Collected Short Fiction, page 113
“We must watch they don’t reach past Earth to Mars. But I think the aridity of our planet may save us altogether. The Brain must need water vapour as a base for its form, just as the Bipeds needed their very watery protoplasm. Both Earth and Venus are largely water-covered. Between them they ought to keep the Brain happy for the rest of our time.
“I think it knows what being happy means. Perhaps I’m a sentimentalist, but I have a feeling the Brain chose a particularly merciful way of eliminating the Bipeds. I don’t believe it would have interfered with them at all if they’d remained as harmless as once they were. But one can understand how the Brain’s thoughtprocesses would be unbearably disturbed by their tearing through its substance in thousands of aeroplanes, blasting it with the atomic space-ships they were working on, and—worst of all—disrupting great volumes of it with atomic bombs. If the Brain hadn’t done what it did on Earth to the Bipeds, then soon it would have had to have done it to them on Venus.
“The Bipeds were a partially crazed and largely unhappy race. Their chaotic brain rhythms caused fearful tensions in their minds, which frequently sought relief in wild explosions. Probably it was merciful to kill them anyway, but the Brain (this is my theory) anaesthetized them first by drawing off some of that electrical tension. (Report in detail of the coronal rings of invert energy to follow—together with some pretty good pictures). Then it administered simultaneous and instant death, so that none suffered physically and none lived to see others die before them.
“It is this revealed quality of mercy which gives me hope that sooner or later we can communicate with the Brain on our higher moral plane . . . Enough of theory: let’s get down to facts . . .”
The Martian Captain had observed capably and inferred even more so. Yet he had missed one thing, one small Biped named Parnell.
Perhaps the Venusian Brain had missed it also. Perhaps, through some unique and personal kink in the mind, that kind of anaesthetic didn’t take with this one incredibly unlucky human. Or perhaps the Brain was the reverse of merciful, and had deliberately left one helpless, harmless survivor to amuse itself with sadistically. Or perhaps it had kept just one living specimen of homo sapiens for a museum piece.
But the Venusian Brain was inscrutable except to itself—or maybe now to its selves. The complicated interplay of thoughts active in the clouds not so very far above Parnell’s head might be aware of him with pity, or malice, or scientific detachment. Or it might be as oblivious to him as he was to it.
For Parnell was oblivious to all things except one: he was sitting at last in the Editorial chair of the Globe, after a frightful journey there on foot which had unhinged his mind. Now all the Editorial chairs in the world were vacant. He could occupy any he chose. And not even the Proprietors could give him orders.
The meek had inherited the earth.
Man in a Maze
SCIENTISTS CAN BE INHUMAN. LIKE WHEN THEY TRY TO PUT A—
IF YOU DIP TWENTY-FOUR pairs of rabbits’ back legs in liquid air, and twenty-three pairs freeze and fall off, but only one leg of the twenty-fourth pair falls off, what different quality resides in that odd rabbit’s leg which causes it still to adhere?
Tyler wondered about it. He made a characteristically neat note in his desk diary to order more rabbits in the morning.
How many rabbits to dip before it happened again? Or maybe it wouldn’t happen again. No matter. The importance of an event was usually in ratio to its rarity, and nothing could be rarer than uniqueness. It was one of those ends you had to pull until you got—something.
Too late to start pulling now—it was 3 a.m. and he was very tired. He’d let his thoughts play around it idly as he drifted towards sleep. That border on the edge of dreamland was fertile country for any seeds of inspiration. You might bludgeon your brain with reason all day and find no answer, no clue. And then, when you’d given up and retired defeated to bed and the sleep-fog was thickening in your brain, the answer would blossom like a magic flower from your subconscious.
Then you’d have to fight yourself awake and sketch its outline, before it faded, in the bedside notebook. But sometimes you hadn’t the strength. And in the morning your only memory was that you’d had an inspiration, an idea that might have changed the world. But now it was as surely lost as the lyrics of Sappho.
Tyler opened his bedroom door and at once forgot about the iconoclastic rabbit’s leg. Because beyond the bedroom door wasn’t the bedroom—but the bathroom.
His fingers tried to crush the green plastic door knob, then lost strength and began to tremble. Sweat ran from the palm towards their tips.
It was happening again.
During these last unbroken fifteen hours in the lab, absorption in research had temporarily submerged the greater puzzle, which at times lately had driven him near to hysteria.
Now he had to face it again. The inexplicable. The horrible sense of insecurity. The self-distrust. The unresolvable problem: objective or subjective?
Suddenly, his fear was transmuted to anger. This time he wouldn’t retreat. It was his job to investigate the mysterious. He’d always sought problems. Why should he run away from this particular one merely because he hadn’t sought it? He would outface this thing, master it, solve it, use it.
He went into the bathroom that shouldn’t be there.
Everything was real, solid. He turned on the tap to splash his tired eyes with cold water. Then he yelped and snatched his scalded fingers back. Steam rose swiftly from the basin and fogged his startled image in the mirror.
He sucked his fingers. Then, gingerly, he tried the other tap. Yes, the cold water was coming from the tap labelled hot, and very definitely vice versa.
That was a new one.
He had not eaten all day, else the wash basin would have served for another and more urgent purpose. He felt that bad, suddenly.
He retreated to the passage, tiptoed uncertainly along it as though it had been mined, and reached the branch where the bathroom had been yesterday. Around the corner, the carpet was blue. Yesterday it had been golden. Before that, grass-green. He was almost conditioned to the changes. But not quite. He would never really become used to them until his scientific mind had reached an explanation.
But what explanation? The carpet was an ordinary carpet. He’d examined tufts of it under the binocular microscope. He’d tested them chemically. The only way to make them change colour was to dye them. Dyeing presupposed a dyer. And where, where, where was the dyer?
He opened what had been the bathroom door. Behind it was the impossibly spacious lounge, the frozen flowerbed of the Perian carpet, the tall clock with the gold face and the easily swinging pendulum, the long, low easy chairs. The last time he was in the lounge it had been on the floor below.
His head swam, the feeling of nausea returned.
Where was the bedroom hiding from him now? Was it worth chasing around these shifting corridors? No, he was too tired. “Too scared!” mocked the acidulous voice of self-criticism. But his weariness was genuine, and he lapsed into indifference.
He flopped into the nearest armchair without bothering to remove his white laboratory coat, and lay back with closed eyes. Almost at once he heard a distant rumbling, very faint, like far away thunder. It died away. He groaned, and put the back of a hand to his hot forehead.
Again: objective or subjective?
In short, were these hallucinations—or not?
He tried to be logical. If these were hallucinations, then his worst fear looked like being very real—a brain tumour. If they were not, then this house was untenantable—one couldn’t live in a maze nor call a single experiment authentic when performed with untrustworthy tools.
In either case he would have to lose his marvellous lab, the best-equipped he’d ever had the use of, relinquish his income—and lose his life. For pure research was his life.
Then he’d never, probably, learn why that particular rabbit’s leg refused to fall off . . .
Where was the mysterious Charles Sweet? If Sweet couldn’t explain these mysteries, at least he could help by setting up a lab somewhere else. But Sweet might be anywhere on the face of the globe, and there was no telling where. Sweet was . . . Sweet was . . .
Another hallucination? A character in a dream? He had certainly seemed too good to be true.
He had materialised out of the mist of an early spring night, a big blond man who made the worn chairs in Tyler’s apartment seem all too small. He looked forty at first glance. But Tyler soon realised that he was still in his twenties and all that fat wasn’t middle-age spread, but the result of a glandular disorder.
He seemed to be wearing a faint twisted smile. He looked at Tyler and winked. Tyler instinctively smiled back. Then understood that his unknown visitor was not all that pleased to see him. The twisted mouth and the twitching eyelid were symptoms of a nervous tic.
“Mr. Tyler, I presume?”
The stranger’s voice was weak for such a bulk. It had a rising note to it as though its owner were protesting.
“Yes. You wish to see me?”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. I have to see you, but I’d rather contemplate the Rokeby Venus.”
Tyler froze. “Now, see here, I don’t know who you are, but——”
The fat man jammed a card so hard into Tyler’s hand that it hurt. “That’s who I am.”
Despite himself, Tyler looked at the card. It said, tersely: Charles sweet. Mr. Sweet might have been anything from a mortician to a magician, but the card was reticent about his profession. It also refused to divulge his address.
“I’ve never heard the name,” said Tyler.
“I’m not surprised. I made it up.”
Tyler stared at him for a moment and then said: “You might have picked a more suitable pseudonym. Now, Mr. Sweet, I don’t know what you’re selling, but you’re wasting both your time and mine. I can’t buy anything. I’m a poor man, but a busy one——”
“I can imagine that. There was a lot of work in your paper in the Journal of Industrial Sciences on plastic tensions. But what I came to see you about was that anomaly in the refractive indices of resins at certain temperatures. Have you followed that up?”
Tyler was taken aback. “Er—no. I’m sorry, I thought—I had no idea——”
“May I sit down?” said Sweet, sitting down.
“Certainly,” said Tyler, belatedly.
“Listen, little man, for your own good don’t take offence at my rudeness. It’s merely a habit. I’ve always been rich and able to afford the privilege of being rude. Those who have actively resented it have always regretted it. So don’t oppose me. I can do you some good.”
“In what way?”
“Why didn’t you follow up that resin business?”
“I haven’t the necessary equipment.”
“Would you like the equipment?”
Tyler hesitated. “Actually, I’m hot on the tail of something else at the moment——”
“You’ll never get anywhere, little man, if you try to chase all the hares in all directions at once. Hang on to one tail at a time until you’ve captured your quarry.”
“I knew. But I’m always reaching the point where I have to quit practical investigation for theory. Because of lack of equipment.”
“I’m offering you all the equipment you’ll ever need,” said Sweet, irritably, winking twice to the second.
“But why?”
“Let’s say I’m a patron of science. That I back little ferrets like you to find out things. It’s a good investment.” Tyler didn’t like being described as a little ferret nor being addressed as a little man—perhaps because he was a little man.
“I’m not interested in making money for you, Mr. Sweet. My line is pure research for the sake of research. I’ve told that to a number of industrialists. They said they quite understood and let me have the run of their labs. For a time. Until they discovered that I meant what I said and pursued lines that promised no commercial exploitation whatever. Then they thanked me, fried me, and blacklisted me—I couldn’t get hired anywhere on those terms now.”
“Never mind, little man, I’ll hire you. I’ve noted some of your bright ideas and I’m disappointed at the way you let ’em peter out. You keep leaving me up in the air. It’s like reading thrillers with the last chapter torn out. Resign from the college tomorrow. I’ll send you a monthly cheque sufficient for all your needs, and loan you a house—one I designed myself, centered about the best laboratory you ever saw. You can stay there as long as you like.”
“This is—rather breathtaking, Mr. Sweet. What are the conditions?”
“Simply that you prepare full and exact reports on all your experiments and have them ready to show any time I call—which won’t be too often.”
“Can this be really true?” Tyler asked of himself.
It was true. Amazingly true. The very next day Sweet showed him over the house, set in a quiet and leafy boulevard. It was a three-storey erection, spacious, and perfectly cylindrical. At the heart of it was a tall cylindrical lab, with fine benches of polished wood, gleaming white sinks, glass-fronted shelves of apparatus, power points and gas faucets, electronic gadgets, a projector microscope. It was a research man’s Utopia.
Corridors and stairways wound around the outer walls of the lab leading to bedrooms, spare rooms, a lounge, a technical library, a dark room, and enough usual offices to make a house agent’s eyes light up.
Each room was equipped with a robot cleaner which sucked the dust away in a few short gulps. Every fitting shone with permanent polish. Heating was electrical. There were self-making beds and electrically drawn window curtains. No housework was necessary. Tyler could devote himself wholly to his own work without interruptions from servants.
“If there’s anything you need beyond this for your work, little man,” Sweet told him, “ring Parkside 2195—
my agent will have it delivered to you.”
A month later, Tyler moved in.
For six months after that he was in heaven. Sometimes he went for a week without shaving, scarcely even eating or sleeping, lured along some magic trail he’d hit on in the woods of science. Sometimes the trail led to a dead end or faded out into the insignificant. But sometimes it led to a fat report to await Mr. Sweet. But Mr. Sweet never came. Nor did Tyler particularly want him to come—yet. Not while things were so interesting.
It was the week when things started to become too interesting that he felt the need for Sweet.
When he noticed that the carpet in the ground floor lobby had changed colour from fawn to a glaring scarlet. It might have changed colour before that, but half the time he lived in reverie and scarcely noticed his surroundings. But that scarlet fairly shrieked at him.
Soon afterwards, he found himself in the lounge after he’d started out to get Tinbergen’s The Study of Instinct from the library.
This was far from the first time he’d gone absent-mindedly into the wrong room. He tut-tutted, and withdrew. The library was on the top floor, so he tried to go up a floor. This turned out to be impossible simply because he discovered himself to be on the top floor already.
He examined the blank wall where the ascending staircase wasn’t, and then craned out of a window and counted the windows beneath.
He counted them thrice. Then his hands trembled on the sill as he leaned on them and gazed at the quiet boulevard below. He couldn’t seem to think of anything except how peaceful and normal it was out there, and that he should go out more often.
What was it? Overwork? Hallucinations?
Maybe he’d been overdoing it. The brain plays queer tricks when it’s been denied sleep for forty hours.
All the same, a library can’t be transformed into a lounge outside of the Arabian Nights.
Presently, he opened the one-time library door again, cautiously, and when he saw the even ranks of book spines his feelings were mixed. It was nice to have the library back in its niche in space-time, but not so nice to reflect that if the room hadn’t wandered then it meant that his mind had.
After that, either things or his mind went on behaving strangely—in spasms.
When, for instance, he pressed the button to draw the lounge curtains and they didn’t move but the electric fan started up. That could have been a fault in the wiring, taken by itself. But taken in conjunction with sundry other events . . . It drove him one day to dial Parkside 2195 and ask the agent if he could speak to Mr. Sweet.
“I’m sorry, but Mr. Sweet doesn’t reside here.”
The agent’s voice was cold and impersonal, as always. It occurred to Tyler that he didn’t know where the agent resided, nor even his name.
“Well, then, can you give me his address?”
“M-. Sweet is out of town,” said the agent, elliptically. “When will he be back?”
“I have no idea.”
“This week?”
“Maybe. Maybe next week. Maybe next year. I don’t know.”
“But I must contact him.”
“A lot of people want to contact him. If he wishes to contact them, he will do so.”
“Then please ask him to contact me. It’s important.”
“That,” said the agent, “is a matter for Mr. Sweet’s adjudication.”
There was a click as he hung up.
After that there was a complete cessation of phenomena, and Tyler, immensely relieved, began following up the odd events of the rabbit’s leg that didn’t fall off when dipped in liquid air. This, of course, was a phenomenon in itself, and might be one that couldn’t occur outside the confines of this queer house. That was the kind of angle that might drive you mad if you thought about it too much. For how could you separate the general and the specific if you couldn’t experiment anywhere else?
