheels instead of
ugly feet, and a sweet voice that never changed, and a mind that knew
everything and never lost its temper."
Tulya continued, "They told us when they went
why they must go. So that we could live by our own
E |
ower alone, as all beings should. But we
loved them and ave always been sorry.
There
was no getting away from it, Elven decided after
making some casual use of his special mind-searching powers to test the veracity
of their answers. These four people had actually been reared by robots of some
sort. But why? A dozen fantastic, unprovable
possibilities occurred to him. He remembered what Fedris
had said about the mystery of the universe, and smiled wryly.
Then
it was his turn to answer questions, hesitant and awestricken ones. He replied
simply, "I am a black angel from above. When God created his universe he
decided it would be a pretty dull place if there weren't a few souls in it
willing to take all risks and dare all dangers. So here and there among his
infinite flocks of tame angels, sparingly, he introduced a wild strain, so that
there would always be a few souls who would kick up their heels and jump any
fences. Yes, and break the fences down too, exposing the tame flocks to night
with its unknown beauties and dangers." He smiled around impishly, the
firelight making odd highlights on his lips and cheeks. "Just
as I've broken down your thorn fence."
It
had been pitch black outside for some time. The wine jar was almost empty. Elven yawned. Immediately preparations were made for his
rest. The cat got up from the hearth and came and rubbed Elven's
legs.
The first pale glow of dawn aroused Elven and he slipped out of bed so quietly that he wakened
no one, not even the cat. For a moment he hesitated in the gray room heavy with
the smell of embers and the lees of wine. It occurred to him that it would be
rather pleasant to live out his life here as a sylvan god adored by nymphs and
rustics.
But
then his hand touched his throat and he shook his head. This was no place for
him to accomplish his mission—for one thing, there weren't enough people. He
needed cities. With a last look at his blanket-huddled hostesses and hosts—Sefora's hair had just begun to turn ruddy in the
increasing light—he went out
As
he had expected, the thorn forest had long ago repaired the break he had made
near the stream. He turned in the opposite direction and skirted the hill until
he reached the green wall beyond. There, consulting his compass, he set his
course away from the wrecked space-boat Then he began
to dust
By
early afternoon—judging time from the changing intensity of the light—he had
made a dozen miles and was thinking that perhaps he should have stayed at the
wreck long enough to try to patch up a levitator. If only he could get up a
hundred feet to see what—if anything—was going to happen to this ridiculous
forest!
For it still fronted him unchangingly, like
some wizard growth from a book of fairy tales. The glassy thorns still curved
back and struck whenever he swayed too close. And behind him the green shoots
still pushed up through the slaty powder.
He
thought, what a transition—from ultraphotonic flight
in a spaceboat, to this worm's-crawl. Enough to bore
a Wild One to desperation, to make him think twice of the simple delights of a
life spent as a sylvan god.
But
then he unfastened the locket at his throat and took out the tiny white sphere.
His smile became an inspired one as he gazed at it gleaming on his palm.
Only
one of the Wild Ones had escaped from their beleaguered planet, Fedris had said.
What did Fedris know!
He
knew that before Elven reached his spaceboat, he had escaped in disguise through the
tremendous cordons of the sos.
That in the course of that escape he had twice been searched so thoroughly that
it would have been a miracle if. he could have
concealed more than this one tiny tablet.
But this one tiny tablet
was enough.
In it were all the Wild
Ones.
Early humans had often been fascinated by the
idea of an invisible man. Yet it hadn't occurred to them that the invisible man
has always existed, that each one of us begins as an invisible man—the single
cell from which each human grows.
Here
in this white tablet were the genetic elements of all the Wild Ones, the
chromosomes and genes of each individual. Here were fire-eyed Vlana, swashbuckling Nar, soft-laughing Forten—they,
and a billion others! The identical twins of each last person destroyed with
the planet of the Wild Ones, waiting only encasement in suitable denucleated growth cells and nurture in some suitable
mother. All rolling about prettily in Elven's
palm.
So
much for the physical inheritance.
And as for the social
inheritance, there was Elven.
Then it could all begin again. Once more the
Wild Ones could dream then* cosmos-storming dreams and face their beautiful
dangers. Once more they could seek to create, if they chose, those giant atoms,
seeds of new universes, because of which the sos had destroyed them. Back in the Dawn Age
physicists had envisioned the single giant atom from which the whole universe
had grown, and now it was time to see if more such atoms could be created from
energy drawn from sub-space. And who were Fedris and Elven and the sos
to say whether or not the new universes might—or should—destroy the old? What
matter how the tame herds feared those beautiful, sub-microscopic eggs of
creation?
It must all begin again, Elven resolved.
Yet
it was as much the feel of the thorn shoots rising under his feet, as his
mighty resolve, that drove him on.
An
hour later his duster disintegrated a tangle of boughs that had only sky behind
it. He stepped into a clearing a half mile in diameter. Just ahead a bubbling
stream went through a little valley, where russet grain rippled. Beyond the
valley was a small, orchard-covered hill. On its hither side, low gray
buildings clustered raggedly. From one rose a thread of smoke. A man came
around the hill, driving cattle.
Elven's second thought was that something must have
gone wrong with his compass, some force must have been deflecting it steadily,
to draw him back in a circle.
His
first thought, which he had repressed quickly, had been that here was the
mystery Fedris had promised him, something
supernatural from the ancient fairy-book world.
And as if time too had been drawn back in a
circle—he repressed this notion even more quickly—he saw Sefora
standing by the familiar copse of trees just ahead. .
Elven called her name and hurried toward her, a
little surprised at his pleasure in seeing her again.
She
saw him, brought up her hand and swiftly tossed something to him. He started to
catch it against his chest, thinking it a gleaming fruit-He jerked aside barely
in time. It was a gleaming and wickedly heavy-bladed knife. "Sefora!" he shouted.
The
red-haired nymph turned and fled like a doe, screaming, "Alfors! Kors! Tulya!" Elven raced after her.
It
was just beyond the first out-building that he ran into the ambush, which
seemed to have been organized impromptu in an ancient carpenter's shop. Alfors and Kors came roaring at
him from the barn, the one swinging a heavy mallet, the one a long saw. While
from the kitchen door, nearer by, Tulya rushed with a
cleaver.
Elven
caught her wrist and the two of them reeled with the force of her swing.
Reluctantly then—hating his action and only obeying necessity—he snatched out
his duster for a snap-shot at the nearest of the others.
Kors staggered, lifted his hand to his eyes and
brushed away dust. Now Alfors was the closest. Elven could see the inch-long teeth on the twanging,
singing saw-blade. Then its gleaming lower length dissolved along with Alfors' hand, while its upper half went screeching past
his head.
Kors came on, screaming in pain, swinging the
mallet blindly. Elven sent him sprawling with a
full-intensity shot that made his chest a small volcano of dust, swung round
and cut down Alfors, ducked just in time as the
cleaver, transferred to Tulya's other hand, swiped at
his neck. They went down together in a heap, the duster at Tulya's
throat.
Brushing the fine gray ashes frantically from his face, Elven looked up to see Sefora
racing toward him. Her naming hair and livid face were preceded by the three gleaming
tines of a pitchfork.
"Sefora!" he cried and tried to get up, but Alfors had fallen across his legs. "Sefora!" he cried again imploringly, but she didn't
seem to hear him and her face looked only hate, so he snapped on the duster,
and tines and face and hair went up in a gray cloud. Her headless body pitched
across him with a curious little vault as the blunted pitchfork buried its end
in the ground. She hit and rolled over twice. Then everything was very still,
until a cow lowed restlessly.
Elven dragged himself from under what remained of Alfors and stood up shakily. He coughed a little, then with
a somewhat horrified distaste raced out of the settling gray cloud. As soon as'
he was in clean air he emptied his lungs several times, shuddered a bit, smiled
ruefully at the four motionless forms on which the dust was settling, and set
himself to figure things out.
Evidently
some magnetic force had deflected his compass needle, causing him to travel in
a circle. Perhaps one of the magnetic poles of this planet was in the immediate
locality. Of course this was no ordinary polar climate or day-night cycle,
still there was no reason why a planet's axes of magnetism and rotation
mightn't be far removed from each other.
The
behavior of his last evening's hosts and hostesses was a knottier problem. It
seemed incredible that his mere disappearance, even granting they thought him a
god, had offended them so that they had become murderous. Ancient
Earth-peoples had killed gods and godsymbols, of
course, yet that had been a matter of deliberate ritual, not sudden
blood-frenzy.
For
a moment he found himself wondering if Fedris had
somehow poisoned their minds against him, if Fedris
possessed some FTL agency that had rendered the whole universe allergic to Elven. But that, he knew, was the merest morbid fancy, a
kind of soured humor.
Perhaps
his charming rustics had been subject to some kind of cyclic insanity.
He
shrugged, then resolutely went into the house arm prepared himself a meal. By
the time it was ready the sky had darkened. He built a big fire and put in some
time constructing out of materials in his pack, a small gyrocompass. He worked
with an absent-minded mastery, as one whittles a toy for a child. He noticed
the cat watching him from the doorway, but it fled whenever he called to it,
and it refused to be lured by the food he set on the hearth. He looked up at
the wine jars dangling from the rafters, but did not reach them down.
After a while he disposed himself on the
couch Kors and Tulya had
occupied the night before. The room grew dim as the fire died down. He
succeeded in keeping his thoughts away from what lay outside, except that once
or twice his mind pictured the odd little vault Sefora's
body had made in pitching over him. In the doorway the cat's eyes gleamed.
When
he woke it was full day. He quickly got his things together, adding a little
fruit to his pack. The cat shot aside as he went out the door. He did not look
at the scene of yesterday's battle. He could hear flies buzzing there. He went
over the hill to where he had entered the thorn forest last morning. The thorn
trees, with their ridiculous fairy-book persistence, had long ago repaired the
opening he'd made. There was no sign of it. He turned on the tiny motor of the
gyrocompass, leveled his gun at the green wall, and started dusting.
It
was as monotonous a work as ever, but he went about it with a new and almost
unsmiling grimness. At regular intervals he consulted the gyrocompass and
sighted back carefully along the arrow-straight, shoot-green corridor that
narrowed with more than perspective. Odd, the speed with which those thorns
grew!
In
his mind he rehearsed his long-range course of action. He could count, he must
hope, on a generation's freedom from Fedris and the
forces of the sos. In that
time he must find a large culture, preferably urban, or one with a large number
of the right sort of domestic animals, and make himself absolute master of it,
probably by establishing a new religion. Then the proper faculties for
breeding must be arranged. Next the seeds of the Wild Ones pelleted
in the locket at his throat must be separated—as many as there were facilities
for—and
E |
laced in their living or non-living mothers. Probably ving. And probably not
human—that might present too many sociological difficulties.
It
amused him to think of the Wild Ones reborn from sheep of goats, or perhaps
some wholly alien rooster or browser, and his mind conjured up a diverting
picture of himself leading his strange flocks over hilly pastures, piping like
ancient Pan—until he realized that his mind had pictured Sefora
and Tulya dancing along beside him, and he snapped
off the mental picture with a frown.
Then would come the
matter of the rearing and education of the Wild Ones. His hypothetical
community of underlings would take care of the former, the latter must all
proceed from his own brain—supplemented by the library of educational
micro-tapes in the wrecked spaceboat. Robots of some
sort would be an absolute necessity. He remembered the conversation of the
night before last, which had indicated that there were or had been robots on
this planet, and lost himself in tenuous speculation—though not forgetting his
gyrocompass observations.
So
the day wore on for Elven, walking hour after hour
behind a dustgun into a dustcloud,
until he was almost hypnotized in spite of his self-watchfulness and a host of
disquieting memories fitfully thronged his mind: the darkness of sub-space; the
cat's eyes at the doorway, the feel of its fur against his ankle; dust billowing
from Tulya's throat; the little vault Sefora's body had given in pitching over him, almost as if
it rode an invisible wave in the air; an imaginary vision of the blasted planet
of the Wild Ones, its dark side aglow with radioactives
visible even in deep space; the wasplike humming in
the wrecked spaceboat; Fedris'
ghostly whisper, "The unknown will find you, Elven—
The break in the thorn
forest took him by surprise.
He
stepped into a clearing half a mile in diameter. Just ahead a stream bubbled
through a little valley rippling with russet grain. Beyond was a small
orchard-covered hill against whose side low, gray buildings clustered raggedly.
From one rose a ribbon of smoke.
He
hardly felt the thorns sting him as he backed into them, though the stimulus
they provided was enough to send him forward again a few steps. But such
trifles had no effect on the furious working of his mind. He must, he told
himself, be up against a force that distorted a gyrocompass as much as a
magnet, that even distorted the visual lines of space.
Or
else he really was in a fairy-book world where no matter how hard you tried to
escape through an enchanted forest, you were always
led back at evening to—
He
fancied he could see a black cloud of flies hovering near the low gray
buildings.
And
then he heard a rustling in the copse of trees just ahead and heard a horribly
familiar voice call excitedly, "Tulya! Come
quickly!"
He
began to shake. Then his hair-triggered muscles, obeying some random stimulus,
hurled him forward aimlessly, jerked him to a stop as suddenly. Thigh-deep in
the grain, he stared around wildly. Then his gaze fixed on a movement in the
twilit grain—two trails of movement, shaking the grain but showing nothing
more. Two trails of movement working their way from the copse to him.
And then suddenly Sefora and Tulya were upon him,
S |
ringing
from their concealment like mischievous chil-en,
their eyes gleaming, their mouths smiling with a wicked delight. Tulya's throat, that he had yesterday seen billow into
dust, bulged with laughter. Seforas red hair, that he
had watched puff into a gray cloud, rippled in the breeze.
He
tried to run back into the forest but they cut him off and caught him with
gales of laughter. At the touch of their hands all strength went out of him, and it seemed to him that his bones were turning to an
icy mush as they dragged him along stumblingly through the grain.
"We
won't hurt you," Tulya assured him between peals
of wicked laughter.
"Oh, Tulya, but he's shy!"
'"Something's made him
unhappy, Sefora."
"He
needs loving, Tulya!" And Elven
felt Sefora's cold arms go round his neck and her wet
lips press his. Gasping, he tried to push away, and the hps
bubbled more laughter. He closed his eyes tight and
began to sob.
When next he opened them, he was standing
near the gray buildings, and someone had put wreaths of flowers around his neck
and smeared fruit on his chin, and Alfors and Kors had come, and all four of them were dancing around him
wildly in the twilight, hand in hand, laughing, laughing.
Then
Elven laughed too, louder and louder, and their
gleaming eyes encouraged him, and he began to spin round and round inside their
spinning circle, and they grimaced their joy at his
comradeship. And then he raised his dustgun and
snapped it on and kept on spinning until the circle of other laughers was only ah expanding dust ring. Then, still laughing, he ran over
the hill, a cat scampering in swift rushes at his side, until he came to a
thorny wall. After his hands and face were puffing with stings, he remembered
to lift something he'd been holding in his hand and touch a button on it. Then
he marched into a dust cloud, singing.
All
night he marched and sang, pausing only to reload the gun with a gleeful
automatism, or to take from his pack another flashglobe
of cold light, which revealed the small world of green thorns and dust motes
around him. Mostly he sang an old Centaurian lied that went:
I
"We'll fall through the stars, my Deborah, We'll fall through the skeins of light,
We'll fall out of the
Galaxy And I'll kiss you again in the night."
Only sometimes he sang "Sefora" instead of "Deborah" and
"kill" instead of "kiss." At times it seemed to him that he
was followed by prancing goats and sheep and strange monsters that were really
his brothers and sisters. And at other times there danced along beside him two
nymphs, one red-haired. They sang with him in high sweet voices and smiled at
him wickedly. Toward morning he grew tired and unstrapped the pack from his
back and threw it away, and later he ripped something from his throat and threw
that away, too.
As
the sky paled through the boughs, the nymphs and beasts vanished and he
remembered that he was someone dangerous and important, and that something
quite impossible had truly happened to him, but that if he could really manage
to think things through—
The
thorn forest ended. He stepped into a clearing a half mile in diameter. Just
ahead a stream gurgled through a small valley. Beyond was an orchard-covered
hill. Russet grain rippled in the valley. On the hillside low gray buildings
clustered raggedly. From one rose a thin streamer of smoke.
And
toward him, striding lithely through the grain, came Sefora.
Elven screamed horribly and pointed the dustgun. But the range was too great. Only a ribbon of
grain stretching halfway to her went up in dust. She turned and raced toward
the buildings. He followed her, gun still pointed and snapped on at full power,
running furiously along the dust path, taking wild leaps through the gray
clouds.
The
dust path drew closer and closer to Sefora, until it
almost lapped her heels. She darted between two buildings.
Then
something tightened like a snake around Elven's
knees, and as he pitched forward something else tightened around his upper
body, jerking his elbows against his sides. The dustgun
flew from his hand as he smashed against the ground.
Then
he was lying on his back gasping, and through the thinning dust cloud Alfors and Kors were looking down
at him as they wound their lassos tighter and tighter around him, trussing him
up. He heard Alfors say, "Are you all right, Sefora?" and a voice reply, "Yes. Let me see him.
And then Sefora's face appeared through the dust
cloud and looked down into his with cold curiosity, and her red hair touched
his cheek, and Elven closed his eyes and screamed
many times.
"It was all very simple and there was,
of course, absolutely nothing of the supernatural," the Director of Human
Research assured Fedris, taking a sip of mellow Magellanic wine from the cup at his elbow. "Elven merely walked in a straight line."
Fedris
frowned. He was a small man with a worried look that the most thoroughgoing
psychoanalyses had been unable to eradicate. "Of course the Galaxy is tremendously
grateful to you for capturing Elven. We never dreamed
he'd got as far as the Magellanics. Can't say what
horrors we may have escaped—
"I
deserve no credit," the director told him. "It was all sheer
accident, and the matter of Elven's nerve cracking.
Of course you'd prepared the ground there by hinting to him that the
supernatural might take a hand."
"That
was the merest empty threat, born of desperation," Fedris
interrupted, reddening a bit,
"Still,
it prepared the ground. And then Elven had the
devilish misfortune of landing right in the middle of our project on Magellanic 47. And that, I admit, might be enough to startle
anyone." The director grinned.
Fedris
looked up. "Just what is your project? All I know is that it's rather
hush-hush.
The
director settled back in his easy-chair. "The scientific understanding of
human behavior has always presented extraordinary difficulties. Ever since the
Dawn
Age
men have wanted to analyze their social problems in the same way they analyze
the problems or physics and chemistry. They've wanted to know exactly what
causes produce exactly what results. But one great obstacle has always licked
them."
Fedris nodded. "Lack of
controls."
"Exactly,"
the director agreed. "With rats, say, it would be easy. You can have
two—or a hundred—families of rats, each family with identical heredity, each in
an identical environment. Then you can vary one factor in one family and watch
the results. And when you get results you can trust them, because the other
family is your control, showing what happens when you don't vary the
factor."
Fedris looked at him wonderingly. "Do you mean
to
The director nodded. "On Magellanic 47 we're carrying on that same sort of work,
not with rats, but with human beings. The cages are half-mile clearings with
identical weather, terrain, plants, animals—everything identical down to the
tiniest detail. The bars of the cages are the thorn trees, which our botanists
developed specially for the purpose. The inmates of the cages—the human
experimental animals—are identical twins—though centuplets
would be closer to the right word. Identical upbringings are assured for each group
by the use of robot nurses and mentors, set to perform always the same
unvarying routine. These robots are removed when the members of the group are
sufficiently mature for our purposes. All our observations are, of course,
completely secret—and also intermittent, which had the unfortunate result of
letting Elven do some serious damage before he was
caught.
"Do
you see the setup now? In the thorn forest in which Elven
was wrecked there were approximately one hundred identical clearings set at
identical intervals. Each clearing looked exactly like the other, and each
contained one Seiora, one Tulya,
one Alfors, and one Kors. Elven thought he was going in a circle, but actually he was
going in a straight line. Each evening it was a different clearing he came to.
Each night he met a new Sefora.
"Each
group he encountered was identical except for one factor—the factor we were
varying—and that had the effect of making it a bit more grisly for him. You
see, in those groups we happened to be running an experiment to determine the
causes of human behavior patterns toward strangers. We'd made slight variations
m their environment and robot-education, with the result that the first group
he met was submissive toward strangers; the second was violently hostile; the
third as violently friendly; the fourth highly suspicious. Too bad he didn't
meet the fourth group first—though, of course, they'd have been unable to
manage him except that he was half mad with supernatural terror."
The
director finished his wine and smiled at Fedris.
"So you see it all was the sheerest accident. No one was more
surprised than I when, in taking a routine observation, I found that my
'animals' had this gibbering and trussed-up intruder. And you could have
knocked me over with a molecule when I found out it was Elven."
Fedris whistled his wonder. "I can sympathize
with the poor deviL" he said, "and I can
understand, too, why your project is hush-hush."
The
director nodded. "Yes, experimenting with human beings is a rather hard
notion for most people to take. Still it's better than running all mankind as
one big experiment without controls. And we're extremely kind to our
'animals.' As soon as our experiment with each is
finished, it's our policy to graduate them, with
suitable re-eduation, into the sos."
"Still-" said Fedris doubtfully.
"You
think it's a bit like some of the ideas of the Wad Ones?"
"A bit," Fedris admitted.
"Sometimes I think so too," the director admitted with a
smile, and poured his guest more wine.
While
deep in the thorn forest on Magellanic 47, green
shoots and tendrils closed round a locket containing a white tablet,
encapsulating all the Wild Ones save Elven in a green
and tiny tomb.
The
Business, as Usual
BY MACK REYNOLDS
"Listen," the time traveler said to the first
pedestrian who came by, "I'm from the Twentieth Century. I've only got
fifteen minutes and then I'll go back. I guess it s too much to expect you to
understand me, eh?"
"Certainly, I
understand you."
"Hey! You talk English
fine. How come?"
"We
call it Amer-English. I happen to be a student of
dead languages."
"Swell!
But, listen, I only got a few minutes. Let's get going."
"Get going?"
"Yeah, yeah. Look, don't you get it? I'm a time traveler. They picked me to send mto the future. I'm important."
"Ummm. But you must realize that we have time
travelers turning up continuously these days."
"Listen,
that rocks me, but I just dont have time to go into
it see? Let's get to the point."
"Very
well.
What have you got?"
"What d'ya mean, what've I got?"
The
other sighed. "Don't you think you should attempt
to acquire some evidence that you have been in the future? I can warn you now,
the paradoxes involved in time travel prevent you from taking back any
knowledge
which might alter the past On your return, your mind will be blank in regard to
what happened here."
The time traveler blinked. "Oh?" "Definitely. However, I shall be glad to make a trade
with you."
"Listen,
I get the feeling I came into this conversation half a dozen sentences too
late. What d'ya mean, a
trade?"
"I
am willing to barter something of your century for something of mine, although,
frankly, there is little in your period that is of other than historical
interest to us." The pedestrian's eyes held a gleam now. He cleared his
throat "However, I have here an atomic pocketknife. I hesitate to even
tell you of the advantages it has over the knives of your period."
"Okay.
I got only ten minutes left, but I can see you're right. I ve
got to get something to prove I was here."
"My knife would do it," the
pedestrian nodded.
"Yeah, yeah. Listen, I'm a little confused,' like. They picked me for this job the
last minute—didn't want to risk any of these professor guys, see? That's the
screwiest knife I ever saw, let me have it for my evidence."
"Just a moment, friend. Why should I give you my Imife?
What can you offer in exchange?"
"But I'm from the Twentieh
Century."
"Ummm. And I'm from the Thirtieth."
The
time traveler looked at him for a long moment Finally,
"Listen, paL I don't have a lot of time. Now,
for instance, my watch—"
"Ummm. And what else?"
"Well, my money, here."
"Of interest only to a
numismatist."
"Listen,
I gotta have some evidence I been in the Thirtieth Century!"
"Of course. But business is business as the proverb
goes."
"I wish the hell I had
a gun."
"I
have no use for a gun in this age," the other said primly.
"No,
but I have," the time traveler muttered. "Look, fella,
my time is running out by the second. What d'ya want? You see what I got, clothes, my wallet, a little
money, a key ring, a pan* of shoes."
"I'm
willing to trade, but your possessions are of small value. Now some art
object—an original Al Capp or something."
The
time traveler was plaintive. "Do I look like I'd be carrying around art
objects? Listen, I'll give you everything I got but my pants for that screwy
knife."
"Oh,
you want to keep your pants, eh? What're you trying to do, Anglo me down? Or
does your period antedate the term?"
"Anglo
. . . what? I
don't get it."
"Well, I'm quite an
etymologist—"
"That's too bad,
but-''
"Not
at all, a fascinating hobby," the pedestrian said. "Now
as to the phrase Anglo me down. The term Anglo first came into popular use during the 1850-1950 period.
It designated persons from the Eastern United States, English descent
principally, who came into New Mexico and Arizona shortly after the area was
liberated—I believe that was the term used at the time—'from Mexico. The
Spanish and Indians came to know the Easterners as Anglos."
The
time traveler said desperately, "Listen, pal, we get further and further
from—"
"Tracing
back the derivation of the phrase takes us along two more side trails. It goes
back to the fact that these Anglos became the wealthiest businessmen of the
Twentieth Century. So much so that they soon dominated the
world with their dollars."
"Okay,
okay. I know all about that. Personally I never had enough dollars to dominate
anybody, but—"
"Very
welL the point is that the Anglos became the
financial wizards of the world, the most clever
dealers, the sharpest bargainers, the most competent businessmen."
The
time traveler shot a quick despairing look at his watch. "Only
three—"
"The
third factor is one taken from still further in the past. At one time there was
a racial minority, which many of the Anglos held in disregard, called the Joos. For many years the term had been used, to Joo you down —meaning to make the price lower. As the
Anglos assumed their monetary dominance, the term evolved from Joo you down to Anglo you down; and
thus it has come down to our own day, although neither Anglo nor Joo till exists as a separate
people.
The
time traveler stared at him. "And I won't be able to take the memory of
this story back with me, eh? And me a guy named Levy." He darted another
look at his watch and groaned. Quick!" he said, "let's make this
trade; everything I got for that atomic knife!"
The
deal was consummated. The citizen of the Thirtieth Century stood back, his
loot in his arms, and watched as the citizen of the Twentieth, nude but with
the knife grasped tightly and happily in hand, faded slowly from view.
The knife poised momentarily in empty air,
then dropped to the ground as the time traveler completely disappeared.
The
other stooped, retrieved it, and stuck it back in his pocket. "Even more
naive than usual," he muttered. "Must have been one of the very
first, I suppose they'll never reconcile themselves to the paradoxes.
Obviously,
you can carry things forward in time, since that's the natural flow of the
dimension; but you just can't carry anything, not even memory, backward against the current,"
He resumed his journey
homeward.
Marget, hands on hips, met him at the door.
"Where in kert have you been?" she snapped.
"You
mustn't swear, darling," he said. "I met another time traveler on the
way home."
"You didn't-"
"Certainly, why not? If I didn't somebody else would." "But you ve already got the closet overflowing with—" "Now
Marget, don't look that way. One of these days some
museum or collector—" She grunted sceptically
and turned back into the house.
The
Martian and The Moron
BY THEODORE STURGEON
In 1924, when I was just a pup, my father was a thing known
currently as a "radio bug." These creatures were wonderful. They
were one part fanatic, one
E |
art
genius, a dash of child-like wonderment, and two uckets
full of trial-and-error. Those were the days when you could get your picture in
the paper for building a crystal set in something small and more foolish than
the character who had his picture in the paper the day before. My father had
his picture in there for building a "set" on a pencil eraser with a
hunk of galena in the top and about four thousand turns of No. 35 enamelled wire wrapped around it. When they came around to
take his picture he dragged out another one built into a peanut. Yes, a real
peanut which brought in WGBS, New York. (You see, I really do remember.) They
wanted to photograph that too, but Dad thought it would be a little immodest
for him to be in the paper twice. So they took Mother's picture with it. The
following week they ran both pictures, and Dad got two letters from other
radio bugs saying his eraser radio wouldn't work and Mother got two hundred and
twenty letters forwarded from the paper, twenty-six of which contained
proposals of marriage. (Of course Mother was a YL and
not an OW then.) Oddly enough, Dad never did become a radio man. 127
He
seemed satisfied to be the first in the neighborhood to own a set, then to
build a set (after the spider-web coil phase he built and operated a one-tube
regenerative set which featured a UX-11 detector and a thing called a vario-coupler which looked like a greasy fist within a
lacquered hand, and reached his triumph when he hooked it into a forty-'leven pound "B-eliminator" and ran it right out
of the socket like a four-hundred-dollar "electric radio), and first in
the state to be on the receiving end of a court-order restraining him from
using his equipment. (Every time he touched the tuning dials —three—the
neighboring radios with which Joneses were keeping up with each other, began
howling unmercifully.) So for a time he left his clutter of forms and wire and
solder-spattered "Bathtub" condensers shoved to the back of his
cellar workbench, and went back to staffing field mice and bats, which had been
his original hobby. I think Mother was glad, though she hated the smells he
made down there. That was after the night she went to bed early with the
cramps, and he DX'd WLS in Chicago at four-thirty one
morning with a crystal set, and wanted to dance. (He learned later that he had
crossed aerials with Mr. Bohackus next door, and had
swiped Mr. Bohackus' fourteen-tube Atwater-Kent
signal right out of Mr. Bohackus' goose-neck
megaphone speaker. Mr. Bohackus was just as unhappy
as Mother to hear about this on the following morning. They had both been up
all night.)
Dad
never was one to have his leg pulled. He got very sensitive about the whole
thing, and learned his lesson so well that when the last great radio fever took
him, he went to another extreme. Instead of talking his progress all over the
house and lot, he walled himself up. During the late war I ran up against
security regulations—and who didn't—but they never bothered me. I had my training
early.
He
got that glint in his eye after grunting loudly over the evening paper one
night. I remember Mother's asking him about it twice, and f remember her sigh—her famous "here we go again" sigh—when he
didn't answer. He leapt up, folded the paper, got out his keys, opened the
safe, put the paper in it, locked the safe, put his keys away, looked Knowingly at us, strode out of the room, went down into
the cellar, came up from the cellar, took out his keys, opened the safe, took
out the paper, closed the safe, looKed knowingly at us again, said, "Henry, your father's going to be
famous," and went down into the cellar.
Mother
said, "I knew it. I knew it!
I should have thrown the paper away. Or torn out that
page."
"What's he going to
make, Mother?" I asked.
"Heaven
knows, she sighed. "Some men are going to try to
get Mars on the radio."
"Mars? You mean the star?"
"It
isn't a star, dear, it's a planet. They've arranged to turn off all the big
radio stations all over the world for five minutes every hour so the men can
listen to Mars. I suppose your father thinks he can listen too."
"Gee," I said,
"I'm going down and—"
"You're
going to do no such thing," said Mother firmly. "Get yourself all
covered with that nasty grease he uses in his soldering, and stay up until all
hours! It's almost bedtime. And—Henry—"
"Yes, Mother?"
She put her hands on my shoulders.
"Listen to me, darling. People have been—ah—teasing your father." She
meant Mr. Bohackus. "Don't ask him any questions
about this if he doesn't want to talk, will you, darling? Promise?"
"All right,
Mother." She was a wise woman.
Dad
bought a big, shiny brass padlock for his work-ship in the cellar, and every
time Mother mentioned the cellar, or the stars, or radio to him in any
connection, he would just smile knowingly at her. It drove her wild. She didn't
like the key, either. It was a big brass key, and he wore it on a length of
rawhide shoelace tied around his neck. He wore it day and night. Mother said it
was lumpy. She also said it was dangerous, which he denied, even after the time
down at Roton Point when we were running Mr. Bohackus' new gasoline-driven ice-cream freezer out on the
beach. Dad leaned over to watch it working. He said, "This is the way to
get thing done, all right. I can't wait to get into that ice-cream," and
next thing we knew he was face down in the brine and flopping like a banked
trout. We got him out before he drowned or froze. He was bleeding freely about
the nose and lips, and Mr. Bohackus was displeased
because Dad's key had, in passing through the spur-gears in which it had
caught, broken off nine teeth. That was six more than Dad lost, but it cost
much more to fix Dad's and showed, Mother said, just how narrow-minded Mr. Bohackus was.
Anyway,
Dad never would tell us what he was doing down in the cellar. He would arrive
home from work with mysterious packages and go below and lock them up before
dinner. He would eat abstractedly and disap-
i |
iear
for the whole evening.
Mother, bless her, bore it with ortitude. As a matter
of fact, I think she encouraged it. It was better than the previous fevers,
when she had to sit for hours listening to crackling noises and organ music
through big, heavy, magnetic earphones—or else. At least she was left to her
own devices while all this was going on. As for me, I knew when I wasn't
needed, and, as I remember, managed to fill my life quite successfully with
clock movements, school, and baseball, and ceased to wonder very much.
About
the middle of August Dad began to look frantic. Twice he worked right through
the night, and though he went to the office on the days that followed, I doubt
that he did much. On August 21—1 remember the date because it was the day
before my birthday, and I remember that it was a Thursday because Dad took the
next day off for a "long week end," so it must have been Friday—the crisis came. My bedtime was nine o'clock. At
nine-twenty Dad came storming up from the cellar and
demanded that I get my clothes on instantly and go out and get him two hundred
feet of No. 27 silk-covered wire. Mother laid down the law and was instantly
overridden. "The coil! The one coil I haven't
finished!" he shouted hysterically. "Six thousand meters, and I have
to run out of it. Get your clothes on this instant, Henry, number
twenty-seven wire. Just control yourself this once Mother and you can
have—Henry stop standing there with your silly eyes bulging and get dressed
—you can have any hat on Fifth Avenue— hurryf
I
hurried. Dad gave me some money and a list of places to go to, told me not to
come back until I'd tried every one of them, and left the house with me. I went
east, he went west. Mother stood on the porch and wrung her hands.
I got home about twenty after ten, weary and
excited, bearing a large metal spool of wire. I put it down triumphantly while
Mother caught me up and felt me all over as if she had picked me up at the root
of a cliff. She looked drawn. Dad wasn't home yet.
After
she quieted down a little she took me into the kitchen and fed me some
chocolate-covered doughnuts. I forget what we talked, about, if we talked, but
I do remember that the cellar door was ajar, and at the bottom of the steps I
could see a ray of yellow light. "Mother," I said, "you know
what? Dad ran out and left his workshop open."
She went to the door and
looked down the stairs.
"Darling,"
she said after a bit, "Uh—wouldn't you like to—I mean, if he—"
I
caught on quick. "I'll look. Will you stay up here and bump on the floor
if he comes?"
She
looked relieved, and nodded. I ran down the steps and cautiously entered the
little shop.
Lined
up across the bench were no less than six of the one-tube receivers which were
the pinnacle of Dad's electronic achievement. The one at the end was turned
back-to-front and had its rear shielding off; a naked coil-form dangled
unashamedly out.
And
I saw what had happened to the two alarm clocks which had disappeared from the
bedrooms in the past six weeks. It happened that then, as now, clocks were my
passion, and I can remember clearly the way he had set up pieces of the
movements.
He
had built a frame about four feet long on a shelf at right angles to the bench
on which the radios rested. At one end of the frame was a clock mechanism
designed to turn a reel on which was an endless band of paper tape about eight
inches wide. The tape passed under a hooded camera—Mother's old Brownie—which
was on a wall-bracket and aimed downward, on the tape. Next in line, under the
tape, were six earphones, so placed that their diaphragms (the retainers had
been removed) just touched the under side of the
tape. And at the other end of the frame was the movement from the second alarm
clock. The bell-clapper hung downwards, and attached to it was a small
container of black powder.
I
went to the first clock mechanism and started it by pulling out the toothpick
Dad had jammed in the gears.
The
tape began to move. I pulled the plug on the other movement. The little
container of black powder began to shake like mad and, through small holes,
laid an even film of the powder over the moving tape. It stopped when it had
put down about ten inches of it. The black line moved slowly across until it
was over the phones. The magnets smeared the powder, which I recognized thereby
as iron filings. Bending to see under the tape, I saw that the whole bank of
phones was levered to move downward a half an inch away from the tape. The
leads from each of the six phones ran to a separate receiver.
I stood back and looked at this Goldberg and
scratched my head, then shook same and carefully blew away the black powder on
the tape, rewound the movements, refilled the containers from a jar which stood
on the bench, and put the toothpick back the way I had found it.
I
was halfway up the stairs when the scream of burning rubber on the street
outside coincided with Mother's sharp thumping on the floor. I got to her side
as she reached the front window. Dad was outside paying off a taxi driver. He
never touched the porch steps at alL and came into
the house at a dead run. He had a package under his arm.
"Fred!" said
Mother.
"Can't stop now," he said, skidding
into the hallway. "Couldn't get twenty-seven anywhere.
Have to use twenty-five. Probably won't work. Everything happens to me,
absolutely everything." He headed for the kitchen.
"I got you a whole
reel of twenty-seven, Dad."
"Don't
bother me now. Tomorrow," he said, and thumped downstairs. Mother and I
looked at each other. Mother sighed. Dad came bounding back up the stairs. "You what?"
"Here."
I got the wire off the hall table and gave it to him. He snatched it up, hugged
me, swore I'd get a bicycle for my birthday (he made good on that, and on
Mother's Fifth Avenue hat, too, by the way), and dove back downstairs.
We
waited around for half an hour and then Mother sent me to bed. "You poor
baby," she said, but I had the idea it wasn't me she was sorry for.
Now
I'd like to be able to come up with a climax to all this, but there wasn't one.
Not for years and years. Dad looked, the next morning, as if he had been up all
night again—which he had—and as if he were about to close his fingers on the
Holy GraiL All that day he would reappear
irregularly, pace up and down, compare his watch with the living-room clock and
the hall clock, and sprint downstairs again. That even went on during my
birthday dinner. He had Mother call up the office and say he had Twonk's disease, and kept up his peregrinations all that
night and all the following day until midnight. He fell into bed, so Mother
told me, at 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning and slept right through
until supper-time. He still maintained a dazzling silence about his
activities. For the following four months he walked around looking puzzled. For
a year after that he looked resigned. Then he took up stuffing newts and moles.
The only thing he ever said about the whole crazy business was that he was born
to be disappointed, but at least, this time, no one could rib
him about it. Now I'm going to tell you about Cordelia.
This
happened years and years later. The blow-off was • only last week, as a matter
of fact. I finished school and went into business with Dad and got mixed up in
the war and all that, I didn't get married, though. Not yet That's
what I want to teffyou about
I
met her at a party at Ferris'. I was stagging
it but I don't think it would have made any difference if I had brought
someone; when I saw Cordelia I was, to understate
the matter, impressed.
She
came in with some guy I didn't notice at the time and, for all I know, haven't
seen since. She Slipped out of her light wrap with a single graceful movement;
the sleeve caught in her bracelet, and she stood there, full profile, in the
doorway, both arms straight and her hands together behind her as she worried
the coat free, and I remember the small explosion in my throat as my indrawn
breath and my gasp collided. Her hair was dark and lustrous, parted in a wide
winging curve away from her brow. There were no pins in it; it shadowed the
near side of her face as she bent her head toward the room. The cord of her
neck showed columnar and clean. Her lips were parted ever so slightly, and
showed an amused chagrin. Her lashes all but lay on her cheeks. She came across
to my side of the room and sat down while the Thing who was with her went
anonymously away to get her a drink and came unnoticeably back.
I
said to myself, "Henry, my boy, stop staring at the lady. You'll embarrass
her."
She
turned to me just then and gave me a small smile. Her eyes were widely spaced,
and the green of deep water. "I don't mind, really," she said, and I
realized I had spoken aloud. I took refuge in a grin, which she answered, and
then her left eyelid dropped briefly, and she looked away. It was a wink, but
such a slight, tasteful one! If she had used both eyelids, it wouldn't have
been a wink at all; she would have looked quickly down and up again. It was an
understanding, we're-together little wink, a tactful, gracious, wonderful, marvellous, do you begin to see how I felt?
The
party progressed. I once heard somebody decline an invitation to one of Ferris'
parties on the grounds that he had been to
one of Ferris' parties. I tend to be a little more liberal than that, but
tonight I could see the point. It was because of Cordelia.
She sat still, her chin on the back of her hand, her fingers curled against her
white throat, her eyes shifting lazily from one point in the room to another.
She did not belong in this conglomeration of bubbleheads. Look at her—part
Sphinx, part Pallas Athenae. . . .
Ferris
was doing his Kasbah act, with the bath towel over his head. He will next
imitate Clyde McCoy's trumpet, I thought. He will then inevitably put that
lamp shade on his head, curl back his upper lip, and be a rickshaw coolie.
Following which he will do the adagio dance in which he will be too rough with
some girl who will be too polite to protest at his big, shiny, wet climaxing
kiss.
I
looked at Cordelia and I looked at Ferris and I
thought, no, Henry; that won't do. I drew a deep breath, leaned over to the
girl, and said, "If there were a fire in here, do you know the quickest
way out?"
She shook her head
expectantly.
"I'll
show you," I said, and got up. She hesitated a charming moment, rose from
her chair as with helium, murmured something polite to her companion, and came
to me.
There were French doors opening on the wide
terrace porch which also served the front door. We went through them. The air
was fragrant and cool, and there was a moon. She said nothing about escaping
from fires. The French doors shut out most of the party noises-enough so that
we could hear night sounds. We looked at the sky. I did not touch her.
After a bit she said in a
voice of husky silver,
"Is the moon tired? she
looks so pale Within her misty veil:
She
scales the sky from east to west, And takes no rest.
"Before
the coming of the night The moon shows papery white; Before the dawning of the day She fades away."
It was simple and it was perfect. I looked at
her in wonderment. "Who wrote that?"
"Christina
Rosset-ti," she said meticulously, looking at
the moon. The light lay on her face like dust, and motes of it were caught in
the fine down at the side of her jaw.
"I'm
Henry Folwell and I know a place here we could talk
for about three hours if we hurry," I said, utterly amazed at myself,
"I don't generally operate like this."
She
looked at the moon and me, the slight deep smile playing subdy
with her lips. "I'm Cordelia Thorne, and I
couldn't think of it," she said. "Do you think you could get my wrap
without anyone seeing? It's a—"
"I
know what it is," I said, sprinting. I went in through the front door,
located her coat, bunched it up small, skinned back outside, shook it out and
brought it to her. "You're still here," I said incredulously.
"Did you think I'd go
back inside?
"I
thought the wind, or the gods, or my alarm clock would take you away."
"You
said that beautifully," she breathed, as I put the coat around her
shoulders. I thought I had too. I notched her high up in my estimation as a very
discerning girl.
We
went to a place called the Stroll Inn where a booth encased us away from all of
the world and most of its lights. It was wonderful. I think I did most of the
talking. I don't remember all that passed between us but I remember these things,
and remember them welL
I was talking about Ferris and the gang he
had over there very Saturday night; I checked myself, shrugged, and said, Oh
well. Chacun a sa goiite,
as they say, which
means—"
And
she stopped me. "Tlease.
Don't translate. It couldn't be phrased as well in English."
I
had been about to say "—which means Jack's son has the gout." I felt
sobered and admiring, and just sat and glowed at her.
And
then there was that business with the cigarette. She stared at it as it lay in
the ash tray, followed it with her gaze to my lips and back as I talked, until
I asked her about it.
She said in a soft, shivery voice, "I
feel just like that cigarette." I, of course, asked her why.
"You
pick it up," she whispered, watching it "You enjoy some of it You put it down and let it—smolder. You like it, but you
hardly notice it . . ."
I
thereupon made some incredibly advanced protestations.
And
there was the business about her silence—a long, faindy
amused, mward-turning silence. I asked her what she
was thinking about
"I
was nmiinating," she said, in a
self-depreciating, tragic voice, "on the futility of human endeavor,"
and she smiled. And when I asked her what she meant, she laughed aloud and
said, "Don't you know?" And I said, "Oh. That," and worshipped
her. She was deep. I'd have dropped dead before Id have admitted I didn't know what
specifically she was driving at
And books. Music, too. When we were at the stage where I had both her
hands and for minutes on end our foreheads were so close together you couldn't
have slipped a swizzlestick between them, I
murmured, "We seem to think so much alike.... Tell me, Cordelia,
have you read Cabell?"
She
said, "Well, really," in such a tone that, so help me, I apologized.
"Love stuff," I said, recovering.
She
looked reminiscently over my shoulder, smiling her small smile. "So lovely."
"I
knew you'd read him," I said, struck with sweet thunder. "And
Faulkner—have you read any of Faulkner?"
She
gave me a pitying smile. I gulped and said, "Ugly, isn't it?"
She
looked reminiscently over my other Shoulder, a tiny frown flickering brow.
"So ugly," she said.
In
between times she listened importantly to my opinions on Faulkner and Cabell. And Moussorgsky and Al Jolson. She
was wonderful, and we agreed in everything.
And,
hours later, when I stood with her at her door, I couldn't do a thing but
shuffle my feet and haul on the hem of my jacket. She gave me her hand gravely,
and I think she stopped breathing. I said, "Uh, well," and couldn't
improve on it. She swept her gaze from my eyes to my mouth, from side to side
across my forehead; it was a tortured "No!" her sUghtly
turning head articulated, and her whole body moved minutely with it. She let
go my hand, turned slowly toward the door, and then, with a cry which might
have been a breath of laughter and which might have been a sob, she pirouted back to me and kissed me—not on the mouth, but in
the hollow at the side of my neck. My fuse blew with a snap and a bright light
and, as it were, incapacitated my self-starter. She moved deftly then, and to
my blurred vision, ap-parently changed herself into a
closed door. I must have stood looking at that door for twenty minutes before I
turned and walked dazedly home.
I saw her five more times. Once it was a
theater party, and we all went to her house afterward, and she showed great
impartiality. Once it was a movie, and who should we run into afterward but her
folks. Very nice people. I liked them and I think they
liked me. Once it was the circus; we stayed very late, dancing at a pavilion,
and yet the street was still crowded outside her home when we arrived there,
and a handshake had to do. The fourth time was at a party to which I went alone
because she had a date that night. It devolved that the date was the same party.
The way she came in did things to me. It wasn't the fact that she was with
somebody else; I had no claim on her, and the way she acted with me made me
feel pretty confident. It was the way she came in, slipping out of her wrap,
which—caught on her—bracelet, freezing her in profile while framed in the
doorway... I don't want to think
about it. Not now.
I
did think about it; I left almost immediately so that I could. I went home and
slumped down in an easy-chair and convinced myself about coincidences, and was
almost back to normal when Dad came into the room,
"ArghP' he said.
I
leapt out of the chair and helped him to pick himself up off the middle of the
rug. "Blast it, boy," he growled, "why don't you turn on a
light? What are you doing home? I thought you were out with your goddess. Why
can't you pick up your big bony feet, or at least leave them somewhere else
besides in the doorway of a dark room?" He dusted off his knees. He wasn't
hurt. It's a deep-piled rug with two cushions under it, "You're a howling
menace. Kicking your father." Dad had mellowed
considerably with the years. "What's the matter with you anyhow? She do something to you? Or are you beginning to have
doubts'?" He wore glasses now, but he saw plenty. He'd ribbed me about Cordelia as only a man who can't stand ribbing himself
could do.
"It was a lousy
party," I said.
He turned on a light,
"What's up, Henry?"
"Nothing,"
I said. "Absolutely nothing. I haven't had a
fight with her, if that's what you're digging for."
"All right,
then," he said, picking up the paper.
"There's
nothing wrong with her. She's one of the most wonderful people I know, that's alL"
"Sure she is. He began
to read the paper.
"She's
deep, too. A real wise head, she is. You wouldn't expect to find that in
somebody as young as that. Or as good-looking." I
wished he would put his eyebrows down.
"She's read everything worth
reading," I added as he turned a page a minute later. "Marvellous," he said flatly.
I
glared at him. "What do you mean by that?" I barked. "What's marvellous?"
He
put the paper down on his knee and smoothed it. His voice was gentle. "Why Cordelia, of course. I'm
not arguing with you, Henry.
"Yes,
you—well, anyway, you're not saying what you
think."
"You don't want to
hear what I think."
"I know what I
want!" I flared.
He
crackled the paper nervously. "My," he said as if to himself,
"this is worse than I thought." Before I could interrupt, he said,
"Half of humanity doesn't know what it wants or how to find out The other half knows what it wants, hasn't got it and is
going crazy trying to convince itself that it already has it
"Very sound," I
said acidly. "Where do you peg me?"
He
ignored this. "The radio commercial which annoys me most," he said
with apparent irrelevancy, "is the one which begins. 'There
are some things so good they don't have to be improved.' That annoys me because
there isn't a thing on God's green earth, which couldn't stand improvement. By
the same token, if you find something which looks to you as if it's unimprovable, then either it's a mirage or you're out of
your mind."
"What has that to do
with Cordelia?"
"Don't
snap at me, son," Dad said quietly. "Let's operate by the rule of
reason here. Or must I tear your silly head off and stuff it down your
throat?"
I
grinned in spite of myself. "Reason prevails, Dad. Go on."
"Now,
I've seen the girl, and you're right; she's striking to look at. Extraordinary. In the process of raving about that you've
also told me practically every scrap of conversation you've ever had with
her."
"I have?"
"You're
like your mother; you talk too much," he smiled. "Don't get
flustered. It was good to listen to. Shows you're healthy. But I kept noticing
one thing in these mouthings—all she's read, all the
languages she understands, all the music she likes—and that is that you have
never quoted her yet as saying a single declarative sentence. You have never
quoted her as opening a conversation, changing the subject, mentioning
something you both liked before you
mentioned it, or having a single idea that you didn't like." He
shrugged. "Maybe she is a good listener. They're—"
"Now wait a
minute—"
"—They're rare
anywhere in the world, especially in this house," he went on smoothly.
"Put your hands back in your pockets, Henry, or sit on 'em until I've finished. Now, I'm not making any charges
about Cordelia. There aren't any. She's wonderful.
That's the trouble. For Pete's sake get her to make a flat statement."
"She
has, plenty of times," I said hotly. "You just don't know her! Why,
she's the most—"
He
put up his hands and turned his head as if I were aiming a bucket of water at
him, "Shut up!" he roared. I shut, "Now," he said,
"listen to me. If you're right, you're right and there's no use defending
anything. If you're wrong you'd better find it out soon before you get hurt.
But I don't want to sit here and watch the process. I know how you tick, Henry.
By gosh, I ought to. You're like I was. You and I, we get a hot idea and go all
out for it, all speed and no control. We spill off at the mouth until we have
the whole world watching, and when the idea turns sour the whole world gets in
its licks, standing around laughing. Keep your beautiful dreams to yourself. If
they don't pan out you can always kick yourself effectively enough, without
having every wall-eyed neighbor helping you."
A
picture of Mr. Bohackus with the protruding
china-blue eyes, our neighbor of long ago, crossed my mind, and I chuckled.
"That's
better, Henry," said Dad. "Listen. When a fellow gets to be a big
grownup man, which is likely to happen at any age, or
never, he learns to make a pile of his beloved failures and consign them to the
flames, and never think of them again. But it ought to be a private
bonfire."
It sounded like sense, particularly the part
about not having to defend something if it was right enough to be its own defense.
I said, "Thanks, Dad. I'll have to think. I don't know if I agree with
you. ... I'll tell you something,
though. If Cordelia turned out to be nothing but a
phonograph, I'd consider it a pleasure to spend the rest or
my life buying new records for her."
"That'd
be fine," said Dad, "if it was what you wanted. I seriously doubt
that it is just now."
"Of
course it isn't. Cordelia's all woman
and has a wonderful mind, and that's what I want."
''Bless you, my
children," Dad said, and grinned.
I
knew I was right, and that Dad was simply expressing a misguided caution. The
Foxy Grandpa routine, I thought, was a sign of advancing age. Dad sure was
changed since the old days. On the other hand, he hadn't been the same since
the mysterious frittering-out of his mysterious down-cellar project. I stopped
thinking about Dad, and turned my mind to my own troubles.
I
had plenty of tune to think; I couldn't get a Saturday
date with her for two weeks, and I wanted this session to run until it was
finished with no early curfews. Not, as I have said, that I had any doubts. Far from it. All the same, I made a little list. . . .
I
don't think I said ten words to her until we were three blocks from her house.
She quite took my breath away. She was wearing a green suit with surprising
lapels that featured her fabulous profile and made me ache inside. I had not
known that I was so hungry for a sight of her, and now she was more than a
sight, now her warm hand had slipped into mine as we walked. "Cordelia..." I whispered.
She
turned her face to me, and showed me the tender crinkles in the corners of her
mouth. She made an interrogative sound, like a sleepy bird.
Cordelia," I said thickly. It all came out in a
monotone. "I didn't know I could miss anybody so much. There's been a
hollow place in my eyes, wherever I looked; it had no color and it was shaped
like you. Now you fill it and I can see again."
She
dropped her eyes, and her smile was a thing to see. "You said that
beautifully," she breathed.
I
hadn't thought of that. What I had said was squeezed out of me like toothpaste
out of a tube, with the same uniformity between what came out and what was
still inside.
"We'll go to the Stroll Inn." I
said. "It was where we met. We didn't meet at the party. We just saw each
other there. We met in that booth."
She
nodded gravely and walked with me, her face asleep, its attention turned
inward, deeply engaged. It was not until we turned the corner on Winter Street
and faced the Inn that I thought of my list; and when I did, I felt a double,
sickening impact—first, one of shame that I should dare to examine and
experiment with someone like this, second, because item five on that list was
"You said that beautifully...."
The
Stroll Inn, as I indicated before, has all its lights, practically, on the
outside. Cordelia looked at me thoughtfully as we
walked into their neon field. "Are you all right?" she asked.
"You look pale."
"How
can you tell?" I asked, indicating the lights, which flickered and
switched, orange and green and blue and red. She smiled appreciatively, and two
voices spoke within me. One said joyfully, "'You look pale' is a
declarative statement," The other said angrily, "You're hedging. And
by the way, what do you suppose that subtle smile is covering up, if
anything?" Both voices spoke forcefully, combining in a jumble which left
me badly confused. We went in and found a booth and ordered dinner. Cordelia said with pleasure that she would have what I
ordered.
Over
the appetizer I said, disliking myself intensely,
"Isn't this wonderful? All we need is a moon. Can't you see it, hanging up
there over us?"
She
laughed and looked up, and sad sensitivity came into her face. I closed my
eyes, waiting.
" 'Is the moon tired? she
looks so pale— "
she began.
I
started to chew again. I think it was marinated herring, and very good too,
but at the moment it tasted like cold oatmeal with a dash of warm lard. I
called the waiter and ordered a double rum and soda. As he turned away I called
him back and asked him to bring a bottle instead. I needed help from
somewhere, and pouring it out of a bottle seemed a fine idea at the time.
Over
the soup I asked her what she was thinking about. "I was ruminating,"
she said in a self-depreciating, tragic voice, "on the futnity
of human endeavor." Oh, brother, me too, I thought. Me
too.
Over
the dessert we had converse again, the meat course having passed silently. We
probably presented a lovely picture, the,two
of us wordlessly drinking in each other's presence, the girl radiating an
understanding tenderness, the young man speechless with admiration. Look how he
watches her, how his eyes travel over her face, how he sighs and shakes his
head and looks back at his plate.
I looked across the Inn. In a plate-glass
window a flashing neon sign said bluely, "nil UortS.
nnl llortS."
"Nni llorts," I
murmured.
Cordelia looked up at me expectantly, with her questioning
sound. I tensed. I filled the jigger with rum and poured two fingers into my
empty highball glass. I took the jigger in one hand and the glass in the other.
I
said, "You've read Kremlin von Schtunk, the Hungarian
poet?" and drank the jigger.
"Well, really,"
she said pityingly.
"I
was just thinking of his superb line "Nni llorts, nov shmoz
ka smorgasbord," I intoned, "which means—" and I drank the
glass.
She
reached across the table and touched my elbow. "Please. Don't translate.
It couldn't be phrased as well in English."
Something
within me curled up and died. Small tight, cold and dense, its corpse settled
under my breastbone. I could have raged at her, I supposed. I could have coldly
questioned her, pinned her down, stripped from her
those layers of schooled conversational reactions, leaving her ignorance in
nakedness. But what for? I didn't want it. . .. And I could have talked to her about
honesty and ethics and human aims—why did she do it? What did she ever hope to
get? Did she think she would ever corral a man and expect him to be blind, for
the rest of his life, to the fact that there was nothing behind this false
front—nothing at all? Did she think that—did she think? No.
I
looked at her, the way she was smiling at me, the deep shifting currents which
seemed to be in her eyes. She was a monster. She was some graceful diction
backed by a bare half-dozen relays. She was a card-file. She was a bubble,
thin-skinned, covered with swirling, puzzling, compelling colors, filled with
nothing. I was hurt and angry and, I trunk, a little frightened. I drank some
more rum. I ordered her a drink and then another, and stayed ahead of her four
to one. I'd have walked out and gone home if I had been able to summon the
strength. I couldn't, I could only sit and stare at her and bathe myself in
agonized astonishment She didn't mind. She sat
listening as raptly to my silence as she had to my conversation. Once she
said, "We're just being
together, aren't we?"
and I recognized it as another trick from the bag. I wondered idly how many she
might come up with if I just waited.
She came up with plenty.
She
sat up and leaned forward abruptly. I had the distinct feeling that she was
staring at me—her face was positioned right for it—but her eyes were closed. I
put my glass down and stared blearily back, thinking, now what?
Her
lips parted, twitched, opened wide, pursed. They uttered a glottal gurgling
which was most unpleasant I pushed my chair back, startled. "Are you
sick?"
"Are you terrestrial?" she asked
me. "Am I -whatr
"Making—contact
thirty years," she said. Her voice was halting, filled with effort.
"What are you talking about?"
"Terrestrial
quickly power going," she said clearly. "Many—uh—much power making
contact this way very high frequencies thought. Easy radio. Not again thought. Take radio code
quickly."
"Listen,
toots," I said nastily, "This old nose no longer has a ring in it. Go
play tricks on somebody else." I drank some more rum. An I. Q. of sixty, and crazy besides. "You're a real find, you
are," I said.
"Graphic,"
she said. "Uh-write. Write. Write." She
began to claw the table cloth. I looked at her hand. It was making scribbling
motions. "Write, write."
I
nipped a menu over and put it in front of her and gave her my pen.
Now,
I read an article once on automatic writing—you know,
that spiritualist stuff. Before witnesses, a woman once wrote a long letter in
trance in an unfamiliar (to her) hand, at the astonishing rate of four hundred
and eight words a minute. Cordelia seemed to be out
to break that record. That pen-nib was a blur. She was still leaning forward
rigidly, and her eyes were still closed. But instead of a blurred scrawl, what
took shape under her flying hand was a neat list or chart. There was an
alphabet of sorts, although not arranged in the usual way; it was more a list
of sounds. And there were the numbers one to fourteen. Beside each sound and
each number was a cluster of regular dots which looked rather like Braille. The
whole sheet took her not over forty-five seconds to do. And after she finished
she didn't move anything except her eyelids, which went up. "I
think," she said conversationally, "that I'd better get home, Henry.
I feel a little dizzy.
I
felt a little more than that. The rum, in rum's inevitable way, had sneaked up
on me, and suddenly the room began to spin, diagonally, from the lower left to
the upper right. I closed my eyes tight, opened them, fixed my gaze on a beertap on the bar at the end of the room, and held it
still until the room slowed and stopped. "You're so right," I said,
and did a press-up on the table top to assist my legs. I managed to help Cordelia on with her light coat. I put my pen back in my
pocket (I found it the next morning with the cap still off and a fine color
scheme in the lining of my jacket) and picked up the menu.
"What's that?"
asked Cordelia.
"A
souvenir," I said glumly. I had no picture, no school ring, no nothing. Only a doodle. I was
too tired, twisted, and tanked to wonder much about it, or about the fact that
she seemed never to have seen it before. I folded it in two and put it in my
hip.
I
got her home without leaning on her. I don't know if she was ready to give a
repeat performance of that goodnight routine. I didn't wait to find out, I
took her to the door and patted her on the cheek and went away from there. It
wasn't her fault ...
When
I got to our house, I dropped my hat on the floor in the hall and went into the
dark living room and fell into the easy-chair by the door. It was a comfortable
chair. It was a comfortable room. I felt about as bad as I ever had. I remember
wondering smokily whether anyone ever loves a
person. People seem to love dreams instead, and for the lucky ones, the person
is close to the dream. But it's a dream all the same, a sticky dream. You
unload the person, and the dream stays with you.
What
was it Dad had said? "When a fellow gets to be a big grown-up man ... he learns to make a pile of his beloved
failures and consign them to the flames." "Hah!"
I ejaculated, and gagged. The rum tasted terrible. I had
nothing to burn but memories and the lining of my stom-
ach. The latter was flaming merrily. The former stayed
where they were. The way she smiled, so deep and se-
cret
Then
I remembered the doodle. Her hands had touched it, her mind had— No, her mind
hadn't. It could have been anyone's mind, but not hers. The girl operated under
a great handicap. No brains. I felt terrible. I got up out of the chair and
wove across the room, leaning on the mantel. I put my forehead on the arm which
I had put on the mantel, and with my other hand worried the menu out of my
pocket. With the one hand and my teeth I tore it into small pieces and dropped
the pieces in the grate, all but one. Then I heaved myself upright, braced my
shoulder against the mantel, which had suddenly begun to bob and weave, got
hold of my lighter, coaxed a flame out of it and lit the piece I'd saved. Jt burned fine. I let it slip into the grate. It flickered,
dimmed, caught on another piece of paper, flared up
again. I went down on one knee and carefully fed all the little pieces to the
flame. When it finally went out I stirred the ashes around with my finger, got
up, wiped my hands on my pants, said, "That was good advice Dad gave
me," and went back to the chair. I went back into it, pushed my Shoes off
my feet, curled my legs under me and, feeling much better, dozed off.
I
woke slowly, some time later, with granulated eyelids
and a mouth full of emory and quinine. My head was
awake but my legs were asleep and my stomach had its little hands on my
backbone and was trying to pull it out by the roots. I sat there groggily
looking at the fire.
Fire?
What fire? I blinked and winced; I could almost hear my eyelids rasping.
There
was a fire in the grate. Dad was kneeling beside it, feeding it small pieces of
paper. I didn't say anything; I don't think it occurred to me. I just watched.
He
let the fire go out after a while; then he stirred the ashes with his finger
and stood up with a sigh, wiping his hands on his pants. "Good advice I
gave the boy. Time I took it myself." He loomed
across the shadowy room to me, turned around and sat down in my lap. He was relaxed
and heavy, but he didn't stay there long enough for me to feel it. "Gah!" he said, crossed the room again in one huge
bound, put his back against the mantel and said, "Don't move, you. I've
got a gun."
"It's me, Dad."
"Henry! Bythelordharry,
you'll be the death of me yet. That was the most inconsiderate thing you have
ever done in your entire selfish life. I've a notion to bend this poker over
your Adam's apple, you snipe." He stamped over to the bookcase and turned
on the light. "This is the last time I'll ever—Henry! What's the matter?
You look awful! Are you all right?"
"I'll
live," I said regretfully. "What were you burning?"
He
grinned sheepishly. "A beloved failure. Remember
my preachment a couple weeks ago? It got to working on me. I deceided to take my own advice." He breathed
deeply. "I feel much better, I think."
"I
burned some stuff too," I croaked. "I feel better too, I tliink," I added.
"Cordelia?"
he asked, sitting near me.
"She hasn't got brain
one," I said.
"Well,"
he said. There was more sharing and comfort in the single syllable than in
anything I have ever heard. I looked at him. He hadn't changed much over the
years. A bit heavier. A bit grayer.
Still intensely alive, though.
And
he'd learned to control those wild projects of his. I thought, quite
objectively, "I like this man.
We
were quiet for a warm while. Then, "Dad—what was it you burned? The Martian project?"
"Why,
you young devil! How
did you know?"
'1 dunno. You look like I feel. Sort
of—well, you've finally unloaded something, and it hurts to lose it, but you're
glad you did."
"On
the nose," he said, and grinned sheepishly. "Yup, Henry—I really
hugged that project to me. Want to hear about it?"
Anything
but Cordelia, I thought. "I saw your rig,"
I said, to break the ice. "The night you sent me out for
the wire. You left the workshop open."
"I'll be darned. I
thought I'd gotten away with it."
"Mother
knew what you were up to, though she didn't know how."
"And you saw
how."
"I
saw that weird gimmick of yours, but it didn't mean anything to me, Mother told
me never to mention it to you. She thought you'd be happier if you were left
alone."
He
laughed with real delight. "Bless her heart," he said. "She was
a most understanding woman."
"I
read about the Martian signals in the papers," I said. "Fellow
named—what was it?"
"Jenkins," said Dad. "C.
Francis Jenkins. He built a film-tape recorder to catch the signals. He tuned
to six thousand meters and had a flashing light to record the signals.
Primitive, but it worked. Dr. David Todd of Amherst was the man who organized
the whole project, and got the big radio people aU
over the world to cooperate. They had a five-minute silence every hour during
Mars' closest proximity—August 21 to 23."
"I remember," I said "It was
my birthday. 1924. What got you so teed-off?"
"I
got mad," said my father, folding his hands over bis stomach. "Just because it had become
fashionable to use radio in a certain way on earth, those simple souls had to
assume that the Martian signals—if any—would come through the same way. I felt
that they'd be different."
"Why should they
be?"
"Why
should we expect Martians to be the same? Or even think the same? I just took a
wild stab at it, that's alL I tuned in on six
wave-lengths at the same time. I set up my rig so that anything coming through
on any one wave-length would actuate a particular phone."
"I
remember," I said, trying hard. "The iron filings on the paper tape,
over the earphones."
"That's
right. The phone was positioned far enough below the tape so that the magnetic
field would barely contain the filings. When the diaphragm vibrated, the
filings tended to cluster. I had six phones on six different wave-lengths,
arranged like this," and he counted them out on the palm of his hand:
1 2
3 4 5 6
"What could you get? I don't figure it,
Dad. There'd be no way of separating your dots and dashes."
"Blast!''
he exploded? '"That's the kind of thinking that made me mad, and makes me
mad to this day! No, what I was after was something completely different in
transmission. Look; how much would you get out of piano music if all the
strings but one were broken? Only when the pianist hit that note in the course
of his transmission would you hear anything. See what I mean? Supposing the
Martians were sending In notes and chords of an established
octave of frequencies? Sure—Jenkins got signals. No one's ever been able to
interpret them. Well, supposing I was right—then Jenkins was recording only one
of several or many 'notes' of the scale, and of course it was
meaningless."
"Well, what did you
get?"
"Forty-six photographs, five of which were so badly under-exposed
that they were useless to me. I finally got the knack of moving the tape carefully enough and lighting
it properly, and they came out pretty well. I got signals of four of the six
frequencies. I got the same grouping only three of four times; I mean,
sometimes there would be something on phones 1, 2, and 4, and sometimes it
would only be on 4, and sometimes it would be on 2 and 6. Three and 5 never did
come through; it was just fantastic luck that I picked the right frequencies, I
suppose, for the other four."
"What frequencies did
you use?"
He
grinned. "I don't know. I really don't. It was all by guess and by golly.
I never was an engineer, Henry. I'm in the insurance business. I had no
instruments—particularly not in 1924. I wound a 6,000-meter coil according to
specs they printed in the paper. As for the others, I worked on the knowledge
that less turns of heavier wire means shorter wave-lengths. I haven't got the
coils now and couldn't duplicate 'em in a million
years. All I can say for sure is that they were all different, and stepped down
from 6,000.
"Anyway, I studied those things until I
was blue in the face. It must've been the better part of a year before I called
in anyone else. I wrote to Mr. Jenkins and Dr. Todd too, but who am I? A taxidermical broker with a wacky idea.
They sent the pictures back with polite letters, and I can't say I blame them
. . . anyway, good riddance to the things. But it was a wonderful idea, and I
wanted so much to be the man who did the job.... Ever want something so badly
you couldn't see straight, Henry?" "Me?" I asked, with
bitterness.
"It's
all over now, though. I'm through with crazy-projects, for life. Never again. But gosh, I did love that project. Know what I
mean?"
"No," I said with
even more bitterness.
He
sat up straight. "Hey. I'm sorry, fellow. Those were rhetorical questions.
Maybe you'd better spill it."
So I
told it to him—all of it. Once I started, I couldn't stop. I told him about the
moon poem and the "well, really" gimmick and the "please don't
translate" routine, and the more I talked the worse I felt. He sat and
listened, and didn't say "I told you so," and the idea was worming its way into the back of my mind as I talked that
here sat one of the most understanding people ever created, when he screamed.
He screamed as one screams at the intrusion of an ice-cube into the back of
one's bathing suit
"What's the
matter?" I asked, breaking off.
"Go
on, go on," he gabbled. "Henry, you idiot, don't tell me you don't
know what you're saying for Pete's sake, boy, tell it to—"
"Whoa! I don't even
remember where I was."
"What she said to
you—'Are you a terrestrial?'"
"Oh,
don't get so excited, Dad. It doesn't mean anything. Why bother? She was
trying to interest me, I suppose. I didn't let it get to me then and I won't
now. She-"
"Blast
her! I'm not talking about
her. It was what she said. Go on, Henry! You say she wrote something?"
He
wormed it all out of me. He forced me to go over it and over it. The windows
paled and the single light by the bookcase looked yellow and ill in the dawn,
but still he pounded at me. And I finally quit. I just quit, out of compounded
exhaustion and stubbornness. I lay back in the big chair and glared at him.
He
strode up and down the room, trying to beat his left hand to a pulp with a
right fist. "Of course, of course," he said excitedly. "That's
how they'd do it. The blankest mind in the world. Blank and sensitive, like undeveloped film. Of course! 'Making contact thirty years' they said. 'Much
power making contact this way—very high frequencies thought.' A radionic means of transmitting thought, and it uses too
much power to be practical. 'Easy radio. Not again
thought.'"
He
stopped in front of me, glaring. '"Not again thought,' he growled. "You—you dope! How
could my flesh and blood be so abjectly stupid? There in your hands you held
the interplanetary Rosetta Stone, and what did you do
with it?"
I
glared back at him. "I was quote consigning one of my beloved failures to
the flames end quote, I said nastily.
Suddenly
he was slumped and tired. "So you were, son. So you were. And it was all
there—like Braille, you said. A series of phonetic symbols, and almost
certainly a list of the frequency-octave they use. And—and all my pictures. ... I burned them too." He sat down.
"Henry-"
"Don't
take it so hard, Dad," I said. "Your advice was good. You forget your
Martians and I'll forget my moron. When a fellow gets to be a grown-up
man—"
He
didn't hear me. "Henry. You say her folks like you?"
I
sprang to my feet. "NO!" I bellowed. "Dad, I will not, repeat, not under any circumstances woo that beautiful package of brainless
reflexes. I have had mine. I—"
"You really mean it,
don't you?"
"That I do," I
said positively.
"Well," he said
dejectedly, "I guess that's that."
And then that old, old
fever came back into his face.
"Dad-"
He slowly straightened up, that hot
"Land ho!" expression in his eyes. My father is hale, handsome, and
when he wants to be, extremely persistent,
"Now,
Dad," I said. "Let's be reasonable. She's very young, Dad. Now, let's
talk this thing over a little more, Dad. You can't go following a girl all over
the house with a notebook and pencil. They said they wouldn't use the thought
contact again, Dad. Now Dad—"
"Your
mother would understand if she were alive," he murmured.
"No!
You can't!" I bawled. "Dad, for heaven's sake use
your head! Why you—Cordelia—Dad, she'd make me call
her Mummy!" -
Now what am I going to do?
Null-P
BY WILLIAM TENN
Several
months after the Second
Atomic War, when radioactivity still held one-third of the planet in
desolation, Dr. Daniel Glurt of Fillmore Township, Wise., stumbled upon a discovery which was to generate
humanity's ultimate sociological advance.
Like
Columbus, smug over his voyage to India; like Nobel, proud of the synthesis of
dynamite which made combat between nations impossible, the doctor misinterpreted
his discovery. Years later, he cackled to a visiting historian:
"Had
no idea it would lead to this, no idea at alL You
remember, the war had just ended: we were feeling mighty subdued what with the
eastern and western coasts of the United States practically sizzled away. Well,
word came down from the new capitol at Topeka in Kansas for us doctors to give
all our patients a complete physical check. Sort of be on the lookout, you
know, for radioactive burns and them fancy new
diseases the armies had been tossing back and forth. Well, sir, that's
absolutely all I set out to do. I'd known George Abnego
for over thirty years—treated him for chicken-pox and pneumonia and ptomaine
poisoning. I'd never
suspected!"
Having
reported to Dr. Glurt's office immediately after work
in accordance with the proclamation snouted through the streets by the county
clerk, and having
waited
patiently in line for an hour and a half, George Abnego
was at last received into the small consulting room. Here he was thoroughly
chest-thumped, X-rayed, blood-sampled and urin-analyzed.
His skin was examined carefully, and he was made to answer the five hundred
questions prepared by the Department of Health in a pathetic attempt to cover
the symptoms of the new ailments.
George
Abnego then dressed and went home to the cereal
supper permitted for that day by the ration board. Dr. Glurt
placed his folder in a drawer and called for the next patient. He had noticed
nothing up to this point; yet already he had unwittingly begun the Abnegite Revolution.
Four
days later, the health survey of Fillmore, Wise.,
being complete, the doctor forwarded the examination reports to Topeka. Just
before signing George Abnego's sheet, he glanced at
it cursorily, raised his eyebrows and entered the following note: "Despite
the tendency to dental caries and athlete's foot, I would consider this man to
be of average health. Physically, he is the Fillmore Township norm."
It
was this last sentence which caused the government medical official to chuckle
and glance at the sheet once more. His smile was puzzled after this; it was
even more puzzled after he had checked the figures and statements on the form
against standard medical references.
He
wrote a phrase in red ink in the right-hand corner and sent it along to
Research.
His name is lost to
history.
Research
wondered why the report on George Abnego had been
sent up—he had no unusual symptoms portending exotic innovations like cerebral
measles or arterial trilhinosis. Then it observed the
phrase in red ink and Dr. Glurt's remark. Research
shrugged its anonymous shoulders and assigned a crew of statisticians to go further
into the matter.
A
week later, as a result of their findings, another crew—nine medical
specialists—left for Fillmore. They examined George Abnego
with coordinated precision. Afterwards, they called on Dr. Glurt
briefly, leaving a copy of their examination report with him when he expressed
interest.
Ironically,
the government copies were destroyed in the Topeka Hard-Shelled Baptist Riots a
month later, the same riots which stimulated Dr. Glurt
to launch the Abnegite Revolution.
This
Baptist denomination, because of population shrinkage due to atomic and
bacteriological warfare, was now the largest single religious body in the
nation. It was then controlled by a group pledged to the establishment of a
Hard-Shelled Baptist theocracy in what was left of the United States. The
rioters were quelled after much destruction and bloodshed; their leader, the
Reverend Hemingway T. Gaunt—who had vowed that he would remove neither the
pistol from his left hand nor the Bible from his right until the Rule of God
had been established and the Third Temple built—was sentenced to death by a
jury composed of stern-faced fellow Baptists.
Commenting
on the riots, the Fillmore, Wise., Bugle-Herald drew a mournful parallel between the Topeka
street battles and the destruction wreaked upon the world by atomic conflict.
"International
communication and transportation having broken down," the editorial went
on broodingly, "we now know little of the smashed world in which we live
beyond such meager facts as the comple disappearance
of Australia beneath the waves, and the contraction of Europe to the Pyrenees
and Ural Mountains. We know that our planet's physical appearance has changed
as much from what it was ten years ago, as the infant monstrosities and
mutants being born everywhere as a result of radioactivity are unpleasantly
different from their parents.
"Truly,
in these days of mounting catastrophe and change, our faltering spirits beg the
heavens for a sign, a portent, that all will be well again, that all will yet
be as it once was, that the waters of disaster will subside and we shall once
more walk upon the solid ground of normalcy."
It
was this last word which attracted Dr. Glint's attention. That night, he slid
the report of the special
f |
overnment medical crew into the newspaper's
mail slot, le had penciled a laconic note in the margin of
the first page:
"Noticed your interest in the
subject."
Next week's edition of the Fillmore Bugle-Herald flaunted
a page one five-column headline.
FILLMORE
CITIZEN THE SIGN?
Normal Man of Fillmore May Be Answer From
Above Local Doctor Reveals Government Medical Secret
The story that followed was liberally
sprinkled with quotations taken equally from the government report and the
Psalms of David. The startled residents of Fillmore learned that one George Abnego, a citizen unnoticed in their midst for almost
forty years, was a living abstraction. Through a combination of circumstances
no more remarkable than those producing a royal flush in stud poker, Abnego's physique, psyche, and other miscellaneous
attributes had resulted in that legendary creature— the statistical average.
According to the last census taken before the
war,
George
Abnego's height and weight were identical with the
mean of the American adult male. He had married at the exact age—year, month,
day-^when statisticians had estimated the marriage of the average man took
place; he had married a woman the average number
of years younger than himself; his income as declared on his last tax statement
was the average
income for that year. The
very teeth in his mouth tallied in quantity and condition with those predicted
by the American Dental Association to be found on a man extracted at random
from the population. Abnego's metabolism and blood
pressure, his bodily proportions and private neuroses, were all cross-sections
of the latest available records. Subjected to every psychological and
personality test available, his final, overall grade corrected out to show that
he was both average and normal.
Finally,
Mrs. Abnego had been recently delivered of their
third child, a boy. This development had not only occurred at exactly the right
time according to the population indices, but it had resulted in an entirely
normal sample of humanity—unlike most babies being born throughout the land.
The Bugle-Herald blared its hymn to the new celebrity around a
greasy photograph of the family in which the assembled Abnegos
stared glassily out at the reader, looking, as many put it,
"Average—average as hell!"
Newspaper
in other states were invited to copy.
They
did, slowly at first, then with an accelerating, contagious enthusiasm. Indeed,
as the intense public interest in this symbol of stability, this refugee from
the extremes, became manifest, newspaper columns
gushed fountains of purple prose about the "Normal Man of Fillmore."
At
Nebraska State University, Professor Roderick Klingmeister
noticed that many members of his biology
class
were wearing extra-large buttons decorated with pictures of George Abnego. "Before beginning my lecture," he
chuckled, "I would like to tell you that this "normal man' of yours
is no Messiah. All he is, I am afraid, is a bell-shaped curve with ambitions,
the median made flesh—"
He
got no further. He was brained with his own demonstration miscroscope.
Even
that early, a few watchful politicians noticed that no one was punished for
this hasty act.
The
incident could be related to many others which followed: the unfortunate and
unknown citizen of Duluth, for example, who—at the high point of that city's Welcome Average Old Abnego
parade—was heard to remark
in good-natured amazement, "Why, he's just an ordinary jerk like you and
me," and was immediately torn into celebratory confetti by horrified
neighbors in the crowd.
Developments
such as these received careful consideration from men
whose power was derived from the just, if well-directed, consent of the
governed.
George
Abnego, these gentry concluded, represented the
maturation of a great national myth which, implicit in the culture for over a
century, had been brought to garish fulfillment by the mass communication and
entertainment media.
This
was the myth that began with the juvenile appeal to be "A Normal
Red-Blooded American Boy" and ended, on the highest political levels, with
a shirt-sleeved, suspendered seeker after political office boasting.
"Shucks, everybody knows who I am. I'm folks—just plain folks."
This
was the myth from which were derived such superficially disparate practices as
the rite of political baby-kissing, the cult of "keeping up with the
Joneses," the foppish, foolish, forever-changing fads which went through
the population which the monotonous regularity and sweep of a windshield wiper.
The myth of styles and fraternal organizations. The myth of the "regular fellow."
There was a presidential
election that year.
Since
all that remained of the United States was the Middle West, the Democratic
Party had disappeared. Its remnants had been absorbed by a group calling itself
the Old Guard Republicans, the closest thing to an American Left, The party in
power—the Conservative Republicans—so far right as to verge upon royalism, had acquired enough pledged theocratic votes to
make them smug about the election.
Desperately,
the Old Guard Republicans searched for a candidate. Having regretfully passed
over the adolescent epileptic recently elected to the governorship of South
Dakota in violation of the state constitution—and deciding against the
psalm-singing grandmother from Oklahoma who punctuated her senatorial speeches
with religious music upon the banjo—the party strategists arrived, one summer
afternoon, in Fillmore, Wisconsin.
From
the moment that Abnego was persuaded to accept the
nomination and his last well-intentioned but flimsy objection was overcome (the
fact that he was a registered member of the opposition party), it was obvious
that the tide of battle had turned, that the fabled grass roots had caught
fire.
Abnego ran
for President on the slogan "Back to Normal with the Normal Man!"
By the time the Conservative Republicans met
in conference assembled, the danger of loss by landslide was already apparent They changed their tactics, tried to meet the attack head-on
and imaginatively.
They nominated a hunchback for the
presidency. This
man
suffered from the additional disability of being a distinguished professor of
law in a leading-university; he had married with no issue and divorced with
much publicity; and finally, he had once admitted to a congressional
investigating committee that he had written and published surrealist poetry.
Posters depicting him leering horribly, his hump twice life-size, were smeared
across the country over the slogan: "An Abnormal Man for an Abnormal
World!"
Despite
this brilliant political stroke, the issue was never in doubt. On Election Day,
the nostalgic slogan defeated its medicative
adversary by three to one. Four years later, with the same opponents, it had
risen to five and a half to one. And there was no organized opposition when Abnego ran for a third term. . . .
Not
that he had crushed it. There was more casual liberty of political thought
allowed during Abnego's administrations than in many
previous ones. But less political thinking was done.
Whenever
possible, Abnego avoided decision. When a decision
was unavoidable, he made it entirely on the basis of precedent. He rarely spoke
on a topic of current interest and never committed himself. He was garrulous
and an exhibitionist only about his family.
"How
can you lampoon a vacuum?" This had been the wail of many opposition
newspaper writers and cartoonists during the early years of the Abnegite Revolution, when men still ran against Abnego at election time. They tried to draw him into
ridiculous statements or admissions time and again without success. Abnego was simply incapable of saying anything that any
major cross-section or the population would consider ridiculous.
Emergencies? "Well," Abnego
had said, in the story every school-child knew, "I've noticed even the
biggest forest fire will bum itself out. Main thing is not to get
excited."
He
made them lie down in low blood-pressure areas. And, after years of building
and destruction, of stimulation and conflict, of accelerating anxieties and
torments, they rested and were humbly grateful.
It
seemed to many, from the day Abnego
was sworn in, that chaos began to waver and everywhere a glorious, welcome
stability flowered. In some respects, such as the decrease in the number of
monstrous births, processes were under way which had nothing at all to do with
the Normal Man of Fillmore; in others—the astonished announcement by
lexicographers, for example, that slang expressions peculiar to teen-agers in Abnego's first term were used by their children in exactly
the same contexts eighteen years later in his fifth administration—the historical
leveling-out and parting-down effects of the Abnegite
trowel were obvious.
The
verbal expression of this great calm was the Ab-negism.
History's
earliest record of these deftly phrased inadequacies relates to the
administration in which Abnego, at last feeling
secure enough to do so, appointed a cabinet without any regard to the wishes of
his party hierarchy. A journalist, attempting to point up the absolute lack of
color in the new official family, asked if any one of them—from Secretary of
State to Postmaster-General— had ever committed himself publicly on any issue
or, in previous positions, had been responsible for a single constructive step
in any direction.
To
which the President supposedly replied with a bland, unhesitating smile,
"I always say there's no hard feelings if no one's defeated. Well, sir, no
one's defeated in a fight where the referee can't make a decision."
Apocryphal though it may have been, this
remark
expressed the
mood of Abnegite America perfectly. "As
i |
)leasant
as a no-decision bout" became part of everyday anguage."
Certainly
as apocryphal as the George Washington cherry-tree legend, but the most
definite Abnegism of them all was the one attributed
to the President after a performance of Romeo and Juliet. "It is better not to have loved at all, than to have loved and
lost," he is1 reported to have remarked at the morbid end of
the play.
At
the inception of Abnego's sixth term—the first in
which his oldest son served with him as Vice-President— a group of Europeans
re-opened trade with the United States by arriving in a cargo ship assembled
from the salvaged parts of three sunken destroyers and one capsized aircraft
carrier.
Received
everywhere with undemonstrative cordiality, they traveled the country, amazed
at the placidity—the almost total absence of political and military excitement
on the one hand, and the rapid technological retrogression on the other. One of
the emissaries sufficiently mislaid his diplomatic caution to comment before he
left:
"We
came to America, to these cathedrals of industrialism, in the hope that we
would find solutions to many vexing problems of
applied science. These problems—the development of atomic power for factory
use, the application of nuclear fission to such small arms as pistols and hand
grenades—stand in the way of our postwar recovery. But you, in what remains of
the United States of America, don't even see what we, in what remains pf Europe, consider so complex and pressing. Excuse me, but
what you have here is a national trance!"
His
American hosts were not offended: they received his expostulations with polite
smiles and shrugs. The delegate returned to tell his countrymen that the
Americans, always notorious for their madness, had finally specialized in
cretinism.
But another delegate who had observed widely
and asked many searching questions went back to his native Toulouse (French
culture had once more coagulated in Provence) to define the philosophical
foundations of the Abnegite Revolution.
In a
book which was read by the world with enormous interest, Michel Gaston Fouffnique, sometime Professor of History at the Sorbonne,
pointed out that while twentieth-century man had escaped from the narrow Greek
formulations sufficiently to visualize a non-Aristotelian logic and a
non-Euclidean geometry, he had not yet had the intellectual temerity to create
a non-Platonic system of politics. Not until Abnego.
"Since
the time of Socrates," wrote Monsieur Fouffnique,
"Man's political viewpoints have been in thrall to the conception that the
best should govern. How to determine that 'best,' the scale of values to be
used in order that the 'best' and not mere undifferentiated 'betters' should
rule—these have been the basic issues around which have raged the fires of
political controversy for almost three millennia. Whether an aristocracy of
birth or intellect should prevail is an argument over values; whether rulers
should be determined by the will of a god as determined by the entrails of a nog, or selected by the whole
people on the basis of a ballot tally— these are alternatives in method. But
hitherto no political system has ventured away from the implicit and unexamined
assumption first embodied in the philosopher-state of Plato's Republic.
"Now,
at last, America has turned and questioned the pragmatic validity of the axiom.
The young democracy to the west, which introduced the concept of the Rights of
Man to jurisprudence, now gives a feverish world the Doctrine of the Lowest
Common Denominator in government. According to this doctrine as I have come to
understand it through prolonged observation, it is not the worst who should govern—as many of my prejudiced fellow-delegates
insist—but the mean: what might be termed the •unbest'
or the 'non-elite.'"
Situated
amid the still-radioactive rubbish of modern war, the people of Europe listened devoudy to readings from Fouffmque's monograph. They were enthralled by the peaceful
monotonies said to exist in the United States and bored by the academician's
reasons thereto: that a governing group who knew to begin with that they were nmbest" would be free of the myriad jealousies and
conflicts arising from the need to prove individual superiority, andthat such a group would tend to smooth any major quarrel
very rapidly because of the dangerous opportunities created for imaginative and
resourceful people by conditions of struggle and strain.
There
were oligarchs here and bosses there; in one nation an ancient religious order
still held sway, in another, calculating and brilliant men continued to lead
the people. But the word was preached. Shamans appeared in the population,
ordinary-looking folk who were called "abnegos.
Tyrants found it impossible to destroy these shamans, since they were not
chosen for any special abilities but simply because they represented the median
of a given group: the middle of any population grouping, it was found, lasts as
long as the group itself. Therefore, through bloodshed and much time, the abnegos spread their philosopny
and flourished.
Oliver
Abnego, who became the first President of the World,
was President Abnego VI of the United States of
America. His son presided—as Vice President—over a Senate composed mostly of
his uncles and his cousins and his aunts. They and their numerous offspring
lived in an economy which had deteriorated very, very slightly from the
conditions experienced by the founder of then: line.
As
world president, Oliver Abnego approved only one
measure—that granting preferential university scholarships to students whose
grades were closest to their age-group median all over the planet. The
President could hardly have been accused of originality and innovation
unbecoming to his high office, however, since for some time now all reward
systems—scholastic, athletic, and even industrial—had been adjusted to
recognition of the most average achievement while castigating equally the
highest and lowest scores.
When
the usable oil gave out shortly afterwards, men turned with perfect calmness to
coal. The last turbines were placed in museums while still in operating condition:
the people they served felt their isolated and individual use of electricity
was too ostentatious for good abnegism.
Outstanding
cultural phenomena of this period were carefully rhymed and exactly metered
poems addressed to the nondescript beauties and vague charms of a wife or
sweetheart. Had not anthropology disappeared long ago, it would have become a
matter of common, knowledge that there was a startling tendency to uniformity
everywhere in such qualities as bone structure, features and pigmentation, not
to mention intelligence, musculature, and personality. Humanity was breeding
rapidly and unconsciously in towards its center.
Nonetheless,
just before the exhaustion of coal, there was a brief sputter of intellect
among a group who established themselves on a site northwest of Cairo. These Nilotics, as they were known, consisted mostly of unreconstructed
dissidents expelled by their communities, with a leavening of the mentally ill
and the physically handicapped; they had at their peak an immense number of
technical gadgets and yellowing books culled from crumbling museums and
libraries the world over.
Intensely ignored by. their fellow-men, the Nilotics
carried on shrill and interminable debates while plowing their muddy fields
just enough to keep alive. They concluded that they were the only surviving
heirs of homo
sapiens, the
bulk of the world's population now being composed of what they termed homo abnegus.
Man's
evolutionary success, they concluded, had been due chiefly to his lack of
specialization. While other creatures had been forced to standardize to a
particular and limited environment, mankind had been free for a tremendous
spurt, until ultimately it had struck an environmental factor which demanded
the price all viable forms had to pay eventually—specialization.
Having
come this far in discussion, the Nilotics determined
to use the ancient weapons at their disposal to save homo abnegus from himself. However, violent disagreements
over the methods of re-education to be employed, led them to a bloody
internecine conflict with those same weapons in the course of which the entire
colony was destroyed and its site made untenable for life. About this time, his
coal used up, Man reentered the broad, self-replenishing forests.
The
reign of homo
abnegus endured for a quarter of a million years. It was disputed finally—and
successfully— by a group of Newfoundland retrievers who had been marooned on an
island in Hudson Bay when the cargo vessel transporting them to new owners had
sunk back in the twentieth century.
These
sturdy and highly intelligent dogs, limited perforce to each other's growling
society for several hundred millennia, learned to talk in much the same manner
that mankind's simian ancestors had learned to walk when a sudden shift in
botany destroyed their ancient arboreal homes—out of boredom. Their wits
sharpened further by the hardships of their bleak island, their imaginations
stimulated by the cold, the articulate retrievers
built a most remarkable canine civilization in the Arctic before sweeping
southward to enslave and eventually domesticate humanity.
Domestication
took the form of breeding men solely for their ability to throw sticks and
other objects, the retrieving of which was a sport still popular among the new
masters of the planet, however sedentary certain erudite individuals might have
become.
Highly
prized as pets were a group of men with incredibly thin and long arms; another
school of retrievers, however, favored a stocky breed whose arms were short,
but extremely sinewy; while, occasionally, interesting results were obtained by
inducing rickets for a few generations to produce a pet whose arms were
sufficiently limber as to appear almost boneless. This last type, while
intriguing both esthetically and scientifically, was generally decried as a
sign of decadence in the owner as well as a functional insult to the animal.
Eventually,
of course, the retriever civilization developed machines which could throw
sticks farther, faster, and with more frequency. Thereupon, except in the most
backward canine communities, Man disappeared.
THE END
Other Science Fiction titles available in Berkley editions:
POSSIBLE WORLDS OF SCIENCE FICTION edited by
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ASTOUNDING TALES OF SPACE AND TIME edited by
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BIG BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION edited by Groff Cenklin G53—35*
A TREASURY OF SCIENCE FICTION edited by Groff
Cenklin G63—35*
STRANGERS IN THE UNIVERSE by Clifford D. Simak G71—35*
BEACHHEADS
IN SPACE edited by August Derleth G77—35*
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BEYOND
TIME AND SPACE edited by August Derleth Gl 04—35«
THE
OUTER REACHES edited by August Derleth Gl 16—35«
STRANGE
PORTS OF CALL edited by August Derleth G131—35«
MEN.
MARTIANS AND MACHINES by Erie Frank Russell G148—35«
MISSION TO THE STARS by A. E. Van Yegt #344—25«
THE TIME MACHINE by H. G. Wells #380—25«
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