Collected Short Fiction, page 574
“Better begin with that one,” Nan said. “It’s by one of the best young men in the field, Dane Belfast.” The name-made him shiver inside, but he didn’t know why. “I think you’ll find them all easy reading, because your memory is really only half erased.”
He read all day, alone, in his cabin, skimming that book and the others until his eyes blurred and his head ached again, looking for the past he had lost. He was disappointed. The briefest glance recalled the meaning of each page, like something known before, but that was all. The books opened their limited area of technical knowledge across that stubborn barrier of forgetfulness, but all his groping efforts failed to find anything beyond.
Once, when the plane landed, he looked out to see a fringe of palms beyond the taxiways, and pink stucco bungalows buried in purple bougainvilleas. He left his books uneasily, to ask where they were.
“Potter Field,” the steward told him. “Near Honolulu.” Through the ports on the other side of the lounge, Medina showed him huge freighters docked, and rows of long warehouses all bearing the emblem of the dragon and the giant. “And Potter Harbor.”
“All this belongs to Cadmus?”
“We’re an enormous enterprise.” The little brown man beamed proudly. “The sun never sets on the dragon. We’re all very lucky, to be with such a company.” Nodding dubiously, Dane went back to the books.
That night he slept badly, while the plane lurched and shuddered through rain squalls along the tropical front. He dreamed another dreadful dream, in which Nan Sanderson and Messenger were generous friends no longer, but sly and dangerous enemies.
He woke in the dark, his ears clicking painfully from the pressure change as the plane came down to land. A thin pain pulsed in his head again, and his mouth tasted bitter and dry. He lay sweating and trembling in his berth, almost afraid to breathe. For that nightmare had followed him out of sleep, no longer a dream. He was no longer Donovan Fallon, groping to find himself in a strange world one day old.
He was Dane Belfast.
IX
RUBBER whined against hard coral as the wheels struck a landing strip, and he stumbled to the small round window of his cabin as the plane taxied through sudden damp heat toward a lighted hangar and a waiting fuel truck. He searched the dark field, frantically.
Still sick and shuddering from the terror of that nightmare turned real, he could think only of the need to reach John Gellian with his apologetic warning that Messenger was an ally of the not-men, and New Guinea their fortress—an impregnable citadel defended by that virus of forgetfulness, and by all the men it had robbed of their humanity, and doubtless by deadlier creations of the maker’s stolen science.
And this, panic whispered, might be his last chance. Escape from those guarded concessions had proved impossible for many another man before him; and the next time these enemies of men removed his memory, their means would surely be something more primitive and permanent than that mutant virus.
He dressed quickly in the dark, and came back to measure the little porthole. It was far too small to let him out, and the glass was securely fastened. Peering out anxiously as the craft rolled to a halt and the engines died, he recoiled from another barrier.
Painted above the hangar doors was the Cadmus trademark, the dragon-shape of that enormous island and the victorious golden giant sowing dark human seed. This Pacific islet must be another company station, operated by virus-amnesiacs—he sardonically thought of them as “lotus-eaters”—too cheerily loyal to give him any aid.
It struck him then that his present status as a supposed amnesiac was an accidental weapon in his hands, worth far more than whatever information he could take to Gellian, even if he got away.
He didn’t know very much right now; but if he stayed, concealing his recovery from the amnesia—
How many not-men were gathered in New Guinea? What were their weapons and their plans? Were they fighting to dominate mankind, or only to save their own lives? The danger driving Messenger and Nan Sanderson back to New Guinea must be something more grave than Gellian’s raids . . . He thought it might turn out to be a crisis in the fortunes of the not-men that could be used to end this war of races with some just peace.
The role of a happy captive of the virus would be hard to play. The difficulties and the dangers he saw waiting in New Guinea made his discarded scheme for escape seem as attractive as ever. Yet he was suddenly eager to go on, hoping to learn Charles Potter’s actual fate, and even to discover the final secrets of life which had been his own goal from the beginning.
He undressed again, and turned back to his berth.
THEY were again in flight when the hot sunlight of morning woke him. Looking from his cabin window, he saw only sky and clouds and sea: the sky an infinite bright chasm of milky light in which the droning plane hung motionless; the clouds remote cumulus, luminous and topless and somehow palely unreal; the sea a dull mirror for the clouds and the sea, equally infinite and equally unreal.
He found Nan Sanderson standing in the lounge, staring somberly out at that empty sky and lonely sea.
“We’ll soon be over New Guinea,” she greeted him. “Shall we eat while we wait to see it?”
She rang for the steward. Before they had finished breakfast, the shape of land began emerging into that featureless bright void, first a pale shadow beneath the tall pillars of shining cloud ahead, and then a sudden green reality, edged raggedly with a thin white line of beach and broken water, and trailing reddish stains from muddy rivers far out into the clean dark sea.
“That red is like the dragon’s blood.” The girl nodded sadly at the long stains. “And Cadmus is dying, really—unless we can grow another crop of Potter’s mules.”
Dane caught his breath to inquire how Potter’s mules were grown, and abruptly swallowed the question. Too easily, he could betray too much knowledge about the dead green creature Nicholas Venn had died for possessing, and too much emotion for a man without a past. Afraid to look at her, he stood watching the dark jungle silently, and he felt vastly relieved when she left him to see how Messenger was feeling.
The sick man came shuffling laboriously back with her, wheezing for his breath. His puffy flesh looked sallow and blotched and almost cadaverous, but he was able to grin a genial greeting at Belfast, and soon he was leaning ponderously to inspect the company concessions which came into view beyond the coastal range, his shrewd eyes anxious.
Those concessions made Dane almost forget his careful calm. Broad highways cut the deep rain forest, leaping canyons and rivers on long steel bridges. Tall white dams backed blue lakes against frowning mountains. The sun glanced on railway steel. Unending rows of cultivated trees made ranks and files across vast plantations.
“The mules have done all that,” the girl remarked. “With only a few amnesiacs like yourself to supervise them.”
He nodded stiffly, trying hard to conceal the dismay which had followed his first amazement. This was literally an empire, created and controlled by that stolen science of genetic engineering. What could one man hope to accomplish against it?
“Look!” Messenger was muttering gloomily. “Won’t you look at that?” And Dane forgot his dismay, staring at the financier in deep bewilderment. For Messenger seemed to find no pleasure in the look of this immense green domain. Shaking his puffy head, he was making dull clucking sounds of regret, and his small eyes had filled with bitter tears.
“What’s wrong?” Dane whispered. “The mules?” the fat man gasped. “Dying.”
“Where?” They were flying far too high to distinguish those small green creations of the maker. Dane was puzzled, and almost sorry for the sick man. “I can’t see anything.”
“Nothing.” Messenger nodded sadly. “No tractors working the plantations. No trucks on the roads. No trains. No shipping on the rivers. The mules are dying—and everything has stopped.”
“There isn’t much about mules in those books,” Dane said cautiously. “Aren’t they a kind of hybrid?”
“Potter’s mules are different.”
“Won’t I need to know something more about them?”
MESSENGER nodded, and he waited painfully, trying to cover the naked intensity of his interest with the serene cheer of those men without trouble.
“Potter’s mules conquered New Guinea.” The sick man nodded somberly at the jungle-choked canyons below the descending craft. “This damned island’s no place for men, and there was too much work for men to do. But Potter knew how to take the genes apart and put them back together to grow whatever he wanted. He made the mules.” Messenger shook his head gloomily. “He would never even tell me much about them, and I didn’t know enough genetics to follow the little he did.”
“That’s too bad,” Dane said carefully. “Calamitous! Unless you and Miss Sanderson know enough genetics to grow another crop of mules.”
“What did he mutate them from?”
“A motile alga, he called it.” The fat face frowned. “I don’t remember the Latin name he used, but it’s a simple, one-celled plant that swims in fresh water ponds under its own power. He changed the genes to make the cells develop into obedient little bipeds, about half as tall as men. They can’t talk, but they’re intelligent enough for most kinds of labor. And they don’t eat—that’s a touch of Potter’s genius.” Belfast tried to breathe again, reminding himself that to a man without memory such creatures might seem no more remarkable than the common green scum from which they had been made.
“Potter kept the chlorophyll, you see,” Messenger was wheezing. “But mutated, too, to store up eighty percent of the energy of sunlight, instead of one percent. All those mules need for food is air and water and sunshine.”
Dane nodded, as blankly as possible. “I don’t suppose you fully appreciate that,” the financier rumbled. “But it means free labor, in an age when the human worker wants more and more for less and less. We could have taken over the world—if old Potter had made enough mules.”
“But don’t they breed?”
“Mules are sterile,” Messenger wheezed. “That’s why he picked the name. He made them that way on purpose—for the same reason he made them so short-lived and so small. Afraid they’d get out of hand.”
The fat man paused to peer gloomily out at the clouds piling up toward the dark mountains westward, all their bases level as if they stood on some transparent floor, the summits billowing far up into the milky brightness of the tropic sky. Dane waited impatiently, afraid to prompt him.
“Potter made the mules to live just two years,” he went on bitterly. “The last crop came out of his lab just before he died, nearly two years ago. That’s why we’ve got to grow another.”
Dane opened his clenched hands again, and inhaled deliberately. “Those books tell you how to cause a few mutations at will,” he said carefully. “But those few are all simple special cases. There’s no general formula. I wouldn’t know how to begin trying to breed anything like that. Unless—”
He looked up at Messenger, trying not to seem too anxious. “Unless Potter happened to leave some record of his process?”
“Unreasonable, I told you.” The bulging head shook heavily. “He burned every scrap of paper in the lab.”
“Then I don’t see much hope—”
“Miss Sanderson knows something,” the financier said. “I sent her out here to help nurse old Potter, and she finally won his trust. He tried to tell her how, toward the end—after he was already too far gone, it seems, to remember all the steps.”
Had he trusted her, really? Dane looked down at the jungle again, to cover that sudden doubt. Had Potter really talked—or had she just attempted to pick the priceless secret from his mind, with some mutant but still imperfect mental perception?
“She tried a batch of mules, after he was dead,” Messenger wheezed sadly. “They looked all right—until they died in the vats. But she’s been studying in New York, and now she has you to help. Maybe you two can do it, together. Cadmus is ruined if you fail.”
Recalling the haughty facade of the Cadmus Building in New York, Dane found it difficult to veil his astonishment.
“Everybody outside still thinks we’re solid as Gibraltar,” Messenger went on. “I’ve floated bonds and borrowed money to keep up a convincing front, but that’s played out. Our own directors want to come out here to see what’s wrong. I can’t stall them off much longer. If we haven’t got production to show them, that’s the end of Cadmus.”
Emotion shuddered in the shallow voice. “That’s the situation, Dr. Fallon. A grave predicament for all of us—and especially for you lotus-eaters, who depend so much on the company. You understand why you must give your utmost?”
Belfast had not been able to suppress a start at the words “lotus-eaters”—his own term for the virus-amnesiacs. Now he nodded as calmly as he could. “I think so.”
“Then help me get up!”
X
BELFAST saw the mules half an hour later, when the landing plane taxied to a jolting stop on a muddy airstrip at Edentown. Recent floods had slashed raw canyons in the strip and the taxiways, and the mules were repairing the damage.
Silent busy pygmies, toiling with toy spades or struggling by twos and threes to lift small stones, they came scarcely to the waist of their overseer, a tanned lotus-eater who towered above them like a golden giant. The green of their queer, slim bodies was glossy and almost black, and they worked with an unceasing haste.
“Can they fly?” he asked Nan Sanderson, following her toward a mud-splashed jeep in which another smiling, sunburned man sat waiting.
She shook her head, and he could see already that those slender, fringed appendages were too delicate for flight. An astonishing triumph of biological engineering, the mules were living protoplasm shaped for one specific purpose—to deliver free labor. Designed with all the free ingenuity that other sorts of engineers had always used in building their simpler mechanisms of dead metal, they amazed him and frightened him.
“Coming, Don?” the girl called back.
He hurried after her, uneasily. They caught up with Messenger, who was gasping painfully and mopping feebly at the sweat already shining on his bloated flesh. Dane turned to help the driver haul Messenger into the front seat of the jeep, and then climbed in to sit with Nan on the luggage in the rear.
She had dressed for the tropic heat, her long body golden beneath blue shorts and halter, and for a moment he couldn’t take his eyes from her loveliness. In spite of himself, he suddenly wanted to have her and hold her and defend her forever, even against his fellow men.
But then she looked at him. A faint smile warmed her cool blue eyes, as if she had sensed his surge of emotion. She seemed aloofly pleased—but a dark terror brushed him. If she could read his unwilling admiration, she would surely soon perceive some more dangerous thought.
The pitching of the jeep in the muddy ruts flung them apart and kept them hanging on. Afraid to say anything, he sat sweating in the damp heat, his clothing already adhesive.
Her allure was only one more weapon, he warned himself. She probably used it as deliberately as she did that mutant virus, to keep the loyalty of these men who had forgotten other women—but even that thought might be his last, if she were to pick it up.
“Look around you, Fallon.” Messenger’s breathless voice brought him a welcome escape. “You’ll see how much we need the mules.”
Relieved to turn his thoughts from the girl, he looked out at a young plantation already choked with grass and vines.
“Potter’s last creation,” the financier gasped laboriously. “A mutant kind of rubber tree. The latex is a thermosetting plastic, clear as glass and strong as steel. This one plantation might save Cadmus, if we had mules enough to hold the jungle back.”
The only mules Dane could see, however, were a few carrying rocks and earth in tiny baskets, to fill a gully where flood water had cut the road. He was watching one small creature when it paused and staggered with its burden. Its flightless wings fluttered and collapsed. Silently, ignored by the others, it sank down in the mud.
“They die that way,” the girl said. “As quietly as they live.”
The battered vehicle splashed ahead and Nan’s golden arm lifted toward a low structure of white concrete, which stood isolated beyond a barbed wire fence ahead.
“The mutation lab,” she told Dane. “The biological engineering section, where Potter used to produce all his mutations.”
Trying to veil the taut agony of his interest, he leaned to study the building where that lonely genius had made the mules, and probably that virus of forgetfulness, and possibly even Nan Sanderson herself. The massive windowless walls gave it the look of a fortress, and he was not surprised to see two brown riflemen outside.
“Notice them, Fallon!” Messenger’s voice had a sudden flat vehemence. “That area’s taboo—even to you lotus-eaters. Keep out. Those guards shoot to kill.”
“Outsiders want our secret processes,” the girl said more quietly. “Some of them are ingenius and persistent. We have to protect the company.”
Dane nodded as calmly as he could, trying not to flinch when he recalled how she had protected the company from one persistent and ingenious outsider named Nicholas Venn.
“The production section.” The fat man gestured heavily. “Your domain, Fallon.”
JUST across the muddy ruts from the mutation lab, the production section was another long building roofed with sheet aluminum. Beyond it, a series of broad shallow concrete tanks spread fan-like down the slope toward the jungle-clotted river.
“That looks strange.” Cautiously, Dane probed again for the secret of creation. “Do I know enough to run it?”
“Not yet,” Messenger gasped at Nan.
“Tell him.”
Dane forced himself to breathe again. Afraid the girl would see the raw violence of his anxiety, he turned to frown again at the puzzling construction of those empty tanks. For here must be the tremendous secret he had sought from the beginning.
