Collected Short Fiction, page 568
Approaching it with that enlightened understanding, he prodded the nude plastic flank of it with an experimental forefinger, and even slapped the lean curve of a silicone buttock resoundingly. There was no reaction. The slightest human need of its service or obedience or protection would trigger its remote relays, but nothing else could move it.
“Jane Carter—is she still ruled by the grid?”
“Her Awakening Day was three years ago.”
Three years! He must have spent all that time in featureless oblivion—and how much longer? A cold awe touched him and was gone—as if all that time lay very thinly covered just beneath the threshold of his own recollection. Yet he couldn’t remember anything, actually, and he asked eagerly: “Where is she now?”
“Away,” the machine said. “Traveling.”
“Can’t I get any message to her?”
“Possibly you can secure information from one of her associates, sir.”
“Where are they?”
“Mr. Ironsmith is still with the Psychophysical Institute. Mr. Mansfield and Mr. White are living now at Dragonrock, in the intervals between their expeditions.”
“So Mark White’s free of the grid?” He smiled with relief. “I’d like to see him.”
“Mr. White has anticipated your wish, sir. He had been informed that you were to awaken today, and he is now aboard a rhodomagnetic cruiser on his way here. He’ll be landing in a few minutes.”
“Good!” Forester nodded, anxious to see how the grid had transformed that archenemy of the machines into an associate of Mansfield and Ironsmith. He couldn’t keep his voice from catching as he asked, “And where’s—Ruth?”
“With Mr. Ironsmith, sir.” The pain from which he shrank had somehow been erased, and he felt only an eager interest when the machine added, “She sent a gift, to be delivered when you asked of her.” Another mechanical brought it to him. A thin rectangular block of something black, polished smooth and golden-veined, it carried a green-lettered message in Ruth’s neat printing:
Dearest Clay—
We’re delighted that you’re well again, and we both rejoice in the new felicity you should discover now.
Ruth and Frank
Felicity—that was a pet word of hers. The plaque had a faint, haunting hint of Sweet Delirium. He read the message twice, before a stinging in his eyes blurred her clean printing.
“Please thank them both.” His voice was quiet, surprisingly, as if his tears had been for nothing. “Please tell them I wish them happiness together.”
“We are telling them,” the machine said. “But there is a picture also, if you wish to see it.”
He began to shake his head, recoiling from the pain of old emotions, and found again that they had vanished. Quickly he whispered, “Let me see.”
The humanoid pressed a stud at the base of the plaque, and the green printing dissolved. The golden veinings faded, and the dark surface became a window, through which he saw a simple gay pavilion cupped in a green valley beneath the silver towers of the Institute. Frank Ironsmith and Ruth came out of it, waving at him gaily. The man looked heavier, pink with health and calmly self-content, his sun-burned jaws moving as if he still were chewing gum. Ruth was straight and radiant, the clean planes of her face firm with a quiet strength he had not seen there before. They came on toward him, smiling in the picture, until the stud clicked softly back again and that tiny window closed itself. Even then the image of Ruth stayed in his mind. She had never looked quite so young, he thought, not even on the day of their own wedding back at Starmont, never quite so light and free.
“Tell them I’m glad to see their own felicity.” He grinned at the grave machine. “Now please put the picture away for me—and open this window.”
Nodding a casual farewell to that curiously youthful and untroubled reflection of himself, he watched the mechanical press another button. The mirror became a wide transparency, which slid down silently. A clean morning breeze came in to cool his face, and it brought him a sense of free well-being.
“There’s the cruiser.” The machine pointed gracefully. “Mr. White is landing now.”
He caught a shimmer of color moving against the sky. The cruiser was dropping silently, the oval mirror of its hull aglow with blue and flowing green and the red reflection of the stage. It touched gently and Mark White jumped lightly down from the deck, not waiting for the humanoid behind him.
“Well, Clay!” Forester stared, too breathless to reply to that boom of greeting, for White showed no trace of time. The luxuriant beard and shaggy head were fiery as ever, and he came striding across the stage with a young man’s buoyancy. “Confused?” White’s chuckle rumbled. “I know how you feel.”
Forester stepped slowly over the low window ledge, to take the huge man’s offered hand. Looking up from the merry light in those blue eyes which he had last seen smiling out of cold forgetfulness, he whispered huskily:
“How long has it been—how many years?”
“This is the fiftieth Awakening Day.”
A cold wind blew on his spine.
“That’s the day the grid releases its yearly crop of graduates, ready for independent life,” White added genially. “Quite a holiday, and we’ve arranged a party for you. We’re getting together at Dragonrock. Mansfield will be there, and our old friends Ford and Graystone and Overstreet—who all finished a year ago.”
“And—Jane Carter?”
“Not there.” Disappointingly, White shook his head. “But we’re going on to join her—and you’ll find her changed from the ragged little waif we used to know!”
A breathless eagerness caught him. “Join her?” he whispered anxiously. “Where?”
“A million light-years from here, more or less.” The big man spoke of that unimaginable distance almost casually. “Somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy—our nearest neighbor, you know, among the spiral nebulas. She has been exploring likely planets for our new colonial project there, you see, and she’ll be waiting for us at the site she has picked for our first installation.”
“Andromeda!” Forester shivered and smiled again, at another vanishing phantom of awe. “That’s a long way for colonists to go.”
“But the distance is no barrier to us,” White objected heartily. “The only difficulty is that the humanoid units can’t operate there—rhodomagnetic beams can’t reach successfully so far. We first settlers will have to exist without any humanoid service.”
“No great hardship.” Forester frowned at a momentary sense of wildly illogical delight, which turned unreal as he tried to examine it. Impulsively he said, “I think I’d like to stay there.”
“You’re going to,” White assured him. “That’s why we had Ironsmith leave you under the grid so long—to receive special training for your job out there.”
Forester caught his breath, waiting.
“Our first installation, on the site Jane has picked, is going to be a new rhodomagnetic grid,” the big man explained. “The beginning of a separate humanoid service for the Andromedan pioneers. The first relay sections will have to be assembled and tested without mechanical aid, of course, and you’ve been chosen to do that delicate bit of rhodomagnetic engineering.”
Forester wondered why his body tried to stiffen, and why he almost shook his head. He could recall a time when he had disliked the humanoids and even mistrusted Frank Ironsmith, but now, even though his recollections of past events seemed clear enough, all the misguided emotions which must have driven him to his unfortunate past actions were fading from awareness, even as he fumbled vaguely for them, like the irrelevant stuff of some vague and unlikely dream.
“Ready?” The former foe of the machines nodded restlessly toward the waiting cruiser. “Jane will be waiting.”
Forester hesitated, glancing back at the motionless humanoid in the room behind, poised alertly to serve and obey. He knew it would be useless to him on those distant worlds until the new palladium relays were working, but at least he wanted it with him until the time to go.
“Come along,” he commanded. Obediently it came, and he turned with a bright expectation on his face to go aboard with White.
Dragon’s Island
Many men had tried to solve the mystery of Dragons Island—and lost their memories! Now it was up to Belfast . . . but Belfast had amnesia!
About the Author of this Novel
IF YOU dig into the dusty files of the old Gernsback magazines you will find the name of Jack Williamson and the sketch of a callow youth barely in his teens adorning the top of story after story. Jack began early and stayed long; he is one of the real old timers in science-fiction writing. Unlike some others who could not grow with it, he has not fallen by the wayside as the craft grew out of its swaddling clothes. His modern work bears little resemblance to the early experiments in this still fluid medium.
A laconic, dry-humored westerner, Jack Williamson lives and works in New Mexico except for a hitch with the Army during World War II which took him to New Guinea and set the stage for DRAGON’S ISLAND.
—The Editor
“Life is a stream. Fluid protoplasm, the eternal stuff of men and dinosaurs and trilobites, it has flowed down the evolving generations of a billion years, its channels always set by the chance pressures of mutation and environment. Always until now—but not forevermore. For now at last life has found its own secret springs, in the structure of the genes. Man may now become his own maker. He can remove the fatal flaws in his own imperfect species, before the stream of life flows on to leave him stranded on the banks of time with the dinosaurs and trilobites—if he will only accept and use the new science of genetic engineering.”
Charles Kendrew
I
THE CITY SNARLED. Its sudden hostility was a bitter taste and a biting scent of menace, and a livid glow of danger over everything he saw, and cold peril crawling up the back of his neck. Though his ears heard no warning, alarm crashed inside his brain.
Dane Belfast met that shocking impact when he opened the door of his New York hotel room, at seven that March morning. The unexpected force of it took his breath and drove him backward. He retreated into the doorway, groping dazedly to discover what had hit him.
The maroon-carpeted corridor lay empty. He listened, thinking there must have been some shot or scream, but he could hear nothing more alarming than the muted mutter of traffic on Madison Avenue, twenty floors below. He sniffed to test the air for smoke, but he found no actual odor more disturbing than the faint, stale human scents of tobacco and perfume.
His straining senses found no threat of anything, and he tried at first to ignore what he had felt. He was a scientist, a research geneticist. He had found mysteries enough in the working of the genes and chromosomes, whereby like gives birth to like. He had no time for the inexplicable.
He started resolutely out again toward the elevator. You didn’t need to be a professional biologist to know that danger by itself has no taste or feel or warning glow, and he tried for a moment to believe that he had been stricken with a sudden synesthesia—that abnormality of perception in which sounds are seen in color and colors tasted.
But he wasn’t ill. He had never been, not even with a cold. Even after the crushing strain of these last months, he felt too hard and fit to be yielding to any fevered imaginings. He was only twenty-five, still clothed in the indestructible vigor of youth. Everything had been all right, until the moment when he opened the door.
He was trying now to swallow that acrid taste of evil, but it clung to his tongue. He blinked against that colorless glare, but still it washed the corridor with a dreary enmity. And danger halted him again, before he could close the door of his room. An invisible yet strangely actual barrier, it delayed him for a few uneasy seconds—long enough to hear the telephone ringing.
He hurried back inside to answer.
“Dane?” The voice was a young woman’s, low-pitched and pleasant. “Dr. Dane Belfast?”
She sounded as if she thought she knew him, but he had no friends in New York; no girl friends, certainly.
“I’m Nan Sanderson,” she was saying. “Of the Sanderson Service. We’re on Fortieth, just a few blocks from your hotel. Would you come over to our office this morning, say at eleven?”
“Huh?” He felt sure he had never heard of the Sanderson Service, and he wondered for a moment how the firm had got his name. He had not announced his coming even to Messenger, the financier he meant to see. “What are you selling?”
“Nothing,” she answered quietly. “Unless you’d call it life insurance. Because you’re in danger, Dr. Belfast. And we can probably save your life.”
HER VOICE had a ring of conviction, and her words opened the room to the dark illumination he had met outside. Now that danger-sense was no longer a possible illusion. It was suddenly something real, that he had to accept and explain.
“Danger?” he whispered blankly. “What enemies have I?”
“Enough!” Her voice had a hurried urgency. “Deadly enemies, working cleverly in secret, desperate enough to poison your food or shoot you in the back or stab you while you sleep.”
Five minutes ago, he might have laughed at that. Now, however, he could feel the frosty breath of peril seeping around the closed door.
“That sounds pretty drastic.” He couldn’t help shivering. “Who would want to murder me?”
“One man who might is John Gellian.”
He repeated that name. Its sound was strange, and he tried again to deny the possibility of danger. He had injured nobody. His research goals had been unselfish. He had nothing anyone could want desperately enough to kill him for it.
“I can’t talk long,” the girl was saying. She gave him an address on Fortieth. “Will you be here at eleven?”
“But I can’t be in any real trouble,” he insisted. “Unless . . . Is it because of my research?”
Like his father, he had been looking for a way to reach and change the genes, to reshape the traits of inheritance they carried. That secret of creation might have been enough to surround him with greedy enemies—but he had failed to find it. He had been ready to give up the research, when he found the old letters in his father’s desk.
Letters from Charles Kendrew—written in the 1930’s by that pioneer geneticist, about his daring plans for the great new science he called genetic engineering. Letters from J.D. Messenger, dated many years later, promising funds to carry on Kendrew’s unfinished work.
Those letters were in Dane’s scuffed brief case now. They had brought him to New York. They contained exciting evidence that a workable process for creating useful genetic mutations had already been discovered, probably by Kendrew himself, and that Messenger had made a fortune from it.
That evidence was what he meant to talk to the financier about. He expected an explosive interview. Any process for making directed mutations could be more important to mankind than the methods of setting off atomic fission. If Messenger had anything to hide, the letters might become a dangerous possession after he had been confronted with them.
But Messenger hadn’t seen them yet. Neither had anybody else. Whatever his motives, he had given nearly two million dollars in all to the laboratory. That entitled him, Dane felt, to the benefit of a considerable doubt.
All Dane wanted was another chance to realize Kendrew’s magnificent dream. If Messenger was already exploiting some crude mutation process, as the letters suggested, he wanted to learn it, perfect it, and see it applied as Kendrew had intended—to benefit mankind and not a corporation.
“I’ve been doing some genetics research,” he explained to the girl on the telephone. “It might have been important, but it didn’t pan out. If anybody thinks I discovered anything worth stealing—”
“No, Dane, it isn’t that,” she broke in quickly. “But your predicament is truly desperate. Look out for Gellian. And we’ll be expecting you at eleven.”
“Wait!” he whispered. “Can’t you tell me—”
SHE HAD HUNG up. He replaced his own receiver and reached absently for his handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his clammy palms. He had failed to learn anything about the Sanderson Service, but he knew he would be there at eleven, hoping to escape the cold pall of danger around him.
Her warning had convinced him that his disquieting sensations were due to some real cause outside himself, but it seemed to him now, as he turned from the telephone, that they were already fading. He realized uncomfortably that the net result of that glare and reek and taste of menace had been to keep him here long enough to receive her call.
Until he had more data, however, the nature of that danger-sense seemed likely to remain mysterious. He gulped a glass of water to ease the dryness in his throat, and then unlocked his brief case, suddenly afraid the contents would be gone, with all his clues to that secret science.
He found them safe—the time-yellowed letters in the neat hand printing of Charles Kendrew, and the notes from Messenger typed on the expensive letterheads of Cadmus Corporation, and the penciled drafts or the carbon copies of a few of his father’s replies.
He locked the case gratefully, and took it with him when he started out again. He met no shock of new alarm, and that pitiless bloom of danger had dimmed to a haunting memory by the time he reached the lobby. He called the office number on Messenger’s letterhead from a public telephone booth.
Mr. Messenger wasn’t in, a sleek voice purred. Mr. Messenger seldom came in before three in the afternoon, but Dane could leave his name.
He left his name, and said he would be waiting to see Mr. Messenger at three.
It was still nearly two hours before he would be expected at the Sanderson Service. Hoping to find some illuminating fact about that firm or Messenger’s company or even about somebody named John Gellian, he bought an armful of newspapers at the stand in the lobby and started back to read them in the dubious sanctuary of his room.
