Supermind, page 17
It was daylight, early morning. She found that out in a sensational fashion. She went outside and looked . . . without moving from the bed!
There she was lying in her bedroom; and there she was out in the street.
Simultaneously.
Involuntarily, she held her breath. Slowly, the outside scene faded, and she was back in the bed, wholly indoors.
With a gasp, she started breathing again.
By cautious experimentation, she discovered that her perception extended about a hundred yards.
And that was all she learned. Something in her brain acted like an invisible eye stalk that could reach through walls and bring back visual images to the light-interpretation centers. The ability remained completely stable.
Presently she became aware that a small black van was parked down the street and that Dr. Gloge was in it. She realized that he had an instrument with an earplug with which he seemed to be listening in on her.
His face was intent, his small eyes narrowed. Something of the determination of this little bald-headed scientist seeped through to her, and Barbara suddenly felt uneasy. She sensed remorselessness, an impersonal quality that was entirely different from her own lighthearted participation in his experiment.
To Gloge—she realized suddenly—his subjects were like inanimate objects.
In human terms the viciousness of it was infinite.
As she continued to perceive him, Gloge shut off his instruments, started the motor of his car, and drove off.
Since Vince was again on the night shift, presumably Gloge was heading home.
She phoned Vince's apartment to make sure; when there Was no answer, she called the photo lab.
"No, Strather didn't come in last night," the administrative assistant of that department told her.
Barbara replaced the receiver unhappily, recalling that Vince had not responded well to the first shot. She suspected the biologist had given him his second shot also, and that he was not responding favorably to it either.
She dressed and drove over to his apartment. As she came near, she could see him inside, so when he showed no sign of replying to her ring, she let herself in with her key—and found him on the living-room couch, tossing and turning. He looked feverish. She felt his forehead; it was dry and hot to the touch.
He stirred and opened his eyes, looked up with his sick brown eyes into her bright blue ones. She thought unhappily: "I'm so well and he's so ill. What can be wrong?"
Aloud, anxiously, she said, "You need a doctor, Vince. What's the name of that man who gave you a checkup last year?"
"I'll be all right," he mumbled. He sank back to sleep.
Sitting there on the settee beside him, Barbara felt something in her lungs. Her instant, amazed thought was: "Gas!" But she was too slow.
She must have blacked out, because her next awareness was of lying on the floor, and of Gloge bending over her.
The scientist was calm, efficient, seemed satisfied. Barbara caught his thought: "She'll be all right."
She realized that he was stepping past her to Vince. "Hmmm!" Gloge seemed critical and unhappy. "Still not good. Let's see if a tranquillizer will help him."
He made the injection, then straightened, and there was a strange, hard thought in his mind: "By Monday night, it'll be time for the third injection, and I'll have to decide what to do."
So clear was the thought that came from him, it was almost as if he spoke aloud. What his thought said was that he intended to kill them both, if either failed to develop as he desired.
Shocked, Barbara held herself very still; and at that moment an entirely different growth process occurred in her.
It began with a veritable flood of suppressed information suddenly rising to the surface of her mind.
. . . About the reality of what people were like . . . the dupes, the malingerers, and the weaklings on the one hand, and, on the other, the angry and the distorted, the worldly wise and the cynics. She recognized that there were well-meaning people in the world who were strong, but she was more aware of the destructive at this instant ... by the million, the swindlers and betrayers—all self-justified, she saw now. But she realized also that they had misread their own bitter experiences. Because they were greedy and lustful and had lost their fear of punishment, earthly or unearthly; because they resented being thwarted in their slightest whim; because—
A forgotten scene flashed into her mind from her own past, of a minor executive in her first job, who had fired her when she refused to come up to his apartment.
All her life she had been taught, and she had tried not to be aware of such things. But now, at some level of neural computation, she permitted all that data to be calculated into the mainstream of her awareness.
The process was still going on a few minutes later when Gloge departed as silently as he had come.
After he had left, Barbara tried to get up and was surprised that she could not even open her eyes. The realization that her body was still unconscious presently enthralled her.
What a marvellous ability!
As time passed, it began to be disconcerting. She thought: "I'm really quite helpless." It was early afternoon before she was finally able to move. She got up, subdued and thoughtful, warmed a can of soup for Vince and herself, and forced him to drink it from a cup.
Immediately after, he stretched out again on the couch and fell asleep. Barbara left the apartment to keep her appointment with her own doctor.
As she drove, she could feel a stirring inside her. More change? She decided it was. Perhaps there would be many such between now and Monday. Yet her intuition was that she would not be able to dominate this situation with the changes from the first and second shots only.
"Somehow," she thought, "I've got to get that third shot."
XXIX
At noon Monday, after he had dictated some letters to a girl from the steno pool, Hammond came out of his office.
"What's the word from Nine-two?"
Helen looked up with her flashing smile. "Barbara?"
"Yes."
"Her doctor called in this morning at her request. He said he saw her Saturday. She appears to have a mild temperature, is subject to dizzy spells and a variety of unmentionable ailments like diarrhea. However, there's one unexpected thing, the doctor said—evidently his own comment. Interested?"
"Of course."
"He said that in his opinion Barbara has had a major personality change since he last checked her about a year ago."
Hammond shook his head slowly. "Merely confirms our own observation. Well, keep me in touch."
But about four o'clock, when the long-distance screen was finally silent, he buzzed Helen Wendell. "I can't get that girl out of my mind. It's premonition-level stuff, so I can't ignore it. Phone Barbara."
She called to him a minute later: "Sorry, there's no answer."
"Bring her file to me," said Hammond. "I've got to assure myself I'm not missing something in this unusual matter."
As he scanned the typed pages a few minutes later, he came presently to the photograph of Vince Strather. He uttered an exclamation.
"What is it?" Helen asked.
He told her, finished, "Of course, I didn't connect Barbara with that young man. But this is his picture. Get Gloge's file."
"Apparently the change started when his sister died five months ago," Helen Wendell said presently. "One of those sudden and dangerous shifts in personal motivation." She added ruefully, "I should have watched him on that. The death of a near relative has often proved important."
She was seated in the main room of Hammond's living quarters at Research Alpha. The door to Hammond's private office behind them was closed. Across the room, a large wall safe had been opened, revealing a wide double row of thin, metal-bound files. Two of the files—Henry Gloge's and Barbara Ellington's—lay on the table before Helen. Hammond stood beside her.
He said now, "What about that trip he made back east early in the month?"
"He spent three days in his hometown, purportedly to make arrangements to sell his sister's and his property there. They had a house, complete with private laboratory, untenanted, on the grounds of an old farm. The perfect location for unsupervised experimentation. On primates? Not likely. They're not easy to obtain secretly, and except for the smaller gibbons, they should make potentially quite dangerous subjects for Dr. Gloge's project. So it must be humans he planned to work on." Hammond nodded.
There was an almost sick expression on his face. The woman looked up at him. "You seem very anxious. Presumably, Barbara and Vince have now had two injections each. That will take them to fifty thousand years from now on some level. It doesn't seem desperately serious to me."
The man smiled tautly. "Don't forget that we're dealing with one of the seed races."
"Yes—but only fifty thousand years so far."
He stared at her sympathetically. "You and I," he said, "are still far down on the ladder. So it's hard for us to conceive of the evolutionary potential of the genus Homo galacticus."
She laughed. "I'm content with my lowly lot—"
"Good conditioning," he murmured.
"—but I'm willing to accept your analysis. What do you intend to do with Gloge?"
Hammond straightened decisively. "Even if this is Great Galactic overlap, we will be expected to take account of the realities of the situation. And my normal reaction tells me that when a man has murder intent, we should keep an eye on his potential victims. And, as nearly always, prevention is the best cure."
He continued: "Call Ames and have him put special security men at every exit. For the next hour, don't let Gloge out of this building. And if Vince or Barbara try to enter the complex, tell him to hold them. When you've done that, start cancelling my appointments for the day and evening."
Helen said, "Are you going to stop the experiment?"
"I'm going to try," said the man. "But I'm beginning to have a faint glimmer of what Barbara's intended role is in all this, and so I doubt if we can do anything at this stage except protect her and Vince."
He disappeared into his bedroom, came out presently dressed for the street.
Helen Wendell greeted him with: "I called Ames, and he says 'Check!' But I also phoned Gloge's office. He left about an hour ago, his secretary says."
Hammond said quickly, "Sound a standby alert. Tell Ames to throw a guard around the homes of both of those young people!"
"You're going where?"
"First Barbara, then Vince. I only hope I'm in time."
A look must have come into Helen's face, because he smiled tensely and said, "Your expression says I'm getting too involved."
The beautiful blond woman smiled with understanding, said, "Every day on this planet thousands of people are murdered, hundreds of thousands are robbed, and countless minor acts of violence occur. People are struck, choked, yelled at, degraded, cheated—I could go on. If we ever opened ourselves to that, we'd shrivel away."
"I kind of like Barbara," Hammond confessed.
Helen was calm. "So do I. What do you think is happening?"
"As I see it, Gloge gave them the first injection last Wednesday and the second on Friday. That means the third one should be given today. That, unless they are responding well, I should stop."
He departed hastily.
XXX
Gloge had become nervous. As Monday wore on, he kept thinking of his two specimens; and what bothered him was that he did not have them under observation on this last day.
What a ridiculous situation, he told himself. The greatest experiment in human history—and no scientific person watching it through to a conclusion of the key second injection.
There was another feeling, also.
Fear!
He couldn't help but remember the young man. It seemed to Gloge that he had seen too many animals show in their fashion the symptoms he had observed in Vince. Failure to respond well to the serum, the signs of internal malaise, the sick appearance, the struggle of the cells visibly reflecting defeat in the efforts and chemistry at the surface of the skin.
And there was—he had to admit it—a further anxiety. Many of the unsuccessful animal specimens had developed tough fight-back characteristics. It would be wise to be prepared for emergencies of that nature.
He thought grimly: "No use fooling myself. I'd better drop everything and take another look at those two."
That was when he left his office.
He took it for granted that Barbara was all right. So he drove to Vince's apartment, and first checked with his audio pickups to make sure he was there and alone.
He detected at once movements; the sound of labored breathing, an occasional squeak of the springs of the couch. These noises came screeching through the hypersensitive receiver, but Gloge had the volume on them turned down so that they were not actually painful in his ears.
Gloge's spirits had already dropped even more, for the sounds he was hearing confirmed his fears.
Suddenly, all the justified scientific attitude that had motivated him until now came hard against the reality of the failure that was here.
By his previous reasoning, he would now have to kill Vince.
And that meant, of course, that he would also have to dispose of Barbara.
His state of funk yielded, after what must have been many minutes, to a strictly scientific thought: Mere sounds were not enough data for so basic a decision, it seemed to him.
He felt intense disappointment.
Now he must go and make his decision from an actual meeting with Vince. It would be improper to dispose of his two human subjects without a face-to-face interrogation.
As Gloge climbed out of his car and headed for the apartment building, Vince had a dream.
He dreamed that the man—what was his name?—Gloge, with whom he had quarreled a few days before in the corridor at Research Alpha, was coming here to his apartment, with the intention of killing him. At some deep of his being, anger began. But he did not awaken.
The dream—product of his own disturbed, strange evolutionary development—continued.
From some vantage point, he watched Gloge approach his back door. He felt no surprise when the small bald-headed man produced a key. Tense with fear, Vince watched as Gloge stealthily inserted the key into the lock, slowly turned it, and quietly opened the door.
At that point, Vince's body was impelled by his extreme anxiety to defensive action. Millions of tiny, shining, cream-colored energy bundles were emitted by his nervous system. They resembled very short straight lines. And they passed through the wall that separated the living room from the kitchen, and they struck Gloge.
Great masses of the energy units unerringly sought out nerve ends in Gloge's body and darted in their scintillating fashion up to the man's brain.
The energy units were not the result of conscious analytical thought. They were brought into being solely by fright, and carried pressor messages. They pushed at Gloge mentally, urging him to leave, to go back to where he had come from.
Dr. Gloge came to his senses with a start. He was back in his van. He remembered running in precipitant flight. He had a vague recollection of complete panic.
He sat now, trembling, breathing hard, trying to recover from the most disgraceful act of fear that he had ever experienced in his whole life.
And he knew that he had to go back.
Twice more, the sleeping Vince emitted enough energy bundles to compel Gloge to run. Each time the power available was less and Gloge retreated a shorter distance before stopping and forcing himself to go back again to the apartment.
On Gloge's fourth approach, the brain mechanism in Vince was able to manufacture only a small energy discharge. Gloge felt the fear rise in him, but he fought it successfully.
He moved silently across the kitchen floor toward the door of the living room.
He still did not realize that the sleeping body and he had fought a battle—which he had now won.
Moments later, Gloge looked down at the exhausted form of his male subject. The sleeping body had perspired excessively. It trembled and moaned, and, as Gloge watched, jerked fitfully.
Unmistakably—Gloge decided—a failed experiment.
He wasted no time. He had come prepared. He pulled a pair of handcuffs from his pocket, carefully slipped one over Vince's farthest-away arm, and softly clicked it shut. He lifted the arm as carefully toward the other wrist and clicked that handcuff on also.
