Mutant, page 23
“That’s what we’re going to find out. But it ought to—it ought to,”
Allenby said, opening a door in the wall of the corridor. Cody followed the psychologist into one of the caverns which had been made into an experimental laboratory.
There was a great deal going on in the cave, but Cody was not distracted by external sense-impressions; he turned immediately toward where Lucy was standing, the baby in her arms. He went toward her quickly. He reached out to her mind and then checked himself. There was, perhaps, too much he did not want to know, now or ever.
Cody said, “These bandages don’t mean anything. I feel fine.”
“They told me,” Lucy said. “It was one time I was glad of telepathy. I knew they could really tell if you were all right—even if you were unconscious.”
He put his arm around her, looking down at the sleeping baby.
Lucy said, “I couldn’t tell a thing by watching you. You might have been—dead. But it was so good to have Allenby and the others able to look into your mind and make sure you were all right. I wanted to do something to help, but there wasn’t anything I could do. Except . . . this. Allenby told me he needed volunteers for the Inductor experiment. So I volunteered. It’s one way I can help—and I want to.”
So Lucy knew about the Inductor now. Well, the time and need for secrecy was past. It no longer mattered how much or how little the
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prisoners in the Caves knew. It no longer mattered, now that the pogrom had begun.
“It’s a total pogrom this time, isn’t it?” she asked, and he had an irrational second of amazement ( telepathy? ) before he realized that Lucy was merely reacting to cues learned through long familiarity with his behavior. All married couples have flashes of this kind of pseudo-telepathy, if there is real sympathy between them. And in spite of everything, that sympathy had existed. It was strange to know this now, to be sure of it and to feel elation, when so little time might remain. The pogrom could still destroy everything, in spite of the Inductor.
“Lucy,” he said. “If we fail—we’ll make sure you get safely out of the Caves, back home—”
She looked down at the baby, and then turned away from Cody. He suddenly realized, as men have always done, that even with telepathic power to aid him, he would never really understand a woman’s reactions—not even Lucy’s.
“Aren’t you ready yet?” she asked Allenby.
“I think so,” he said. “Let somebody hold the baby, Lucy.”
She turned back to Cody, smiled at him, and put the baby in his arms. Then she followed Allenby toward an insulated chair, jury-rigged with a tangle of wires which led to a complicated instrument panel.
The mind of the baby had a little flame in it like the flames Cody remembered in the goldfish in the pool back at American Gun. But there was a very great difference. He did not know exactly what it was, but he had not felt pity and fear as he watched the glimmering minds of the fish. The mind of his child, his and Lucy’s, held a small flame that burned with ridiculous confidence for so small and helpless a creature, and yet each slight stimulus, the rocking movement of his arms, the slight hunger-contractions of the child’s stomach, made the fragile flame quiver and blow in a new direction before it swung back to its perseverant burning. So many things would shake that flame, in even the best of all worlds—but, he
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thought with sudden clarity, in that flame the personality of the child would be forged and made strong.
He looked toward Lucy. She was sitting in the chair now, and electrodes were being attached to her temples and the base of her skull. A man he recognized as Pomerance, gaunt and gray-haired, was hovering over her, getting in the way of the experimenters. In Pomerance’s mind, Cody saw, was a slight irritation the man was trying hard to repress. This application, this connection—I don’t understand how it fits the theory. My God, if only I were a telepath!
But if the Inductor works, I can be. Now how does this hook-up fit into—and then the thoughts swung into inductive abstractions as the biochemist tried to puzzle the problem out.
The cave-laboratory was crowded. There were the Mute-scientists, and there were a score of captives from the Caves—all volunteers, Cody realized warmly. In spite of everything, they had wanted to help, as Lucy had wanted to.
Now the test was beginning. Lucy relaxed in the chair, her thoughts nervously considering the pressure of the electrodes. Cody withdrew his mind. He felt nervous too. He scanned the group, found a receptive mind, and recognized Allenby.
“Suppose the Inductor works,” Cody said in silence. “How will that stop the pogrom?”
“We’ll offer telepathy to everybody,” Allenby told him. “There’s a video hook-up all ready to cut in on every screen in every town. I think even a lynch mob will stop to listen if they’re offered telepathy.”
“I wonder.”
“Besides, there are plenty of humans on our side, like Pomerance.
We’ve got—” The thought paused.
For something was happening to Lucy’s mind. It was like a wave, a flood of something as indefinable as abstract music rising in Lucy’s thoughts as the nucleoproteins of her brain altered. She’s becoming a telepath, one of us, Cody thought.
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“Power off,” Allenby said suddenly. He bent forward and removed the electrodes. “Wait a minute, now, Lucy.” He stopped talking, but his mind spoke urgently in silence.
Move your right hand, Lucy. Move your right hand.
Not a Baldy looked at Lucy’s hands. There must be no unconscious signals.
Lucy did not move. Her mind, opened to Cody, suddenly and appallingly reminded him of Jasper Horne’s walled mind. He did not know why, but a little thrill of fear touched him.
Move your right hand.
No response.
Try another command, someone suggested . Lucy—stand up.
Stand up.
She did not move.
It may take time, a Baldy suggested desperately . She may need time to learn—
Maybe, Allenby thought. But we’d better try another subject.
“All right, Lucy,” Cody said. “Come over here with me. We’re going to try someone else.”
“Didn’t it work?” she asked. She went to him, staring into his eyes as though trying to force rapport between mind and mind.
“We can’t tell yet,” he said. “Watch June.”
June Barton was in the chair now, flinching a little as the electrodes were attached.
In Cody’s thoughts something moved uneasily—something he had not thought of since he woke. If the Inductor failed, then—it would be his problem again, the same old problem, which he had failed to solve. The dilemma which had sent him out to try to kill Jasper
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Horne. The responsibility that was too great for any one man to carry after a while. Operation Apocalypse. The end of all flesh. . . .
Very quickly he turned his mind from that thought. He reached out mentally with a sense of panic, while his arm tightened about Lucy.
( Would he have to kill her—her and their child? It may not come to that. Don’t think about it! ) He searched for a concept intricate enough to drive the obsessive terror from his mind. The Inductor, he asked at random. What’s the theory? How does it work?
Another mind leaped gratefully toward the question. It was Kunashi, the physicist. From beneath Kunashi’s Mute helmet came quick clear thoughts that could not quite conceal the anxiety in the man’s mind. For Kunashi, too, was married to a non-telepath.
“You remember when we asked the calculator for a solution to our problem?” (The electrodes were being unclamped from June Barton’s head now.) “We gathered all the data we could to feed into the calculator. We read the minds of human scientists everywhere, and coded all the data that could possibly be relevant. Well, some of that data came from Pomerance’s mind, more than a year ago.
He wasn’t very far along with his theory then, but the key concepts had been formulated—the hypothesis involving mutation of nucleoproteins by resonance. The calculator integrated that with other data and came up with the simplest answer—the virus. It didn’t have the necessary data to follow the theory along the lines of the Inductor, even though both concepts depend on the same basic—resonance.”
(Someone else was sitting down in the chair. The electrodes were being attached. Cody felt the growing distress and anxiety in every mind.)
Kunashi went on doggedly, “Pomerance is a biochemist. He was working on a virus—Japanese encephalitis type A—and trying to mutate it into a specialized bacteriophage.” The thought faltered for an instant and picked up again. “The reproduction of a virus—or a gene—depends on high internal resonance; it’s a nucleoprotein.
Theoretically, anything can change into anything else, eventually.
But the physical probability of such a change depends on the
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relative resonance measure of the two states—high for the aminoacid-protein chain, for example, and the two states of the benzene ring.”
(Kunashi’s wife was sitting down in the chair.)
“The change, the reproduction, also involves high specificity of the chemical substances involved. That’s the reason telepaths would be immune to the Operation Apocalypse virus, whatever it is. Now .
. . now specificity can vary not only from species to species, but within the species too. Our immunity is innate. The ( will it work? will it work? ) nucleoprotein of the Operation Apocalypse virus must have a high affinity for certain high-resonance particles in the central nervous system of non-telepaths. Such particles have a great capacity for storing information. So our virus would attack the information centers of the non-telepathic brain.
“That affinity depends on resonance differential—and Pomerance’s experiments were aimed at finding a way to alter that differential.
Such a method would make it possible to mutate virus-strains with great predictability and control. And it can also be used to induce telepathy. Telepathy depends on high resonance of nuceloproteins in the brain’s information centers, and by artificially increasing specificity, the telepathic function can be induced in—in—”
The thought stopped. Kunashi’s wife was leaving the experimental chair, and the physicist’s mind clouded with doubt, misery, and hopelessness. Cody’s thoughts linked with Kunashi’s, sending a strong message of wordless warm encouragement—not intellectual hope, he did not have much of that himself—but a deep emotional bridge of understanding and sympathy. It seemed to help a little. It helped Cody, too. He watched Kunashi’s wife walk quickly to him, and they linked arms and stood together waiting.
Suddenly Lucy said, “I want to try again.”
“Do you feel—” Cody began, but immediately knew that there had been no change. Her mind was still walled.
Yet Allenby, across the room, nodded.
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“It’s worth trying,” he said. “Let’s do it with the power on, this time.
The resonance effect should last for several minutes after disconnecting the electrodes, but we won’t take any chances.”
Cody had taken the baby again, and Lucy was settling herself in the chair. “Ideally, all these gadgets will be in a small power-pack that will be worn and operating continuously . . . All right, Lucy? Power on.”
Again mind after mind tried to touch Lucy’s. Again Cody sensed, as he had sensed in the minds of the other subjects too, that strange walled aspect that reminded him of Jasper Horne. But Lucy wasn’t paranoid!
Yet her mind did not open. So it was failure—not a mechanical failure, for Pomerance’s hypothesis had been verified by everything except the ultimate verification of experimental proof. And yet, without that proof, the pogrom would rage on unchecked, spreading and destroying.
She’s not paranoid! Cody thought. The baby stirred in his arms. He reached into that warm, shapeless mind and sensed nothing there that reminded him at all of Jasper Horne.
The baby, Allenby thought suddenly. Try the baby.
Questions thrust toward the psychologist. But they were not answered. He did not know the answers. He had a hunch, that was all.
Try the baby.
Allenby turned off the power and removed the electrodes from Lucy’s head. The baby was laid gently, in his blankets, on the seat Lucy vacated. The electrodes were attached carefully. The baby slept.
Power on, Allenby ordered.
His thoughts reached out toward the child.
The child slept on.
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. . . Defeat, the last defeat of all, Cody knew. Telepaths and nontelepaths were ultimately different, after all. That wall could never go down. No armistice could ever be made. The pogrom could not be stopped.
The paranoids had been right. Telepaths could not exist side by side with non-telepaths.
And suddenly in Cody’s mind blazed the flash and roar of the exploding bomb, the blinding thunderclap that was to engulf the whole world now—
On the chair, the baby squirmed, opened its eyes and mouth, and screamed.
In the soft, floating mistiness of its mind was the formless shape of fear—the sudden flash and roar and Cody’s own memory of falling helplessly through space—the oldest fears of all, the only fears which are inborn.
For the first time in history, telepathy had been induced.
Cody sat alone at the control panel of the electronic calculator. For there was no time at all now. In a moment the emergency telecast would begin, the last appeal to the group of non-telepaths. They would be offered the Inductor—conditionally. For they could not use it. Only their children could.
If they were willing to accept the Inductor and halt the pogrom, the Baldies would know very quickly. The most secret thoughts of men cannot be hidden from telepaths.
But if they would not accept—the Baldies would know that, too, and then Cody would touch a certain button on the panel before him.
Then Operation Apocalypse would begin. In six hours the virus would be ready. In a week or two, ninety per cent of the world’s population would be dead or dying. The pogrom might go on until the last, but telepaths could hide efficiently, and they would not have to remain hidden long. The decision was man’s.
Cody felt Allenby come in behind him.
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“What’s your guess?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It depends on egotism—paranoia, in a way. Maybe man has learned to be a social animal; maybe he hasn’t. We’ll soon find out.”
“Yes. Soon. It’s the end now, the end of what started with the Blowup.”
“No,” Allenby said, “it started a long time before that. It started when men first began to live in groups and the groups kept expanding.
But before there was any final unification, the Blowup came along.
So we had decentralization, and that was the wrong answer. It was ultimate disunity and control by fear. It built up the walls between man and man higher than ever. Aggression is punished very severely now—and in a suspicious, worried, decentralized world there’s a tremendous lot of aggression trying to explode. But the conscience represses it—the criminal conscience of a fear-ruled society, built up in every person from childhood. That’s why no nontelepathic adult today can let himself receive thoughts—why Lucy and the others couldn’t.”
“She’ll . . . never be able to?”
“Never,” Allenby said quietly. “It’s functional hysteric deafness—
telepathic deafness. Non-telepaths don’t know what other people are thinking—but they believe they know. And they’re afraid of it.
They project their own repressed aggressions on to others; unconsciously, they feel that every other being is a potential enemy—and so they don’t dare become telepaths. They may want to consciously, but unconsciously there’s too much fear.”
“Yet the children—”
“If they’re young enough, they can become telepaths, like your baby, Jeff. His superego hasn’t formed yet. He can learn, and learn realistically, with all minds open to him, with no walls locking him in as he grows and learns.”
Cody remembered something an old poet had written. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. Too many walls had been built, for
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too long, walls that kept each man apart from his neighbor. In infancy, perhaps in early childhood, anyone was capable of receiving telepathic thoughts, given the Inductor. In infancy the mind of the child was whole and healthy and complete, able to learn telepathic as well as verbal communication. But soon, fatally soon, as the child grew and learned, the walls were built.
Then man climbed his wall and sat on it like Humpty Dumpty—and somehow, somewhere, in the long process of maturing and learning, the mind was forever spoiled. It was the fall, not only of Humpty Dumpty, but the immemorial fall of man himself. And then—
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.
For Lucy, it was forever too late.
After a little while, Cody said, “What about the paranoids? They were telepathic as children. What happened to them?”
Allenby shook his head.
“I don’t know the answer to that one, Jeff. It may be an hereditary malfunction. But they don’t matter now; they’re a minority among telepaths—a very small minority. They’ve been dangerous only because we were a minority among non-telepaths, and vulnerable to scapegoating. We won’t be, if. . . .”
“What about the secret wave-bands?”
“The Inductor can be built to adapt to any wave-length the human brain can transmit. There won’t be any more walls at all.”
“If our offer is accepted. If it isn’t—if the pogrom goes on—then I still have the responsibility for Operation Apocalypse.”
“Is it your responsibility?” Allenby asked. “Is it ours, even? The nontelepaths will be making their own choice.”
