Collected Short Fiction, page 549
The inspector’s head was already throbbing, but impressions from the finder had begun to crowd his mind again. The tall prisoner stood beside a fire, bound with rawhide things but undefeated. The red firelight gleamed on his blood-matted beard, and glinted on the black water lapping close to his feet, and flickered over the frightened men waiting to kill him. A young child cried, somewhere in the dark. A sobbing woman hushed it, and then the prisoner sang.
The big man tried to catch the words, but the effort merely increased that squeezing pressure on the top of his head. His hands came up to snatch off the headset.
“Don’t.” The explorer’s low voice had a quivering urgency that stopped him. “You can understand it all, if you will only try. Because the inventor begins in a very simple way, by telling how the conflicting errors of the wise men had taught him to doubt everything, and how he learned to look for the truth. Just listen to him.”
Reluctantly, the inspector settled the headset back into place. He sat for a few moments frowning with the mental effort the finder required, and then loosened the headset impatiently, turning to the explorer with a look of puzzled disappointment.
“Is that all it was?” he muttered uncertainly. “Just a way of thinking?”
“Wasn’t that enough?” the scientist said quickly. “He taught men how to think. In that song, he declared the freedom of thought, against habit and ignorance and fear. What he really invented was nothing less than the human mind.”
He smiled gravely at the fat man’s startled face.
“I know the brain already existed,” he said. “Just as the neutrino did, before it was harnessed to the interstellar drive. Those savages who hoped to appease the deluge with a human life had brains with all the cells of ours, but they hadn’t learned to use them.”
“That may be true,” the inspector muttered grudgingly, “but still I don’t entirely understand—”
“Try again.” The slight man gestured urgently at the finder. “Words can’t say enough. Only psionics can show you the full meaning of that man’s achievement. He was a genius. With his own revealing intuitions, after he had established his own mental independence, he realized the capacities of the liberated mind far more fully than these blundering savages around us do today—in spite of all the belated efforts they call psychoanalysis and parapsychology.”
The inspector shook his head stubbornly. “Could men have existed as you say they did, for thousands of years before him, without knowing how to think?”
“Too few do, even now.” The explorer grinned wryly. “Possibly, of course, the science of thought had been invented by other men before him—although few enough minds ever reach the caliber of his, even with the best conditioning. But he passed on the art. Fighting that night for his life, he used all he knew to force other men to begin thinking for themselves—and the process, painful as it may be, has never yet entirely stopped.
“But let the finder show you.”
Gingerly, the inspector adjusted the headset again. In a moment his thick hands came up apprehensively to take it off, but something checked him. He paused and nodded and sat back again, with an awed intentness in his bulging eyes. His hands relaxed and fell.
After a long time, he removed the instrument as reluctantly as he had put it on. For a moment he sat peering at the explorer, as if too deeply moved for words. His fat features trembled to some conflict of emotions, and he gasped suddenly for breath.
“That makes a difference,” he whispered huskily. “Do you know, I could see myself in that savage—even if he had no soul to be reborn. The troubles of his unhappy youth were the same that have followed me all the way from Kares II, and I found the answers to most of my doubts in his song.”
Bent over the finder, staring at that shapeless flake of old metal and smiling a little at the forgotten things it had revealed, the explorer seemed not to hear him.
“That makes all the difference.”
He raised his rasping voice, to get the little man’s attention. “I intend to learn how to think—if those savages did it, without psionics, so can I. And then I’m going back to Kares II. Another cycle is running there; Rigel will be approaching again, and the wise men preaching their old faith of sacred death and miraculous rebirth. I think my people need that first invention.”
He rose abruptly in that hot narrow space between the shelves and benches, disturbed by the slight man’s silence. Sweat poured down his bloodless face. His fat hands shuddered and clenched again, and he shook his head unbelievingly.
“Don’t you worry about Atlantis!” he shouted desperately. “I’ll take care of everything. I’ll carry back your artifacts, and all your psionic notes and records. I see now why men must know the truth—”
Dismay took his voice. He reached anxiously to touch the worn little man at the finder, and stumbled numbly back. The smiling man was dead.
THE END
1952
Man Down
The world is not what it is one-half so much as it is what a man sees it to be. And we see through eyes colored by our own past. Given a very different past, on a very different planet, and a very different set of beliefs—
The cruise of the space yacht Royal Mother, out from Altair II and back again, had been arranged to kill some sixty years of time. Sixty years on that woman-governed planet—until the matriarch got ready to round out her iron-willed reign by directing the coronation and the formal nuptials of her daughter. Aboard the yacht, however, in the flux of space and time at interstellar speeds, the years had shrunk to days.
The prince had been twenty-four when the cruise began. A slim and unobtrusive man with a hesitant voice and dark curly hair, he was still boyishly engaging when he smiled, although the waiting burden of his royal duties had already stooped him slightly and sobered his blue eyes with a wistful resignation. His newly granted title was as yet unblooded; he had never killed a man.
He was expected to return unchanged by time, still a fit consort for his future ruler—who had been a red and wrinkled infant when he left, squalling alarmingly through the betrothal ceremony. And he fully intended to return on time. He had assented without protest when his mother and Her Majesty announced the traditional arrangements. He was merely a man. He knew his place.
A faint discontent had begun to nip him now and then, however, even while the faint spark of Altair hung reddened and fading behind the ship. Moody silences began to blight the small talk expected of him at dinners and receptions on the civilized planets he visited. For all his efforts at a princely submission, rebellion smoldered in him. When the psionic screens showed him Altair turning bright and blue ahead, beyond Alpha Centuari and Sol, desperation took hold of him.
Trapped in the cold luxury of the royal suite, he tried to learn the speech his aide had written for him to make on Proxima IV, but the hollow phrases mocked him. He tried to sleep and paced the decks, until a wild impulse drove him to arouse the aide—a grizzled, hard-bitten old duelist who had fought his way to a title that can be rendered here as count.
“Call the bridge and change our course.” He gulped to smooth his voice. “I . . . I want to stop at Sol instead of Proxima.”
“But . . . your highness!” An apprehensive disapproval flickered through the old aristocrat’s well-bred reserve. “You know the matriarch herself picked out our ports of call. She won’t be pleased. And if we’re late for the coronation—”
The count paused ominously, without words to convey the enormity of that, but the prince understood the danger. Other mothers had coveted the throne for their own sons, and their jealousy would surely turn any delay into disaster for him.
“I mean to be on time,” he protested hastily. Afterwards, all his life would be arranged for him, but suddenly now he felt that he had to have one moment of his own.
“Why Sol?” The count spoke with the candor of old friendship. “A desert system, except for a handful of savages on the third planet—I was there with the quarantine service, before I came into the fighting class. Why go there?”
“I don’t quite know,” the prince admitted hesitantly. “But when I saw Sol ahead, it set me to thinking of history. The Men’s Rebellion. There’s a legend, you know, that the survivors escaped into space, and one of my tutors had a theory they settled that third planet. I’d like to forget speech-making long enough to investigate his theory.”
“There’s evidence that the migration came the other way,” the bluff old nobleman objected. “Even today, some tribes there are largely woman-ruled. But you’ll have to take my word for that, because they’re under the Covenants of Non-Contact. No outsiders allowed, except service undercover men.”
“That won’t stop me from exploring some of the desert planets, to look for traces of those exiled men.”
“Perhaps not.” The gaunt count shrugged and stood for a moment chewing at the yellow fringes of his luxuriant mustache, frowning sadly at the prince. “There’s another reason for keeping on the safe route the matriarch selected for us. The galactic drift.”
“Haven’t we safety devices enough?”
“For the charted interstellar lanes. But if we change course out here—” The old man shrugged. “Who knows?”
“If you think there’s too much risk for the crew, I’ll give it up.”
“Our lives are safe enough,” the count admitted, “with all our survival devices. It’s just that any collision might delay us for years, waiting for a rescue ship. We might be late for your coronation.”
The prince straightened uneasily.
“If that’s all that worries you, call the bridge.”
“Are you out of your head?” The count scowled forbiddingly. “Risking the favor of the matriarch now, for just a whim?”
“It’s more than a whim,” the prince insisted. “Even if it seems an empty gesture, it’s something I have to do. The only free choice, probably, that I’ll ever get to make.”
“I’ll call the bridge—but watch yourself.” The stern old nobleman lifted a cautionary finger. “Freedom is a dangerous drink for any man to sip. A deadly habit, and difficult to break.”
He called the bridge. An astonished officer made him repeat the incredible command, but then the ship answered. Momentum flowed away into impalpable neutrionic energy, and came back with a new direction. The twin points of Alpha crept aside, and Sol blazed blue ahead.
On the planets, half a dozen years flashed away. The matriarch reigned, attending to the education and the travels of her daughter. The childish natives of Sol III rashly split the atom, and laughed at rumors of mysterious machines in the sky.
Aboard the Royal Mother, speed turned time to miles. The prince slept well again, once. He spent a day scanning the films on the planets of Sol in the ship’s library. After dinner, he had several drinks with the count. Listening to the old man’s tales of desperate undercover missions, he forgot his own stern future for a time. He went to bed again.
He was sleeping when it happened.
Neutrionic ships were almost perfect. The yacht was armed and armored against disaster, but this time something failed. Somehow, as she picked her automatic path into the thin cloud of galactic debris around Sol, some hostile scrap of iron or stone escaped her psionic detectors and came through some unguarded chink in her shielding fields. She was wounded fatally.
Her shudder woke the prince. He tumbled out of his bed, cold with disaster, but for a moment he found nothing wrong. The impact was not repeated. The lights came on, and he had time to see the glasses and the empty bottle beside the chairs where he had sat talking with the count, not even upset. He was trying to believe that sickening jar had been a dream, when the alarm came.
COLLISION ALERT!
That shocking warning screamed silently from the same psionic screen where they had sat watching Sol exploding like a bomb of violet light before the plunging ship.
MAIN DRIVE DISABLED. EMERGENCIES BURNING OUT. ALL HANDS ADJUST LIFE BELTS. STAND BY TO ABANDON SHIP!
He reached automatically for the life belt in its glowing holder above his bed. It snapped out to meet his hand, a flat mechanical serpent. He stooped to adjust it, but it slid out of his lingers and coiled itself around his waist. Its wonderful quickness was comforting, until he thought of the count.
The old nobleman had stretched his stories to last out the bottle. Afraid he wouldn’t wake, the prince turned to call him—and felt the emergency drive collapse. Suddenly weightless, he was swept up from the deck. He snatched wildly at a passing chair, but it eluded him. He tried to shout, but panic took his voice.
LAST ALERT!
The screen flickered and dimmed. STAND BY ESCAPEWAYS—
The screen went out. For an instant he thought the whole ship was dead, but then he saw the escape hatch in the wall of his bedroom glow red and burst open. Outrushing air flung him toward it, but he clutched at a table, still hoping to reach and help the count. A roaring wind tore the table away, tossed it ahead of him, splintered it.
For the stricken ship had died before the escape way was fully open. The door had stopped half across his path. He had time to see the empty bottle and the weightless glasses shatter against its hard metal face, and he tried desperately to gather his own spinning body for the shock.
The next thing he knew, he was lying somewhere in the dark. He had been savagely mauled. A grating agony caught his right arm when he tried to raise himself. One side of his face felt stiff with dried blood. He tried to imagine what had happened, but his senses and his brain seemed useless as his throbbing arm.
Something was smothering him. A dull jagged blade stabbed his chest with each breath, as his body fought for air. He wondered dimly if the belt had brought him to some dark and airless asteroid, before he remembered that it ought to give illumination and ought to renew the oxygen around him. He explored the broad links of it with his good hand, and found three caved in.
Its psionic servos had been battered as badly as his body, but there were still the manual controls. He felt for the control link and slid the cover back and twisted the oxygen booster stud. His gasping lungs found comfort again, and his foggy senses cleared.
The damage to himself and the belt bewildered him at first, because that device was designed to guard itself and its wearer from almost any hazard. But then he remembered that half-open door, which he must have struck before the belt was fully activated.
He sat up carefully, clutching at his disabled arm with the other, and tried to see where he was. The shielding field of the belt supported him a little above the muddy ground. Steep banks of rain-cut clay loomed up around him. A few stars danced feebly in the murky sky above. Straggling weeds stood dark against the sky, rustling in the wind.
Wind and weeds—air and life. This was no dead asteroid, but some habitable planet of Sol. Relief eased his pain for an instant. For the quarantine station was near the inhabited planet, hidden on its moon. He would surely be picked up at once.
Or would he be? His unhurt hand moved numbly to finger the harsh stubble bristling through the caked blood on his chin, and he tried vainly to wet the rusty dryness in his mouth. He must have been adrift for many hours. The damaged belt had failed to take him to the station or to call help for him, but perhaps the voice transmitter would work. He groped with a feverish haste for that little instrument on its flexible cable.
“Calling Sol Station!” He croaked his name and title. “I’m off the Royal Mother,” he gasped. “Down in a gully on some savage planet. Please trace my signal, and send a rescue craft.”
He put the instrument anxiously to his ear and heard nothing at all, not even the whisper of the converter. The thing was dead. It slipped out of his fingers and the little cable snapped it back into place.
But part of the belt was working, for it still held him off the ground. Perhaps it could carry him on to the station, under manual control—if he could breathe. The air was already bad again, however, even with the booster stud all the way out. He was panting in spite of the pain in his chest, and anoxia was once more clouding his senses.
He saw that he must try to repair the damage. Though he wasn’t an expert technician, he had been tutored in the theory of neutrionics. He thought he could follow the psionic instructions packed with the assortment of tiny tools and spare parts in the repair link.
Yet he shrank from taking off the belt, even to inspect the damage. Without its invisible field around him, he would be exposed to all the unseen dangers of this unknown world. To hostile monsters and deadly microbes and perhaps to savage men.
Anxiously, he blinked again at the fringe of ragged weeds above him. The light seemed stronger now, as if dawn were coming, and he could see that the plants were green. Green leaves meant chlorophyl, releasing free oxygen. That assurance decided him.
Twisting painfully, he groped for the emergency link. His quivering fingers found the repair kit and the tiny psionic translator and the deadly tittle neutrionic pistol, but he left them in the link. He slipped out the flat first-aid packet. Peering dimly at the bright psionic labels, he found the general immunization needle. Clumsily, he pulled off the sheath with his teeth, and stabbed the point into his disabled arm, above the injury.
That would protect him from infection. There were drugs in the packet to ease pain and speed tissue repair, but already the labels were blurring in his mind. He had to have air. He found the release key, where the belt fastened, and twisted it frantically. Something clicked. The field died. He fell.
He had meant to land on his feet, but the gravitation caught him like a great wave breaking. He must have been weaker than he knew, from his injuries and anoxia, for he staggered and went down. Blinding pain twisted his arm again, and his lacerated face plowed into cold mud.
