Complete Short Fiction, page 314
Cargill turned and automatically started toward the terminal. Abruptly he stopped short.
“Just a moment,” he thought, “I’m free. They didn’t wait to make sure that I would go in. Why shouldn’t I just head downhill and lose myself in the wilderness?”
It looked immeasurably desolate—peaks and crags and valleys and ravines and everywhere the primitive forest. It would probably take several days to reach the foothills.
But it was a way out. Cargill made as if to turn. Nothing happened. He stood very still, startled. He remembered the tube that had “trained” him. Carefully he walked forward, then abruptly tried to twist on his heels, The muscles wouldn’t respond.
Pale but determined he thought “I’ll just stay here. I’ll act so queerly that the Shadows will become suspicious.”
His legs began to move, easily, naturally, without any sense of strain. He tried to stop them but it was as if he had forgotten how. Involuntarily, but without any of the appearance or feeling of being an automaton, he walked across the lawn toward the terminal building.
He was able to pause at the door, but only long enough to peer briefly through the thick glass into a marble alcove. A young woman inside smiled at him and pressed a button. The door opened.
A moment later Cargill was inside.
CHAPTER XV
Unexpected Welcome
cARGILL paused again just inside the door. In spite of his tenseness, he was curious. He stared with interest and some excitement at the young woman behind the alcove desk. A Shadow? he wondered.
She had something of the intellectual look that he’d half expected. But there was an intensity about her also—it was hard to define.
The young receptionist smiled and said in a rich, emotional voice, “We’re so very glad to see you here of your own free will. We welcome you with all our hearts. We wish you luck. We want you to be one of us.”
Cargill studied her warily. He recognized an emotional appeal when he heard one and he was impressed by the psychology of it. He was not so prepared to accept it for himself. He had too many walls erected against chance breakthroughs of an emotional nature.
The young woman was speaking again. “You go through this door,” she said. She pressed a button.
Cargill had already glanced through the door. It was wonderfully transparent and led into a corridor that slanted off to the right. He could only see a portion of it and that was a marble wall.
He smiled at the receptionist, said, “Thank you!” and walked through the door she had opened for him. Two nice-looking older women—Cargill guessed about forty years each—sat at a records section to the right.
One of them said, “You’re a fine-looking young man. We wish you luck.”
The other came out from behind the counter. “Come with me.”
She led the way along a corridor that was lined with glass-fronted cubbyholes. They reminded Cargill of the way some department stores arranged their credit sections. In each office was a desk and two chairs. Cargill’s guide paused at one of the entrances.
“Here’s your prize of the day, Moira.” She touched Cargill’s arm lightly. “Good luck, young man.”
“Thank you.”
He spoke automatically, then walked into the office. The young woman looked up and surveyed him thoughtfully for a moment.
Then she said, “I like you.”
“Thanks,” said Cargill somewhat drily. It seemed to him he was beginning to get the idea. And it was pretty terrific. In little more than a minute they had tried to make him welcome. He saw that Moira was studying him understanding.
“You’re a cynic?” she said.
That was unexpected. Cargill protested, “I think you’ve got an excellent system.”
“It didn’t hurt me to say I liked you,” said the girl, “so I said it. Do you mind closing the door?”
Cargill closed it and said, “It’s a very good technique for making new arrivals feel at home.”
She shook her head. “I’m very happy to disillusion you. That’s the way we live. Part of our life is so tremendously intellectual, so precise and scientific, that we long ago adopted a warmly emotional personal approach on every level of our community life. You’ll see when you get into the city. But now, please sit down.”
As Cargill complied, she took out a card and picked up a pen. “You’re Morton Cargill, aren’t you?”
Cargill stiffened. He had had a false name quivering on the tip of his tongue. Now he sank a little lower in his chair, silent and alarmed. It seemed to him that he had no recourse but to admit the truth.
The chilling effect of the identification grew. He had a sense of being finally committed. Everything he had done since coming to the twenty-fourth century had been done under pressure. And yet, throughout, he’d had the feeling that he would he able to control his destiny. That feeling was gone. In spite of all his actions and counteractions here he was just where the plotters wanted him to be.
hE braced himself to the reality. His opposition, it seemed to him, must now be narrowed down to one individual. If he could somehow kill Grannis that, and that alone, might still sway the balance.
Aloud he said, “Am I expected?”
She nodded but said nothing. He watched as she wrote down his name, his nervousness growing. He thought of more implications of the recognition.
Mentally he pictured himself back in the original therapy room, being killed while Betty Lane—who had made the original complaint against him—looked on. It put a pressure on him. He had to have more information.
“I don’t understand how you could possibly know my name. Do you know in advance the name of everyone who comes here?”
“Oh, no. You’re special.” She looked up. “You’ve come for the training, of course?”
It was only partly a question. The point was one which she evidently wanted to be taken for granted. Cargill decided temporarily to abandon his effort to find out how these people had learned his name. The young woman smiled at him again. She looked so young suddenly that he said with impulsive curiosity:
“Are you a Shadow?”
The girl nodded. “Yes, I am.”
“You don’t always maintain the Shadow shape then?”
“Whatever for?” She seemed genuinely astonished. “That’s a highly specialized state of being.” As if she suspected his instant fascination with the subject matter she said hurriedly, “Have you any idea what your responsibilities will be when you become a Shadow?”
Cargill noted that she said “when” and not “if.” It gave him a heady sensation and emboldened him to ask directly, “How did you know my name?”
“Time paradox.”
“You mean something has—already—happened that you know about but I don’t?”
She nodded.
“What?” asked Cargill with automatic absorption.
She shrugged. “It’s really very simple. For your own private reasons you’ve been doing things for months. We don’t know why but it brought you to our attention.”
Cargill was cautious. “No one has investigated my reasons?”
The woman smiled. “Naturally not. But now—it’s customary for me to explain what our work is.”
Cargill restrained the questions that quivered on his lips. He forced himself to sit back. He watched the woman intently as she spoke.
“We Shadows,” she began, “are trying to undo the effects of the psychological disaster that demoralized the human race, beginning in the Twentieth century. The pressure of civilization was apparently too much for millions of people. “Everywhere men sought escape and they found the means late in Nineteen Eighty in the newly invented floaters. When it became apparent that a mass flight from responsibility was under way psychologists searched frantically for the causes. “Naturally, in accordance with their training, they looked into the immediate past of each individual and so it was only gradually that they learned the truth.
“It was an inherited weakness, the result of experiences and disasters that had befallen the affected bloodline, sometimes one, sometimes many generations earlier. Jung, one of the pioneer analysts, suspected its existence very early. He called it the ancestral shadow.
“After many years of experiment, a technique was developed for reaching into the past and rectifying to some extent the effects of the original disaster. The results are becoming more apparent to us every year. Planiacs are accepting our training in ever-increasing numbers.
“Unfortunately, since they start from such a low level of culture, most of them fail in their purpose. The result of the test, I must explain, is something we cannot control. It is purely mechanical.
“The individual either responds to the training and becomes a Shadow or does not respond and so gains only the educational benefits that enable him to become a Tweener. But the Shadow shape depends on a balance within the individual. We know how that balance functions but we have no artificial method for producing it. Do you understand that?”
Cargill said, genuinely interested.
“What types of people generally succeed?”
“Your type.” said Moira. She stood up. She pointed at a closed door to his right—which he hadn’t noticed till that instant. “You go through there. Good luck.”
Cargill stood up uncertainly but he opened the door. There were a grassy lawn outside and a spread of flowering shrubs that hid his view. He stepped across the threshold, walked around the shrubbery end saw with a start that he was inside Shadow City.
WITH a hissing intake of his breath Cargill stopped. He was on a plateau, looking down at the city proper. But how had he come here so quickly? It was a mile at least to the terminal center where he had reported.
In spite of his previous knowledge of their method of transportation he felt compelled to turn around and investigate. When he looked he saw that there was a shallow cliff behind him. It was about fifty feet high and it was covered with growth. Flowers of every hue peered from among shining green leaves and the dry cool air was heavy with the blended perfume.
For a moment, Cargill stood there, breathing deeply in relaxed enjoyment, and then he saw the door. It was in the side of the cliff. He went to it and it seemed ordinary enough. On impulse he turned the knob, pushed and stepped through. He was back in terminal center.
The woman was still at her desk. “Curious?” she asked.
Cargill said intently, “How does it work?”
She pointed up at the top of the door frame. “There’s a tube up there. It focuses on you as you step over the threshold.”
“Is it instantaneous?”
She shook her head. “Not exactly.”
Cargill hesitated. Another thought had struck him. There had been no resistance to his returning here. The “training” Ann Reece had given him had earlier, prevented him from so much as turning around but now he had come back a mile and a half.
“If I could tell this woman about Grannis,” he thought tensely.
He parted his lips, swallowed, tried again but no words came. He guessed the explanation. His return this time had been natural, had had nothing to do with opposition to the “training.” The moment, however, that he had consciously tried to take advantage of the situation the pressure resumed.
He found himself struggling against the inhibition as he stood there. It was a silent fight but desperate for all that. He could think the words. He could even imagine the exact shape his mouth should take to utter them. But they didn’t come. He swallowed again, and gave it up. He said quietly, “I guess I’d better be going.”
He stepped through the door and found himself once more in the park. A minute later he was walking along a pathway when he heard the sweet sound of a child’s laughter. A woman said something in a pleasant voice. Presently mother and daughter—Cargill assumed the relationship—emerged from behind a large path.
Cargill watched them out of sight behind a line of brush. He was trying to picture this city, its protective screen zone, attacked by swarms of volors. It was a deadly scene he visualized and it stiffened him. Because he had to stop it—had to. He turned down the hill, and came after a little to a street. A line of floaters, drawn in to the curb, stretched out of sight behind a bend. A signboard read:
NEWCOMERS
Use These Floaters
GO TO
Square Building
AT CENTER OF BUILDING
Cargill climbed into one of the machines, guided it up and in the indicated direction. He had no difficulty finding the square building. It was surrounded by a series of round structures, and on its roof was a huge sign that spelled out:
TRAINING CENTER
Another smaller sign said:
Land on Roof
Once out of the floater Cargill followed a line of arrows to a doorway, down a flight of marble stairs and into a marble corridor. Both sides of the hall were lined with transparent plexiglass doors and there was a woman at a great desk behind a counter to his left. Cargill walked over to her. He identified himself a little nervously and she consulted a folder.
“You will receive your first training,” she said pleasantly, “in cubicle eleven. It’s down the corridor to your right.” She smiled at him. “Good luck.”
His heels clacked on the marble floor as he walked and that gave him a cozy feeling of being in friendly surroundings. This coming to Shadow City had burdened his mind with the fear that he would find only the alien and the unknown.
But the human beings he had met so far were the friendliest and most relaxed he had ever seen. That made him uneasy for it didn’t fit at all with the ruthless—therapy—they had planned for him. And yet there was the little girl he had seen in the park—so childlike, so normal.
He could feel the pressure of this gathering crisis closing in upon him. What to do?
The thought ended as he came to cubicle eleven, hesitated, opened the door and stepped inside.
CHAPTER XVI
Grannnis
THE cubicle was larger than the one in which he had been interviewed at terminal center. Except for that it looked very similar at first sight. A desk, one chair (not two) and another door—he wondered if it led to some remote point. There was also a mirror on the wall to his left.
He had a strong will to know his surroundings, so he tried the door. It was locked. As he turned back a voice spoke out of the air in front of him.
“Sit down, please.”
The tone was friendly. Tense in spite of that, not knowing what to expect, Cargill seated himself. The voice spoke again. “See this!”
The room flashed into pitch darkness and in the air only about two feet in front of Cargill’s eyes appeared a stream of radiant energy. It was a delicate lacework of brightness, as if he were looking at a filament out of its vacuum environment. The voice said, “You are witnessing electron flow in a vacuum tube. Now watch.”
The direction of the flow began to change. It followed a more winding path, and it seemed to be turning on some kind of an axis. Several moments passed before he saw that the flow direction was a distinct spiral.
The voice said, “Old in mathematics is the idea that two forces exerted at right angles to each other produce a diagonal curve of motion. And so one times one may equal one and one-half or some fraction thereof, something other than it might equal in the old classical mathematics. Watch as we bring the spirals closer together.”
To Cargill they had seemed close as they were. But now as he stared at the filament the spiraling line of light seemed to draw together, a tiny bit only. “One times one times one times one times zero,” said the voice, “equals a million.”
Again there was a change in the flow. The filaments were closer together.
“. . . equal a billion,” said the voice.
There was a pause. The filament glowed on. Then the voice said, “Now, we superimpose ordinary infra-red light powered by a tiny battery. And we have—a spitgun.”
The outline of a spitgun appeared in the air and Cargill saw how the tube was fastened into it, how the battery powered it. “We superimpose,” said the voice, “a magnetic field. Now we can bend steel.”
Cargill saw how that was done.
The voice went on, “We superimpose ordinary sunlight—and we have a sun motor, power source of the floater. A score of energy possibilities suggest themselves.”
In quick succession, three were shown, how the volor worked, a method of turning a wheel and the way thoughts were imposed on a brain.
“Now,” said the voice, “would you like to do these various things with your own mind? We focus a millionpower brainpattern tube on the somaesthenic centers of the parietal lobe of the left hemisphere of the brain—since you are right handed—and establish a high conditionality of flow patterned exactly after that of the steptube itself. We thus create a nerve tube in the brain.
“Since it is not possible for you in your normal body to superimpose other rhythms on the flow of this organic tube we use the new control to alter slightly the atomic pattern of the body. And so, by drawing on the broadcast power of the pyramid screen, we create the Shadow shape. Young man, look at yourself in the mirror.”
The light came on. Cargill, in spite of the words not knowing what to expect, stepped over to the mirror.
A Shadow image was reflected back at him.
“Oh, my lord!” he thought. He looked down at himself. He was a Shadow, too.
He began to feel the difference. His vision sharpened. He turned toward the mirror. It seemed now to be less substantial, as if most of the light were coming through it. Through it, beyond it, he looked.
He stood on a height and his vision was Olympian. A speck in the distant sky beyond the now completely invisible pyramid touched his tension. His vision leaped to it. It was a bird, a hawk, wheeling in flight.
ASTOUNDED at the remarkable telescopic effect he drew back into the room and looked at the floor. It half-dissolved before his eyes and then became as transparent as glass. He looked down at the floor below, down into the soil beneath.
