Complete Short Fiction, page 253
Civilization, it was said, had never before attained so high a level of freedom. But it wouldn’t do to try the patience of the Great Judge by destroying an invention. Aird had a sharp conviction that less civilized methods might be used on him if he failed to carry through the farce.
Sitting there in his apartment, surrounded by every modern convenience, Aird sighed. He would spend his last week alive in any luxury he might choose. It was the final refinement of mental torture, to be free, to have the feeling that if only he could think of something he might succeed in escaping. Yet he knew escape was impossible. If he climbed into his hopjet, he’d have to swoop in at the nearest patrol station, and have his electronic registration “plates” stamped with a signal. Thereafter, his machine would continuously give off vibrations automatically advising patrol vessels of the time and space limitations of his permit.
Similar restrictions controlled his person. The electronic instrument “printed” on his upper right arm could be activated by any central, which would start a burning sensation of gradually increasing intensity.
There was absolutely no escape from the law of the Great Judge.
Aird climbed to his feet wearily. Might as well get his material ready for the science investigator. It was too bad he wouldn’t have an opportunity to experiment with higher life forms but—
Aird stopped short in the doorway of his laboratory. His body throbbed with the tremendousness of the idea that had slammed into his mind. He began to quiver. He leaned weakly against the door jamb, then slowly straightened.
“That’s it!” He spoke the words aloud, his voice low and intense, simultaneously utterly incredulous and hopeful to the point of madness. It was the mounting hope that brought a return of terrible weakness. He collapsed on the rug just inside the laboratory, and lay there muttering to himself, the special insanities of an electronician:
“. . . have to get a larger grid, and more liquid and—”
Special Science Investigator George Mollins returned to the Great Judge’s Court and immediately asked for a private interview with the Great Judge.
“Tell him,” he told the High Bailiff of the Court, “that I have come across a very important scientific discovery. He will know what is meant if you simply say ‘Category AA.’ ”
While he waited to be received, the Science Investigator arranged his instruments for readier transport, and then he stood idly looking around him at the dome-vaulted anteroom. Through a transparent wall, he could see the gardens below. In the profusion of greenery, he caught the glint of a white skirt, which reminded him that the Great Judge was reputed to have at least seven reigning beauties in his harem at all times.
“This way, sir. The Great Judge will receive you.”
The man who sat behind the desk looked about thirty-five years old. Only his eyes and his mouth seemed older. From bleak blue eyes and with thin-lipped silence, the immortal, ever-young Great Judge studied his visitor.
The latter wasted no time. The moment the door shut behind him, he pressed the button that released a fine spray of gas straight at the Great Judge. The man behind the desk simply sagged in his chair.
The visitor was calm but quick. He dragged the limp body around to his instrument case, and removed the clothes of the upper body. Swiftly, he swabbed the body with the liquid he had brought, and began to attach his nodes. Half a dozen on one side and a dozen on the other.
The next step was to attach the wires to his own body, lie down and press the activator.
The question that puzzled Douglas Aird on the day that he succeeded in transferring the nervous impulses of a chicken into the nervous system of a dog was: How complete was the transference?
Personality, he argued with himself, was a complex structure. It grew out of many quadrillions of minute experiences and, as he had discovered, finally gave to each body its own special neural vibration.
Would it be possible by artificially forcing that exact vibration upon another body to establish a nerve energy flow between the two bodies? A flow so natural and easy that every cell would be impregnated with the thoughts and memories of the other body? A flow so complete, that, when properly channeled, the personality of one body would flow into the other?
The fact that a dog acted like a chicken was not complete proof. Normally, he would have experimented very carefully before trying it on a human being. But a man doomed to die didn’t have to think of risks. When the Science Investigator called on him two days before the date of the execution, he gassed the man, and made the experiment then and there.
The transference was not absolutely complete. Blurred memories remained behind, enough to make the routine of going to the Great Judge’s Court familiar and easy. He had worried about that. It was important that he follow the right etiquette in approaching a man who normally permitted no one near him but people he had learned to trust.
As it turned out, he did everything right. The moment he felt the blurring sensation which marked the beginning of the transfer of his personality from the body of the Science Investigator to the body of the Great Judge, Aird acted. He released a gas toward the Great Judge that would revive the man in about five minutes. Simultaneously, he sprayed his present body with instantaneous anesthetic gas. Even as he sank into unconsciousness, he could feel the sharp, hard personality of the Great Judge slipping into the Investigator’s body.
Five minutes later Douglas Aird, now in the body of the Great Judge, opened his eyes, and looked around him alertly. Carefully, he disconnected the wires, packed the instruments—and then called a bailiff. As he had expected, no one questioned the actions of the Great Judge. It was the work of an hour to drive to the apartment of Douglas Aird, transfer the Great Judge’s personality to the body of Douglas Aird—and at the same time return the personality of the Science Investigator into its proper body. As a precaution, he had the Science Investigator taken to a hospital.
“Keep him there for three days under observation,” he commanded.
Back at the Great Judge’s Court, he spent the next few days cautiously fitting himself into the pleasant routine of a life of absolute power. He had a thousand plans for altering a police state into a free state, but as a scientist he was sharply aware of the need for orderly transition.
It was at the end of a week that he inquired casually about a traitor named Douglas Aird. The story was interesting.
The man had, it seemed, attempted to escape. He had flown some five hundred miles in an unregistered hopjet before being grounded by a local patrol. Immediately, he fled into the mountains. When he failed to report on the morning of the day set for his execution, the printed instrument on his right arm was activated. Shortly before dusk, a tired, distracted, staggering scarecrow of a man, screaming that he was the Great Judge, appeared in a mountain patrol station. The execution was then carried out with no further delay. The report concluded:
“Seldom in the experience of the attending patrol officers has a condemned man approached the converter with so much reluctance.”
The Great Judge, sitting at his desk in the luxurious court, could well believe it.
THE MONSTER
Raising the Monster from the dust of a dead planet proved a dangerously one-way affair. They could raise him, but laying that ghost wasn’t so simple—
The great ship poised a quarter of a mile above one of the cities, below was a cosmic desolation. As he floated down in his energy bubble, Enash saw that the buildings were crumbling with age.
“No sign of war damage!” The bodiless voice touched his ears momentarily. Enash tuned it out.
On the ground he collapsed his bubble. He found himself in a walled inclosure overgrown with weeds. Several skeletons lay in the tall grass beside the rakish building. They were of long, two-legged, two-armed beings with the skulls in each case mounted at the end of a thin spine. The skeletons, all of adults, seemed in excellent preservation, but when he bent down and touched one, a whole section of it crumbled into a fine powder. As he straightened, he saw that Yoal was floating down nearby. Enash waited till the historian had stepped out of his bubble, then he said:
“Do you think “we ought to use our method of reviving the long dead?”
Yoal was thoughtful. “I have been asking questions of the various people who have landed, and there is something wrong here. This planet has no surviving life, not even insect life. We’ll have to find out what happened before we risk; any colonization.”
Enash said nothing. A soft wind was blowing. It rustled through a clump of trees nearby. He motioned towards the trees. Yoal nodded and said:
“Yes, the plant life has not been harmed, but plants after all are not affected in the same way as the active life forms.”
There was an interruption. A voice spoke from Yoal’s receiver: “A museum has been found at approximately the center of the city. A red light has been fixed to the roof.”
Enash said: “I’ll go with you, Yoal. There might be skeletons of animals and of the intelligent being in various stages of his evolution. You didn’t answer my question: Are you going to revive these beings?”
Yoal said slowly: “I intend to discuss the matter with the council, but I think there is no doubt. We must know the cause of this disaster.” He waved one sucker vaguely to take in half the compass. He added as an afterthought, “We shall proceed cautiously, of course, beginning with an obviously early development. The absence of the skeletons of children indicates that the race had developed personal immortality.”
The council came to look at the exhibits. It was, Enash knew, a formal preliminary only. The decision was made. There would be revivals. It was more than that. They were curious. Space was vast, the journeys through it long and lonely, landing always a stimulating experience, with its prospect of new life forms to be seen and studied.
The museum looked ordinary. High-domed ceilings, vast rooms. Plastic models of strange beasts, many artifacts—too many to see and comprehend in so short a time. The life span of a race was imprisoned here in a progressive array of relics. Enash looked with the others, and was glad when they came to the line of skeletons and preserved bodies. He seated himself behind the energy screen, and watched the biological experts take a preserved body out of a stone sarcophagus. It was wrapped in windings of cloth, many of them. The experts did not bother to unravel the rotted material. Their forceps reached through, pinched a piece of the skull—that was the accepted procedure. Any part of the skeleton could be used, but the most perfect revivals, the most complete reconstructions resulted when a certain section of the skull was used.
Hamar, the chief biologist, explained the choice of body. “The chemicals used to preserve this mummy show a sketchy knowledge of chemistry; the carvings on the sarcophagus indicate a crude and unmechanical culture. In such a civilization there would not be much development of the potentialities of the nervous system. Our speech experts have been analyzing the recorded voice mechanism which is a part of each exhibit, and though many languages are involved—evidence that the ancient language spoken at the time the body was alive has been reproduced—they found no difficulty in translating the meanings. They have now adapted our universal speech machine, so that anyone who wishes to, need merely speak into his communicator, and so will have his words translated into the language of the revived person. The reverse, naturally, is also true. Ah, I see we are ready for the first body.”
Enash watched intently with the others, as the lid was clamped down on the, plastic reconstructor, and the growth processes were started. He could feel himself becoming tense. For there was nothing haphazard about what was happening. In a few minutes a full-grown ancient inhabitant of this planet would sit up and stare at them. The science involved was simple and always fully effective.
. . . Out of the shadows of smallness life grows. The level of beginning and ending, of life and—not life; in that dim region matter oscillates easily between old and new habits. The habit of organic, or the habit of inorganic.
Electrons not have life and un-life values. Atoms know nothing of inanimateness. But when atoms form into molecules, there is a step in the process, one tiny step, that is of life—if life begins at all. One step, and then darkness. Or aliveness.
A stone or a living cell. A grain of gold or a blade of grass, the sands of the sea or the equally numerous animalcules inhabiting the endless fishy, waters—the difference is there in the twilight zone of matter. Each living cell has in it the whole form. The crab grows a new leg when the old one is torn from its flesh. Both ends of the planarian worm elongate, and soon there are two worms, two identities, two digestive systems, each as greedy as the original, each a whole, unwounded, unharmed by its experience.
Each cell can be the whole. Each cell remembers in a detail so intricate that no totality of words could ever describe the completeness achieved.
But—paradox—memory is not organic. An ordinary wax record remembers sounds. A wire recorder easily gives up a duplicate of the voice that spoke into it years before. Memory is a physiological impression, a mark on matter, a change in the shape of a molecule, so that when a reaction is desired the shape emits the same rhythm of response.
Out of the mummy’s skull had come the multi-quadrillion memory shapes from which a response was now being evoked. As ever, the memory held true.
A man blinked and opened his eyes.
“It is true, then,” he said aloud, and the words were translated into the Ganae tongue as he spoke them. “Death is merely an opening into another life—but where are my attendants?” At the end, his voice took on a complaining tone.
He sat up, and climbed out of the case, which had automatically opened as he came to life. He saw his captors. He froze—but only for a moment. He had a pride and a very special arrogant courage, which served him now.
Reluctantly, he sank to his knees, and made obeisance, but doubt must have been strong in him. “Am I in the presence of the gods of Egyptus?”
He climbed to his feet. “What nonsense is this? I do not bow to nameless demons.”
Captain Gorsid said: “Kill him!”
The two-legged monster dissolved, writhing, in the beam of a ray gun.
The second man stood up palely, and trembled with fear. “My God, I swear I won’t touch the stuff again. Talk about pink elephants—”
Yoal was curious. “To what stuff do you refer, revived one?”
“The old hooch, the poison in the old hip pocket flask, the juice they gave me at that speak . . . my lordie!”
Captain Gorsid looked questioningly at Yoal. “Need we linger?”
Yoal hesitated: “I am curious.” He addressed the man. “If I were to tell you that we were visitors from another star, what would be your reaction?”
The man stared at him. He was obviously puzzled, but the fear was stronger. “Now, look,” he said, “I was driving along, minding my own business. I admit I’d had a shot or two too many, but it’s the liquor they serve these days. I swear I didn’t see the other car—and if this is some new idea of punishing people who drink and drive, well, you’ve won. I won’t touch another drop as long as I live, so help me.”
Yoal said: “He drives a ‘car’ and thinks nothing of it. Yet we saw no cars; they didn’t even bother to preserve them in the museum.”
Enash noticed that everyone waited for everyone else to comment. He stirred as he realized the circle of silence would be complete unless he spoke. He said:
“Ask him to describe the car. How does it work?”
“Now, you’re talking,” said the man. “Bring on your line of chalk, and I’ll walk it, and ask any questions you please. I may be so tight that I can’t see straight, but I can always drive. How does it work? You just put her in gear, and step on the gas.”
“Gas,” said engineering officer Veed. “The internal combustion engine. That places him.”
Captain Gorsid motioned to the guard with the ray gun.
The third man sat up, and looked at them thoughtfully. “From the stars?” he said finally. “Have you a system, or was it blind chance?”
The Ganae councillors in that domed room stirred uneasily in their curved chairs. Enash caught Yoal’s eye on him; the shock in the historian’s eyes alarmed the meteorologist. He thought: “The two-legged one’s adjustment to a new situation, his grasp of realities, was unnormally rapid. No Ganae could have equaled the swiftness of the reaction.”
Hamar, the chief biologist, said: “Speed of thought is not necessarily a sign of superiority. The slow, careful thinker has his place in the hierarchy of intellect.”
But, Enash found himself thinking, it was not the speed; it was the accuracy of the response. He tried to imagine himself being revived from the dead, and understanding instantly the meaning of the presence of aliens from the stars.
He couldn’t have done it.
He forgot his thought, for the man was out of the case. As Enash watched with the others, he walked briskly over to the window and looked out. One glance, and then he turned back.
“Is it all like this?” he asked.
Once again, the speed of his understanding caused a sensation; It was Yoal who finally replied.
“Yes, Desolation. Death. Ruin. Have you any idea as to what happened?”
The man came back and stood in front of the energy screen that guarded the Ganae. “May I look over the museum? I have to estimate what age I am in. We had certain possibilities of destruction when I was last alive, but which one was realized depends on the time elapsed.”
The councillors looked at Captain Gorsid, who hesitated; then: “Watch him,” he said to the guard with the ray gun. He faced the man. “We understand your aspirations fully. You would like to seize control of this situation, and insure your own safety. Let me reassure you. Make no false moves, and all will be well.”
Whether or not the man believed the lie, he gave no sign. Nor did he show by a glance or a movement that he had seen the scarred floor where the ray gun had burned his two predecessors into nothingness. He walked curiously to the nearest doorway, studied the other guard who waited there for him, and then, gingerly, stepped through. The first guard followed him, then came the mobile energy screen, and finally, trailing one another, the councillors. Enash was the third to pass through the doorway. The room contained skeletons and plastic models of animals. The room beyond that was what, for want of a better term, Enash called a culture room. It contained the artifacts from a single period of civilization. It looked very advanced. He had examined some of the machines when they first passed through it, and had thought: Atomic energy. He was not alone in his recognition. From behind him, Captain Gorsid said:
