Complete Short Fiction, page 385
His recollection flashed to a question Carr had asked a few minutes before, about being ill. “Of course.” Denovich thought again. “He must think he’s mentally ill!”
He stood then, trembling wife the possibilities of his lightning analysis, and he tried to visualize how he himself might feel in Carr’s place.
Instantly he realized the other’s problem. An American psychologist confessing to his Soviet colleague that he believed himself to be mad!
Denovich said gently, “Doctor, in what way do you think you’re crazy?”
When Carr hesitated, the psychiatrist urged: “Our lives are at stake. You must not hold back.”
Carr sighed. “I have paranoid symptoms,” he said. And he sounded suddenly tearful.
“Details! Hurry!”
Carr smiled wanly. “It’s really very extreme. When I awakened, I became aware of signals.”
“Signals?”
“Everything means something.”
“Oh, that one!” said Denovich. He added, “For example?”
“Well, I look at you, and you’re just one mass of—well—meaningful signals. Even the way you stand is a message.”
Denovich was baffled. What Carr seemed to be describing was certainly only a variation of a routine paranoid stereotype.
Was this the famous second stage of the ESP cycle, which—he had to admit it—had been so convincing in its initial stage?
He caught himself. “Explain further,” he urged.
“Well—” Carr paused, his pudgy face showed helplessness. “Well, your pulsations!”
As he haltingly explained it, Denovich’s body was like a large mass of energy circuits that gave off a set of signals.
Carr looked at the man, and at the surface signals in the exposed part of the body. And through the skin to the atomic structure inside: tiny golden balls in stacks of billions to each cubic millimeter, pulsing and signalling—and connected . . .
Connected by quadrillions of force lines to distant stars, to the near universe, already stretching out, shiningly tenuous, to other people on the Moon station.
But the overwhelming majority of the lines curved off through the walls and across to the earth . . . A solid mass of connections with other people and with all the places Denovich had ever been.
The signals that pulsed along some of the lines were intense, Carr followed one of the more powerful complexes to an earlier year in Denovich’s life, to a young woman, with tears streaming down her face.
The thoughts that came along that set of lines were: “I trusted you and you betrayed me!”
“Now, Natasha—” said that younger Denovich.
“You see—” said Carr, helplessly. He stopped. “What’s the matter?”
The Russian psychiatrist wondered if his face looked as bloodless as he felt.
“What? W-what?” he gasped. He was stunned. Natasha was a girl he had got pregnant in his younger days and she had died in childbirth. With an effort, he controlled himself. “Can you do anything with R?”
“Well—yes, I guess so.”
As he spoke uncertainly, Carr did something that cut the bundle that connected with the girl and watched the lines recoil back upon Denovich like a rubber band, suddenly released.
Denovich uttered a cry; he couldn’t help it. It was a caterwauling sound, with a bass, throaty yowl in it, that brought Wentworth out of the other office on the double.
By this time, Denovich was trying to reach the couch. But his knees buckled. He fell to the floor and lay there, at first writhing and moaning. But all at once he began a mad screaming.
The Russian agent pressed into the room behind Wentworth and stood there with bulging eyes. After a moment, Wentworth returned to the phone and called Medical Emergency.
The two men who came injected the insanely screaming body with a sedative. The screaming died down to a sobbing sound and then silence. They carried the unconscious man out on a stretcher to a small, mobile unit, called an ambulette and rode off with him.
The machine in Xilmer’s helmet spoke: “We absolutely require that Dr. Carr explain what he did to Dr. Denovich.”
Carr gazed helplessly at Wentworth. “I just cut the lines. I’m guessing that, instantly, all the barriers he had between himself and that girl went down. I think that what we saw was the effect of total guilt suddenly breaking through.”
“Wait!” said the voice from the Xilmer turban machine.
Wentworth, who could not forget that Xilmer’s headpiece had energy weaponry in it, silently waved everybody out of the room. He himself backed into position beyond the door jamb.
One minute. Two. Then the voice spoke: “Unquestionably a powerful mental force exists in Dr. Carr. The analysis of Xilmer’s death was that the unconscious mind of Dr. Carr defended itself from him by cutting the energy lines involving the execution intent of Xilmer. Hence, a reversal was induced, whereby he promptly used his mirt—a weapon in his headpiece—to “commit suicide. The condition of his body indicated that almost total dissolution occurred.”
Wentworth turned to Carr. “Any comment about that?” he whispered slowly.
Carr shook his head.
“No memory of it?”
Again, the head shake.
The voice was continuing, sarcastically, “Naturally, we shall wait until this man’s remarkable mental gift runs through its cycle, a few hours from now. You shall hear from us then.”
Silence.
VII
To hours; perhaps less.
Other men came. There were tense conferences. Carr sat off to one side. Presently, as the voices grew more urgent, he slipped away into the room where Xilmer’s turban lay and stood with eyes closed, gazing at a universe of countless—signals.
Billions of these—pulsations—still lingered around the machine in Xilmer’s headpiece. Quadrillions of lines were focused on it from somewhere out in space.
Carr glanced along the lines with a casual ability. Now that he was no longer disturbed by the mental phenomenon itself, he was aware that there was a faculty in his mind which could understand the meaning of millions of lines at once.
He saw with total clarity that signals and pulsations were merely a surface activity of the basic universe structure.
Underneath was—truth.
Between the signals and what they represented was an intricate feedback, an interchange of the surface meaning with the colossal fact below.
He was aware of Wentworth coming up beside him. “Doctor Carr,” the security officer said softly, “our discussions have led us to the launching of nuclear missiles from the U.N. Space Station hovering over the Atlantic. These will be available close to here in about five hours, but in the final issue our real hope comes back to you and what you can do. What can you do?”
“I can—experiment,” Carr answered, “with signals.”
Wentworth experienced an intense disappointment. For signals, it seemed to him, were a part of communication, and not of weaponry. And that, he realized bitterly, was obviously logical. Beginning with the reading of thoughts on faces the American psychologist had now, in the twist, come to some ultimate ability to understand and manipulate communication.
It was a great gift, but it was not what was needed in this fantastic emergency.
“What kind of experiment?” Wentworth asked.
“Like this!” said Carr.
And he disappeared.
Wentworth stood tense. Then, aware of Xilmer’s turban and the importance of the enemy not finding out what had happened, he tiptoed from the room. Hurrying to the nearest hall communicator, he inserted his key and asked his agents to make a quick search for Carr.
In ten minutes it was fairly well established that the plump psychologist was not in the Moon station. As the reports trickled in confirming this improbable fact, Wentworth put out a call to leading scientists in the station, and soon there were men and women of several nationalities standing around him, speaking into their translation microphones, giving him their concepts of the situation.
But the sum total of the scientific speculations added up to a question: What could be done by one individual to thousands?
And that, in terms of Carr’s ability, came down to: What was the smallest number of lines that needed to be cut to defeat the invader?
As Wentworth stood by, glancing from face to face, it became clear that none of these trained people had any idea what the answer was.
For Carr, after he arrived on the giyn, there was a period of—not confusion, for he was totally aware of the problem—but of immense . . . violence.
He had—selected—an unoccupied room to arrive in; and there he was in what seemed to be a laboratory. Instruments. Tables. Machines. All these stood silently around him, unattended and unthreatening.
His problem derived from the fact that giyn was programmed to resist the presence of unregistered life forms. That defense system, being quiescent, had no visible lines until his appearance triggered the mechanism.
The result of that triggering created the violence.
At the instant of his appearance in the room, the walls, the ceiling and the floor focused their weapons on him. Lines of force sprang out from every side, spun a web of energy around him; tried to hold him.
And that was but the first of four progressively more destructive attack systems. The energy trap was succeeded by an elementary mirt discharge, designed to stun; then came a primary mirt, consisting of murderous impact energies; and, finally, there was a nuclear reaction pattern, as strong as it could be in a confined space.
To the faculty in Carr’s brain, it was all signals, observed, correlated, defeated at source. Each attack was a cycle that ran its programmed measure. All cycles completed. Silence settled.
Pause.
Abruptly, somewhere aboard, a living mind took note. And an astonished voice spoke into Carr’s brain:
“Who are you?”
Carr did not reply.
The immense number of signals that had been flooding in on him from other levels told him that he was inside a ship twenty miles long, five miles wide and four miles thick. There were 80,000 Gizdans aboard, each of whom now tuned in on the alarm that had alerted the entire ship.
For a few moments, they had the same general thought; the same conditioning responded, the same attention focused on the intruder. Like so many iron filings abruptly magnetized, the pulsations of alignment made a pattern. It was the pattern that made them manageable.
Carr in a single, comprehensive glance isolated the tiny portion of significant lines—and cut them.
Then, with equal unerring skill, he selected a mass of lines that inter-related and interacted with Basic Truth, drew them to him, intertwined himself with them—and stepped through an energy vacuum into the room on the Moon Station where Denovich lay asleep under sedation. He had a feeling that very little time remained for the “twist” ability.
Hastily, he repaired the lines ho had old earlier and watched the massive internal armor of the psychiatrist realign. Whereupon Dr. Carr walked out of the room, out of the hospital sector, to the nearest phone booth. He called Wentworth.
When the Security Officer finally came on the line, he said, “Doctor, what happened?”
“They’ve left,” said Carr simply. “B-but—” Wentworth’s voice poised at a peak of puzzlement. But he caught hold of himself and said more calmly, “Doctor, we figured out here that there was probably a smallest decisive group of lines to cut—”
“That’s what I did.”
“But what could that be? What could be the lowest common denominator for so many persons?”
Carr told him.
Wentworth said, admiringly, “Well, I’ll be . . . Of course. Congratulations, Doctor.”
Hours later, when the ESP twist was already faded, at a time when the giyn was nearing the remote end of the solar system and still accelerating, it made its sub-space contact with the great Gizdan fleet cruising in another part of space.
“Got anything for us?” said the fleet commander.
“No!” said the captain of the giyn.
“We understood you were approaching an inhabited system that looked easy.”
“I don’t know how you could have got such an impression. There’s nothing here at all.”
“Okay. Break contact.”
As the captain of the giyn complied, for an instant he had a fleeting impression, like a dream, as if there was something he ought to know about the sun system through which the giyn had passed.
Had he been able to be aware of such things, he would have noticed that all lines relating to Earth and the moon were cut and coiled back into a tiny corner of his brain.
The feeling of something known and understood . . . faded. And was gone.
Forever. END
1967
ENEMY OF THE SILKIES
The Silkies were Earth’s only defense against a foe who had already defeated them once!
I
When the Silkie call for help came, Nat Cemp, himself a Silkie, was exploring the planet which had been given the astronomical designation Minus 1109-93 . . . the 1109th planet farther away than Earth from the new, mighty sun, of which Earth had become one small, green, planetary part, revolving at an angle of 93° in relation to Earth’s orbit.
It was a temporary nomenclature. No one took the attitude that Earth was the most important planet of the new system.
Not, apparently, that it was going to matter. On the three planets that had been assigned to Cemp—1107, 1108 and now 1109—there were no detectable inhabitants. He had been skimming for nearly half a day among the strange, slender buildings which reared like stretched lacework toward the sky. And already it was sadly obvious that here, also, the transition period had been too long for life to survive. Perhaps only Earth and the few others already discovered had been able to make the changeover.
The call for help came as Cemp was floating through a vast generator building complex. Clear and sharp and urgent, he picked it up from the mechanical relay system between 1109 and 1110.
It said, “All Silkies and government agencies: I have just received a (Silkie word) message from Lan Jedd.”
The special Silkie “word” was a thought-form that was used to describe an after-death Silkie communication phenomenon. As a Silkie descended into death, there was a threshold point at which an isolated neural bundle was activated. The bundle was a telepathic sender; and it, quite simply, transmitted the final living thoughts, perceptions and feelings of a Silkie who, at the time the message was sent, was already dead.
The name of the dead Silkie, thus relayed, shocked Cemp. For Lan Jedd and he had been as much Mends as any two Silkies ever were, or rather ever were allowed to be. Human beings and particularly the Special People—humans who could communicate telepathically with Silkies—had always discouraged Silkie-with-Silkie associations.
Lan and he had chosen to explore adjoining sets of planets at this remote end of the system in order to have relatively unmonitored discussions about the increasing severity of the Silkie-human problem.
So for Cemp, as the message reached him, the shocking thrill-thought came: except for the sender, he himself was the nearest “help.”
He responded at once with: “Nat Cemp coming immediately. Who are you?”
“Ou-Dan! Calling from 1113-86.”
The identification of the sender was disturbing. It was a name of the type and style common to meteorite Silkies, whose existence had been unknown until less than a year ago. The presence of such “original” Silkies in this vastly larger sun system was an unknown, unresolved factor . . . which Cemp and Lan Jedd had also talked about in great detail.
Startling to consider that, perhaps, Ou-Dan had “listened in” to their discussion.
But what especially disturbed Cemp was that he had no confidence in the fighting abilities of these newly arrived Silkies. It meant that for many hours he would be virtually alone against a mysterious, powerful enemy who had already proved himself strong enough to kill a Silkie.
As he had these awarenesses, Cemp was projecting himself out of the building he was in. Moments later he was rising out of the atmosphere by means of his Silkie method of gravitation reversal. Literally, the planet expelled his body which, in his C-Silkie form, was almost bullet-shaped and ten feet long. In this form it was a body that was fully able to operate and live in the vacuum of space.
Once away from the planet, Cemp maintained his expulsion momentum and moved through space by cutting off gravity from all objects in space except in the direction he wanted to go. Thus the outer planets drew him, and he “fell” with ever increasing speed toward his destination, a special “ship.”
In spite of his initial acceleration, it was the usual slow journey of a Silkie traveling by himself through space. And so it was several anxious hours later before at last he saw the ship in the dark space ahead.
The ship was a defensive vessel that had been built as part of a crash program after the disaster of Earth becoming part of the new sun system. Built without walls, utilizing weapons as modern as what Cemp had learned from the Glis, it and others like it were part of the safety measures set up in conjunction with exploring so many new and unknown planets.
As soon as he was securely in control of the ship, Cemp started it toward Ou-Dan, a distance of only four planets. Which was no problem at all to the fast ship.
Once under way, Cemp allowed its relay sender to activate again. Thus he tuned into communications which were already in progress from more remote points: Silkies speculating telepathically about what had happened.
What a powerful life-form that particular planet which Lan Jedd had been exploring must have, if one or even several of them could kill a fully grown Silkie like Lan. That was the general thought. From all over the system converging Silkies readied for a mass battle with a dangerous opponent.
Unfortunately, it would be quite a while before these more distant helpers arrived on the scene. For at least an earth day, Ou-Dan and he would be the only living beings on or near the scene of the crime.
