The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton, page 57
But I have made a little list of guys I’m going to ferret out and poke in the nose once I get back to Earth. Maybe those Hollywood producers who think the only way to solve a problem is to beat up somebody or gun him down have something, after all. Right on top of that list, in big bold letters, is the spacesuit designer who thinks a man can handle the incredibly fine parts of miniaturized electronic equipment with those crude instruments they give us to screw into the arm ends of spacesuits.
Somehow we managed. Somehow, out of chaos, order came. Somehow tests got made. Sometimes the theories worked; sometimes, more often, there w-as only the human sigh, the gulp, the shrug, and back to the drawing board.
Big surprise at the end of the first three months. A supply ship landed. Mostly food and some champagne, yet! Stuff the folks back home thought they’d like to have if they were out here. Even some pin-up pictures, as if we weren’t already having enough trouble without being reminded. But none of the equipment we’d radioed for in case the taxpayers could forego a drink and a cigarette apiece to raise money for sending it. The public couldn’t understand our need for equipment, so they didn’t send any. Miracles aren’t supposed to need any equipment or effort; they just come into being because people want them.
The packages of home-baked cookies w-ere welcome enough after our diet of hydroponic algae, but I’d still rather have had a handful of miniature transistors.
Some of the guys said they’d have been willing to substitute their cookies for an equal weight of big, buxom blonde: but that’s something the cookie bakers probably preferred not to think about.
The little three-man crew of the supply ship promised, as they were taking off for their return journey, they’d tell em what we really wanted when they got back, but I doubt the message ever got broadcast over the home and family television sets. Anyway, scientists are supposed to be cold, unfeeling, inhuman creatures who wander around looking noble, wise, and above it all.
In the beginning I’d thought that once I got the heavy work of installation completed. I could do a little wandering around myself, looking wise and noble. No such luck. I’d no more than get set up to show one experiment than it was over; and I’d have to dismantle, move, and set up for another. We’d thought the lighter gravity of Mars, 38 percent, would make the labor easy. But somehow there was still lifting, tugging, pulling, hauling, cursing.
But then, nobody wants to hear how the scientist has to work to get his miracle. The whole essence is the illusion that miracles can be had without work, that all one needs is to wish.
All right. So we’ll get to the miracle.
Now we were finally ready to get down to the real test, the main reason for our coming out to Mars—Project Slowburn.
VanDam chose a little pocket at the center of that little cluster of hills to our West—that little cluster of hills everybody has seen in the pictures radioed back to Earth.
We didn’t know it at the time, but that little cluster of hills was causing quite an uproar among archeologists back home. No archeologists had been included in the expedition, and now they were beating their breasts because from the pictures those hills looked mighty artificial to them. There was too much of a hint that the hills might once have been pyramids, they said, incredibly ancient, perhaps weathered down eons ago when the planet was younger, before it had lost so much of its atmosphere, but maybe still containing something beneath them.
We didn’t hear the uproar, of course. Administration deemed it unnecessary for us to bother our pretty little heads about such nonsense. In fact the uproar never got outside the academic cloister to reach the public at all. Administration should have listened. But then, when does man listen to what might interfere with his plans and spoil something?
We got all set to go in that little pocket at the center of the hills. The spot was ideal for us because the hill elevations gave us an opportunity to place our cameras on their tops to focus down into the crater we hoped would appear.
A whole ring of cameras was demanded. The physicists seemed to share too much of the public’s attitude that all I needed to produce enough equipment was to wish for it. But by stripping the stuff from virtually every other project, I managed to balance the demands of the Slow-Burn crew against the outraged screams of the side-issue scientists.
VanDam’s theories worked.
At first it took the instruments to detect that there was any activity; but gradually, even crude human eyes could see there was a hole beginning to appear, deepen and spread—progressively.
It was out of my line, but the general idea seemed to be that only one molecular layer at a time was affected, and that it, in turn, activated the next beneath and to the side while its own electrons and protons gave up their final energy.
The experiment did not work perfectly. The process should have been complete. There should have been no by-product of smoke and fire, no sign to human eyes of anything happening except a slowly deepening and spreading hole in the ground.
Instead there was some waste of improperly consumed molecules, resulting in an increasingly heavy, fire-laced smoke which arose sluggishly in the thin air, borne aloft only by its heat, funneling briefly while it gave up that heat. Then it settled down and contaminated everything it touched. To compound my troubles, of course.
The physicists were griping their guts out because I didn’t have the proper infra-red equipment to penetrate the smoke: and somehow I wasn’t smart enough to snap my fingers and—abracadabra—produce. Those damned cookie packages instead of equipment! Those damned clerks who had decided what we wouldn’t need. My little list was getting longer.
Still, I guess I was able to get a feeble little snap from my fingers. I did manage to convert some stuff, never intended for that purpose, into infra-red penetration. We managed to see down into that smoke and fire-filled crater.
To see enough.
It was the middle of a morning (somebody who still cared claimed it would be a Tuesday back home) some three basic weeks after the beginning of the experiment. The hole was now some thirty feet across and equally deep, growing faster than VanDam’s figures predicted it should, but still not running wild and out of control. Even if it had been, we couldn’t have stopped it. We didn’t know how.
I was trying to work out a little cleaner fix on the south wall of the crater when that wall disappeared like the side of a soap bubble. My focus was sharp enough to see.
To see down and into that huge, vaulted room. To see the living Martians in that room shrivel, blacken, writhe and die. To see some priceless, alien works of art writhe and blacken and curl; some burst into flame; some shatter unto dust.
That was when the scientists, sitting there watching their monitors with horror-stricken eyes, felt jubilation replaced with terrible guilt.
I, too. For naturally I was watching the master monitors to see that the equipment kept working. I saw it all.
I saw those miniature people, yes people, whole and beautiful, in one brief instant blacken, wither and die.
Out of the billions of gross people on Earth, once in a generation a tiny midget is born and matures to such perfection in proportion and surpassing beauty that the huge, coarse, normal person can only stare and marvel—and remember the delicate perfection of that miniature being with nostalgic yearning for the rest of his life.
From such, perhaps, come the legends common to all peoples in all ages, of the fairies. Or, eons ago, was there traffic between Earth and Mars? Or even original colonization from Mars to Earth, finally mutating into giants? They were people, miniatures of ourselves.
I saw them there. Perhaps not more than a dozen in that room. But in other rooms? Perhaps in a lacework of underground rooms? A whole civilization which, like ourselves on Mars, had gone underground, sealed themselves in against the thinning atmosphere, the dying planet?
And we had begun the atomic destruction of their planet. We had begun it. We could not stop it. The corrosion keeps growing, spreading.
I saw them die. Somehow I felt their pain.
But I did not die of it.
I carry it with me. I shall always carry it with me.
That’s all there is.
In years to come people on Earth, people who did not see what we saw, did not feel the pain and guilt we felt, will wonder at our behavior following that.
Oh there is much to wonder. If there is a civilization, where does their food come from? If they are able to convert rock to food, why are they not able to stop the atomic destruction of their planet we have started? If they are able to fill us with such grief that we can think of nothing but to slink away, like whipped curs caught in vandalism, why didn’t they do this before we started the fire we cannot stop?
Oh, there is so much unanswered. People will wonder at the fact that we simply abandoned most of our equipment, the very project itself; that for a sick hour we watched, then, with one accord, without anybody making the decision, we began to withdraw and start for home.
Like small boys, thinking only to vandalize a schoolhouse in their savage glee, discovering it is a shrine.
Or, perhaps in time, we can rationalize it all away. Perhaps so soon as during that long, journey back.
It wasn’t our fault, we shall begin to say. They were as much to blame as we. Sure they were!
More to blame! They were more to blame than we!
Why didn’t they come out of their holes and fight us? With their fists if they didn’t have any guns? Any red-bloodied—er, red blooded—Amuri—well, whatever they are—ought to have enough guts to come out and fight, to defend home, flag and mother!
Well probably get around to that. It’s the normal attitude to take after vandalism. It’s the human way.
But as of now, our only thought is to slink away.
On our abandoned Martian landing field there hangs a man’s discarded spacesuit, suspended from the desensitized prongs of a Come-to-me tower. It is stuffed with straw filched, no doubt, from packing cases which brought out so many more delicate, sensitive, precision instruments than we take back.
Although we have not been entirely irresponsible in our head-long flight back home.
We do bring back some of what we took out: the more valuable of the instruments. We have been most selective in this.
The only coarse, insensitive, unfinished instrument we bring back—is man.
NOVELS
THEY’D RATHER BE RIGHT[*]
Part I
First of Four Parts. They tried to smash “Bossy,” the hyper-computer. Joe and his strange friends saved the machine—but that Hasn’t necessary. You can’t smash an idea—and the idea was bound to grow again anyway! But people can hate an idea.
I.
Just ahead, on Third Street, the massive facade of San Francisco’s Southern Pacific depot loomed, half hidden in the swirling fog and January twilight. Joe Carter pulled his rented pickup truck to the now deserted curb, and squinted appraisingly into the gloom. The warning had come, the usual tingling up and down his spine, the drawing sensation at the nape of his neck.
He sent an expanding wave-field ahead of him, a telepathic inquiry, but there were too many people around the depot for him to sort out the specific source of danger without first knowledge of a focal point. The static of general anxiety, grief and gladness, which always seems to hang over a depot like a pall of smoke, prevented him from finding any menace directed toward himself.
And on the outside of the depot the scene was quite normal. The blurred yellow lights of a taxi pulled out of its reserved section and turned down Townsend Street toward the Embarcadero. The muffled rumble of traffic on the long overhead approach to the Bay Bridge was an audible accompaniment to the esper hum of half vocalized words and phrases picked up from the minds of the people all about the area.
He watched a police car cruise slowly by and disappear into the fog. He sampled the stream of consciousness of the two officers. Their casual glance had registered him in their minds: male truck driver, white, about twenty-two, no obvious disfigurements, not breaking any law at the moment. But there was no recognition.
He swept the street again with his physical eyes, and almost passed over the skid-row wino who had drifted a little far south of the usual haunts. The fellow had stopped in the chill shelter of a darkened store front, and was apparently drinking with desperate thirst from a wine bottle held in a paper sack. It was so usual, so completely in character, that Joe very nearly made the mistake of not penetrating. But even as he started to flick his eyes onward, his nape muscles contracted more sharply, heightening the awareness of danger.
Still doubting that the somatic price he must pay for sharing the wino’s hopelessness and dejection would be worth some bit of factual information drenched in it, Joe pierced.
He got a series of photographs, sharp and clear.
The Federal agent’s disguise was near perfection. Joe chuckled silently, with genuine amusement. In rinsing the wine in his mouth to give him a breath, just in case some other bum stumbled up to him, the agent had inadvertently swallowed a slug of the cheap stuff. With him, and as clearly, Joe felt the somatic effect of the wine in the man’s nose, mouth, throat and stomach.
But the agent’s disgust did not wash out the dominant picture in his mind. He had recently been briefed, and his upper stream of consciousness still carried the conceptual images.
Two more agents were inside the depot; one of them standing near the line of people waiting to get tickets validated; the other reading a newspaper over near the hallway which led to the rest rooms.
Within easy vision of both sat their quarry, Professors Billings and Hoskins. Billings had been recognized at the depot in St. Louis where he was changing trains in his flight across the country. Hoskins had not been discovered at all until he had joined Billings less than half an hour ago. There was elation in the agent’s mind over the meeting, for it might mean that the end of the long trail was near. Obviously, the two men were now wailing for someone else to join them.
And when someone joined them, it was possible, unsuspectingly, they might lead the agents directly to Bossy.
Up until now there had been absolutely no indication of where the synthetic brain had been hidden. There was disgust and contempt in the agent’s mind that during all the years that Hoxworth and other universities had been experimenting in the building of the cybernetic marvel, subsidized with government funds, Washington bureaucracy had not realized the significance of it. It had taken an uprising of the people, themselves, to drive home to Washington how man would react to the destruction of all his previous concepts on how the human mind worked and the values it assumed were absolute.
Someone had said then that this machine was more important than the atomic bomb had been forty years ago; that the implosion of its significance upon man’s psyche might do what the atomic bombs could not do; that man has a way of surviving physical destruction, but there was a large question of whether he could survive self-knowledge.
“You are so right,” Joe murmured, and lit a cigarette to heighten the impression that he had stopped to rest his shoulders and neck from arduous driving.
The agents’ orders were quite clear. Professors Hoskins and Billings were the central figures in developing the synthetic mind. The trail of these two men, sooner or later, would lead to Bossy. Until then, they were to keep the two professors under unsuspected surveillance; were not to concentrate enough agents to arouse suspicion; were to make an arrest only if the actions of the two men forced their hand.
Joe drew on his cigarette, and probed to a deeper level. He found what he wanted. The agent was tired, and he was chilled. He doubted that his stakeout position was necessary. The reports were that old Professor Billings, at least seventy-two, was as naive as a child; that he couldn’t elude the typical Junior G-Man, age six. And the agent’s stomach was beginning to feel queasy from the raw wine he had swallowed.
He was tired, he was chilled, he was queasy. Joe tied himself into the somatic discomfort, intensified it in himself, fed back the intensified dissatisfaction; picked it up again; oscillated it back and forth between them on feedback principle, stepped up each time—in the way he had watched mob reactions heighten far beyond the capacity of any isolated individual—and waited.
The man began to look down the street toward a small restaurant. He was growing ill. Perhaps the wine had poisoned him. There was the fleeting glimpse of wonder if he would be included on the roster of those killed in pursuit of duty. There was the rational denial of the urge to self-pity. There was the compromise to get a cup of coffee first, to see if that would break the chill, rest him, settle his stomach. But, undoubtedly, this was that extreme situation which would justify his leaving his post of duty.
By the time Joe had meshed the gears of his truck to pull away from the curb, the agent was already halfway down the block, hurrying to the restaurant, still clutching the neck of the wine bottle in the paper sack. In case he did die, it might be valuable evidence.
Without more care than an ordinary truck driver would show, Joe drove the pickup into one of the loading docks on the far side of the station. He willed away the last sympathetic waves of nausea from his own stomach, and climbed nimbly up on the ramp. He strolled, without appearing to be in any hurry, through the door marked with the sign of Railway Express.
The clerk looked him over, took in the greasy leather jacket, the oil-stained jeans, the crumpled cap with the cracked visor.
“Yeah?” the clerk challenged. “What do you want?”
“Pickup for Brown Appliance Company,” Joe answered easily. “Crate of television parts.” No flash of alertness, suspicion, was evident in the clerk’s mind. It was confirmation that no one knew of Bossy. He handed the clerk the shipping bill he had obtained when he forwarded the parts of Bossy from a town a hundred miles away from Hoxworth.
“No such package here,” the clerk said automatically. There was no real animosity in his voice or his mind. It was the simple desire to obstruct found in everyone, and often expressed where there is no fear of retaliation.
