Collected Fiction, page 550
A symbol, a word, a sign—what?
He dismissed it—or tried to—and looked forward to a week’s relaxation in Margaret’s company. The prospect was a pleasant one.
And it was pleasant—up to the period when he looked into Margaret’s eyes and felt his senses blank out.
He made the return trip by stages, under posthypnotic control. Afterward there were flashes of memory—finding himself in Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, knowing the vital urgency of arranging another stage in the journey and the equal urgency of communicating with Margaret by visor.
Each stage was a unit in itself, beyond which he could not look or think. And eventually, under hypnosis and the personal guidance of an expendable; he reached the hideout.
What happened after that was vague and strange.
He remained passive. He was not called upon to do anything, except listen, learn, and understand. The time for decision was not vet. Like a man in a dream—which he was—he allowed himself to be led through the underground rooms and corridors and laboratories, listening, watching, not questioning anything, though much of what he saw had come t6 this world from Omega and was unlike anything he had ever known before.
The hypnotic control played him like a delicate instrument, lessening and increasing the intensity as it was needed. His stolen memories returned—memories of what Ilsa Carter had told him in her apartment, and the meaning of the Zodiacal symbol—He remained a witness, while all around him a flurry of high-tension activity went on.
There was no attempt to keep any further secrets from him. On the contrary, Jeng and the others made every effort to acquaint him with the whole history, aim and purpose of the underground organization. With Jeng, he listened to the playbacks of the voice from Omega. With Ilsa Carter, he watched De Anza and Louis being given the sedative shots. He saw the Freak, motionless as a monstrous image in his tank.
Meanwhile the man from Omega spoke further, and Breden listened to that, too.
In a way, it was rather pleasant. All responsibility was taken from him. He was fed, clothed, housed; he had only to watch and listen. He watched as an abstract critic, so that it was only abstractedly that what he learned conflicted with his psychic conditioning. But though he did not know it, the forces within him were unconsciously building up to the decision he would eventually have to make.
And when the opportunity came, habit made him react as he did. Jeng, in his endless integrations, had forgotten one factor. Joseph Breden was not an ordinary man. The organization had searched for a long time before they found the one individual who fitted their needs by virtue of his psychological background and his social position. There had been other possibilities, eventually discarded, who were guardians connected with the uranium piles, and who would be malleable to psych-pressure.
But only Breden, it seemed, had combined another factor: something not quite analyzable, a certain latent positivism—je ne sais quois, in fact, which had almost eluded the organization’s skillful, trained searchers. The basis of their report could be divided into three parts:
1) Joseph Breden had access to Uranium Pile Number One
2) Joseph Breden was vulnerable to psychological pressure
3) Joseph Breden could become very active indeed, once he had made a decision.
Slowly, as the days passed, Breden began to realize that a spark had kindled in his mind. He thought it had always been there, deep down. But now it was being fanned brighter, and its glow was strangely reassuring. As he sat before the televisor, waiting for the face of his Control—Margaret’s face—to checker in, the strange, small, cold spark grew brighter in his mind.
He became conscious that a synapse existed—that the spark was an extension of himself. So might a man who had never opened his eyes be conscious of gradations of light striking through his lids. He tested the extension a little. He found he could bridge the synapse.
Three times he hauled himself out of the passive depths of hypnosis, only to let himself drop back into it, for this was not yet the time.
Meanwhile he waited and listened, while curious things happened in his brain.
GPC’s embargo clamped down harder and harder. The Neoculturalists, who had been harmless fanatics until now, stirred into rebellion under pressure. Had that been GPC’s motive all along—or did their suspicions strike deeper, closer to home? Jeng didn’t know; Ilsa didn’t know; all they knew was that the constriction drew tighter, and the skeleton staff of the hideout diminished.
Too many members of the organization had to play their public lives in detail, not daring to steal time to follow Jeng’s orders. So the brunt fell on others, and one day the hideout was badly undermanned.
Breden was drowsing somnambulistically on a couch when Ilsa came in.
“Follow me, Joe,” she said. “Stand up and follow me. We’re getting another message from Omega.”
He rose slowly. And then his mind made contact with the bright spark. His arm brushed the little rod-weapon that Ilsa carried at her belt and tore it from its clasp. It tinkled to the floor. The girl jerked back, looking at him, but Breden stood motionless, staring blankly, waiting.
Ilsa bent to recover the rod. Breden brought down the edge of his palm across her nape. She fell soundlessly, cushioned by Breden’s out-thrust leg. He picked her up, laid her on the couch, and took the weapon. He had never used it before, but that did not matter. Something far stronger than logic controlled him now—or he controlled it. There was some difficulty in deciding which was true.
He stepped toward a blank wall. He had never seen the lock system that opened the door here, but his hand moved in a quick, intricate gesture before the concealed photoelectric. The door opened. The expendable standing there confirmed his expendability by going down instantly under the impact of the silent, searing energy that leaped from the rod-weapon. Breden had never used this before, either, but he made it work.
He stepped into the next room. He went along a passage, opened another door, and took two quick steps in which proved to be exactly the right direction. The energy bolt of another guard missed him, but Breden’s weapon did not miss.
Then he was alone with the drugged bodies of De Anza and his brother.
There was a cabinet in the corner. Breden opened it and let his gaze move swiftly across the rows and shelves of equipment. He reached for a bottle and took a hypodermic syringe from its sterilized case. Deftly—he had never done this before, either—he administered neutralizing shots to the two prisoners.
“Let’s get out of here,” he-said when they had wakened.
De Anza wanted to ask questions, but Louis was silent as they retraced their steps. They recovered the weapons from the dead guards, and Breden showed his companions how the mechanism worked. He said softly, “We’d better kill Jeng first. If he escapes, it’ll be unfortunate. Even GPC may have some trouble-picking him up. Come on.”
“What the devil’s going on?” De Anza asked blankly.
“Sh-h. Come on.”
Louis, fingering his weapon, frowned and looked under his brows at his brother. He seemed oddly puzzled. “Joe.” he said softly, “this gadget—it’s a killing weapon?”
“It is now. You can stun with it too, if you want.”
“How?”
Impatiently, with two quick motions, Breden showed him. “Come on,” he said, nodding toward the wall. They took the straight corridor that led to Jeng, and presently came out in the big room where the Freak lay motionless in his tank, and the voice from Omega spoke clearly through Ortega’s gadget. Jeng and his technician were together. Breden moved his rod-weapon slightly and killed the technician.
Jeng swung round in his chair. The voice spoke on from behind him, but no one listened to it now. Jeng put his hands on his knees and looked at Joseph Breden.
“Then we’ve failed,” he said quietly. “We didn’t convince you, after all.”
Breden said, “Convince me of what?”
“That what we’re doing is right and necessary.”
Breden said over his shoulder, “Mike, back up a little. Keep your weapon on this man Jeng. Got it? Kill him if he makes a move.” Then he turned so quickly that Louis Breden’s gesture was arrested abortively. “Drop your weapon, Louis,” Joseph Breden said, “or I’ll kill you, now.”
Louis didn’t obey. “Wait a minute, Joe,” he said. “Will you answer a question? Do you intend to kill the Freak?”
De Anza hadn’t glanced away from his quarry, but he made a puzzled interrogative sound. Breden said, “Yes, of course. But—how much did Ilsa Carter tell you?”
“Practically nothing. I learned in . . . in other ways.”
“Just now you intended to knock me out. Watch Jeng, Mike.”
Louis said, “Yes. You see, I . . . will you listen?”
Breden said, “I don’t quite . . . I don’t know whether to kill you or not. I knew the answers before. But—”
Louis said, “I’ve been in telepathic rapport with the Freak’s mind. I know the answers myself now—more of them than you know, probably, unless we’ve got the same mutation, Joe.”
Breden started to say, “I’m not a mutant—” but then something stopped the words, in his mouth and a thought like a bright light burst into sudden radiance in his mind. Imperceptibly, while the thought blazed, he hesitated. Then it died down again and he went on uncertainly, “But . . . what was it, then? What is it? I could bring myself out of hypnosis . . . I knew exactly what I wanted to do—”
Inside his brain a voice was reminding him of-many small things whose sum he could not yet read. What the doctor had been about to say when he died—had he guessed then something more than the simple fact of hypnosis? The altered genes in the bodies of Breden’s parents—the constant assurances he had accepted for so long, that he at least was no mutation—
Louis said, “Maybe I can tell you the answer, Joe. There’s one probability world where instinct has become the dominant. Instinct riding on the back of intelligence and guiding it. Instinct . . . well, that’s our word for whatever the thing may be. Inadequate, of course. Something away beyond the tropisms and the taxis that rule plants and insects, but—”
“And I’ve got it?” Breden asked impatiently.
“I think so. It’s never happened here, but the latent factors were always present. You’re a mutant after all, Joe—but it was a latent mutation, until now.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. I’m guessing. But I’ve got premises to guess from that nobody else knows about. I’ve been seeing these other worlds—”
Jeng was watching and listening, his round face impassive, his eyes bright. De Anza, looking stubborn and bewildered, held his weapon unwavering. Breden’s grip on his own weapon was firm, but there was a note almost of pleading in his voice as he said, “Go on, Louis. If this is instinct—”
“Actually it’s something a lot more subtle, a sort of higher reasoning, from the evidences of senses below the threshold of conscious perception. They know something about it, but not all, in that world where it’s dominant. Maybe it’s clairvoyance, or prescience, or psycho-kinetic deductions, or—I don’t know, Joe! Whatever it is, something’s made it dominant in you. Maybe the hypnosis, or the psychological stresses. All I can say is that now you need it, you’ve got it. What’s really important is what you do with it.”
Breden said, half to himself, “I knew just what to do—I still know—” And he leveled his rod-weapon at Louis.
“That’s self-preservation,” Louis said quickly. “What about the other angle—preservation of the species? Will killing me solve that problem too?”
Breden said, “Talk, Louis. Let’s have it fast.”
Louis let his rod fall to the floor. He took a “step back and leaned against the wall.
“Jeng,” he said, “you listen, too. I know more about what you want to do than you know. The Freak can see and understand, a good deal, but he hasn’t had the experience to perform a screening process. I’ve been in rapport with his mind all the time I’ve been here, unconscious. His memories, his vision—Omega, and the other worlds. The world wherein instinct’s dominant—and that worked out very successfully. But it took controlled eugenics to bring it about. The worlds of war, and of Nirvana, and the worlds that died. I don’t know how many there are. Some are too far away to see clearly. There must be-many further still. But—here it is: I’m a mutant, and the Freak’s a mutant. He’s never been in contact with another mutant before this, has he?”
“Your brother,” Jeng said. “If he is one.”
“Perhaps telepathy isn’t one of Joe’s traits,” Louis said. “Apparently it is one of mine. All the while you’ve kept me under drugs I’ve been in close contact with the Freak’s mind. I’ll tell you what threw him into shock. His father attacked him. And what set Ortega off was something the Freak said. The Freak can see probability variants. He can’t see backward and forward in time, but he can see across the probability track where it intersects the other worlds along the NOW-line. In on. of those tracks the earth doesn’t exist. A chain reaction destroyed it.”
Through the underground room a ripple of panic moved silently.
Louis went on.
“The time-tracks branch, all through the past. Whenever a crisis occurred, there was usually a crossroads, and the result was two probability futures instead of one. Some have spread out too far to be visible now, even through the Freak’s eyes, or with the inter-probability machine Van Buren made in Omega. But others can be seen. There were a good many crossroads a hundred years or so ago. Some were war tracks, others were peace tracks—like ours. In one the United States gave the UN a year to work, and propagandized Russia’s spheres of influence. That branched too: in one probability we conquered Russia, in another Russia sovietized the world. And that branched too. In one NOW, Russia still rules; in another the rising tide of mysticism and passive resistance from India and China have disrupted Russia from within.
“But only in two worlds is GPC in control. Alpha and—we’ll call it Beta. It’s very close to us; the crossroads occurred not ten years ago. It hasn’t gone very far away from us yet. Except that ten years ago a new germ mutation occurred in Beta. There were no research facilities there, either. Beta is dying—of plague,” Louis ended quietly, “because it was too late to do the necessary research to save it.”
The monologue had gone beyond De Anza. He merely watched and listened. But Breden and Jeng were intent.
Jeng said, “In one probability there was a chain reaction—a fatal one? But Van Buren says that’s impossible.”
“Van Buren, in Omega, depends on a mechanical scanner. The Freak’s brain has a wider scope. He can see further across the probability lines. Van Buren doesn’t know. I’ve seen his world through the Freak’s mind—” Louis turned to his brother. “Joe, listen to me. We can communicate with Van Buren. I know how to do that. I’ve picked up that knowledge from the Freak’s brain—Jeng couldn’t, because the symbols he got from Van Buren were arbitrary and oral. But I saw the machine Van Buren built, as the Freak saw it. One part is missing. We can’t make that part—a deflection plate—without a radioisotope, but we don’t need to. Van Buren used that sort of plate because he had it available. He could have used a less efficient, more complicated hookup, but he didn’t need to. We do. I can tell a technician how to rig it. At least, I can sketch it out.”
“Technician?” Jeng said, looking at the body on the floor.
“De Anza could do it. Joe, you could do it. But—you’ve got to make your decision. I’ve made mine. I’ve always been a freak in this world, myself. I know that now. There was no freedom—intellectual freedom. I mean. I was rusting, playing with kid’s toys. So were you. What does guarding Uranium File One mean? Upholding the status quo—but I saw the result of that in Beta!”
Breden hadn’t lowered his weapon. “Destroying the Uranium Pile would mean . . . might mean destruction of the planet.”
“It happened only once, in another probability. Why didn’t it happen in any of the other probabilities? Why not in Omega, where they’ve harnessed atomics for years? What does your instinct tell you about that?”
Jeng said suddenly, “It seems to me that your brother must make a choice between two drives—self-preservation and preservation of the species. If he chooses the first he’ll kill me—and you too, Louis. But if he chooses the second—”
“He’ll choose the second,” Louis said, “if his instinct is the same one I saw working on that other world.
It wouldn’t have become dominant there and succeeded unless it perpetuated the species.”
Breden said, “Louis. In Omega—have they really cured cancer?”
“I saw no cases there,” Louis told him. “And that’s rather my field. I don’t know, of course.
But through the Freak’s brain I saw their medical technologies and—I think they have.”
De Anza cried out suddenly.
“Joe! What isn’t they want you to do?”
No one answered. Perhaps it was conditioning that lifted De Anza’s weapon and aimed it at Jeng. For Mike De Anza fitted in this world, in the status quo, and his mind had already crystallized, though he was younger than Louis or Joseph Breden.
Perhaps it was conditioning that made him try to kill Philip Jeng.
But it was instinct that kept Breden silent, though he knew that behind him Ilsa Carter had come quietly in, until her energy weapon smashed home into De Anza’s brain.
Crossing that blast, a beam shot out from Breden’s rod toward her. But it was a beam to stun, not to kill, and it struck only her wrist above the weapon. Ilsa’s rod tinkled to the floor with a sharp, clear sound above the sliding and the thud of De Anza’s body. She stood staring at them, clutching her paralyzed wrist.
Breden said, “Wait, Ilsa. Louis—wait. I’ve made my decision. I let you kill De Anza, didn’t I?”
