A Treasury of Great Science Fiction Vol 2 Part 11

"He'll be back soon," said Kearnes hastily. No use reminding her that the star s.h.i.+p was already two weeks overdue. "He's all right. It's you we have to think about.""Yes." She knotted her brows together, earnestly. "They still come to me. The shadows, I mean. Words out of nowhere. Sometimes they almost make sense."

"Can you say them to me?" he asked.

"I don't know. This house is on Long Island, long island, longing island, island of longing, where is Pete?"

He relaxed a trifle. That was a more obvious a.s.sociation than she had sprung on him last time. What had it been? But when the uttermost hollow-frozen and time so dark that lightlessness is a weight is, then tell me, what lies beneath it... Maybe she was healing herself in the quiet of her aloneness.

He couldn't be sure. Things had changed too much. A schizophrenic's mind went into lands where he could not follow, the new patterns had simply not been mapped yet. But he thought Sheila was acting a little more healthily.

"I shouldn't play with them, I know," she said abruptly. "That's dangerous. If you take them by the hand they'll let you guide them for a while, but they won't let go of your hand again."

"I'm glad you realize that," he said. "What you want to do is exercise your mind. Think of it as a tool or a muscle. Go through those drills I gave you on logical processes and general semantics."

"I have." She giggled. "The triumphant discovery of the obvious."

"Well," he laughed, "you're back on your feet enough to make snide remarks, at least."

"Oh, yes." She picked at a thread in the upholstery. "But where is Pete?"

He evaded the question and put her through some routine word-a.s.sociation tests. Their diagnostic value was almost nil-every time he tried them, the words seemed to have taken on different connotations-but he could add the results to his own data files. Eventually he would have enough material to find an underlying pattern. This new n-dimensional conformal-mapping technique looked promising, it might yield a consistent picture.

"I have to go," he said at last. He patted her arm. "You'll be all right. Remember, if you ever want help, or just company, in a hurry, all you have to do is call me."

She didn't get up, but sat there watching him till he was out of the door. Then she sighed. I do not like you, Doctor Fell, she thought. You look like a bulldog that snapped at me once, many hundred years ago. But you're so easy to fool!

An old song ran through her head: "He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a gra.s.s green turf, At his heels a stone."

No, she said to the other one who sang in her head. Go away.

The sea growled and grumbled, and snow fell thicker againsj the windows. She felt as if the world were closing in on her.

"Pete," she whispered. "Pete, honey, I need you so much. Please come back."

CHAPTER SIXTEENTHEY FLASHED OUT OF THE FIELD, and the next few minutes were dreadful. Then: "Where are we?"

The unknown constellations glittered around them, and the silence was so enormous that their own breathing was loud and harsh in their ears.

"I don't know," groaned Lewis. "And I don't care. Lemme sleep, will you?"

He stumbled across the narrow cabin and flopped into a bunk, shaking with wretchedness. Corinth watched him for a moment through the blur that was his own vision, and then turned back to the stars.

This is ridiculous, he told himself sharply. You're free again. You have the full use of your brain once more. Then use it!

His body shuddered with pain. Life wasn't meant for changes like this. A sudden return to the old dimness, numb days fading into weeks while the s.h.i.+p hurled herself uncontrollably outward, and then the instant emer-gence, clear s.p.a.ce and the nervous system flaring up to full intensity-it should have killed them.

It will pa.s.s, it will pa.s.s, but meanwhile the s.h.i.+p is still outward bound, Earth lies farther behind with every fleeting second. Stop herl He sat grasping the arms of his chair, fighting down the dry nausea.

Calmness, he willed, slowness, brake the racing heart, relax muscles that jerked against their bones, bank the fires of life and let them build up slowly as they should.

He thought of Sheila waiting for him, and the image was a steadiness in his whirling universe. Gradually, he felt the strength spreading as he willed it. It was a conscious battle to halt the spasmodic gasps of his lungs, but when that was won the heart seemed to slow of itself. The retching pa.s.sed away, the trembling stopped, the eyes cleared, and Peter Corinth grew fully aware of himself.

He stood up, smelling the sour reek of vomit in the cabin and activating the machine which cleaned the place up. Looking out the viewscreens, he gathered in the picture of the sky. The s.h.i.+p would have changed speed and direction many times in her blind race through heaven, they could be anywhere in this arm of the galaxy, but--- Yes, there were the Magellanic Clouds, ghosts against night, and that hole of blackness must be the Coal Sack, and then the great nebula in Andromeda -Sol must lie approximately in that direction. About three weeks' journey at their top pseudospeed; then, of course, they'd have to cast about through the local region to find that very ordinary yellow dwarf which was man's sun. Allow a few days, or even a couple of weeks, for that. Better than a month!

No help for it, however impatient he was. Emotion was, causally, a psychophysiological state, and as such ought to be controllable. Corinth willed the rage and grief out of himself, willed calmness and resolution. He went over to the controls and solved their mathematical problem as well as he could with the insufficient data available. A few swift movements of his hands brought the s.h.i.+p's flight to a halt, turned her about, and plunged her toward Sol.

Lewis was unconscious, and Corinth didn't wake him. Let him sleep off the shock of readjustment. The physicist wanted a little privacy for thinking anyway.

He thought back over the terrible weeks in the field. When they had been there, he and Lewis, their livessince Earth had left it had seemed dreamlike. They could hardly imagine what they had been doing; they could not think and feel as those other selves had done. The chains of reasoning which had made the reorganization of the world and the building of the s.h.i.+p possible within months, had been too subtle and ramified for animal man to follow. After a while, their talk and their desperate scheming had faded into an apathy of despair, and they waited numbly for chance to release them or kill them.

Well, thought Corinth on the edge of a mind that was dealing with a dozen things at once, as it happened, we were released.

He sat looking out at the stupendous glory of heaven, and the realization that he was bound home and still alive and sane was a pulse of gladness within him. But the new coolness which he had willed into himself overlay him like armor. He could throw it off at the proper time, and would, but the fact of it was overwhelming.

He should have foreseen that this would come. Doubtless many on Earth had already discovered it for themselves but, with communications still fragmentary, had not yet been able to spread the word. The history of man had, in one sense, represented an unending struggle between instinct and intelligence, the involuntary rhythm of organism and the self-created patterns of consciousness. Here, then, was the final triumph of mind.

For him it had come suddenly, the shock of re-emergence into full neural activity precipitating the change which had been latent in him. For all normal humanity, though, it must come soon-gradually, continuously, perhaps, but soon.

The change in human nature and human society which this would bring about was beyond even his imagination. A man would still have motivations, he would still want to do things, but he could select his own desires, consciously. His personality would be self-adjusted to the intellectually conceived requirements of his situation. He would not be a robot, no, but he would not resemble what he had been in the past. As the new techniques were fully worked out, psychosomatic diseases would vanish and even organic troubles ought to be controllable in high degree by the will; no more pain; every man could learn enough medicine to take care of the rest, and there would be no more doctors.

Eventually-no more death?

No, probably not that. Man was still a very finite thing. Even now, he had natural limitations, whatever they might be. A truly immortal man would eventually be smothered under the weight of his own experience, the potentialities of his nervous system would be exhausted.

Nevertheless, a life span of many centuries ought to be attainable; and the specter of age, the slow disintegration which was senility, could be abolished.

Protean man-intellectual man-infinity!

The star was not unlike Sol-a little bigger, a little redder, but it had planets and one of them was similar to Earth. Corinth sent the s.h.i.+p plunging into the atmosphere of the night side.

Detectors swept the area. No radiation above the normal background count, that meant no atomic energy; but there were cities in which the buildings themselves shone with a cool light, and machines and radio and a world-wide intercourse. The s.h.i.+p recorded the voices that talked through the night, later on the language could perhaps be a.n.a.lyzed.

The natives, seen an4 photographed in a fractional second as the s.h.i.+p went noiselessly overhead, were of the humanoid sort, mammalian bipeds, though they had greenish fur and six fingers to a hand andaltogether unhuman heads. Thronging their cities, they were almost pathetically like the crowds in old New York. The form was alien, but the life and its humble desires were the same.

Intelligence, another race of minds, man is not alone in the hugeness of s.p.a.ce-time-once it would have marked an epoch. Now it merely confirmed a hypothesis. Corinth rather liked the creatures that walked beneath him, he wished them well, but they were only another species of the local fauna. Animals.

"They seem to be a lot more sensible than we were in the old days," said Lewis as the s.h.i.+p spiraled over the continent. "I see no evidence of war or preparations for war; maybe they outgrew that even before they achieved machine technology."

"Or maybe this is the planet-wide universal state," answered Corinth. "One nation finally knocked out all the others and absorbed them. We'll have to study the place a bit to find out, and I, for one, am not going to stop now to do it."

Lewis shrugged. "I daresay you're justified. Let's go, then-a quick sweep around the day side, and we'll let it go at that."

Despite the self-command which had been growing in him, Corinth had to battle down a fury of impatience. Lewis was right in his insistence that they at least investigate the stars which lay near their homeward path. It wouldn't kill anyone on Earth to wait a few weeks more for their return, and the information would be valuable.

A few hours after entering the atmosphere, the Sheila left it again and turned starward. The planet fell rapidly behind her driving hull, the sun dwindled and was lost, a whole living world-life, evolution, ages of history, struggle and glory and doom, dreams, hates and fears, hope and love and longing, all the many-layered existence of a thousand million sentient beings -was swallowed by darkness.

Corinth looked out and let the s.h.i.+ver of dismay run free within him. The cosmos was too big. No matter how swiftly men fled through it, no matter how far they ranged in all ages to come and how mightily they wrought, it would be the briefest glimmer in one forgotten corner of the great silence. This single dust mote of a galaxy was so inconceivably huge that even now his mind could not encompa.s.s the knowledge; even in a million years, it could not be fully known; and beyond it and beyond it lay s.h.i.+ning islands of stars, outwardness past imagination. Let man reach forth till the cosmos itself perished, he would still accomplish nothing against its unheeding immensity.

It was a healthy knowledge, bringing a humility which the coldness of his new mind lacked. And it was good to know that there would always be a frontier and a challenge; and the realization of that chill hugeness would draw men together, seeking each other for comfort, it might make them kinder to all life.

Lewis spoke slowly in the quiet of the s.h.i.+p: "This makes nineteen planets we've visited, fourteen of them with intelligent life."

Corinth's memory went back over what he had seen, the mountains and oceans and forests of whole worlds, the life which blossomed in splendor or struggled only to live, and the sentience which had arisen to take blind nature in hand. It had been a fantastic variety of shape and civilization. Leaping, tailed barbarians howled in their swamps; a frail and gentle race, gray like silver-dusted lead, grew their big flowers for some unknown symbolic reason; a world smoked and blazed with the fury of nations locked in an atomic death clutch, pulling down their whole culture in a voluptuous hysteria of hate; beings of centaur shape flew between the planets of their own sun and dreamed of reaching the stars; the hydrogen-breathing monsters dwelling on a frigid, poisonous giant of a planet had evolved three separate species, so vast were the distances between; the world-civilization of a biped folk who looked almost human had become so completely and inflexibly organized that individuality was lost, consciousness itselfwas dimming toward extinction as antlike routine took the place of thought; a small snouted race had developed specialized plants which furnished all their needs for the taking, and settled down into a tropical paradise of idleness; one nation, of the many on a ringed world, had scorned wealth and power as motivations and given themselves to a pa.s.sionate artistry. Oh, they had been many and strange, there was no imagining what diversity the universe had evolved, but even now Corinth could see the pattern.

Lewis elaborated it for him: "Some of those races were much older than ours, I'm sure. And yet, Pete, none of them is appreciably more intelligent than man was before the change. You see what it indicates?"

"Well, nineteen planets-and the stars in this galaxy alone number on the order of a hundred billion, and theory says most of them have planets- What kind of a sample is that?"

"Use your head, man! It's a safe bet that under normal evolutionary conditions a race only gets so intelligent and then stops. None of those stars have been in the inhibitor field, you know.

"It ties in; it makes good sense. Modern man is not essentially different from the earliest h.o.m.o sapiens, either. The basic ability of an intelligent species is that of adapting environment to suit its own needs, rather than adapting itself to environment. Thus, in effect, the thinking race can maintain fairly constant conditions. It's as true for an Eskimo in his igloo as it is for a New Yorker in his air-conditioned apartment; but machine technology, once the race stumbles on to it, makes the physical surroundings still more constant. Agriculture and medicine stabilize the biological environment. In short-once a race reaches the intelligence formerly represented by an average I.Q. of 100 to, say, 150, it doesn't need to become smarter than it is."

Corinth nodded. "Eventually surrogate brains are developed, too, to handle problems the unaided mind couldn't deal with," he said. "Computers, for instance; though writing is really the same principle. I see your point, of course."

"Oh, there's more to it than that," added Lewis. "The physical structure of the nervous system imposes limitations, as you well know. A brain can only get so big, then the neural paths become unmanageably long. I'll work out the detailed theory when I get home, if somebody else hasn't beaten me to it.

"Earth, of course, is a peculiar case. The presence of the inhibitor field made terrestrial life change its basic biochemistry. We have our structural limitations too, but they're wider because of that difference in type. Therefore, we may very well be the smartest race in the universe now-in this galaxy, at least."

"Mmmmm, maybe so. Of course, there were many other stars in the field too."

"And still are. New ones must be entering it almost daily. Lord, how I pity the thinking races on those planets! They're thrown back to a sub-moronic level-a lot of them must simply die out, unable to survive without minds. Earth was lucky; it drifted into the field before intelligence had appeared."

"But there must be many planets in a similar case," urged Corinth.

"Well, possibly," conceded Lewis. "There may well be races which emerged, and shot up to our present level, thousands of years ago. If so, we'll meet them eventually, though the galaxy is so big that it may take a long time. And we'll adjust harmoniously to each other." He smiled wryly. "After all, pure logical mind is so protean, and the merely physical will become so unimportant to us, that we'll doubtless find those beings to be just like ourselves-whatever their bodies resemble. How'd you like to be a partner of a-a giant spider, maybe?"

Corinth shrugged. "I'd have no objections.""No, of course not. Be fun to meet them. And we won't be alone in the universe any more---"

Lewis sighed. "Still, Pete, let's face it. Only a very tiny minority of all the sentient species there must be in the galaxy can have been as fortunate as us. We may find a dozen kindred races, or a hundred-no large number. Our sort of mind is very lonely."

His eyes went out to the stars. "Nevertheless, it may be that that uniqueness has its compensations. I think I'm beginning to see an answer to the real problem: what is superbrained man going to do with his powers, what can he find worthy of his efforts? I still wonder if perhaps there hasn't been a reason-call it G.o.d-for all this to happen."

Corinth nodded absently. He was straining ahead, peering into the forward viewscreen as if his vision could leap light-years and find the planet called Earth.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

SPRING HAD COME LATE, but now there was warmth in the air and a mist of green on the trees. It was too nice a day to sit in an office, and Mandelbaum regretted his own eminence. It would be more fun to go out and shoot some golf, if the nearest course was dry enough yet. But as chief administrator of the area including roughly the old states of New York, New Jersey, and New England, he had his duties.

Well, when they had gotten the weather-turning force-screens into full production, he'd move his headquarters out in the country somewhere and sit in the open. Till then, he remained in the city. New York was dying, it had no more economic or social purpose and every day some hundreds of people left it, but the location was still convenient.

He entered the office, nodded at the staff, and went into his own sanctum. The usual stack of reports waited, but he had barely gotten started when the phone rang. He swore as he picked it up-must be rather urgent if his secretary had bucked it on to him. "h.e.l.lo," he snapped.

"William Jerome." It was the voice of the superintendent of the Long Island food-factory project. He had been a civil engineer before the change and continued his old work on a higher level. "I need advice," he continued, "and you seem to be the best human-relations idea-man around."

He spoke a little awkwardly, as did Mandelbaum; both were practicing the recently developed Unitary language. It had a maximal logic and a minimal redundancy in its structure, there was a universe of precise meaning in a few words, and it would probably become the international tongue of business and science if not of poetry; but it had only been made public a week before.

Mandelbaum frowned. Jerome's work was perhaps the most important in the world today. Somehow two billion people must be fed, and the food synthesis plants would permit free distribution of an adequate if unexciting diet; but first they had to be built. "What is it this time?" he asked. "More trouble with Fort Knox?" Gold was an industrial metal now, valued for its conductivity and inertness, and Jerome wanted plenty of it for bus bars and reaction vats.

"No, they've finally begun delivering. It's the workmen. I've got a slowdown on my hands, and it may become a strike."

"What for? Higher wages?" Mandelbaum's tone was sardonic. The problem of money was still not quite solved, and wouldn't be until the new man-hour credit standard got world-wide acceptance; meanwhile he had established his own local system, payment in scrip which could be exchanged for goods and services. But there was only so much to go around: more money would be a valueless gesture.

"No, they've got over that. But the thing is, they don't want to work six hours a day. It's pretty dull,driving nails and mixing concrete. I've explained that it'll take time to build robots for that sort of work, but they want the leisure *immediately. What am I going to do if everybody'd rather accept a minimum standard of living and sit around arguing philosophy in his off hours?"

Mandelbaum grinned. "Leisure time is part of the standard of living too. What you got to do, Bill, is make 'em want to stay on the job."

"Yeah-how?"

"Well, what's wrong with setting up loudspeakers giving lectures on this and that? Better yet, give every man a b.u.t.tonhole receiver and let him tune in on what he wants to hear: talks, symphonies, or whatever.

I'll call up Columbia and get 'em to arrange a series of beamcasts for you."

"You mean broadcasts, don't you?"

"No. Then they'd stay at home and listen. This series will run during working hours and be beamed exclusively at your construction site."

"Hmmm-" Jerome laughed. "It might work at that!"

"Sure. You find out what the boys want and let me know. I'll take care of the rest."

When the engineer had hung up, Mandelbaum stuffed his pipe and returned to his papers. He wished all his headaches could be fixed as easily as that. But this matter of relocation. Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors. That would involve a huge labor of transference and landscaping, to say nothing of clearing owners.h.i.+p t.i.tles. He couldn't resist so strong a demand, but he couldn't do it at once, either. Then there was the business of--- "O'Banion," said the annunciator.

"Hm? Oh, yes. He had an appointment, didn't he? Send him in."

Brian O'Banion had been an ordinary cop before the change; during the chaotic period he had worked with the civil police; now he was local chief of Observers. For all that, he was still a big red-faced Irishman, and it was incongruous to hear crisp Unitary coming from his mouth.

"I need some more men," he said. "The job's getting too large again."

Mandelbaum puffed smoke and considered. The Observers were his own creation, though the idea had spread far and would probably be adopted by the international government before long. The smooth operation of society required a steady flow of information, a fantastically huge amount to be correlated every day if developments were not to get out of hand. The Observers gathered it in various ways: one of the most effective was simply to wander around in the guise of an ordinary citizen, talking to people and using logic to fill in all the implications.

"Takes a while to recruit and train 'em, Brian," said Mandelbaum. "What exactly do you want them for?"

"Well, first, there's this business of the feeble-minded. I'd like to put a couple of extra men on it. Not an easy job; there are still a lot of 'em wandering around, you know, and they've got to be located and un.o.btrusively guided the right way, toward one of the little colonies that're springing up."

"And the colonies themselves ought to be watched more closely and guarded against interference-yeah.

Sooner or later, we're going to have to decide just what to do about them. But that'll be part and parcelof what we decide to do about ourselves, which is still very much up in the air. Okay, anything else?"

"I've got a lead on-something. Don't know just what, but I think it's big and I think part of it is right here in New York."

Mandelbaum turned impa.s.sive. "What's that, Brian?" he asked quietly.

"I don't know. It may not even be criminal. But it's big. I have tips from half a dozen countries around the world. Scientific equipment and materials are going into devious channels and not being seen again- publicly."