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58733_KCSVZ198_1 | Why didn't the Lieutenant know she was pregnant? | SPATIAL DELIVERY
BY RANDALL GARRETT
Women on space station assignments
shouldn't get pregnant. But there's a first
time for everything. Here's the story of
such a time——and an historic situation.
One thousand seventy-five miles above the wrinkled surface of Earth, a
woman was in pain.
There, high in the emptiness of space, Space Station One swung in its
orbit. Once every two hours, the artificial satellite looped completely
around the planet, watching what went on below. Outside its bright
steel hull was the silence of the interplanetary vacuum; inside, in the
hospital ward, Lieutenant Alice Britton clutched at the sheets of her
bed in pain, then relaxed as it faded away.
Major Banes looked at her and smiled a little. "How do you feel,
Lieutenant?"
She smiled back; she knew the pain wouldn't return for a few minutes
yet. "Fine, doctor. It's no worse than I was expecting. How long will
it before we can contact White Sands?"
The major looked nervously at his wristwatch. "Nearly an hour. You'll
be all right."
"Certainly," she agreed, running a hand through her brown hair, "I'll
be okay. Just you be on tap when I call."
The major's grin broadened. "You don't think I'd miss a historical
event like this, do you? You take it easy. We're over Eastern Europe
now, but as soon as we get within radio range of New Mexico, I'll beam
a call in." He paused, then repeated, "You just take it easy. Call the
nurse if anything happens." Then he turned and walked out of the room.
Alice Britton closed her eyes. Major Banes was all smiles and cheer
now, but he hadn't been that way five months ago. She chuckled softly
to herself as she thought of his blistering speech.
"Lieutenant Britton, you're either careless or brainless; I don't
know which! Your husband may be the finest rocket jockey in the Space
Service, but that doesn't give him the right to come blasting up here
on a supply rocket just to get you pregnant!"
Alice had said: "I'm sure the thought never entered his mind, doctor. I
know it never entered mine."
"But that was two and a half months ago! Why didn't you come to
me before this? Of all the tom-fool—" His voice had died off in
suppressed anger.
"I didn't know," she had said stolidly. "You know my medical record."
"I know. I know." A puzzled frown had come over his face then, a frown
which almost hid the green eyes that contrasted so startlingly with the
flaming red of his hair. "The question is: what do we do next? We're
not equipped for obstetrics up here."
"Send me back down to Earth, of course."
And he had looked up at her scathingly. "Lieutenant Britton, it is
my personal opinion that you need your head examined, and not by a
general practitioner, either! Why, I wouldn't let you get into an
airplane, much less land on Earth in a rocket! If you think I'd permit
you to subject yourself to eight gravities of acceleration in a rocket
landing, you're daffy!"
She hadn't thought of it before, but the major was right. The terrible
pressure of a rocket landing would increase her effective body weight
to nearly half a ton; an adult human being couldn't take that sort of
punishment for long, much less the tiny life that was growing within
her.
So she had stayed on in the Space Station, doing her job as always.
As Chief Radar Technician, she was important in the operation of the
station. Her pregnancy had never made her uncomfortable; the slow
rotation of the wheel-shaped station about its axis gave an effective
gravity at the rim only half that of Earth's surface, and the closer to
the hub she went, the less her weight became.
According to the major, the baby was due sometime around the first of
September. "Two hundred and eighty days," he had said. "Luckily, we can
pinpoint it almost exactly. And at a maximum of half of Earth gravity,
you shouldn't weigh more than seventy pounds then. You're to report to
me at least once a week, Lieutenant."
As the words went through her mind, another spasm of pain hit her, and
she clenched her fists tightly on the sheets again. It went away, and
she took a deep breath.
Everything had been fine until today. And then, only half an hour ago,
a meteor had hit the radar room. It had been only a tiny bit of rock,
no bigger than a twenty-two bullet, and it hadn't been traveling more
than ten miles per second, but it had managed to punch its way through
the shielding of the station.
The self-sealing walls had closed the tiny hole quickly, but even in
that short time, a lot of air had gone whistling out into the vacuum of
space.
The depressurization hadn't hurt her too much, but the shock had been
enough to start labor. The baby was going to come two months early.
She relaxed a little more, waiting for the next pain. There was nothing
to worry about; she had absolute faith in the red-haired major.
The major himself was not so sure. He sat in his office, massaging his
fingertips and looking worriedly at the clock on the wall.
The Chief Nurse at a nearby desk took off her glasses and looked at him
speculatively. "Something wrong, doctor?"
"Incubator," he said, without taking his eyes off the clock.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Incubator. We can't deliver a seven-month preemie without an
incubator."
The nurse's eyes widened. "Good Lord! I never thought of that! What are
you going to do?"
"Right now, I can't do anything. I can't beam a radio message through
to the Earth. But as soon as we get within radio range of White Sands,
I'll ask them to send up an emergency rocket with an incubator. But—"
"But what?"
"Will we have time? The pains are coming pretty fast now. It will be at
least three hours before they can get a ship up here. If they miss us
on the next time around, it'll be five hours. She can't hold out that
long."
The Chief Nurse turned her eyes to the slowly moving second hand of the
wall clock. She could feel a lump in her throat.
Major Banes was in the Communications Center a full five minutes
before the coastline of California appeared on the curved horizon of
the globe beneath them. He had spent the hour typing out a complete
report of what had happened to Alice Britton and a list of what he
needed. He handed it to the teletype operator and paced the floor
impatiently as he waited for the answer.
When the receiver teletype began clacking softly, he leaned over the
page, waiting anxiously for every word.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0913 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT NOW BEING COMPUTED FOR
RENDEZVOUS WITH SS-1 AS OF NEXT PASSAGE ABOVE USA. CAPT. JAMES
BRITTON PILOTING. MEDICS LOADING SHIP TWELVE WITH INCUBATOR AND OTHER
SUPPLIES. BASE OBSTETRICIAN LT COL GATES ALSO COMING TO ASSIST IN
DELIVERY. HANG ON. OVER.
Banes nodded and turned to the operator. "I want a direct open
telephone line to my office in case I have to get another message to
the base before we get out of range again."
He turned and left through the heavy door. Each room of the space
station was protected by airtight doors and individual heating units;
if some accident, such as a really large meteor hit, should release the
air from one room, nearby rooms would be safe.
Banes' next stop was the hospital ward.
Alice Britton was resting quietly, but there were lines of strain
around her eyes which hadn't been there an hour before.
"How's it coming, Lieutenant?"
She smiled, but another spasm hit her before she could answer. After a
time, she said: "I'm doing fine, but you look as if you'd been through
the mill. What's eating you?"
He forced a nervous smile. "Nothing but the responsibility. You're
going to be a very famous woman, you know. You'll be the mother of the
first child born in space. And it's my job to see to it that you're
both all right."
She grinned. "Another Dr. Dafoe?"
"Something on that order, I suppose. But it won't be all my glory.
Colonel Gates, the O.B. man, was supposed to come up for the delivery
in September, so when White Sands contacted us, they said he was coming
immediately." He paused, and a genuine smile crossed his face. "Your
husband is bringing him up."
"Jim! Coming up here? Wonderful! But I'm afraid the colonel will be too
late. This isn't going to last that long."
Banes had to fight hard to keep his face smiling when she said that,
but he managed an easy nod. "We'll see. Don't hurry it, though. Let
nature take its course. I'm not such a glory hog that I'd not let Gates
have part of it—or all of it, for that matter. Relax and take it easy."
He went on talking, trying to keep the conversation light, but his eyes
kept wandering to his wristwatch, timing Alice's pain intervals. They
were coming too close together to suit him.
There was a faint rap, and the heavy airtight door swung open to admit
the Chief Nurse. "There's a message for you in your office, doctor.
I'll send a nurse in to be with her."
He nodded, then turned back to Alice. "Stiff uppah lip, and all that
sort of rot," he said in a phony British accent.
"Oh, raw
ther
, old chap," she grinned.
Back in his office, Banes picked up the teletype flimsy.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0928 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT COMPUTED FOR RENDEZVOUS AT 1134
HRS MST. CAPT BRITTON SENDS PERSONAL TO LT BRITTON AS FOLLOWS: HOLD
THE FORT, BABY, THE WHOLE WORLD IS PRAYING FOR YOU. OUT.
Banes sat on the edge of his desk, pounding a fist into the palm of
his left hand. "Two hours. It isn't soon enough. She'll never hold out
that long. And we don't have an incubator." His voice was a clipped
monotone, timed with the rhythmic slamming of his fist.
The Chief Nurse said: "Can't we build something that will do until the
rocket gets here?"
Banes looked at her, his face expressionless. "What would we build it
out of? There's not a spare piece of equipment in the station. It costs
money to ship material up here, you know. Anything not essential is
left on the ground."
The phone rang. Banes picked it up and identified himself.
The voice at the other end said: "This is Communications, Major. I tape
recorded all the monitor pickups from the Earth radio stations, and it
looks as though the Space Service has released the information to the
public. Lieutenant Britton's husband was right when he said the whole
world's praying for her. Do you want to hear the tapes?"
"Not now, but thanks for the information." He hung up and looked into
the Chief Nurse's eyes. "They've released the news to the public."
She frowned. "That really puts you on the spot. If the baby dies,
they'll blame you."
Banes slammed his fist to the desk. "Do you think I give a tinker's dam
about that? I'm interested in saving a life, not in worrying about what
people may think!"
"Yes, sir. I just thought—"
"Well, think about something useful! Think about how we're going to
save that baby!" He paused as he saw her eyes. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant.
My nerves are all raw, I guess. But, dammit, my field is space
medicine. I can handle depressurization, space sickness, and things
like that, but I don't know anything about babies! I know what I read
in medical school, and I watched a delivery once, but that's all I
know. I don't even have any references up here; people aren't supposed
to go around having babies on a space station!"
"It's all right, doctor. Shall I prepare the delivery room?"
His laugh was hard and short. "Delivery room! I wish to Heaven we had
one! Prepare the ward room next to the one she's in now, I guess. It's
the best we have.
"So help me Hannah, I'm going to see some changes made in regulations!
A situation like this won't happen again!"
The nurse left quietly. She knew Banes wasn't really angry at the
Brittons; it was simply his way of letting off steam to ease the
tension within him.
The slow, monotonous rotation of the second hand on the wall clock
seemed to drag time grudgingly along with it. Banes wished he could
smoke to calm his raw nerves, but it was strictly against regulations.
Air was too precious to be used up by smoking. Every bit of air on
board had had to be carried up in rockets when the station was built
in space. The air purifiers in the hydroponics section could keep the
air fresh enough for breathing, but fire of any kind would overtax the
system, leaving too little oxygen in the atmosphere.
It was a few minutes of ten when he decided he'd better get back to
Alice Britton. She was trying to read a book between spasms, but she
wasn't getting much read. She dropped it to the floor when he came in.
"Am I glad to see you! It won't be long now." She looked at him
analytically. "Say! Just what
is
eating you? You look more haggard
than I do!"
Again he tried to force a smile, but it didn't come off too well.
"Nothing serious. I just want to make sure everything comes out all
right."
She smiled. "It will. You're all set. You ordered the instruments
months ago. Or did you forget something?"
That hit home, but he just grinned feebly. "I forgot to get somebody to
boil water."
"Whatever for?"
"Coffee, of course. Didn't you know that? Papa always heats up the
water; that keeps him out of the way, and the doctor has coffee
afterwards."
Alice's hands grasped the sheet again, and Banes glanced at his watch.
Ninety seconds! It was long and hard.
When the pain had ebbed away, he said: "We've got the delivery room all
ready. It won't be much longer now."
"I'll say it won't! How about the incubator?"
There was a long pause. Finally, he said softly: "There isn't any
incubator. I didn't take the possibility of a premature delivery into
account. It's my fault. I've done what I could, though; the ship is
bringing one up. I—I think we'll be able to keep the child alive
until—"
He stopped. Alice was bubbling up with laughter.
"Lieutenant! Lieutenant Britton! Alice! This is no time to get
hysterical! Stop it!"
Her laughter slowed to a chuckle. "
Me
get hysterical! That's a good
one! What about you? You're so nervous you couldn't sip water out of a
bathtub without spilling it!"
He blinked. "What do you mean?"
Another pain came, and he had to wait until it was over before he got
her answer. "Doctor," she said, "I thought you would have figured it
out. Ask yourself just one question. Ask yourself, 'Why is a space
station like an incubator?'"
Space Ship Twelve docked at Space Station One at exactly eleven
thirty-four, and two men in spacesuits pushed a large, bulky package
through the airlock.
Major Peter Banes, haggard but smiling, met Captain Britton in the
corridor as he and the colonel entered the hospital ward.
Banes nodded to Colonel Gates, then turned to Britton. "I don't know
whether to congratulate you or take a poke at you, Captain, but I
suppose congratulations come first. Your son, James Edward Britton II,
is doing fine, thank you."
"You mean—
already
?"
The colonel said nothing, but he raised an eyebrow.
"Over an hour ago," said Banes.
"But—but—the incubator—"
Banes' grin widened. "We'll put the baby in it, now that we've got it,
but it really isn't necessary. Your wife figured that one out. A space
station is a kind of incubator itself, you see. It protects us poor,
weak humans from the terrible conditions of space. So all we had to do
was close up one of the airtight rooms, sterilize it, warm it up, and
put in extra oxygen from the emergency tanks. Young James is perfectly
comfortable."
"Excellent, Major!" said the colonel.
"Don't thank me. It was Captain Britton's wife who—"
But Captain Britton wasn't listening any more. He was headed toward his
wife's room at top speed. | She has an irregular cycle. | She had her tubes tied before going into space. | She wasn't keeping track of her cycle. | Women don't have periods in space. | 0 |
58733_KCSVZ198_2 | Why can't Lieutenant Britton go back to Earth? | SPATIAL DELIVERY
BY RANDALL GARRETT
Women on space station assignments
shouldn't get pregnant. But there's a first
time for everything. Here's the story of
such a time——and an historic situation.
One thousand seventy-five miles above the wrinkled surface of Earth, a
woman was in pain.
There, high in the emptiness of space, Space Station One swung in its
orbit. Once every two hours, the artificial satellite looped completely
around the planet, watching what went on below. Outside its bright
steel hull was the silence of the interplanetary vacuum; inside, in the
hospital ward, Lieutenant Alice Britton clutched at the sheets of her
bed in pain, then relaxed as it faded away.
Major Banes looked at her and smiled a little. "How do you feel,
Lieutenant?"
She smiled back; she knew the pain wouldn't return for a few minutes
yet. "Fine, doctor. It's no worse than I was expecting. How long will
it before we can contact White Sands?"
The major looked nervously at his wristwatch. "Nearly an hour. You'll
be all right."
"Certainly," she agreed, running a hand through her brown hair, "I'll
be okay. Just you be on tap when I call."
The major's grin broadened. "You don't think I'd miss a historical
event like this, do you? You take it easy. We're over Eastern Europe
now, but as soon as we get within radio range of New Mexico, I'll beam
a call in." He paused, then repeated, "You just take it easy. Call the
nurse if anything happens." Then he turned and walked out of the room.
Alice Britton closed her eyes. Major Banes was all smiles and cheer
now, but he hadn't been that way five months ago. She chuckled softly
to herself as she thought of his blistering speech.
"Lieutenant Britton, you're either careless or brainless; I don't
know which! Your husband may be the finest rocket jockey in the Space
Service, but that doesn't give him the right to come blasting up here
on a supply rocket just to get you pregnant!"
Alice had said: "I'm sure the thought never entered his mind, doctor. I
know it never entered mine."
"But that was two and a half months ago! Why didn't you come to
me before this? Of all the tom-fool—" His voice had died off in
suppressed anger.
"I didn't know," she had said stolidly. "You know my medical record."
"I know. I know." A puzzled frown had come over his face then, a frown
which almost hid the green eyes that contrasted so startlingly with the
flaming red of his hair. "The question is: what do we do next? We're
not equipped for obstetrics up here."
"Send me back down to Earth, of course."
And he had looked up at her scathingly. "Lieutenant Britton, it is
my personal opinion that you need your head examined, and not by a
general practitioner, either! Why, I wouldn't let you get into an
airplane, much less land on Earth in a rocket! If you think I'd permit
you to subject yourself to eight gravities of acceleration in a rocket
landing, you're daffy!"
She hadn't thought of it before, but the major was right. The terrible
pressure of a rocket landing would increase her effective body weight
to nearly half a ton; an adult human being couldn't take that sort of
punishment for long, much less the tiny life that was growing within
her.
So she had stayed on in the Space Station, doing her job as always.
As Chief Radar Technician, she was important in the operation of the
station. Her pregnancy had never made her uncomfortable; the slow
rotation of the wheel-shaped station about its axis gave an effective
gravity at the rim only half that of Earth's surface, and the closer to
the hub she went, the less her weight became.
According to the major, the baby was due sometime around the first of
September. "Two hundred and eighty days," he had said. "Luckily, we can
pinpoint it almost exactly. And at a maximum of half of Earth gravity,
you shouldn't weigh more than seventy pounds then. You're to report to
me at least once a week, Lieutenant."
As the words went through her mind, another spasm of pain hit her, and
she clenched her fists tightly on the sheets again. It went away, and
she took a deep breath.
Everything had been fine until today. And then, only half an hour ago,
a meteor had hit the radar room. It had been only a tiny bit of rock,
no bigger than a twenty-two bullet, and it hadn't been traveling more
than ten miles per second, but it had managed to punch its way through
the shielding of the station.
The self-sealing walls had closed the tiny hole quickly, but even in
that short time, a lot of air had gone whistling out into the vacuum of
space.
The depressurization hadn't hurt her too much, but the shock had been
enough to start labor. The baby was going to come two months early.
She relaxed a little more, waiting for the next pain. There was nothing
to worry about; she had absolute faith in the red-haired major.
The major himself was not so sure. He sat in his office, massaging his
fingertips and looking worriedly at the clock on the wall.
The Chief Nurse at a nearby desk took off her glasses and looked at him
speculatively. "Something wrong, doctor?"
"Incubator," he said, without taking his eyes off the clock.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Incubator. We can't deliver a seven-month preemie without an
incubator."
The nurse's eyes widened. "Good Lord! I never thought of that! What are
you going to do?"
"Right now, I can't do anything. I can't beam a radio message through
to the Earth. But as soon as we get within radio range of White Sands,
I'll ask them to send up an emergency rocket with an incubator. But—"
"But what?"
"Will we have time? The pains are coming pretty fast now. It will be at
least three hours before they can get a ship up here. If they miss us
on the next time around, it'll be five hours. She can't hold out that
long."
The Chief Nurse turned her eyes to the slowly moving second hand of the
wall clock. She could feel a lump in her throat.
Major Banes was in the Communications Center a full five minutes
before the coastline of California appeared on the curved horizon of
the globe beneath them. He had spent the hour typing out a complete
report of what had happened to Alice Britton and a list of what he
needed. He handed it to the teletype operator and paced the floor
impatiently as he waited for the answer.
When the receiver teletype began clacking softly, he leaned over the
page, waiting anxiously for every word.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0913 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT NOW BEING COMPUTED FOR
RENDEZVOUS WITH SS-1 AS OF NEXT PASSAGE ABOVE USA. CAPT. JAMES
BRITTON PILOTING. MEDICS LOADING SHIP TWELVE WITH INCUBATOR AND OTHER
SUPPLIES. BASE OBSTETRICIAN LT COL GATES ALSO COMING TO ASSIST IN
DELIVERY. HANG ON. OVER.
Banes nodded and turned to the operator. "I want a direct open
telephone line to my office in case I have to get another message to
the base before we get out of range again."
He turned and left through the heavy door. Each room of the space
station was protected by airtight doors and individual heating units;
if some accident, such as a really large meteor hit, should release the
air from one room, nearby rooms would be safe.
Banes' next stop was the hospital ward.
Alice Britton was resting quietly, but there were lines of strain
around her eyes which hadn't been there an hour before.
"How's it coming, Lieutenant?"
She smiled, but another spasm hit her before she could answer. After a
time, she said: "I'm doing fine, but you look as if you'd been through
the mill. What's eating you?"
He forced a nervous smile. "Nothing but the responsibility. You're
going to be a very famous woman, you know. You'll be the mother of the
first child born in space. And it's my job to see to it that you're
both all right."
She grinned. "Another Dr. Dafoe?"
"Something on that order, I suppose. But it won't be all my glory.
Colonel Gates, the O.B. man, was supposed to come up for the delivery
in September, so when White Sands contacted us, they said he was coming
immediately." He paused, and a genuine smile crossed his face. "Your
husband is bringing him up."
"Jim! Coming up here? Wonderful! But I'm afraid the colonel will be too
late. This isn't going to last that long."
Banes had to fight hard to keep his face smiling when she said that,
but he managed an easy nod. "We'll see. Don't hurry it, though. Let
nature take its course. I'm not such a glory hog that I'd not let Gates
have part of it—or all of it, for that matter. Relax and take it easy."
He went on talking, trying to keep the conversation light, but his eyes
kept wandering to his wristwatch, timing Alice's pain intervals. They
were coming too close together to suit him.
There was a faint rap, and the heavy airtight door swung open to admit
the Chief Nurse. "There's a message for you in your office, doctor.
I'll send a nurse in to be with her."
He nodded, then turned back to Alice. "Stiff uppah lip, and all that
sort of rot," he said in a phony British accent.
"Oh, raw
ther
, old chap," she grinned.
Back in his office, Banes picked up the teletype flimsy.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0928 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT COMPUTED FOR RENDEZVOUS AT 1134
HRS MST. CAPT BRITTON SENDS PERSONAL TO LT BRITTON AS FOLLOWS: HOLD
THE FORT, BABY, THE WHOLE WORLD IS PRAYING FOR YOU. OUT.
Banes sat on the edge of his desk, pounding a fist into the palm of
his left hand. "Two hours. It isn't soon enough. She'll never hold out
that long. And we don't have an incubator." His voice was a clipped
monotone, timed with the rhythmic slamming of his fist.
The Chief Nurse said: "Can't we build something that will do until the
rocket gets here?"
Banes looked at her, his face expressionless. "What would we build it
out of? There's not a spare piece of equipment in the station. It costs
money to ship material up here, you know. Anything not essential is
left on the ground."
The phone rang. Banes picked it up and identified himself.
The voice at the other end said: "This is Communications, Major. I tape
recorded all the monitor pickups from the Earth radio stations, and it
looks as though the Space Service has released the information to the
public. Lieutenant Britton's husband was right when he said the whole
world's praying for her. Do you want to hear the tapes?"
"Not now, but thanks for the information." He hung up and looked into
the Chief Nurse's eyes. "They've released the news to the public."
She frowned. "That really puts you on the spot. If the baby dies,
they'll blame you."
Banes slammed his fist to the desk. "Do you think I give a tinker's dam
about that? I'm interested in saving a life, not in worrying about what
people may think!"
"Yes, sir. I just thought—"
"Well, think about something useful! Think about how we're going to
save that baby!" He paused as he saw her eyes. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant.
My nerves are all raw, I guess. But, dammit, my field is space
medicine. I can handle depressurization, space sickness, and things
like that, but I don't know anything about babies! I know what I read
in medical school, and I watched a delivery once, but that's all I
know. I don't even have any references up here; people aren't supposed
to go around having babies on a space station!"
"It's all right, doctor. Shall I prepare the delivery room?"
His laugh was hard and short. "Delivery room! I wish to Heaven we had
one! Prepare the ward room next to the one she's in now, I guess. It's
the best we have.
"So help me Hannah, I'm going to see some changes made in regulations!
A situation like this won't happen again!"
The nurse left quietly. She knew Banes wasn't really angry at the
Brittons; it was simply his way of letting off steam to ease the
tension within him.
The slow, monotonous rotation of the second hand on the wall clock
seemed to drag time grudgingly along with it. Banes wished he could
smoke to calm his raw nerves, but it was strictly against regulations.
Air was too precious to be used up by smoking. Every bit of air on
board had had to be carried up in rockets when the station was built
in space. The air purifiers in the hydroponics section could keep the
air fresh enough for breathing, but fire of any kind would overtax the
system, leaving too little oxygen in the atmosphere.
It was a few minutes of ten when he decided he'd better get back to
Alice Britton. She was trying to read a book between spasms, but she
wasn't getting much read. She dropped it to the floor when he came in.
"Am I glad to see you! It won't be long now." She looked at him
analytically. "Say! Just what
is
eating you? You look more haggard
than I do!"
Again he tried to force a smile, but it didn't come off too well.
"Nothing serious. I just want to make sure everything comes out all
right."
She smiled. "It will. You're all set. You ordered the instruments
months ago. Or did you forget something?"
That hit home, but he just grinned feebly. "I forgot to get somebody to
boil water."
"Whatever for?"
"Coffee, of course. Didn't you know that? Papa always heats up the
water; that keeps him out of the way, and the doctor has coffee
afterwards."
Alice's hands grasped the sheet again, and Banes glanced at his watch.
Ninety seconds! It was long and hard.
When the pain had ebbed away, he said: "We've got the delivery room all
ready. It won't be much longer now."
"I'll say it won't! How about the incubator?"
There was a long pause. Finally, he said softly: "There isn't any
incubator. I didn't take the possibility of a premature delivery into
account. It's my fault. I've done what I could, though; the ship is
bringing one up. I—I think we'll be able to keep the child alive
until—"
He stopped. Alice was bubbling up with laughter.
"Lieutenant! Lieutenant Britton! Alice! This is no time to get
hysterical! Stop it!"
Her laughter slowed to a chuckle. "
Me
get hysterical! That's a good
one! What about you? You're so nervous you couldn't sip water out of a
bathtub without spilling it!"
He blinked. "What do you mean?"
Another pain came, and he had to wait until it was over before he got
her answer. "Doctor," she said, "I thought you would have figured it
out. Ask yourself just one question. Ask yourself, 'Why is a space
station like an incubator?'"
Space Ship Twelve docked at Space Station One at exactly eleven
thirty-four, and two men in spacesuits pushed a large, bulky package
through the airlock.
Major Peter Banes, haggard but smiling, met Captain Britton in the
corridor as he and the colonel entered the hospital ward.
Banes nodded to Colonel Gates, then turned to Britton. "I don't know
whether to congratulate you or take a poke at you, Captain, but I
suppose congratulations come first. Your son, James Edward Britton II,
is doing fine, thank you."
"You mean—
already
?"
The colonel said nothing, but he raised an eyebrow.
"Over an hour ago," said Banes.
"But—but—the incubator—"
Banes' grin widened. "We'll put the baby in it, now that we've got it,
but it really isn't necessary. Your wife figured that one out. A space
station is a kind of incubator itself, you see. It protects us poor,
weak humans from the terrible conditions of space. So all we had to do
was close up one of the airtight rooms, sterilize it, warm it up, and
put in extra oxygen from the emergency tanks. Young James is perfectly
comfortable."
"Excellent, Major!" said the colonel.
"Don't thank me. It was Captain Britton's wife who—"
But Captain Britton wasn't listening any more. He was headed toward his
wife's room at top speed. | There are no ships available to go to Earth at this time. | There is no one else trained to replace her as Chief Radar Technician on the space station. | The replacement Radar Technician was killed in a car wreck on his way to White Sands. A new technician will have to be trained. | The G-forces the body is subjected to during space travel would affect the fetus. | 3 |
58733_KCSVZ198_3 | Why did the Lieutenant go into labor early? | SPATIAL DELIVERY
BY RANDALL GARRETT
Women on space station assignments
shouldn't get pregnant. But there's a first
time for everything. Here's the story of
such a time——and an historic situation.
One thousand seventy-five miles above the wrinkled surface of Earth, a
woman was in pain.
There, high in the emptiness of space, Space Station One swung in its
orbit. Once every two hours, the artificial satellite looped completely
around the planet, watching what went on below. Outside its bright
steel hull was the silence of the interplanetary vacuum; inside, in the
hospital ward, Lieutenant Alice Britton clutched at the sheets of her
bed in pain, then relaxed as it faded away.
Major Banes looked at her and smiled a little. "How do you feel,
Lieutenant?"
She smiled back; she knew the pain wouldn't return for a few minutes
yet. "Fine, doctor. It's no worse than I was expecting. How long will
it before we can contact White Sands?"
The major looked nervously at his wristwatch. "Nearly an hour. You'll
be all right."
"Certainly," she agreed, running a hand through her brown hair, "I'll
be okay. Just you be on tap when I call."
The major's grin broadened. "You don't think I'd miss a historical
event like this, do you? You take it easy. We're over Eastern Europe
now, but as soon as we get within radio range of New Mexico, I'll beam
a call in." He paused, then repeated, "You just take it easy. Call the
nurse if anything happens." Then he turned and walked out of the room.
Alice Britton closed her eyes. Major Banes was all smiles and cheer
now, but he hadn't been that way five months ago. She chuckled softly
to herself as she thought of his blistering speech.
"Lieutenant Britton, you're either careless or brainless; I don't
know which! Your husband may be the finest rocket jockey in the Space
Service, but that doesn't give him the right to come blasting up here
on a supply rocket just to get you pregnant!"
Alice had said: "I'm sure the thought never entered his mind, doctor. I
know it never entered mine."
"But that was two and a half months ago! Why didn't you come to
me before this? Of all the tom-fool—" His voice had died off in
suppressed anger.
"I didn't know," she had said stolidly. "You know my medical record."
"I know. I know." A puzzled frown had come over his face then, a frown
which almost hid the green eyes that contrasted so startlingly with the
flaming red of his hair. "The question is: what do we do next? We're
not equipped for obstetrics up here."
"Send me back down to Earth, of course."
And he had looked up at her scathingly. "Lieutenant Britton, it is
my personal opinion that you need your head examined, and not by a
general practitioner, either! Why, I wouldn't let you get into an
airplane, much less land on Earth in a rocket! If you think I'd permit
you to subject yourself to eight gravities of acceleration in a rocket
landing, you're daffy!"
She hadn't thought of it before, but the major was right. The terrible
pressure of a rocket landing would increase her effective body weight
to nearly half a ton; an adult human being couldn't take that sort of
punishment for long, much less the tiny life that was growing within
her.
So she had stayed on in the Space Station, doing her job as always.
As Chief Radar Technician, she was important in the operation of the
station. Her pregnancy had never made her uncomfortable; the slow
rotation of the wheel-shaped station about its axis gave an effective
gravity at the rim only half that of Earth's surface, and the closer to
the hub she went, the less her weight became.
According to the major, the baby was due sometime around the first of
September. "Two hundred and eighty days," he had said. "Luckily, we can
pinpoint it almost exactly. And at a maximum of half of Earth gravity,
you shouldn't weigh more than seventy pounds then. You're to report to
me at least once a week, Lieutenant."
As the words went through her mind, another spasm of pain hit her, and
she clenched her fists tightly on the sheets again. It went away, and
she took a deep breath.
Everything had been fine until today. And then, only half an hour ago,
a meteor had hit the radar room. It had been only a tiny bit of rock,
no bigger than a twenty-two bullet, and it hadn't been traveling more
than ten miles per second, but it had managed to punch its way through
the shielding of the station.
The self-sealing walls had closed the tiny hole quickly, but even in
that short time, a lot of air had gone whistling out into the vacuum of
space.
The depressurization hadn't hurt her too much, but the shock had been
enough to start labor. The baby was going to come two months early.
She relaxed a little more, waiting for the next pain. There was nothing
to worry about; she had absolute faith in the red-haired major.
The major himself was not so sure. He sat in his office, massaging his
fingertips and looking worriedly at the clock on the wall.
The Chief Nurse at a nearby desk took off her glasses and looked at him
speculatively. "Something wrong, doctor?"
"Incubator," he said, without taking his eyes off the clock.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Incubator. We can't deliver a seven-month preemie without an
incubator."
The nurse's eyes widened. "Good Lord! I never thought of that! What are
you going to do?"
"Right now, I can't do anything. I can't beam a radio message through
to the Earth. But as soon as we get within radio range of White Sands,
I'll ask them to send up an emergency rocket with an incubator. But—"
"But what?"
"Will we have time? The pains are coming pretty fast now. It will be at
least three hours before they can get a ship up here. If they miss us
on the next time around, it'll be five hours. She can't hold out that
long."
The Chief Nurse turned her eyes to the slowly moving second hand of the
wall clock. She could feel a lump in her throat.
Major Banes was in the Communications Center a full five minutes
before the coastline of California appeared on the curved horizon of
the globe beneath them. He had spent the hour typing out a complete
report of what had happened to Alice Britton and a list of what he
needed. He handed it to the teletype operator and paced the floor
impatiently as he waited for the answer.
When the receiver teletype began clacking softly, he leaned over the
page, waiting anxiously for every word.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0913 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT NOW BEING COMPUTED FOR
RENDEZVOUS WITH SS-1 AS OF NEXT PASSAGE ABOVE USA. CAPT. JAMES
BRITTON PILOTING. MEDICS LOADING SHIP TWELVE WITH INCUBATOR AND OTHER
SUPPLIES. BASE OBSTETRICIAN LT COL GATES ALSO COMING TO ASSIST IN
DELIVERY. HANG ON. OVER.
Banes nodded and turned to the operator. "I want a direct open
telephone line to my office in case I have to get another message to
the base before we get out of range again."
He turned and left through the heavy door. Each room of the space
station was protected by airtight doors and individual heating units;
if some accident, such as a really large meteor hit, should release the
air from one room, nearby rooms would be safe.
Banes' next stop was the hospital ward.
Alice Britton was resting quietly, but there were lines of strain
around her eyes which hadn't been there an hour before.
"How's it coming, Lieutenant?"
She smiled, but another spasm hit her before she could answer. After a
time, she said: "I'm doing fine, but you look as if you'd been through
the mill. What's eating you?"
He forced a nervous smile. "Nothing but the responsibility. You're
going to be a very famous woman, you know. You'll be the mother of the
first child born in space. And it's my job to see to it that you're
both all right."
She grinned. "Another Dr. Dafoe?"
"Something on that order, I suppose. But it won't be all my glory.
Colonel Gates, the O.B. man, was supposed to come up for the delivery
in September, so when White Sands contacted us, they said he was coming
immediately." He paused, and a genuine smile crossed his face. "Your
husband is bringing him up."
"Jim! Coming up here? Wonderful! But I'm afraid the colonel will be too
late. This isn't going to last that long."
Banes had to fight hard to keep his face smiling when she said that,
but he managed an easy nod. "We'll see. Don't hurry it, though. Let
nature take its course. I'm not such a glory hog that I'd not let Gates
have part of it—or all of it, for that matter. Relax and take it easy."
He went on talking, trying to keep the conversation light, but his eyes
kept wandering to his wristwatch, timing Alice's pain intervals. They
were coming too close together to suit him.
There was a faint rap, and the heavy airtight door swung open to admit
the Chief Nurse. "There's a message for you in your office, doctor.
I'll send a nurse in to be with her."
He nodded, then turned back to Alice. "Stiff uppah lip, and all that
sort of rot," he said in a phony British accent.
"Oh, raw
ther
, old chap," she grinned.
Back in his office, Banes picked up the teletype flimsy.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0928 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT COMPUTED FOR RENDEZVOUS AT 1134
HRS MST. CAPT BRITTON SENDS PERSONAL TO LT BRITTON AS FOLLOWS: HOLD
THE FORT, BABY, THE WHOLE WORLD IS PRAYING FOR YOU. OUT.
Banes sat on the edge of his desk, pounding a fist into the palm of
his left hand. "Two hours. It isn't soon enough. She'll never hold out
that long. And we don't have an incubator." His voice was a clipped
monotone, timed with the rhythmic slamming of his fist.
The Chief Nurse said: "Can't we build something that will do until the
rocket gets here?"
Banes looked at her, his face expressionless. "What would we build it
out of? There's not a spare piece of equipment in the station. It costs
money to ship material up here, you know. Anything not essential is
left on the ground."
The phone rang. Banes picked it up and identified himself.
The voice at the other end said: "This is Communications, Major. I tape
recorded all the monitor pickups from the Earth radio stations, and it
looks as though the Space Service has released the information to the
public. Lieutenant Britton's husband was right when he said the whole
world's praying for her. Do you want to hear the tapes?"
"Not now, but thanks for the information." He hung up and looked into
the Chief Nurse's eyes. "They've released the news to the public."
She frowned. "That really puts you on the spot. If the baby dies,
they'll blame you."
Banes slammed his fist to the desk. "Do you think I give a tinker's dam
about that? I'm interested in saving a life, not in worrying about what
people may think!"
"Yes, sir. I just thought—"
"Well, think about something useful! Think about how we're going to
save that baby!" He paused as he saw her eyes. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant.
My nerves are all raw, I guess. But, dammit, my field is space
medicine. I can handle depressurization, space sickness, and things
like that, but I don't know anything about babies! I know what I read
in medical school, and I watched a delivery once, but that's all I
know. I don't even have any references up here; people aren't supposed
to go around having babies on a space station!"
"It's all right, doctor. Shall I prepare the delivery room?"
His laugh was hard and short. "Delivery room! I wish to Heaven we had
one! Prepare the ward room next to the one she's in now, I guess. It's
the best we have.
"So help me Hannah, I'm going to see some changes made in regulations!
A situation like this won't happen again!"
The nurse left quietly. She knew Banes wasn't really angry at the
Brittons; it was simply his way of letting off steam to ease the
tension within him.
The slow, monotonous rotation of the second hand on the wall clock
seemed to drag time grudgingly along with it. Banes wished he could
smoke to calm his raw nerves, but it was strictly against regulations.
Air was too precious to be used up by smoking. Every bit of air on
board had had to be carried up in rockets when the station was built
in space. The air purifiers in the hydroponics section could keep the
air fresh enough for breathing, but fire of any kind would overtax the
system, leaving too little oxygen in the atmosphere.
It was a few minutes of ten when he decided he'd better get back to
Alice Britton. She was trying to read a book between spasms, but she
wasn't getting much read. She dropped it to the floor when he came in.
"Am I glad to see you! It won't be long now." She looked at him
analytically. "Say! Just what
is
eating you? You look more haggard
than I do!"
Again he tried to force a smile, but it didn't come off too well.
"Nothing serious. I just want to make sure everything comes out all
right."
She smiled. "It will. You're all set. You ordered the instruments
months ago. Or did you forget something?"
That hit home, but he just grinned feebly. "I forgot to get somebody to
boil water."
"Whatever for?"
"Coffee, of course. Didn't you know that? Papa always heats up the
water; that keeps him out of the way, and the doctor has coffee
afterwards."
Alice's hands grasped the sheet again, and Banes glanced at his watch.
Ninety seconds! It was long and hard.
When the pain had ebbed away, he said: "We've got the delivery room all
ready. It won't be much longer now."
"I'll say it won't! How about the incubator?"
There was a long pause. Finally, he said softly: "There isn't any
incubator. I didn't take the possibility of a premature delivery into
account. It's my fault. I've done what I could, though; the ship is
bringing one up. I—I think we'll be able to keep the child alive
until—"
He stopped. Alice was bubbling up with laughter.
"Lieutenant! Lieutenant Britton! Alice! This is no time to get
hysterical! Stop it!"
Her laughter slowed to a chuckle. "
Me
get hysterical! That's a good
one! What about you? You're so nervous you couldn't sip water out of a
bathtub without spilling it!"
He blinked. "What do you mean?"
Another pain came, and he had to wait until it was over before he got
her answer. "Doctor," she said, "I thought you would have figured it
out. Ask yourself just one question. Ask yourself, 'Why is a space
station like an incubator?'"
Space Ship Twelve docked at Space Station One at exactly eleven
thirty-four, and two men in spacesuits pushed a large, bulky package
through the airlock.
Major Peter Banes, haggard but smiling, met Captain Britton in the
corridor as he and the colonel entered the hospital ward.
Banes nodded to Colonel Gates, then turned to Britton. "I don't know
whether to congratulate you or take a poke at you, Captain, but I
suppose congratulations come first. Your son, James Edward Britton II,
is doing fine, thank you."
"You mean—
already
?"
The colonel said nothing, but he raised an eyebrow.
"Over an hour ago," said Banes.
"But—but—the incubator—"
Banes' grin widened. "We'll put the baby in it, now that we've got it,
but it really isn't necessary. Your wife figured that one out. A space
station is a kind of incubator itself, you see. It protects us poor,
weak humans from the terrible conditions of space. So all we had to do
was close up one of the airtight rooms, sterilize it, warm it up, and
put in extra oxygen from the emergency tanks. Young James is perfectly
comfortable."
"Excellent, Major!" said the colonel.
"Don't thank me. It was Captain Britton's wife who—"
But Captain Britton wasn't listening any more. He was headed toward his
wife's room at top speed. | A slight depressurization in the space station shocked her body into labor. | Major Banes induced labor early because the baby was unusually large. | The stress of living in outer space caused her body to go into pre-term labor. | An asteroid crashed into the space station causing it to jerk unexpectedly. The Lieutenant fell and her water broke. | 0 |
58733_KCSVZ198_4 | Why do they need an incubator? | SPATIAL DELIVERY
BY RANDALL GARRETT
Women on space station assignments
shouldn't get pregnant. But there's a first
time for everything. Here's the story of
such a time——and an historic situation.
One thousand seventy-five miles above the wrinkled surface of Earth, a
woman was in pain.
There, high in the emptiness of space, Space Station One swung in its
orbit. Once every two hours, the artificial satellite looped completely
around the planet, watching what went on below. Outside its bright
steel hull was the silence of the interplanetary vacuum; inside, in the
hospital ward, Lieutenant Alice Britton clutched at the sheets of her
bed in pain, then relaxed as it faded away.
Major Banes looked at her and smiled a little. "How do you feel,
Lieutenant?"
She smiled back; she knew the pain wouldn't return for a few minutes
yet. "Fine, doctor. It's no worse than I was expecting. How long will
it before we can contact White Sands?"
The major looked nervously at his wristwatch. "Nearly an hour. You'll
be all right."
"Certainly," she agreed, running a hand through her brown hair, "I'll
be okay. Just you be on tap when I call."
The major's grin broadened. "You don't think I'd miss a historical
event like this, do you? You take it easy. We're over Eastern Europe
now, but as soon as we get within radio range of New Mexico, I'll beam
a call in." He paused, then repeated, "You just take it easy. Call the
nurse if anything happens." Then he turned and walked out of the room.
Alice Britton closed her eyes. Major Banes was all smiles and cheer
now, but he hadn't been that way five months ago. She chuckled softly
to herself as she thought of his blistering speech.
"Lieutenant Britton, you're either careless or brainless; I don't
know which! Your husband may be the finest rocket jockey in the Space
Service, but that doesn't give him the right to come blasting up here
on a supply rocket just to get you pregnant!"
Alice had said: "I'm sure the thought never entered his mind, doctor. I
know it never entered mine."
"But that was two and a half months ago! Why didn't you come to
me before this? Of all the tom-fool—" His voice had died off in
suppressed anger.
"I didn't know," she had said stolidly. "You know my medical record."
"I know. I know." A puzzled frown had come over his face then, a frown
which almost hid the green eyes that contrasted so startlingly with the
flaming red of his hair. "The question is: what do we do next? We're
not equipped for obstetrics up here."
"Send me back down to Earth, of course."
And he had looked up at her scathingly. "Lieutenant Britton, it is
my personal opinion that you need your head examined, and not by a
general practitioner, either! Why, I wouldn't let you get into an
airplane, much less land on Earth in a rocket! If you think I'd permit
you to subject yourself to eight gravities of acceleration in a rocket
landing, you're daffy!"
She hadn't thought of it before, but the major was right. The terrible
pressure of a rocket landing would increase her effective body weight
to nearly half a ton; an adult human being couldn't take that sort of
punishment for long, much less the tiny life that was growing within
her.
So she had stayed on in the Space Station, doing her job as always.
As Chief Radar Technician, she was important in the operation of the
station. Her pregnancy had never made her uncomfortable; the slow
rotation of the wheel-shaped station about its axis gave an effective
gravity at the rim only half that of Earth's surface, and the closer to
the hub she went, the less her weight became.
According to the major, the baby was due sometime around the first of
September. "Two hundred and eighty days," he had said. "Luckily, we can
pinpoint it almost exactly. And at a maximum of half of Earth gravity,
you shouldn't weigh more than seventy pounds then. You're to report to
me at least once a week, Lieutenant."
As the words went through her mind, another spasm of pain hit her, and
she clenched her fists tightly on the sheets again. It went away, and
she took a deep breath.
Everything had been fine until today. And then, only half an hour ago,
a meteor had hit the radar room. It had been only a tiny bit of rock,
no bigger than a twenty-two bullet, and it hadn't been traveling more
than ten miles per second, but it had managed to punch its way through
the shielding of the station.
The self-sealing walls had closed the tiny hole quickly, but even in
that short time, a lot of air had gone whistling out into the vacuum of
space.
The depressurization hadn't hurt her too much, but the shock had been
enough to start labor. The baby was going to come two months early.
She relaxed a little more, waiting for the next pain. There was nothing
to worry about; she had absolute faith in the red-haired major.
The major himself was not so sure. He sat in his office, massaging his
fingertips and looking worriedly at the clock on the wall.
The Chief Nurse at a nearby desk took off her glasses and looked at him
speculatively. "Something wrong, doctor?"
"Incubator," he said, without taking his eyes off the clock.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Incubator. We can't deliver a seven-month preemie without an
incubator."
The nurse's eyes widened. "Good Lord! I never thought of that! What are
you going to do?"
"Right now, I can't do anything. I can't beam a radio message through
to the Earth. But as soon as we get within radio range of White Sands,
I'll ask them to send up an emergency rocket with an incubator. But—"
"But what?"
"Will we have time? The pains are coming pretty fast now. It will be at
least three hours before they can get a ship up here. If they miss us
on the next time around, it'll be five hours. She can't hold out that
long."
The Chief Nurse turned her eyes to the slowly moving second hand of the
wall clock. She could feel a lump in her throat.
Major Banes was in the Communications Center a full five minutes
before the coastline of California appeared on the curved horizon of
the globe beneath them. He had spent the hour typing out a complete
report of what had happened to Alice Britton and a list of what he
needed. He handed it to the teletype operator and paced the floor
impatiently as he waited for the answer.
When the receiver teletype began clacking softly, he leaned over the
page, waiting anxiously for every word.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0913 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT NOW BEING COMPUTED FOR
RENDEZVOUS WITH SS-1 AS OF NEXT PASSAGE ABOVE USA. CAPT. JAMES
BRITTON PILOTING. MEDICS LOADING SHIP TWELVE WITH INCUBATOR AND OTHER
SUPPLIES. BASE OBSTETRICIAN LT COL GATES ALSO COMING TO ASSIST IN
DELIVERY. HANG ON. OVER.
Banes nodded and turned to the operator. "I want a direct open
telephone line to my office in case I have to get another message to
the base before we get out of range again."
He turned and left through the heavy door. Each room of the space
station was protected by airtight doors and individual heating units;
if some accident, such as a really large meteor hit, should release the
air from one room, nearby rooms would be safe.
Banes' next stop was the hospital ward.
Alice Britton was resting quietly, but there were lines of strain
around her eyes which hadn't been there an hour before.
"How's it coming, Lieutenant?"
She smiled, but another spasm hit her before she could answer. After a
time, she said: "I'm doing fine, but you look as if you'd been through
the mill. What's eating you?"
He forced a nervous smile. "Nothing but the responsibility. You're
going to be a very famous woman, you know. You'll be the mother of the
first child born in space. And it's my job to see to it that you're
both all right."
She grinned. "Another Dr. Dafoe?"
"Something on that order, I suppose. But it won't be all my glory.
Colonel Gates, the O.B. man, was supposed to come up for the delivery
in September, so when White Sands contacted us, they said he was coming
immediately." He paused, and a genuine smile crossed his face. "Your
husband is bringing him up."
"Jim! Coming up here? Wonderful! But I'm afraid the colonel will be too
late. This isn't going to last that long."
Banes had to fight hard to keep his face smiling when she said that,
but he managed an easy nod. "We'll see. Don't hurry it, though. Let
nature take its course. I'm not such a glory hog that I'd not let Gates
have part of it—or all of it, for that matter. Relax and take it easy."
He went on talking, trying to keep the conversation light, but his eyes
kept wandering to his wristwatch, timing Alice's pain intervals. They
were coming too close together to suit him.
There was a faint rap, and the heavy airtight door swung open to admit
the Chief Nurse. "There's a message for you in your office, doctor.
I'll send a nurse in to be with her."
He nodded, then turned back to Alice. "Stiff uppah lip, and all that
sort of rot," he said in a phony British accent.
"Oh, raw
ther
, old chap," she grinned.
Back in his office, Banes picked up the teletype flimsy.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0928 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT COMPUTED FOR RENDEZVOUS AT 1134
HRS MST. CAPT BRITTON SENDS PERSONAL TO LT BRITTON AS FOLLOWS: HOLD
THE FORT, BABY, THE WHOLE WORLD IS PRAYING FOR YOU. OUT.
Banes sat on the edge of his desk, pounding a fist into the palm of
his left hand. "Two hours. It isn't soon enough. She'll never hold out
that long. And we don't have an incubator." His voice was a clipped
monotone, timed with the rhythmic slamming of his fist.
The Chief Nurse said: "Can't we build something that will do until the
rocket gets here?"
Banes looked at her, his face expressionless. "What would we build it
out of? There's not a spare piece of equipment in the station. It costs
money to ship material up here, you know. Anything not essential is
left on the ground."
The phone rang. Banes picked it up and identified himself.
The voice at the other end said: "This is Communications, Major. I tape
recorded all the monitor pickups from the Earth radio stations, and it
looks as though the Space Service has released the information to the
public. Lieutenant Britton's husband was right when he said the whole
world's praying for her. Do you want to hear the tapes?"
"Not now, but thanks for the information." He hung up and looked into
the Chief Nurse's eyes. "They've released the news to the public."
She frowned. "That really puts you on the spot. If the baby dies,
they'll blame you."
Banes slammed his fist to the desk. "Do you think I give a tinker's dam
about that? I'm interested in saving a life, not in worrying about what
people may think!"
"Yes, sir. I just thought—"
"Well, think about something useful! Think about how we're going to
save that baby!" He paused as he saw her eyes. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant.
My nerves are all raw, I guess. But, dammit, my field is space
medicine. I can handle depressurization, space sickness, and things
like that, but I don't know anything about babies! I know what I read
in medical school, and I watched a delivery once, but that's all I
know. I don't even have any references up here; people aren't supposed
to go around having babies on a space station!"
"It's all right, doctor. Shall I prepare the delivery room?"
His laugh was hard and short. "Delivery room! I wish to Heaven we had
one! Prepare the ward room next to the one she's in now, I guess. It's
the best we have.
"So help me Hannah, I'm going to see some changes made in regulations!
A situation like this won't happen again!"
The nurse left quietly. She knew Banes wasn't really angry at the
Brittons; it was simply his way of letting off steam to ease the
tension within him.
The slow, monotonous rotation of the second hand on the wall clock
seemed to drag time grudgingly along with it. Banes wished he could
smoke to calm his raw nerves, but it was strictly against regulations.
Air was too precious to be used up by smoking. Every bit of air on
board had had to be carried up in rockets when the station was built
in space. The air purifiers in the hydroponics section could keep the
air fresh enough for breathing, but fire of any kind would overtax the
system, leaving too little oxygen in the atmosphere.
It was a few minutes of ten when he decided he'd better get back to
Alice Britton. She was trying to read a book between spasms, but she
wasn't getting much read. She dropped it to the floor when he came in.
"Am I glad to see you! It won't be long now." She looked at him
analytically. "Say! Just what
is
eating you? You look more haggard
than I do!"
Again he tried to force a smile, but it didn't come off too well.
"Nothing serious. I just want to make sure everything comes out all
right."
She smiled. "It will. You're all set. You ordered the instruments
months ago. Or did you forget something?"
That hit home, but he just grinned feebly. "I forgot to get somebody to
boil water."
"Whatever for?"
"Coffee, of course. Didn't you know that? Papa always heats up the
water; that keeps him out of the way, and the doctor has coffee
afterwards."
Alice's hands grasped the sheet again, and Banes glanced at his watch.
Ninety seconds! It was long and hard.
When the pain had ebbed away, he said: "We've got the delivery room all
ready. It won't be much longer now."
"I'll say it won't! How about the incubator?"
There was a long pause. Finally, he said softly: "There isn't any
incubator. I didn't take the possibility of a premature delivery into
account. It's my fault. I've done what I could, though; the ship is
bringing one up. I—I think we'll be able to keep the child alive
until—"
He stopped. Alice was bubbling up with laughter.
"Lieutenant! Lieutenant Britton! Alice! This is no time to get
hysterical! Stop it!"
Her laughter slowed to a chuckle. "
Me
get hysterical! That's a good
one! What about you? You're so nervous you couldn't sip water out of a
bathtub without spilling it!"
He blinked. "What do you mean?"
Another pain came, and he had to wait until it was over before he got
her answer. "Doctor," she said, "I thought you would have figured it
out. Ask yourself just one question. Ask yourself, 'Why is a space
station like an incubator?'"
Space Ship Twelve docked at Space Station One at exactly eleven
thirty-four, and two men in spacesuits pushed a large, bulky package
through the airlock.
Major Peter Banes, haggard but smiling, met Captain Britton in the
corridor as he and the colonel entered the hospital ward.
Banes nodded to Colonel Gates, then turned to Britton. "I don't know
whether to congratulate you or take a poke at you, Captain, but I
suppose congratulations come first. Your son, James Edward Britton II,
is doing fine, thank you."
"You mean—
already
?"
The colonel said nothing, but he raised an eyebrow.
"Over an hour ago," said Banes.
"But—but—the incubator—"
Banes' grin widened. "We'll put the baby in it, now that we've got it,
but it really isn't necessary. Your wife figured that one out. A space
station is a kind of incubator itself, you see. It protects us poor,
weak humans from the terrible conditions of space. So all we had to do
was close up one of the airtight rooms, sterilize it, warm it up, and
put in extra oxygen from the emergency tanks. Young James is perfectly
comfortable."
"Excellent, Major!" said the colonel.
"Don't thank me. It was Captain Britton's wife who—"
But Captain Britton wasn't listening any more. He was headed toward his
wife's room at top speed. | The baby is one month early. | The baby is three months early. | The baby is two months early. | The baby is four months early. | 2 |
58733_KCSVZ198_5 | Why can't they build an incubator? | SPATIAL DELIVERY
BY RANDALL GARRETT
Women on space station assignments
shouldn't get pregnant. But there's a first
time for everything. Here's the story of
such a time——and an historic situation.
One thousand seventy-five miles above the wrinkled surface of Earth, a
woman was in pain.
There, high in the emptiness of space, Space Station One swung in its
orbit. Once every two hours, the artificial satellite looped completely
around the planet, watching what went on below. Outside its bright
steel hull was the silence of the interplanetary vacuum; inside, in the
hospital ward, Lieutenant Alice Britton clutched at the sheets of her
bed in pain, then relaxed as it faded away.
Major Banes looked at her and smiled a little. "How do you feel,
Lieutenant?"
She smiled back; she knew the pain wouldn't return for a few minutes
yet. "Fine, doctor. It's no worse than I was expecting. How long will
it before we can contact White Sands?"
The major looked nervously at his wristwatch. "Nearly an hour. You'll
be all right."
"Certainly," she agreed, running a hand through her brown hair, "I'll
be okay. Just you be on tap when I call."
The major's grin broadened. "You don't think I'd miss a historical
event like this, do you? You take it easy. We're over Eastern Europe
now, but as soon as we get within radio range of New Mexico, I'll beam
a call in." He paused, then repeated, "You just take it easy. Call the
nurse if anything happens." Then he turned and walked out of the room.
Alice Britton closed her eyes. Major Banes was all smiles and cheer
now, but he hadn't been that way five months ago. She chuckled softly
to herself as she thought of his blistering speech.
"Lieutenant Britton, you're either careless or brainless; I don't
know which! Your husband may be the finest rocket jockey in the Space
Service, but that doesn't give him the right to come blasting up here
on a supply rocket just to get you pregnant!"
Alice had said: "I'm sure the thought never entered his mind, doctor. I
know it never entered mine."
"But that was two and a half months ago! Why didn't you come to
me before this? Of all the tom-fool—" His voice had died off in
suppressed anger.
"I didn't know," she had said stolidly. "You know my medical record."
"I know. I know." A puzzled frown had come over his face then, a frown
which almost hid the green eyes that contrasted so startlingly with the
flaming red of his hair. "The question is: what do we do next? We're
not equipped for obstetrics up here."
"Send me back down to Earth, of course."
And he had looked up at her scathingly. "Lieutenant Britton, it is
my personal opinion that you need your head examined, and not by a
general practitioner, either! Why, I wouldn't let you get into an
airplane, much less land on Earth in a rocket! If you think I'd permit
you to subject yourself to eight gravities of acceleration in a rocket
landing, you're daffy!"
She hadn't thought of it before, but the major was right. The terrible
pressure of a rocket landing would increase her effective body weight
to nearly half a ton; an adult human being couldn't take that sort of
punishment for long, much less the tiny life that was growing within
her.
So she had stayed on in the Space Station, doing her job as always.
As Chief Radar Technician, she was important in the operation of the
station. Her pregnancy had never made her uncomfortable; the slow
rotation of the wheel-shaped station about its axis gave an effective
gravity at the rim only half that of Earth's surface, and the closer to
the hub she went, the less her weight became.
According to the major, the baby was due sometime around the first of
September. "Two hundred and eighty days," he had said. "Luckily, we can
pinpoint it almost exactly. And at a maximum of half of Earth gravity,
you shouldn't weigh more than seventy pounds then. You're to report to
me at least once a week, Lieutenant."
As the words went through her mind, another spasm of pain hit her, and
she clenched her fists tightly on the sheets again. It went away, and
she took a deep breath.
Everything had been fine until today. And then, only half an hour ago,
a meteor had hit the radar room. It had been only a tiny bit of rock,
no bigger than a twenty-two bullet, and it hadn't been traveling more
than ten miles per second, but it had managed to punch its way through
the shielding of the station.
The self-sealing walls had closed the tiny hole quickly, but even in
that short time, a lot of air had gone whistling out into the vacuum of
space.
The depressurization hadn't hurt her too much, but the shock had been
enough to start labor. The baby was going to come two months early.
She relaxed a little more, waiting for the next pain. There was nothing
to worry about; she had absolute faith in the red-haired major.
The major himself was not so sure. He sat in his office, massaging his
fingertips and looking worriedly at the clock on the wall.
The Chief Nurse at a nearby desk took off her glasses and looked at him
speculatively. "Something wrong, doctor?"
"Incubator," he said, without taking his eyes off the clock.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Incubator. We can't deliver a seven-month preemie without an
incubator."
The nurse's eyes widened. "Good Lord! I never thought of that! What are
you going to do?"
"Right now, I can't do anything. I can't beam a radio message through
to the Earth. But as soon as we get within radio range of White Sands,
I'll ask them to send up an emergency rocket with an incubator. But—"
"But what?"
"Will we have time? The pains are coming pretty fast now. It will be at
least three hours before they can get a ship up here. If they miss us
on the next time around, it'll be five hours. She can't hold out that
long."
The Chief Nurse turned her eyes to the slowly moving second hand of the
wall clock. She could feel a lump in her throat.
Major Banes was in the Communications Center a full five minutes
before the coastline of California appeared on the curved horizon of
the globe beneath them. He had spent the hour typing out a complete
report of what had happened to Alice Britton and a list of what he
needed. He handed it to the teletype operator and paced the floor
impatiently as he waited for the answer.
When the receiver teletype began clacking softly, he leaned over the
page, waiting anxiously for every word.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0913 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT NOW BEING COMPUTED FOR
RENDEZVOUS WITH SS-1 AS OF NEXT PASSAGE ABOVE USA. CAPT. JAMES
BRITTON PILOTING. MEDICS LOADING SHIP TWELVE WITH INCUBATOR AND OTHER
SUPPLIES. BASE OBSTETRICIAN LT COL GATES ALSO COMING TO ASSIST IN
DELIVERY. HANG ON. OVER.
Banes nodded and turned to the operator. "I want a direct open
telephone line to my office in case I have to get another message to
the base before we get out of range again."
He turned and left through the heavy door. Each room of the space
station was protected by airtight doors and individual heating units;
if some accident, such as a really large meteor hit, should release the
air from one room, nearby rooms would be safe.
Banes' next stop was the hospital ward.
Alice Britton was resting quietly, but there were lines of strain
around her eyes which hadn't been there an hour before.
"How's it coming, Lieutenant?"
She smiled, but another spasm hit her before she could answer. After a
time, she said: "I'm doing fine, but you look as if you'd been through
the mill. What's eating you?"
He forced a nervous smile. "Nothing but the responsibility. You're
going to be a very famous woman, you know. You'll be the mother of the
first child born in space. And it's my job to see to it that you're
both all right."
She grinned. "Another Dr. Dafoe?"
"Something on that order, I suppose. But it won't be all my glory.
Colonel Gates, the O.B. man, was supposed to come up for the delivery
in September, so when White Sands contacted us, they said he was coming
immediately." He paused, and a genuine smile crossed his face. "Your
husband is bringing him up."
"Jim! Coming up here? Wonderful! But I'm afraid the colonel will be too
late. This isn't going to last that long."
Banes had to fight hard to keep his face smiling when she said that,
but he managed an easy nod. "We'll see. Don't hurry it, though. Let
nature take its course. I'm not such a glory hog that I'd not let Gates
have part of it—or all of it, for that matter. Relax and take it easy."
He went on talking, trying to keep the conversation light, but his eyes
kept wandering to his wristwatch, timing Alice's pain intervals. They
were coming too close together to suit him.
There was a faint rap, and the heavy airtight door swung open to admit
the Chief Nurse. "There's a message for you in your office, doctor.
I'll send a nurse in to be with her."
He nodded, then turned back to Alice. "Stiff uppah lip, and all that
sort of rot," he said in a phony British accent.
"Oh, raw
ther
, old chap," she grinned.
Back in his office, Banes picked up the teletype flimsy.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0928 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT COMPUTED FOR RENDEZVOUS AT 1134
HRS MST. CAPT BRITTON SENDS PERSONAL TO LT BRITTON AS FOLLOWS: HOLD
THE FORT, BABY, THE WHOLE WORLD IS PRAYING FOR YOU. OUT.
Banes sat on the edge of his desk, pounding a fist into the palm of
his left hand. "Two hours. It isn't soon enough. She'll never hold out
that long. And we don't have an incubator." His voice was a clipped
monotone, timed with the rhythmic slamming of his fist.
The Chief Nurse said: "Can't we build something that will do until the
rocket gets here?"
Banes looked at her, his face expressionless. "What would we build it
out of? There's not a spare piece of equipment in the station. It costs
money to ship material up here, you know. Anything not essential is
left on the ground."
The phone rang. Banes picked it up and identified himself.
The voice at the other end said: "This is Communications, Major. I tape
recorded all the monitor pickups from the Earth radio stations, and it
looks as though the Space Service has released the information to the
public. Lieutenant Britton's husband was right when he said the whole
world's praying for her. Do you want to hear the tapes?"
"Not now, but thanks for the information." He hung up and looked into
the Chief Nurse's eyes. "They've released the news to the public."
She frowned. "That really puts you on the spot. If the baby dies,
they'll blame you."
Banes slammed his fist to the desk. "Do you think I give a tinker's dam
about that? I'm interested in saving a life, not in worrying about what
people may think!"
"Yes, sir. I just thought—"
"Well, think about something useful! Think about how we're going to
save that baby!" He paused as he saw her eyes. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant.
My nerves are all raw, I guess. But, dammit, my field is space
medicine. I can handle depressurization, space sickness, and things
like that, but I don't know anything about babies! I know what I read
in medical school, and I watched a delivery once, but that's all I
know. I don't even have any references up here; people aren't supposed
to go around having babies on a space station!"
"It's all right, doctor. Shall I prepare the delivery room?"
His laugh was hard and short. "Delivery room! I wish to Heaven we had
one! Prepare the ward room next to the one she's in now, I guess. It's
the best we have.
"So help me Hannah, I'm going to see some changes made in regulations!
A situation like this won't happen again!"
The nurse left quietly. She knew Banes wasn't really angry at the
Brittons; it was simply his way of letting off steam to ease the
tension within him.
The slow, monotonous rotation of the second hand on the wall clock
seemed to drag time grudgingly along with it. Banes wished he could
smoke to calm his raw nerves, but it was strictly against regulations.
Air was too precious to be used up by smoking. Every bit of air on
board had had to be carried up in rockets when the station was built
in space. The air purifiers in the hydroponics section could keep the
air fresh enough for breathing, but fire of any kind would overtax the
system, leaving too little oxygen in the atmosphere.
It was a few minutes of ten when he decided he'd better get back to
Alice Britton. She was trying to read a book between spasms, but she
wasn't getting much read. She dropped it to the floor when he came in.
"Am I glad to see you! It won't be long now." She looked at him
analytically. "Say! Just what
is
eating you? You look more haggard
than I do!"
Again he tried to force a smile, but it didn't come off too well.
"Nothing serious. I just want to make sure everything comes out all
right."
She smiled. "It will. You're all set. You ordered the instruments
months ago. Or did you forget something?"
That hit home, but he just grinned feebly. "I forgot to get somebody to
boil water."
"Whatever for?"
"Coffee, of course. Didn't you know that? Papa always heats up the
water; that keeps him out of the way, and the doctor has coffee
afterwards."
Alice's hands grasped the sheet again, and Banes glanced at his watch.
Ninety seconds! It was long and hard.
When the pain had ebbed away, he said: "We've got the delivery room all
ready. It won't be much longer now."
"I'll say it won't! How about the incubator?"
There was a long pause. Finally, he said softly: "There isn't any
incubator. I didn't take the possibility of a premature delivery into
account. It's my fault. I've done what I could, though; the ship is
bringing one up. I—I think we'll be able to keep the child alive
until—"
He stopped. Alice was bubbling up with laughter.
"Lieutenant! Lieutenant Britton! Alice! This is no time to get
hysterical! Stop it!"
Her laughter slowed to a chuckle. "
Me
get hysterical! That's a good
one! What about you? You're so nervous you couldn't sip water out of a
bathtub without spilling it!"
He blinked. "What do you mean?"
Another pain came, and he had to wait until it was over before he got
her answer. "Doctor," she said, "I thought you would have figured it
out. Ask yourself just one question. Ask yourself, 'Why is a space
station like an incubator?'"
Space Ship Twelve docked at Space Station One at exactly eleven
thirty-four, and two men in spacesuits pushed a large, bulky package
through the airlock.
Major Peter Banes, haggard but smiling, met Captain Britton in the
corridor as he and the colonel entered the hospital ward.
Banes nodded to Colonel Gates, then turned to Britton. "I don't know
whether to congratulate you or take a poke at you, Captain, but I
suppose congratulations come first. Your son, James Edward Britton II,
is doing fine, thank you."
"You mean—
already
?"
The colonel said nothing, but he raised an eyebrow.
"Over an hour ago," said Banes.
"But—but—the incubator—"
Banes' grin widened. "We'll put the baby in it, now that we've got it,
but it really isn't necessary. Your wife figured that one out. A space
station is a kind of incubator itself, you see. It protects us poor,
weak humans from the terrible conditions of space. So all we had to do
was close up one of the airtight rooms, sterilize it, warm it up, and
put in extra oxygen from the emergency tanks. Young James is perfectly
comfortable."
"Excellent, Major!" said the colonel.
"Don't thank me. It was Captain Britton's wife who—"
But Captain Britton wasn't listening any more. He was headed toward his
wife's room at top speed. | They don't have the right kind of lights aboard the space station. | It does not occur to them to build an incubator. | None of them no how to build an incubator and the asteroid knocked out communications. | There are no spare parts aboard the space station. | 3 |
58733_KCSVZ198_6 | What is White Sands? | SPATIAL DELIVERY
BY RANDALL GARRETT
Women on space station assignments
shouldn't get pregnant. But there's a first
time for everything. Here's the story of
such a time——and an historic situation.
One thousand seventy-five miles above the wrinkled surface of Earth, a
woman was in pain.
There, high in the emptiness of space, Space Station One swung in its
orbit. Once every two hours, the artificial satellite looped completely
around the planet, watching what went on below. Outside its bright
steel hull was the silence of the interplanetary vacuum; inside, in the
hospital ward, Lieutenant Alice Britton clutched at the sheets of her
bed in pain, then relaxed as it faded away.
Major Banes looked at her and smiled a little. "How do you feel,
Lieutenant?"
She smiled back; she knew the pain wouldn't return for a few minutes
yet. "Fine, doctor. It's no worse than I was expecting. How long will
it before we can contact White Sands?"
The major looked nervously at his wristwatch. "Nearly an hour. You'll
be all right."
"Certainly," she agreed, running a hand through her brown hair, "I'll
be okay. Just you be on tap when I call."
The major's grin broadened. "You don't think I'd miss a historical
event like this, do you? You take it easy. We're over Eastern Europe
now, but as soon as we get within radio range of New Mexico, I'll beam
a call in." He paused, then repeated, "You just take it easy. Call the
nurse if anything happens." Then he turned and walked out of the room.
Alice Britton closed her eyes. Major Banes was all smiles and cheer
now, but he hadn't been that way five months ago. She chuckled softly
to herself as she thought of his blistering speech.
"Lieutenant Britton, you're either careless or brainless; I don't
know which! Your husband may be the finest rocket jockey in the Space
Service, but that doesn't give him the right to come blasting up here
on a supply rocket just to get you pregnant!"
Alice had said: "I'm sure the thought never entered his mind, doctor. I
know it never entered mine."
"But that was two and a half months ago! Why didn't you come to
me before this? Of all the tom-fool—" His voice had died off in
suppressed anger.
"I didn't know," she had said stolidly. "You know my medical record."
"I know. I know." A puzzled frown had come over his face then, a frown
which almost hid the green eyes that contrasted so startlingly with the
flaming red of his hair. "The question is: what do we do next? We're
not equipped for obstetrics up here."
"Send me back down to Earth, of course."
And he had looked up at her scathingly. "Lieutenant Britton, it is
my personal opinion that you need your head examined, and not by a
general practitioner, either! Why, I wouldn't let you get into an
airplane, much less land on Earth in a rocket! If you think I'd permit
you to subject yourself to eight gravities of acceleration in a rocket
landing, you're daffy!"
She hadn't thought of it before, but the major was right. The terrible
pressure of a rocket landing would increase her effective body weight
to nearly half a ton; an adult human being couldn't take that sort of
punishment for long, much less the tiny life that was growing within
her.
So she had stayed on in the Space Station, doing her job as always.
As Chief Radar Technician, she was important in the operation of the
station. Her pregnancy had never made her uncomfortable; the slow
rotation of the wheel-shaped station about its axis gave an effective
gravity at the rim only half that of Earth's surface, and the closer to
the hub she went, the less her weight became.
According to the major, the baby was due sometime around the first of
September. "Two hundred and eighty days," he had said. "Luckily, we can
pinpoint it almost exactly. And at a maximum of half of Earth gravity,
you shouldn't weigh more than seventy pounds then. You're to report to
me at least once a week, Lieutenant."
As the words went through her mind, another spasm of pain hit her, and
she clenched her fists tightly on the sheets again. It went away, and
she took a deep breath.
Everything had been fine until today. And then, only half an hour ago,
a meteor had hit the radar room. It had been only a tiny bit of rock,
no bigger than a twenty-two bullet, and it hadn't been traveling more
than ten miles per second, but it had managed to punch its way through
the shielding of the station.
The self-sealing walls had closed the tiny hole quickly, but even in
that short time, a lot of air had gone whistling out into the vacuum of
space.
The depressurization hadn't hurt her too much, but the shock had been
enough to start labor. The baby was going to come two months early.
She relaxed a little more, waiting for the next pain. There was nothing
to worry about; she had absolute faith in the red-haired major.
The major himself was not so sure. He sat in his office, massaging his
fingertips and looking worriedly at the clock on the wall.
The Chief Nurse at a nearby desk took off her glasses and looked at him
speculatively. "Something wrong, doctor?"
"Incubator," he said, without taking his eyes off the clock.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Incubator. We can't deliver a seven-month preemie without an
incubator."
The nurse's eyes widened. "Good Lord! I never thought of that! What are
you going to do?"
"Right now, I can't do anything. I can't beam a radio message through
to the Earth. But as soon as we get within radio range of White Sands,
I'll ask them to send up an emergency rocket with an incubator. But—"
"But what?"
"Will we have time? The pains are coming pretty fast now. It will be at
least three hours before they can get a ship up here. If they miss us
on the next time around, it'll be five hours. She can't hold out that
long."
The Chief Nurse turned her eyes to the slowly moving second hand of the
wall clock. She could feel a lump in her throat.
Major Banes was in the Communications Center a full five minutes
before the coastline of California appeared on the curved horizon of
the globe beneath them. He had spent the hour typing out a complete
report of what had happened to Alice Britton and a list of what he
needed. He handed it to the teletype operator and paced the floor
impatiently as he waited for the answer.
When the receiver teletype began clacking softly, he leaned over the
page, waiting anxiously for every word.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0913 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT NOW BEING COMPUTED FOR
RENDEZVOUS WITH SS-1 AS OF NEXT PASSAGE ABOVE USA. CAPT. JAMES
BRITTON PILOTING. MEDICS LOADING SHIP TWELVE WITH INCUBATOR AND OTHER
SUPPLIES. BASE OBSTETRICIAN LT COL GATES ALSO COMING TO ASSIST IN
DELIVERY. HANG ON. OVER.
Banes nodded and turned to the operator. "I want a direct open
telephone line to my office in case I have to get another message to
the base before we get out of range again."
He turned and left through the heavy door. Each room of the space
station was protected by airtight doors and individual heating units;
if some accident, such as a really large meteor hit, should release the
air from one room, nearby rooms would be safe.
Banes' next stop was the hospital ward.
Alice Britton was resting quietly, but there were lines of strain
around her eyes which hadn't been there an hour before.
"How's it coming, Lieutenant?"
She smiled, but another spasm hit her before she could answer. After a
time, she said: "I'm doing fine, but you look as if you'd been through
the mill. What's eating you?"
He forced a nervous smile. "Nothing but the responsibility. You're
going to be a very famous woman, you know. You'll be the mother of the
first child born in space. And it's my job to see to it that you're
both all right."
She grinned. "Another Dr. Dafoe?"
"Something on that order, I suppose. But it won't be all my glory.
Colonel Gates, the O.B. man, was supposed to come up for the delivery
in September, so when White Sands contacted us, they said he was coming
immediately." He paused, and a genuine smile crossed his face. "Your
husband is bringing him up."
"Jim! Coming up here? Wonderful! But I'm afraid the colonel will be too
late. This isn't going to last that long."
Banes had to fight hard to keep his face smiling when she said that,
but he managed an easy nod. "We'll see. Don't hurry it, though. Let
nature take its course. I'm not such a glory hog that I'd not let Gates
have part of it—or all of it, for that matter. Relax and take it easy."
He went on talking, trying to keep the conversation light, but his eyes
kept wandering to his wristwatch, timing Alice's pain intervals. They
were coming too close together to suit him.
There was a faint rap, and the heavy airtight door swung open to admit
the Chief Nurse. "There's a message for you in your office, doctor.
I'll send a nurse in to be with her."
He nodded, then turned back to Alice. "Stiff uppah lip, and all that
sort of rot," he said in a phony British accent.
"Oh, raw
ther
, old chap," she grinned.
Back in his office, Banes picked up the teletype flimsy.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0928 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT COMPUTED FOR RENDEZVOUS AT 1134
HRS MST. CAPT BRITTON SENDS PERSONAL TO LT BRITTON AS FOLLOWS: HOLD
THE FORT, BABY, THE WHOLE WORLD IS PRAYING FOR YOU. OUT.
Banes sat on the edge of his desk, pounding a fist into the palm of
his left hand. "Two hours. It isn't soon enough. She'll never hold out
that long. And we don't have an incubator." His voice was a clipped
monotone, timed with the rhythmic slamming of his fist.
The Chief Nurse said: "Can't we build something that will do until the
rocket gets here?"
Banes looked at her, his face expressionless. "What would we build it
out of? There's not a spare piece of equipment in the station. It costs
money to ship material up here, you know. Anything not essential is
left on the ground."
The phone rang. Banes picked it up and identified himself.
The voice at the other end said: "This is Communications, Major. I tape
recorded all the monitor pickups from the Earth radio stations, and it
looks as though the Space Service has released the information to the
public. Lieutenant Britton's husband was right when he said the whole
world's praying for her. Do you want to hear the tapes?"
"Not now, but thanks for the information." He hung up and looked into
the Chief Nurse's eyes. "They've released the news to the public."
She frowned. "That really puts you on the spot. If the baby dies,
they'll blame you."
Banes slammed his fist to the desk. "Do you think I give a tinker's dam
about that? I'm interested in saving a life, not in worrying about what
people may think!"
"Yes, sir. I just thought—"
"Well, think about something useful! Think about how we're going to
save that baby!" He paused as he saw her eyes. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant.
My nerves are all raw, I guess. But, dammit, my field is space
medicine. I can handle depressurization, space sickness, and things
like that, but I don't know anything about babies! I know what I read
in medical school, and I watched a delivery once, but that's all I
know. I don't even have any references up here; people aren't supposed
to go around having babies on a space station!"
"It's all right, doctor. Shall I prepare the delivery room?"
His laugh was hard and short. "Delivery room! I wish to Heaven we had
one! Prepare the ward room next to the one she's in now, I guess. It's
the best we have.
"So help me Hannah, I'm going to see some changes made in regulations!
A situation like this won't happen again!"
The nurse left quietly. She knew Banes wasn't really angry at the
Brittons; it was simply his way of letting off steam to ease the
tension within him.
The slow, monotonous rotation of the second hand on the wall clock
seemed to drag time grudgingly along with it. Banes wished he could
smoke to calm his raw nerves, but it was strictly against regulations.
Air was too precious to be used up by smoking. Every bit of air on
board had had to be carried up in rockets when the station was built
in space. The air purifiers in the hydroponics section could keep the
air fresh enough for breathing, but fire of any kind would overtax the
system, leaving too little oxygen in the atmosphere.
It was a few minutes of ten when he decided he'd better get back to
Alice Britton. She was trying to read a book between spasms, but she
wasn't getting much read. She dropped it to the floor when he came in.
"Am I glad to see you! It won't be long now." She looked at him
analytically. "Say! Just what
is
eating you? You look more haggard
than I do!"
Again he tried to force a smile, but it didn't come off too well.
"Nothing serious. I just want to make sure everything comes out all
right."
She smiled. "It will. You're all set. You ordered the instruments
months ago. Or did you forget something?"
That hit home, but he just grinned feebly. "I forgot to get somebody to
boil water."
"Whatever for?"
"Coffee, of course. Didn't you know that? Papa always heats up the
water; that keeps him out of the way, and the doctor has coffee
afterwards."
Alice's hands grasped the sheet again, and Banes glanced at his watch.
Ninety seconds! It was long and hard.
When the pain had ebbed away, he said: "We've got the delivery room all
ready. It won't be much longer now."
"I'll say it won't! How about the incubator?"
There was a long pause. Finally, he said softly: "There isn't any
incubator. I didn't take the possibility of a premature delivery into
account. It's my fault. I've done what I could, though; the ship is
bringing one up. I—I think we'll be able to keep the child alive
until—"
He stopped. Alice was bubbling up with laughter.
"Lieutenant! Lieutenant Britton! Alice! This is no time to get
hysterical! Stop it!"
Her laughter slowed to a chuckle. "
Me
get hysterical! That's a good
one! What about you? You're so nervous you couldn't sip water out of a
bathtub without spilling it!"
He blinked. "What do you mean?"
Another pain came, and he had to wait until it was over before he got
her answer. "Doctor," she said, "I thought you would have figured it
out. Ask yourself just one question. Ask yourself, 'Why is a space
station like an incubator?'"
Space Ship Twelve docked at Space Station One at exactly eleven
thirty-four, and two men in spacesuits pushed a large, bulky package
through the airlock.
Major Peter Banes, haggard but smiling, met Captain Britton in the
corridor as he and the colonel entered the hospital ward.
Banes nodded to Colonel Gates, then turned to Britton. "I don't know
whether to congratulate you or take a poke at you, Captain, but I
suppose congratulations come first. Your son, James Edward Britton II,
is doing fine, thank you."
"You mean—
already
?"
The colonel said nothing, but he raised an eyebrow.
"Over an hour ago," said Banes.
"But—but—the incubator—"
Banes' grin widened. "We'll put the baby in it, now that we've got it,
but it really isn't necessary. Your wife figured that one out. A space
station is a kind of incubator itself, you see. It protects us poor,
weak humans from the terrible conditions of space. So all we had to do
was close up one of the airtight rooms, sterilize it, warm it up, and
put in extra oxygen from the emergency tanks. Young James is perfectly
comfortable."
"Excellent, Major!" said the colonel.
"Don't thank me. It was Captain Britton's wife who—"
But Captain Britton wasn't listening any more. He was headed toward his
wife's room at top speed. | A city in New Mexico. | A rocket base in New Mexico. | An obstetrics facility in New Mexico. | A mission control base in New Mexico. | 1 |
58733_KCSVZ198_7 | Why is Alice so relaxed when she finds out there is no incubator aboard the space station? | SPATIAL DELIVERY
BY RANDALL GARRETT
Women on space station assignments
shouldn't get pregnant. But there's a first
time for everything. Here's the story of
such a time——and an historic situation.
One thousand seventy-five miles above the wrinkled surface of Earth, a
woman was in pain.
There, high in the emptiness of space, Space Station One swung in its
orbit. Once every two hours, the artificial satellite looped completely
around the planet, watching what went on below. Outside its bright
steel hull was the silence of the interplanetary vacuum; inside, in the
hospital ward, Lieutenant Alice Britton clutched at the sheets of her
bed in pain, then relaxed as it faded away.
Major Banes looked at her and smiled a little. "How do you feel,
Lieutenant?"
She smiled back; she knew the pain wouldn't return for a few minutes
yet. "Fine, doctor. It's no worse than I was expecting. How long will
it before we can contact White Sands?"
The major looked nervously at his wristwatch. "Nearly an hour. You'll
be all right."
"Certainly," she agreed, running a hand through her brown hair, "I'll
be okay. Just you be on tap when I call."
The major's grin broadened. "You don't think I'd miss a historical
event like this, do you? You take it easy. We're over Eastern Europe
now, but as soon as we get within radio range of New Mexico, I'll beam
a call in." He paused, then repeated, "You just take it easy. Call the
nurse if anything happens." Then he turned and walked out of the room.
Alice Britton closed her eyes. Major Banes was all smiles and cheer
now, but he hadn't been that way five months ago. She chuckled softly
to herself as she thought of his blistering speech.
"Lieutenant Britton, you're either careless or brainless; I don't
know which! Your husband may be the finest rocket jockey in the Space
Service, but that doesn't give him the right to come blasting up here
on a supply rocket just to get you pregnant!"
Alice had said: "I'm sure the thought never entered his mind, doctor. I
know it never entered mine."
"But that was two and a half months ago! Why didn't you come to
me before this? Of all the tom-fool—" His voice had died off in
suppressed anger.
"I didn't know," she had said stolidly. "You know my medical record."
"I know. I know." A puzzled frown had come over his face then, a frown
which almost hid the green eyes that contrasted so startlingly with the
flaming red of his hair. "The question is: what do we do next? We're
not equipped for obstetrics up here."
"Send me back down to Earth, of course."
And he had looked up at her scathingly. "Lieutenant Britton, it is
my personal opinion that you need your head examined, and not by a
general practitioner, either! Why, I wouldn't let you get into an
airplane, much less land on Earth in a rocket! If you think I'd permit
you to subject yourself to eight gravities of acceleration in a rocket
landing, you're daffy!"
She hadn't thought of it before, but the major was right. The terrible
pressure of a rocket landing would increase her effective body weight
to nearly half a ton; an adult human being couldn't take that sort of
punishment for long, much less the tiny life that was growing within
her.
So she had stayed on in the Space Station, doing her job as always.
As Chief Radar Technician, she was important in the operation of the
station. Her pregnancy had never made her uncomfortable; the slow
rotation of the wheel-shaped station about its axis gave an effective
gravity at the rim only half that of Earth's surface, and the closer to
the hub she went, the less her weight became.
According to the major, the baby was due sometime around the first of
September. "Two hundred and eighty days," he had said. "Luckily, we can
pinpoint it almost exactly. And at a maximum of half of Earth gravity,
you shouldn't weigh more than seventy pounds then. You're to report to
me at least once a week, Lieutenant."
As the words went through her mind, another spasm of pain hit her, and
she clenched her fists tightly on the sheets again. It went away, and
she took a deep breath.
Everything had been fine until today. And then, only half an hour ago,
a meteor had hit the radar room. It had been only a tiny bit of rock,
no bigger than a twenty-two bullet, and it hadn't been traveling more
than ten miles per second, but it had managed to punch its way through
the shielding of the station.
The self-sealing walls had closed the tiny hole quickly, but even in
that short time, a lot of air had gone whistling out into the vacuum of
space.
The depressurization hadn't hurt her too much, but the shock had been
enough to start labor. The baby was going to come two months early.
She relaxed a little more, waiting for the next pain. There was nothing
to worry about; she had absolute faith in the red-haired major.
The major himself was not so sure. He sat in his office, massaging his
fingertips and looking worriedly at the clock on the wall.
The Chief Nurse at a nearby desk took off her glasses and looked at him
speculatively. "Something wrong, doctor?"
"Incubator," he said, without taking his eyes off the clock.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Incubator. We can't deliver a seven-month preemie without an
incubator."
The nurse's eyes widened. "Good Lord! I never thought of that! What are
you going to do?"
"Right now, I can't do anything. I can't beam a radio message through
to the Earth. But as soon as we get within radio range of White Sands,
I'll ask them to send up an emergency rocket with an incubator. But—"
"But what?"
"Will we have time? The pains are coming pretty fast now. It will be at
least three hours before they can get a ship up here. If they miss us
on the next time around, it'll be five hours. She can't hold out that
long."
The Chief Nurse turned her eyes to the slowly moving second hand of the
wall clock. She could feel a lump in her throat.
Major Banes was in the Communications Center a full five minutes
before the coastline of California appeared on the curved horizon of
the globe beneath them. He had spent the hour typing out a complete
report of what had happened to Alice Britton and a list of what he
needed. He handed it to the teletype operator and paced the floor
impatiently as he waited for the answer.
When the receiver teletype began clacking softly, he leaned over the
page, waiting anxiously for every word.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0913 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT NOW BEING COMPUTED FOR
RENDEZVOUS WITH SS-1 AS OF NEXT PASSAGE ABOVE USA. CAPT. JAMES
BRITTON PILOTING. MEDICS LOADING SHIP TWELVE WITH INCUBATOR AND OTHER
SUPPLIES. BASE OBSTETRICIAN LT COL GATES ALSO COMING TO ASSIST IN
DELIVERY. HANG ON. OVER.
Banes nodded and turned to the operator. "I want a direct open
telephone line to my office in case I have to get another message to
the base before we get out of range again."
He turned and left through the heavy door. Each room of the space
station was protected by airtight doors and individual heating units;
if some accident, such as a really large meteor hit, should release the
air from one room, nearby rooms would be safe.
Banes' next stop was the hospital ward.
Alice Britton was resting quietly, but there were lines of strain
around her eyes which hadn't been there an hour before.
"How's it coming, Lieutenant?"
She smiled, but another spasm hit her before she could answer. After a
time, she said: "I'm doing fine, but you look as if you'd been through
the mill. What's eating you?"
He forced a nervous smile. "Nothing but the responsibility. You're
going to be a very famous woman, you know. You'll be the mother of the
first child born in space. And it's my job to see to it that you're
both all right."
She grinned. "Another Dr. Dafoe?"
"Something on that order, I suppose. But it won't be all my glory.
Colonel Gates, the O.B. man, was supposed to come up for the delivery
in September, so when White Sands contacted us, they said he was coming
immediately." He paused, and a genuine smile crossed his face. "Your
husband is bringing him up."
"Jim! Coming up here? Wonderful! But I'm afraid the colonel will be too
late. This isn't going to last that long."
Banes had to fight hard to keep his face smiling when she said that,
but he managed an easy nod. "We'll see. Don't hurry it, though. Let
nature take its course. I'm not such a glory hog that I'd not let Gates
have part of it—or all of it, for that matter. Relax and take it easy."
He went on talking, trying to keep the conversation light, but his eyes
kept wandering to his wristwatch, timing Alice's pain intervals. They
were coming too close together to suit him.
There was a faint rap, and the heavy airtight door swung open to admit
the Chief Nurse. "There's a message for you in your office, doctor.
I'll send a nurse in to be with her."
He nodded, then turned back to Alice. "Stiff uppah lip, and all that
sort of rot," he said in a phony British accent.
"Oh, raw
ther
, old chap," she grinned.
Back in his office, Banes picked up the teletype flimsy.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0928 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT COMPUTED FOR RENDEZVOUS AT 1134
HRS MST. CAPT BRITTON SENDS PERSONAL TO LT BRITTON AS FOLLOWS: HOLD
THE FORT, BABY, THE WHOLE WORLD IS PRAYING FOR YOU. OUT.
Banes sat on the edge of his desk, pounding a fist into the palm of
his left hand. "Two hours. It isn't soon enough. She'll never hold out
that long. And we don't have an incubator." His voice was a clipped
monotone, timed with the rhythmic slamming of his fist.
The Chief Nurse said: "Can't we build something that will do until the
rocket gets here?"
Banes looked at her, his face expressionless. "What would we build it
out of? There's not a spare piece of equipment in the station. It costs
money to ship material up here, you know. Anything not essential is
left on the ground."
The phone rang. Banes picked it up and identified himself.
The voice at the other end said: "This is Communications, Major. I tape
recorded all the monitor pickups from the Earth radio stations, and it
looks as though the Space Service has released the information to the
public. Lieutenant Britton's husband was right when he said the whole
world's praying for her. Do you want to hear the tapes?"
"Not now, but thanks for the information." He hung up and looked into
the Chief Nurse's eyes. "They've released the news to the public."
She frowned. "That really puts you on the spot. If the baby dies,
they'll blame you."
Banes slammed his fist to the desk. "Do you think I give a tinker's dam
about that? I'm interested in saving a life, not in worrying about what
people may think!"
"Yes, sir. I just thought—"
"Well, think about something useful! Think about how we're going to
save that baby!" He paused as he saw her eyes. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant.
My nerves are all raw, I guess. But, dammit, my field is space
medicine. I can handle depressurization, space sickness, and things
like that, but I don't know anything about babies! I know what I read
in medical school, and I watched a delivery once, but that's all I
know. I don't even have any references up here; people aren't supposed
to go around having babies on a space station!"
"It's all right, doctor. Shall I prepare the delivery room?"
His laugh was hard and short. "Delivery room! I wish to Heaven we had
one! Prepare the ward room next to the one she's in now, I guess. It's
the best we have.
"So help me Hannah, I'm going to see some changes made in regulations!
A situation like this won't happen again!"
The nurse left quietly. She knew Banes wasn't really angry at the
Brittons; it was simply his way of letting off steam to ease the
tension within him.
The slow, monotonous rotation of the second hand on the wall clock
seemed to drag time grudgingly along with it. Banes wished he could
smoke to calm his raw nerves, but it was strictly against regulations.
Air was too precious to be used up by smoking. Every bit of air on
board had had to be carried up in rockets when the station was built
in space. The air purifiers in the hydroponics section could keep the
air fresh enough for breathing, but fire of any kind would overtax the
system, leaving too little oxygen in the atmosphere.
It was a few minutes of ten when he decided he'd better get back to
Alice Britton. She was trying to read a book between spasms, but she
wasn't getting much read. She dropped it to the floor when he came in.
"Am I glad to see you! It won't be long now." She looked at him
analytically. "Say! Just what
is
eating you? You look more haggard
than I do!"
Again he tried to force a smile, but it didn't come off too well.
"Nothing serious. I just want to make sure everything comes out all
right."
She smiled. "It will. You're all set. You ordered the instruments
months ago. Or did you forget something?"
That hit home, but he just grinned feebly. "I forgot to get somebody to
boil water."
"Whatever for?"
"Coffee, of course. Didn't you know that? Papa always heats up the
water; that keeps him out of the way, and the doctor has coffee
afterwards."
Alice's hands grasped the sheet again, and Banes glanced at his watch.
Ninety seconds! It was long and hard.
When the pain had ebbed away, he said: "We've got the delivery room all
ready. It won't be much longer now."
"I'll say it won't! How about the incubator?"
There was a long pause. Finally, he said softly: "There isn't any
incubator. I didn't take the possibility of a premature delivery into
account. It's my fault. I've done what I could, though; the ship is
bringing one up. I—I think we'll be able to keep the child alive
until—"
He stopped. Alice was bubbling up with laughter.
"Lieutenant! Lieutenant Britton! Alice! This is no time to get
hysterical! Stop it!"
Her laughter slowed to a chuckle. "
Me
get hysterical! That's a good
one! What about you? You're so nervous you couldn't sip water out of a
bathtub without spilling it!"
He blinked. "What do you mean?"
Another pain came, and he had to wait until it was over before he got
her answer. "Doctor," she said, "I thought you would have figured it
out. Ask yourself just one question. Ask yourself, 'Why is a space
station like an incubator?'"
Space Ship Twelve docked at Space Station One at exactly eleven
thirty-four, and two men in spacesuits pushed a large, bulky package
through the airlock.
Major Peter Banes, haggard but smiling, met Captain Britton in the
corridor as he and the colonel entered the hospital ward.
Banes nodded to Colonel Gates, then turned to Britton. "I don't know
whether to congratulate you or take a poke at you, Captain, but I
suppose congratulations come first. Your son, James Edward Britton II,
is doing fine, thank you."
"You mean—
already
?"
The colonel said nothing, but he raised an eyebrow.
"Over an hour ago," said Banes.
"But—but—the incubator—"
Banes' grin widened. "We'll put the baby in it, now that we've got it,
but it really isn't necessary. Your wife figured that one out. A space
station is a kind of incubator itself, you see. It protects us poor,
weak humans from the terrible conditions of space. So all we had to do
was close up one of the airtight rooms, sterilize it, warm it up, and
put in extra oxygen from the emergency tanks. Young James is perfectly
comfortable."
"Excellent, Major!" said the colonel.
"Don't thank me. It was Captain Britton's wife who—"
But Captain Britton wasn't listening any more. He was headed toward his
wife's room at top speed. | Alice knows any room in the space station can be made into a giant incubator with minor adjustments. | Alice is feeling delirious due to the pains of natural childbirth and is only concerned with getting the baby out, and getting the pain to stop at the moment. | Alice is feeling the effects of the morphine they gave her for the contractions and is not concerned with much of anything right now. | Alice is feeling the effects of the Demerol they gave her for the contractions and is not concerned with much of anything right now. | 0 |
58733_KCSVZ198_8 | How does Alice feel about delivering the baby on the space station? | SPATIAL DELIVERY
BY RANDALL GARRETT
Women on space station assignments
shouldn't get pregnant. But there's a first
time for everything. Here's the story of
such a time——and an historic situation.
One thousand seventy-five miles above the wrinkled surface of Earth, a
woman was in pain.
There, high in the emptiness of space, Space Station One swung in its
orbit. Once every two hours, the artificial satellite looped completely
around the planet, watching what went on below. Outside its bright
steel hull was the silence of the interplanetary vacuum; inside, in the
hospital ward, Lieutenant Alice Britton clutched at the sheets of her
bed in pain, then relaxed as it faded away.
Major Banes looked at her and smiled a little. "How do you feel,
Lieutenant?"
She smiled back; she knew the pain wouldn't return for a few minutes
yet. "Fine, doctor. It's no worse than I was expecting. How long will
it before we can contact White Sands?"
The major looked nervously at his wristwatch. "Nearly an hour. You'll
be all right."
"Certainly," she agreed, running a hand through her brown hair, "I'll
be okay. Just you be on tap when I call."
The major's grin broadened. "You don't think I'd miss a historical
event like this, do you? You take it easy. We're over Eastern Europe
now, but as soon as we get within radio range of New Mexico, I'll beam
a call in." He paused, then repeated, "You just take it easy. Call the
nurse if anything happens." Then he turned and walked out of the room.
Alice Britton closed her eyes. Major Banes was all smiles and cheer
now, but he hadn't been that way five months ago. She chuckled softly
to herself as she thought of his blistering speech.
"Lieutenant Britton, you're either careless or brainless; I don't
know which! Your husband may be the finest rocket jockey in the Space
Service, but that doesn't give him the right to come blasting up here
on a supply rocket just to get you pregnant!"
Alice had said: "I'm sure the thought never entered his mind, doctor. I
know it never entered mine."
"But that was two and a half months ago! Why didn't you come to
me before this? Of all the tom-fool—" His voice had died off in
suppressed anger.
"I didn't know," she had said stolidly. "You know my medical record."
"I know. I know." A puzzled frown had come over his face then, a frown
which almost hid the green eyes that contrasted so startlingly with the
flaming red of his hair. "The question is: what do we do next? We're
not equipped for obstetrics up here."
"Send me back down to Earth, of course."
And he had looked up at her scathingly. "Lieutenant Britton, it is
my personal opinion that you need your head examined, and not by a
general practitioner, either! Why, I wouldn't let you get into an
airplane, much less land on Earth in a rocket! If you think I'd permit
you to subject yourself to eight gravities of acceleration in a rocket
landing, you're daffy!"
She hadn't thought of it before, but the major was right. The terrible
pressure of a rocket landing would increase her effective body weight
to nearly half a ton; an adult human being couldn't take that sort of
punishment for long, much less the tiny life that was growing within
her.
So she had stayed on in the Space Station, doing her job as always.
As Chief Radar Technician, she was important in the operation of the
station. Her pregnancy had never made her uncomfortable; the slow
rotation of the wheel-shaped station about its axis gave an effective
gravity at the rim only half that of Earth's surface, and the closer to
the hub she went, the less her weight became.
According to the major, the baby was due sometime around the first of
September. "Two hundred and eighty days," he had said. "Luckily, we can
pinpoint it almost exactly. And at a maximum of half of Earth gravity,
you shouldn't weigh more than seventy pounds then. You're to report to
me at least once a week, Lieutenant."
As the words went through her mind, another spasm of pain hit her, and
she clenched her fists tightly on the sheets again. It went away, and
she took a deep breath.
Everything had been fine until today. And then, only half an hour ago,
a meteor had hit the radar room. It had been only a tiny bit of rock,
no bigger than a twenty-two bullet, and it hadn't been traveling more
than ten miles per second, but it had managed to punch its way through
the shielding of the station.
The self-sealing walls had closed the tiny hole quickly, but even in
that short time, a lot of air had gone whistling out into the vacuum of
space.
The depressurization hadn't hurt her too much, but the shock had been
enough to start labor. The baby was going to come two months early.
She relaxed a little more, waiting for the next pain. There was nothing
to worry about; she had absolute faith in the red-haired major.
The major himself was not so sure. He sat in his office, massaging his
fingertips and looking worriedly at the clock on the wall.
The Chief Nurse at a nearby desk took off her glasses and looked at him
speculatively. "Something wrong, doctor?"
"Incubator," he said, without taking his eyes off the clock.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Incubator. We can't deliver a seven-month preemie without an
incubator."
The nurse's eyes widened. "Good Lord! I never thought of that! What are
you going to do?"
"Right now, I can't do anything. I can't beam a radio message through
to the Earth. But as soon as we get within radio range of White Sands,
I'll ask them to send up an emergency rocket with an incubator. But—"
"But what?"
"Will we have time? The pains are coming pretty fast now. It will be at
least three hours before they can get a ship up here. If they miss us
on the next time around, it'll be five hours. She can't hold out that
long."
The Chief Nurse turned her eyes to the slowly moving second hand of the
wall clock. She could feel a lump in her throat.
Major Banes was in the Communications Center a full five minutes
before the coastline of California appeared on the curved horizon of
the globe beneath them. He had spent the hour typing out a complete
report of what had happened to Alice Britton and a list of what he
needed. He handed it to the teletype operator and paced the floor
impatiently as he waited for the answer.
When the receiver teletype began clacking softly, he leaned over the
page, waiting anxiously for every word.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0913 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT NOW BEING COMPUTED FOR
RENDEZVOUS WITH SS-1 AS OF NEXT PASSAGE ABOVE USA. CAPT. JAMES
BRITTON PILOTING. MEDICS LOADING SHIP TWELVE WITH INCUBATOR AND OTHER
SUPPLIES. BASE OBSTETRICIAN LT COL GATES ALSO COMING TO ASSIST IN
DELIVERY. HANG ON. OVER.
Banes nodded and turned to the operator. "I want a direct open
telephone line to my office in case I have to get another message to
the base before we get out of range again."
He turned and left through the heavy door. Each room of the space
station was protected by airtight doors and individual heating units;
if some accident, such as a really large meteor hit, should release the
air from one room, nearby rooms would be safe.
Banes' next stop was the hospital ward.
Alice Britton was resting quietly, but there were lines of strain
around her eyes which hadn't been there an hour before.
"How's it coming, Lieutenant?"
She smiled, but another spasm hit her before she could answer. After a
time, she said: "I'm doing fine, but you look as if you'd been through
the mill. What's eating you?"
He forced a nervous smile. "Nothing but the responsibility. You're
going to be a very famous woman, you know. You'll be the mother of the
first child born in space. And it's my job to see to it that you're
both all right."
She grinned. "Another Dr. Dafoe?"
"Something on that order, I suppose. But it won't be all my glory.
Colonel Gates, the O.B. man, was supposed to come up for the delivery
in September, so when White Sands contacted us, they said he was coming
immediately." He paused, and a genuine smile crossed his face. "Your
husband is bringing him up."
"Jim! Coming up here? Wonderful! But I'm afraid the colonel will be too
late. This isn't going to last that long."
Banes had to fight hard to keep his face smiling when she said that,
but he managed an easy nod. "We'll see. Don't hurry it, though. Let
nature take its course. I'm not such a glory hog that I'd not let Gates
have part of it—or all of it, for that matter. Relax and take it easy."
He went on talking, trying to keep the conversation light, but his eyes
kept wandering to his wristwatch, timing Alice's pain intervals. They
were coming too close together to suit him.
There was a faint rap, and the heavy airtight door swung open to admit
the Chief Nurse. "There's a message for you in your office, doctor.
I'll send a nurse in to be with her."
He nodded, then turned back to Alice. "Stiff uppah lip, and all that
sort of rot," he said in a phony British accent.
"Oh, raw
ther
, old chap," she grinned.
Back in his office, Banes picked up the teletype flimsy.
WHITE SANDS ROCKET BASE 4 JULY 1984 0928 HRS URGENT TO: MAJ PETER
BANES (MC) 0-266118 SS-1 MEDICAL OFFICER FROM: GEN DAVID BARRETT
0-199515 COMMANDING WSRB ROCKET. ORBIT COMPUTED FOR RENDEZVOUS AT 1134
HRS MST. CAPT BRITTON SENDS PERSONAL TO LT BRITTON AS FOLLOWS: HOLD
THE FORT, BABY, THE WHOLE WORLD IS PRAYING FOR YOU. OUT.
Banes sat on the edge of his desk, pounding a fist into the palm of
his left hand. "Two hours. It isn't soon enough. She'll never hold out
that long. And we don't have an incubator." His voice was a clipped
monotone, timed with the rhythmic slamming of his fist.
The Chief Nurse said: "Can't we build something that will do until the
rocket gets here?"
Banes looked at her, his face expressionless. "What would we build it
out of? There's not a spare piece of equipment in the station. It costs
money to ship material up here, you know. Anything not essential is
left on the ground."
The phone rang. Banes picked it up and identified himself.
The voice at the other end said: "This is Communications, Major. I tape
recorded all the monitor pickups from the Earth radio stations, and it
looks as though the Space Service has released the information to the
public. Lieutenant Britton's husband was right when he said the whole
world's praying for her. Do you want to hear the tapes?"
"Not now, but thanks for the information." He hung up and looked into
the Chief Nurse's eyes. "They've released the news to the public."
She frowned. "That really puts you on the spot. If the baby dies,
they'll blame you."
Banes slammed his fist to the desk. "Do you think I give a tinker's dam
about that? I'm interested in saving a life, not in worrying about what
people may think!"
"Yes, sir. I just thought—"
"Well, think about something useful! Think about how we're going to
save that baby!" He paused as he saw her eyes. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant.
My nerves are all raw, I guess. But, dammit, my field is space
medicine. I can handle depressurization, space sickness, and things
like that, but I don't know anything about babies! I know what I read
in medical school, and I watched a delivery once, but that's all I
know. I don't even have any references up here; people aren't supposed
to go around having babies on a space station!"
"It's all right, doctor. Shall I prepare the delivery room?"
His laugh was hard and short. "Delivery room! I wish to Heaven we had
one! Prepare the ward room next to the one she's in now, I guess. It's
the best we have.
"So help me Hannah, I'm going to see some changes made in regulations!
A situation like this won't happen again!"
The nurse left quietly. She knew Banes wasn't really angry at the
Brittons; it was simply his way of letting off steam to ease the
tension within him.
The slow, monotonous rotation of the second hand on the wall clock
seemed to drag time grudgingly along with it. Banes wished he could
smoke to calm his raw nerves, but it was strictly against regulations.
Air was too precious to be used up by smoking. Every bit of air on
board had had to be carried up in rockets when the station was built
in space. The air purifiers in the hydroponics section could keep the
air fresh enough for breathing, but fire of any kind would overtax the
system, leaving too little oxygen in the atmosphere.
It was a few minutes of ten when he decided he'd better get back to
Alice Britton. She was trying to read a book between spasms, but she
wasn't getting much read. She dropped it to the floor when he came in.
"Am I glad to see you! It won't be long now." She looked at him
analytically. "Say! Just what
is
eating you? You look more haggard
than I do!"
Again he tried to force a smile, but it didn't come off too well.
"Nothing serious. I just want to make sure everything comes out all
right."
She smiled. "It will. You're all set. You ordered the instruments
months ago. Or did you forget something?"
That hit home, but he just grinned feebly. "I forgot to get somebody to
boil water."
"Whatever for?"
"Coffee, of course. Didn't you know that? Papa always heats up the
water; that keeps him out of the way, and the doctor has coffee
afterwards."
Alice's hands grasped the sheet again, and Banes glanced at his watch.
Ninety seconds! It was long and hard.
When the pain had ebbed away, he said: "We've got the delivery room all
ready. It won't be much longer now."
"I'll say it won't! How about the incubator?"
There was a long pause. Finally, he said softly: "There isn't any
incubator. I didn't take the possibility of a premature delivery into
account. It's my fault. I've done what I could, though; the ship is
bringing one up. I—I think we'll be able to keep the child alive
until—"
He stopped. Alice was bubbling up with laughter.
"Lieutenant! Lieutenant Britton! Alice! This is no time to get
hysterical! Stop it!"
Her laughter slowed to a chuckle. "
Me
get hysterical! That's a good
one! What about you? You're so nervous you couldn't sip water out of a
bathtub without spilling it!"
He blinked. "What do you mean?"
Another pain came, and he had to wait until it was over before he got
her answer. "Doctor," she said, "I thought you would have figured it
out. Ask yourself just one question. Ask yourself, 'Why is a space
station like an incubator?'"
Space Ship Twelve docked at Space Station One at exactly eleven
thirty-four, and two men in spacesuits pushed a large, bulky package
through the airlock.
Major Peter Banes, haggard but smiling, met Captain Britton in the
corridor as he and the colonel entered the hospital ward.
Banes nodded to Colonel Gates, then turned to Britton. "I don't know
whether to congratulate you or take a poke at you, Captain, but I
suppose congratulations come first. Your son, James Edward Britton II,
is doing fine, thank you."
"You mean—
already
?"
The colonel said nothing, but he raised an eyebrow.
"Over an hour ago," said Banes.
"But—but—the incubator—"
Banes' grin widened. "We'll put the baby in it, now that we've got it,
but it really isn't necessary. Your wife figured that one out. A space
station is a kind of incubator itself, you see. It protects us poor,
weak humans from the terrible conditions of space. So all we had to do
was close up one of the airtight rooms, sterilize it, warm it up, and
put in extra oxygen from the emergency tanks. Young James is perfectly
comfortable."
"Excellent, Major!" said the colonel.
"Don't thank me. It was Captain Britton's wife who—"
But Captain Britton wasn't listening any more. He was headed toward his
wife's room at top speed. | She is confident in Major Barnes. She feels he's perfectly competent, though obstetrics is not his field. | She is excited. She's going to be famous. No one has ever had a baby in space before. | She is terrified. No one has ever had a baby in space before. | She is scared because the baby is so early and there is no incubator onboard the space station. | 0 |
60291_XQ25ASO2_1 | What is the Farm? | BRAMBLE BUSH
BY ALAN E. NOURSE
There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise;
He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw what he had done, with all his might and main
He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again.
MOTHER GOOSE
Dr. David Lessing found Jack Dorffman and the boy waiting in his office
when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. Dorffman looked as
though he'd been running all night. There were dark pouches under his
eyes; his heavy unshaven face seemed to sag at every crease. Lessing
glanced sharply at his Field Director and sank down behind his desk
with a sigh. "All right, Jack—what's wrong?"
"This kid is driving me nuts," said Dorffman through clenched teeth.
"He's gone completely hay-wire. Nobody's been able to get near him
for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's
leaving the Farm. I talk to him, I sweat him down, I do everything but
tie him to the bed, and I waste my time. He's leaving the Farm. Period."
"So you bring him down here," said Lessing sourly. "The worst place he
could be, if something's really wrong." He looked across at the boy.
"Tommy? Come over and sit down."
There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin,
with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal
eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward
grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute
appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and
blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape.
The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear.
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently.
"I don't want to go back to the Farm," said the boy.
"Why?"
"I just don't. I hate it there."
"Are you frightened?"
The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly.
"Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?"
"No. Oh, no!"
"Then what?"
Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none
came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off—" He fingered
the grey plastic helmet.
"You think
that
would make you feel better?"
"It would, I know it would."
Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the
monitor is for, don't you?"
"It stops things from going out."
"That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator.
You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off,
away from the Farm."
The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there—" The
fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I
never want to go back."
"Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at
Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has
been going on for
three weeks
?"
"I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern—we see so
much of that up there."
"I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better
set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid
you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to
deal with this morning—the one who's threatening to upset the whole
Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with.
I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing
ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy
downstairs."
"Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman.
"Certainly! And Jack—in this case, be
sure
of it. If Tommy's in the
trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact
now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands."
Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was
from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book,
and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled.
Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical
Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck
up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm—yet he
hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And now, as the book
approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really
get back to work again.
The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the
International Psionics Conference:
Dear Dr. Lessing:
In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic
behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle
speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October 12th. A few remarks in
discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order—
They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the
scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His
earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going—but the
book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A
Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good
title—concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right.
And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a
guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and
baffling new science.
For they were floundering. When they were finally forced to recognize
that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds,
with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had
plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening
bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. Nothing worked, and
everything worked too well. They were trying to study phenomena which
made no sense, observing things that defied logic. Natural laws came
crashing down about their ears as they stood sadly by and watched
things happen which natural law said could never happen. They had never
been in this jungle before, nor in any jungle remotely like it. The
old rules didn't work here, the old methods of study failed. And the
more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush
became—
But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a
theory to work by—
At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "A gentleman to see you," the girl
said. "A Dr. Melrose. He's very impatient, sir."
He shut off the scanner and said, "Send him in, please."
Dr. Peter Melrose was tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark
mocking eyes. He wore a threadbare sport coat and a slouch. He offered
Lessing a bony hand, then flung himself into a chair as he stared about
the office in awe.
"I'm really overwhelmed," he said after a moment. "Within the
stronghold of psionic research at last. And face to face with the
Master in the trembling flesh!"
Lessing frowned. "Dr. Melrose, I don't quite understand—"
"Oh, it's just that I'm impressed," the young man said airily. "Of
course, I've seen old dried-up Authorities before—but never before
a brand spanking new one, just fresh out of the pupa, so to speak!"
He touched his forehead in a gesture of reverence. "I bow before the
Oracle. Speak, oh Motah, live forever! Cast a pearl at my feet!"
"If you've come here to be insulting," Lessing said coldly, "you're
just wasting time." He reached for the intercom switch.
"I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply,
"because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month
unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. And if you
don't think I can do it, you're in for quite a dumping."
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me—just what, exactly, do you want?"
"I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of
'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in
Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental
controls you keep talking about will actually bear. But mostly, I want
to see just what in psionic hell you're so busy making yourself an
Authority about." There was no laughter in the man's sharp brown eyes.
"You couldn't touch me with a ten foot pole at this conference,"
snapped Lessing.
The other man grinned. "Try me! We shook you up a little bit last year,
but you didn't seem to get the idea."
"Last year was different." Lessing scowled. "As for our 'fairy tale',
we happen to have a staggering body of evidence that says that it's
true."
"If the papers you've already published are a preview, we think it's
false as Satan."
"And our controls are above suspicion."
"So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said
Melrose. "We've done a lot of work on it, too."
"Oh, yes—I've heard about your work. Not bad, really. A little
misdirected, is all."
"According to your Theory, that is."
"Wildly unorthodox approach to psionics—but at least you're energetic
enough."
"We haven't been energetic enough to find an orthodox approach that got
us anywhere. We doubt if you have, either. But maybe we're all wrong."
Melrose grinned unpleasantly. "We're not unreasonable, your Majesty. We
just ask to be shown. If you dare, that is."
Lessing slammed his fist down on the desk angrily. "Have you got the
day to take a trip?"
"I've got 'til New Year."
Lessing shouted for his girl. "Get Dorffman up here. We're going to the
Farm this afternoon."
The girl nodded, then hesitated. "But what about your lunch?"
"Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest
here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us...."
Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels
and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the
Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the
rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in
the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing
briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the
long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less
than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed
north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside.
"What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along
through the afternoon sun.
"I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating."
Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of
beating the bushes with this—" He broke off to glare at young Melrose.
Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here."
"It's—unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped.
"Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day
school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even
used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here."
"Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying
to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis."
"Of course, you're sure you were measuring
something
."
"Oh, yes. We certainly were."
"Yet you said that you didn't know what."
"That's right," said Lessing. "We don't."
"And you don't know
why
your instruments measure whatever they're
measuring." The Chicago man's face was thoughtful. "In fact, you can't
really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at
all. It's not inconceivable that the
children
might be measuring the
instruments
, eh?"
Lessing blinked. "It's conceivable."
"Mmmm," said Melrose. "Sounds like a real firm foundation to build a
theory on."
"Why not?" Lessing growled. "It wouldn't be the first time the tail
wagged the dog. The psychiatrists never would have gotten out of their
rut if somebody hadn't gotten smart and realized that one of their new
drugs worked better in combatting schizophrenia when the doctor took
the medicine instead of the patient. That was quite a wall to climb."
"Yes, wasn't it," mused Melrose, scratching his bony jaw. "Only took
them seventy years to climb it, thanks to a certain man's theories.
I wonder how long it'll take psionics to crawl out of the pit you're
digging for it?"
"We're not digging any pit," Lessing exploded angrily. "We're
exploring—nothing more. A phenomenon exists. We've known that, one way
or another, for centuries. The fact that it doesn't seem to be bound by
the same sort of natural law we've observed elsewhere doesn't mean that
it isn't governed by natural law. But how can we define the law? How
can we define the limits of the phenomenon, for that matter? We can't
work in the dark forever—we've
got
to have a working hypothesis to
guide us."
"So you dreamed up this 'tadpole' idea," said Melrose sourly.
"For a working hypothesis—yes. We've known for a long time that every
human being has extrasensory potential to one degree or another. Not
just a few here and there—every single one. It's a differentiating
quality of the human mind. Just as the ability to think logically in a
crisis instead of giving way to panic is a differentiating quality."
"Fine," said Melrose. "Great. We can't
prove
that, of course, but
I'll play along."
Lessing glared at him. "When we began studying this psi-potential, we
found out some curious things. For one thing, it seemed to be immensely
more powerful and active in infants and children than in adults.
Somewhere along the line as a child grows up, something happens. We
don't know what. We do know that the child's psi-potential gradually
withdraws deeper and deeper into his mind, burying itself farther and
farther out of reach, just the way a tadpole's tail is absorbed deeper
and deeper into the growing frog until there just isn't any tail any
more." Lessing paused, packing tobacco into his pipe. "That's why we
have the Farm—to try to discover why. What forces that potential
underground? What buries it so deeply that adult human beings can't get
at it any more?"
"And you think you have an answer," said Melrose.
"We think we might be near an answer. We have a theory that explains
the available data."
The shuttle car bounced sharply as it left the highway automatics.
Dorffman took the controls. In a few moments they were skimming through
the high white gates of the Farm, slowing down at the entrance to a
long, low building.
"All right, young man—come along," said Lessing. "I think we can show
you our answer."
In the main office building they donned the close-fitting psionic
monitors required of all personnel at the Farm. They were of a
hard grey plastic material, with a network of wiring buried in the
substance, connected to a simple pocket-sized power source.
"The major problem," Lessing said, "has been to shield the children
from any external psionic stimuli, except those we wished to expose
them to. Our goal is a perfectly controlled psi environment. The
monitors are quite effective—a simple Renwick scrambler screen."
"It blocks off all types of psi activity?" asked Melrose.
"As far as we can measure, yes."
"Which may not be very far."
Jack Dorffman burst in: "What Dr. Lessing is saying is that they seem
effective for our purposes."
"But you don't know why," added Melrose.
"All right, we don't know why. Nobody knows why a Renwick screen
works—why blame us?" They were walking down the main corridor and out
through an open areaway. Behind the buildings was a broad playground. A
baseball game was in progress in one corner; across the field a group
of swings, slides, ring bars and other playground paraphernalia was in
heavy use. The place was teeming with youngsters, all shouting in a
fury of busy activity. Occasionally a helmeted supervisor hurried by;
one waved to them as she rescued a four-year-old from the parallel bars.
They crossed into the next building, where classes were in progress.
"Some of our children are here only briefly," Lessing explained as
they walked along, "and some have been here for years. We maintain a
top-ranking curriculum—your idea of a 'country day school' wasn't
so far afield at that—with scholarships supported by Hoffman Center
funds. Other children come to us—foundlings, desertees, children from
broken homes, children of all ages from infancy on. Sometimes they
stay until they have reached college age, or go on to jobs. As far as
psionics research is concerned, we are not trying to be teachers. We
are strictly observers. We try to place the youngsters in positions
where they can develope what potential they have—
without
the
presence of external psionic influences they would normally be subject
to. The results have been remarkable."
He led them into a long, narrow room with chairs and ash trays, facing
a wide grey glass wall. The room fell into darkness, and through the
grey glass they could see three children, about four years old, playing
in a large room.
"They're perfectly insulated from us," said Lessing. "A variety of
recording instruments are working. And before you ask, Dr. Melrose,
they are all empirical instruments, and they would all defy any
engineer's attempts to determine what makes them go. We don't know what
makes them go, and we don't care—they go. That's all we need. Like
that one, for instance—"
In the corner a flat screen was flickering, emitting a pale green
fluorescent light. It hung from the wall by two plastic rods which
penetrated into the children's room. There was no sign of a switch,
nor a power source. As the children moved about, the screen flickered.
Below it, a recording-tape clicked along in little spurts and starts of
activity.
"What are they doing?" Melrose asked after watching the children a few
moments.
"Those three seem to work as a team, somehow. Each one, individually,
had a fairly constant recordable psi potential of about seventeen on
the arbitrary scale we find useful here. Any two of them scale in at
thirty-four to thirty-six. Put the three together and they operate
somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred on the same scale."
Lessing smiled. "This is an isolated phenomenon—it doesn't hold for
any other three children on the Farm. Nor did we make any effort to
place them together—they drew each other like magnets. One of our
workers spent two weeks trying to find out why the instruments weren't
right. It wasn't the instruments, of course."
Lessing nodded to an attendant, and peered around at Melrose. "Now, I
want you to watch this very closely."
He opened a door and walked into the room with the children. The
fluorescent screen continued to flicker as the children ran to Lessing.
He inspected the block tower they were building, and stooped down to
talk to them, his lips moving soundlessly behind the observation wall.
The children laughed and jabbered, apparently intrigued by the game he
was proposing. He walked to the table and tapped the bottom block in
the tower with his thumb.
The tower quivered, and the screen blazed out with green light, but the
tower stood. Carefully Lessing jogged all the foundation blocks out of
place until the tower hung in midair, clearly unsupported. The children
watched it closely, and the foundation blocks inched still further out
of place....
Then, quite casually, Lessing lifted off his monitor. The children
continued staring at the tower as the screen gave three or four violent
bursts of green fire and went dark.
The block tower fell with a crash.
Moments later Lessing was back in the observation room, leaving the
children busily putting the tower back together. There was a little
smile on his lips as he saw Melrose's face. "Perhaps you're beginning
to see what I'm driving at," he said slowly.
"Yes," said Melrose. "I think I'm beginning to see." He scratched his
jaw. "You think that it's adult psi-contact that drives the child's
potential underground—that somehow adult contact acts like a damper, a
sort of colossal candle-snuffer."
"That's what I think," said Lessing.
"How do you know those children didn't make you take off your monitor?"
Lessing blinked. "Why should they?"
"Maybe they enjoy the crash when the blocks fall down."
"But that wouldn't make any difference, would it? The blocks still fall
down."
Melrose paced down the narrow room. "This is very good," he said
suddenly, his voice earnest. "You have fine facilities here, good
workers. And in spite of my flippancy, Dr. Lessing, I have never
imagined for a moment that you were not an acute observer and a
careful, highly imaginative worker. But suppose I told you, in perfect
faith, that we have data that flatly contradicts everything you've told
me today. Reproducible data, utterly incompatable with yours. What
would you say to that?"
"I'd say you were wrong," said Lessing. "You couldn't have such data.
According to the things I am certain are true, what you're saying is
sheer nonsense."
"And you'd express that opinion in a professional meeting?"
"I would."
"And as an Authority on psionic behavior patterns," said Melrose
slowly, "you would kill us then and there. You would strangle us
professionally, discredit anything we did, cut us off cold." The
tall man turned on him fiercely. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see
what danger you're in? If you publish your book now, you will become
an Authority in a field where the most devastating thing that could
possibly happen would be—
the appearance of an Authority
."
Lessing and Dorffman rode back to the Hoffman Center in grim silence.
At first Lessing pretended to work; finally he snapped off the tape
recorder in disgust and stared out the shuttle-car window. Melrose had
gone on to Idlewild to catch a jet back to Chicago. It was a relief to
see him go, Lessing thought, and tried to force the thin, angry man
firmly out of his mind. But somehow Melrose wouldn't force.
"Stop worrying about it," Dorffman urged. "He's a crackpot. He's
crawled way out on a limb, and now he's afraid your theory is going to
cut it off under him. Well, that's his worry, not yours." Dorffman's
face was intense. "Scientifically, you're on unshakeable ground. Every
great researcher has people like Melrose sniping at him. You just have
to throw them off and keep going."
Lessing shook his head. "Maybe. But this field of work is different
from any other, Jack. It doesn't follow the rules. Maybe scientific
grounds aren't right at all, in this case."
Dorffman snorted. "Surely there's nothing wrong with theorizing—"
"He wasn't objecting to the theory. He's afraid of what happens after
the theory."
"So it seems. But why?"
"Have you ever considered what makes a man an Authority?"
"He knows more about his field than anybody else does."
"He
seems
to, you mean. And therefore, anything he says about it
carries more weight than what anybody else says. Other workers follow
his lead. He developes ideas, formulates theories—and then
defends
them for all he's worth
."
"But why shouldn't he?"
"Because a man can't fight for his life and reputation and still keep
his objectivity," said Lessing. "And what if he just happens to be
wrong? Once he's an Authority the question of what's right and what's
wrong gets lost in the shuffle. It's
what he says
that counts."
"But we
know
you're right," Dorffman protested.
"Do we?"
"Of course we do! Look at our work! Look at what we've seen on the
Farm."
"Yes, I know." Lessing's voice was weary. "But first I think we'd
better look at Tommy Gilman, and the quicker we look, the better—"
A nurse greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. "We called
you at the Farm, but you'd already left. The boy—" She broke off
helplessly. "He's sick, Doctor. He's sicker than we ever imagined."
"What happened?"
"Nothing exactly—happened. I don't quite know how to describe it."
She hurried them down the corridor and opened a door into a large
children's playroom. "See what you think."
The boy sat stolidly in the corner of the room. He looked up as they
came in, but there was no flicker of recognition or pleasure on his
pale face. The monitor helmet was still on his head. He just sat there,
gripping a toy fire engine tightly in his hands.
Lessing crossed the room swiftly. "Tommy," he said.
The boy didn't even look at him. He stared stupidly at the fire engine.
"Tommy!" Lessing reached out for the toy. The boy drew back in terror,
clutching it to his chest. "Go away," he choked. "Go away, go away—"
When Lessing persisted the boy bent over swiftly and bit him hard on
the hand.
Lessing sat down on the table. "Tommy, listen to me." His voice was
gentle. "I won't try to take it again. I promise."
"Go away."
"Do you know who I am?"
Tommy's eyes shifted haltingly to Lessing's face. He nodded. "Go away."
"Why are you afraid, Tommy?"
"I hurt. My head hurts. I hurt all over. Go away."
"Why do you hurt?"
"I—can't get it—off," the boy said.
The monitor
, Lessing thought suddenly. Something had suddenly gone
horribly wrong—could the boy really be sensing the source of the
trouble? Lessing felt a cold knot gather in the pit of his stomach. He
knew what happened when adult psi-contact struck a psi-high youngster's
mind. He had seen it a hundred times at the Farm. But even more—he
had felt it in his own mind, bursting from the child. Like a violent
physical blow, the hate and fear and suspicion and cruelty buried and
repressed in the adult mind, crushing suddenly into the raw receptors
of the child's mind like a smothering fog—it was a fearful thing. A
healthy youngster could survive it, even though the scar remained. But
this youngster was sick—
And yet
an animal instinctively seeks its own protection
. With
trembling fingers Lessing reached out and opened the baffle-snap on the
monitor. "Take it off, Tommy," he whispered.
The boy blinked in amazement, and pulled the grey helmet from his head.
Lessing felt the familiar prickly feeling run down his scalp as the
boy stared at him. He could feel deep in his own mind the cold chill
of terror radiating from the boy. Then, suddenly, it began to fade. A
sense of warmth—peace and security and comfort—swept in as the fear
faded from the boy's face.
The fire engine clattered to the floor.
They analyzed the tapes later, punching the data cards with greatest
care, filing them through the machines for the basic processing and
classification that all their data underwent. It was late that night
when they had the report back in their hands.
Dorffman stared at it angrily. "It's obviously wrong," he grated. "It
doesn't fit. Dave, it doesn't agree with
anything
we've observed
before. There must be an error."
"Of course," said Lessing. "According to the theory. The theory says
that adult psi-contact is deadly to the growing child. It smothers
their potential through repeated contact until it dries up completely.
We've proved that, haven't we? Time after time. Everything goes
according to the theory—except Tommy. But Tommy's psi-potential was
drying up there on the Farm, until the distortion was threatening the
balance of his mind. Then he made an adult contact, and we saw how he
bloomed." Lessing sank down to his desk wearily. "What are we going to
do, Jack? Formulate a separate theory for Tommy?"
"Of course not," said Dorffman. "The instruments were wrong. Somehow we
misread the data—"
"Didn't you see his
face
?" Lessing burst out. "Didn't you see how he
acted
? What do you want with an instrument reading?" He shook his
head. "It's no good, Jack. Something different happened here, something
we'd never counted on. It's something the theory just doesn't allow
for."
They sat silently for a while. Then Dorffman said: "What are you going
to do?"
"I don't know," said Lessing. "Maybe when we fell into this bramble
bush we blinded ourselves with the urge to classify—to line everything
up in neat rows like pins in a paper. Maybe we were so blind we missed
the path altogether."
"But the book is due! The Conference speech—"
"I think we'll make some changes in the book," Lessing said slowly.
"It'll be costly—but it might even be fun. It's a pretty dry, logical
presentation of ideas, as it stands. Very austere and authoritarian.
But a few revisions could change all that—" He rubbed his hands
together thoughtfully. "How about it, Jack? Do we have nerve enough to
be laughed at? Do you think we could stand a little discredit, making
silly asses of ourselves? Because when I finish this book, we'll be
laughed out of existence. There won't be any Authority in psionics for
a while—and maybe that way one of the lads who's
really
sniffing out
the trail will get somebody to listen to him!
"Get a pad, get a pencil! We've got work to do. And when we finish, I
think we'll send a carbon copy out Chicago way. Might even persuade
that puppy out there to come here and work for me—" | The Farm is Dr. Lessing's home in the country. | The Farm is a compound where they research the psionic abilities of children. | The Farm is where they train CIA agents with telekinetic abilities. | The Farm is where they do genetic testing on children to give them psychic abilities. | 1 |
60291_XQ25ASO2_2 | Why will adult psi contact hurt the children? | BRAMBLE BUSH
BY ALAN E. NOURSE
There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise;
He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw what he had done, with all his might and main
He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again.
MOTHER GOOSE
Dr. David Lessing found Jack Dorffman and the boy waiting in his office
when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. Dorffman looked as
though he'd been running all night. There were dark pouches under his
eyes; his heavy unshaven face seemed to sag at every crease. Lessing
glanced sharply at his Field Director and sank down behind his desk
with a sigh. "All right, Jack—what's wrong?"
"This kid is driving me nuts," said Dorffman through clenched teeth.
"He's gone completely hay-wire. Nobody's been able to get near him
for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's
leaving the Farm. I talk to him, I sweat him down, I do everything but
tie him to the bed, and I waste my time. He's leaving the Farm. Period."
"So you bring him down here," said Lessing sourly. "The worst place he
could be, if something's really wrong." He looked across at the boy.
"Tommy? Come over and sit down."
There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin,
with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal
eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward
grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute
appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and
blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape.
The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear.
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently.
"I don't want to go back to the Farm," said the boy.
"Why?"
"I just don't. I hate it there."
"Are you frightened?"
The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly.
"Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?"
"No. Oh, no!"
"Then what?"
Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none
came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off—" He fingered
the grey plastic helmet.
"You think
that
would make you feel better?"
"It would, I know it would."
Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the
monitor is for, don't you?"
"It stops things from going out."
"That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator.
You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off,
away from the Farm."
The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there—" The
fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I
never want to go back."
"Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at
Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has
been going on for
three weeks
?"
"I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern—we see so
much of that up there."
"I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better
set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid
you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to
deal with this morning—the one who's threatening to upset the whole
Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with.
I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing
ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy
downstairs."
"Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman.
"Certainly! And Jack—in this case, be
sure
of it. If Tommy's in the
trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact
now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands."
Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was
from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book,
and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled.
Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical
Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck
up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm—yet he
hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And now, as the book
approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really
get back to work again.
The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the
International Psionics Conference:
Dear Dr. Lessing:
In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic
behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle
speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October 12th. A few remarks in
discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order—
They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the
scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His
earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going—but the
book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A
Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good
title—concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right.
And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a
guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and
baffling new science.
For they were floundering. When they were finally forced to recognize
that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds,
with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had
plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening
bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. Nothing worked, and
everything worked too well. They were trying to study phenomena which
made no sense, observing things that defied logic. Natural laws came
crashing down about their ears as they stood sadly by and watched
things happen which natural law said could never happen. They had never
been in this jungle before, nor in any jungle remotely like it. The
old rules didn't work here, the old methods of study failed. And the
more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush
became—
But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a
theory to work by—
At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "A gentleman to see you," the girl
said. "A Dr. Melrose. He's very impatient, sir."
He shut off the scanner and said, "Send him in, please."
Dr. Peter Melrose was tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark
mocking eyes. He wore a threadbare sport coat and a slouch. He offered
Lessing a bony hand, then flung himself into a chair as he stared about
the office in awe.
"I'm really overwhelmed," he said after a moment. "Within the
stronghold of psionic research at last. And face to face with the
Master in the trembling flesh!"
Lessing frowned. "Dr. Melrose, I don't quite understand—"
"Oh, it's just that I'm impressed," the young man said airily. "Of
course, I've seen old dried-up Authorities before—but never before
a brand spanking new one, just fresh out of the pupa, so to speak!"
He touched his forehead in a gesture of reverence. "I bow before the
Oracle. Speak, oh Motah, live forever! Cast a pearl at my feet!"
"If you've come here to be insulting," Lessing said coldly, "you're
just wasting time." He reached for the intercom switch.
"I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply,
"because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month
unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. And if you
don't think I can do it, you're in for quite a dumping."
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me—just what, exactly, do you want?"
"I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of
'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in
Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental
controls you keep talking about will actually bear. But mostly, I want
to see just what in psionic hell you're so busy making yourself an
Authority about." There was no laughter in the man's sharp brown eyes.
"You couldn't touch me with a ten foot pole at this conference,"
snapped Lessing.
The other man grinned. "Try me! We shook you up a little bit last year,
but you didn't seem to get the idea."
"Last year was different." Lessing scowled. "As for our 'fairy tale',
we happen to have a staggering body of evidence that says that it's
true."
"If the papers you've already published are a preview, we think it's
false as Satan."
"And our controls are above suspicion."
"So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said
Melrose. "We've done a lot of work on it, too."
"Oh, yes—I've heard about your work. Not bad, really. A little
misdirected, is all."
"According to your Theory, that is."
"Wildly unorthodox approach to psionics—but at least you're energetic
enough."
"We haven't been energetic enough to find an orthodox approach that got
us anywhere. We doubt if you have, either. But maybe we're all wrong."
Melrose grinned unpleasantly. "We're not unreasonable, your Majesty. We
just ask to be shown. If you dare, that is."
Lessing slammed his fist down on the desk angrily. "Have you got the
day to take a trip?"
"I've got 'til New Year."
Lessing shouted for his girl. "Get Dorffman up here. We're going to the
Farm this afternoon."
The girl nodded, then hesitated. "But what about your lunch?"
"Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest
here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us...."
Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels
and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the
Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the
rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in
the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing
briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the
long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less
than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed
north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside.
"What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along
through the afternoon sun.
"I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating."
Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of
beating the bushes with this—" He broke off to glare at young Melrose.
Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here."
"It's—unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped.
"Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day
school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even
used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here."
"Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying
to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis."
"Of course, you're sure you were measuring
something
."
"Oh, yes. We certainly were."
"Yet you said that you didn't know what."
"That's right," said Lessing. "We don't."
"And you don't know
why
your instruments measure whatever they're
measuring." The Chicago man's face was thoughtful. "In fact, you can't
really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at
all. It's not inconceivable that the
children
might be measuring the
instruments
, eh?"
Lessing blinked. "It's conceivable."
"Mmmm," said Melrose. "Sounds like a real firm foundation to build a
theory on."
"Why not?" Lessing growled. "It wouldn't be the first time the tail
wagged the dog. The psychiatrists never would have gotten out of their
rut if somebody hadn't gotten smart and realized that one of their new
drugs worked better in combatting schizophrenia when the doctor took
the medicine instead of the patient. That was quite a wall to climb."
"Yes, wasn't it," mused Melrose, scratching his bony jaw. "Only took
them seventy years to climb it, thanks to a certain man's theories.
I wonder how long it'll take psionics to crawl out of the pit you're
digging for it?"
"We're not digging any pit," Lessing exploded angrily. "We're
exploring—nothing more. A phenomenon exists. We've known that, one way
or another, for centuries. The fact that it doesn't seem to be bound by
the same sort of natural law we've observed elsewhere doesn't mean that
it isn't governed by natural law. But how can we define the law? How
can we define the limits of the phenomenon, for that matter? We can't
work in the dark forever—we've
got
to have a working hypothesis to
guide us."
"So you dreamed up this 'tadpole' idea," said Melrose sourly.
"For a working hypothesis—yes. We've known for a long time that every
human being has extrasensory potential to one degree or another. Not
just a few here and there—every single one. It's a differentiating
quality of the human mind. Just as the ability to think logically in a
crisis instead of giving way to panic is a differentiating quality."
"Fine," said Melrose. "Great. We can't
prove
that, of course, but
I'll play along."
Lessing glared at him. "When we began studying this psi-potential, we
found out some curious things. For one thing, it seemed to be immensely
more powerful and active in infants and children than in adults.
Somewhere along the line as a child grows up, something happens. We
don't know what. We do know that the child's psi-potential gradually
withdraws deeper and deeper into his mind, burying itself farther and
farther out of reach, just the way a tadpole's tail is absorbed deeper
and deeper into the growing frog until there just isn't any tail any
more." Lessing paused, packing tobacco into his pipe. "That's why we
have the Farm—to try to discover why. What forces that potential
underground? What buries it so deeply that adult human beings can't get
at it any more?"
"And you think you have an answer," said Melrose.
"We think we might be near an answer. We have a theory that explains
the available data."
The shuttle car bounced sharply as it left the highway automatics.
Dorffman took the controls. In a few moments they were skimming through
the high white gates of the Farm, slowing down at the entrance to a
long, low building.
"All right, young man—come along," said Lessing. "I think we can show
you our answer."
In the main office building they donned the close-fitting psionic
monitors required of all personnel at the Farm. They were of a
hard grey plastic material, with a network of wiring buried in the
substance, connected to a simple pocket-sized power source.
"The major problem," Lessing said, "has been to shield the children
from any external psionic stimuli, except those we wished to expose
them to. Our goal is a perfectly controlled psi environment. The
monitors are quite effective—a simple Renwick scrambler screen."
"It blocks off all types of psi activity?" asked Melrose.
"As far as we can measure, yes."
"Which may not be very far."
Jack Dorffman burst in: "What Dr. Lessing is saying is that they seem
effective for our purposes."
"But you don't know why," added Melrose.
"All right, we don't know why. Nobody knows why a Renwick screen
works—why blame us?" They were walking down the main corridor and out
through an open areaway. Behind the buildings was a broad playground. A
baseball game was in progress in one corner; across the field a group
of swings, slides, ring bars and other playground paraphernalia was in
heavy use. The place was teeming with youngsters, all shouting in a
fury of busy activity. Occasionally a helmeted supervisor hurried by;
one waved to them as she rescued a four-year-old from the parallel bars.
They crossed into the next building, where classes were in progress.
"Some of our children are here only briefly," Lessing explained as
they walked along, "and some have been here for years. We maintain a
top-ranking curriculum—your idea of a 'country day school' wasn't
so far afield at that—with scholarships supported by Hoffman Center
funds. Other children come to us—foundlings, desertees, children from
broken homes, children of all ages from infancy on. Sometimes they
stay until they have reached college age, or go on to jobs. As far as
psionics research is concerned, we are not trying to be teachers. We
are strictly observers. We try to place the youngsters in positions
where they can develope what potential they have—
without
the
presence of external psionic influences they would normally be subject
to. The results have been remarkable."
He led them into a long, narrow room with chairs and ash trays, facing
a wide grey glass wall. The room fell into darkness, and through the
grey glass they could see three children, about four years old, playing
in a large room.
"They're perfectly insulated from us," said Lessing. "A variety of
recording instruments are working. And before you ask, Dr. Melrose,
they are all empirical instruments, and they would all defy any
engineer's attempts to determine what makes them go. We don't know what
makes them go, and we don't care—they go. That's all we need. Like
that one, for instance—"
In the corner a flat screen was flickering, emitting a pale green
fluorescent light. It hung from the wall by two plastic rods which
penetrated into the children's room. There was no sign of a switch,
nor a power source. As the children moved about, the screen flickered.
Below it, a recording-tape clicked along in little spurts and starts of
activity.
"What are they doing?" Melrose asked after watching the children a few
moments.
"Those three seem to work as a team, somehow. Each one, individually,
had a fairly constant recordable psi potential of about seventeen on
the arbitrary scale we find useful here. Any two of them scale in at
thirty-four to thirty-six. Put the three together and they operate
somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred on the same scale."
Lessing smiled. "This is an isolated phenomenon—it doesn't hold for
any other three children on the Farm. Nor did we make any effort to
place them together—they drew each other like magnets. One of our
workers spent two weeks trying to find out why the instruments weren't
right. It wasn't the instruments, of course."
Lessing nodded to an attendant, and peered around at Melrose. "Now, I
want you to watch this very closely."
He opened a door and walked into the room with the children. The
fluorescent screen continued to flicker as the children ran to Lessing.
He inspected the block tower they were building, and stooped down to
talk to them, his lips moving soundlessly behind the observation wall.
The children laughed and jabbered, apparently intrigued by the game he
was proposing. He walked to the table and tapped the bottom block in
the tower with his thumb.
The tower quivered, and the screen blazed out with green light, but the
tower stood. Carefully Lessing jogged all the foundation blocks out of
place until the tower hung in midair, clearly unsupported. The children
watched it closely, and the foundation blocks inched still further out
of place....
Then, quite casually, Lessing lifted off his monitor. The children
continued staring at the tower as the screen gave three or four violent
bursts of green fire and went dark.
The block tower fell with a crash.
Moments later Lessing was back in the observation room, leaving the
children busily putting the tower back together. There was a little
smile on his lips as he saw Melrose's face. "Perhaps you're beginning
to see what I'm driving at," he said slowly.
"Yes," said Melrose. "I think I'm beginning to see." He scratched his
jaw. "You think that it's adult psi-contact that drives the child's
potential underground—that somehow adult contact acts like a damper, a
sort of colossal candle-snuffer."
"That's what I think," said Lessing.
"How do you know those children didn't make you take off your monitor?"
Lessing blinked. "Why should they?"
"Maybe they enjoy the crash when the blocks fall down."
"But that wouldn't make any difference, would it? The blocks still fall
down."
Melrose paced down the narrow room. "This is very good," he said
suddenly, his voice earnest. "You have fine facilities here, good
workers. And in spite of my flippancy, Dr. Lessing, I have never
imagined for a moment that you were not an acute observer and a
careful, highly imaginative worker. But suppose I told you, in perfect
faith, that we have data that flatly contradicts everything you've told
me today. Reproducible data, utterly incompatable with yours. What
would you say to that?"
"I'd say you were wrong," said Lessing. "You couldn't have such data.
According to the things I am certain are true, what you're saying is
sheer nonsense."
"And you'd express that opinion in a professional meeting?"
"I would."
"And as an Authority on psionic behavior patterns," said Melrose
slowly, "you would kill us then and there. You would strangle us
professionally, discredit anything we did, cut us off cold." The
tall man turned on him fiercely. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see
what danger you're in? If you publish your book now, you will become
an Authority in a field where the most devastating thing that could
possibly happen would be—
the appearance of an Authority
."
Lessing and Dorffman rode back to the Hoffman Center in grim silence.
At first Lessing pretended to work; finally he snapped off the tape
recorder in disgust and stared out the shuttle-car window. Melrose had
gone on to Idlewild to catch a jet back to Chicago. It was a relief to
see him go, Lessing thought, and tried to force the thin, angry man
firmly out of his mind. But somehow Melrose wouldn't force.
"Stop worrying about it," Dorffman urged. "He's a crackpot. He's
crawled way out on a limb, and now he's afraid your theory is going to
cut it off under him. Well, that's his worry, not yours." Dorffman's
face was intense. "Scientifically, you're on unshakeable ground. Every
great researcher has people like Melrose sniping at him. You just have
to throw them off and keep going."
Lessing shook his head. "Maybe. But this field of work is different
from any other, Jack. It doesn't follow the rules. Maybe scientific
grounds aren't right at all, in this case."
Dorffman snorted. "Surely there's nothing wrong with theorizing—"
"He wasn't objecting to the theory. He's afraid of what happens after
the theory."
"So it seems. But why?"
"Have you ever considered what makes a man an Authority?"
"He knows more about his field than anybody else does."
"He
seems
to, you mean. And therefore, anything he says about it
carries more weight than what anybody else says. Other workers follow
his lead. He developes ideas, formulates theories—and then
defends
them for all he's worth
."
"But why shouldn't he?"
"Because a man can't fight for his life and reputation and still keep
his objectivity," said Lessing. "And what if he just happens to be
wrong? Once he's an Authority the question of what's right and what's
wrong gets lost in the shuffle. It's
what he says
that counts."
"But we
know
you're right," Dorffman protested.
"Do we?"
"Of course we do! Look at our work! Look at what we've seen on the
Farm."
"Yes, I know." Lessing's voice was weary. "But first I think we'd
better look at Tommy Gilman, and the quicker we look, the better—"
A nurse greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. "We called
you at the Farm, but you'd already left. The boy—" She broke off
helplessly. "He's sick, Doctor. He's sicker than we ever imagined."
"What happened?"
"Nothing exactly—happened. I don't quite know how to describe it."
She hurried them down the corridor and opened a door into a large
children's playroom. "See what you think."
The boy sat stolidly in the corner of the room. He looked up as they
came in, but there was no flicker of recognition or pleasure on his
pale face. The monitor helmet was still on his head. He just sat there,
gripping a toy fire engine tightly in his hands.
Lessing crossed the room swiftly. "Tommy," he said.
The boy didn't even look at him. He stared stupidly at the fire engine.
"Tommy!" Lessing reached out for the toy. The boy drew back in terror,
clutching it to his chest. "Go away," he choked. "Go away, go away—"
When Lessing persisted the boy bent over swiftly and bit him hard on
the hand.
Lessing sat down on the table. "Tommy, listen to me." His voice was
gentle. "I won't try to take it again. I promise."
"Go away."
"Do you know who I am?"
Tommy's eyes shifted haltingly to Lessing's face. He nodded. "Go away."
"Why are you afraid, Tommy?"
"I hurt. My head hurts. I hurt all over. Go away."
"Why do you hurt?"
"I—can't get it—off," the boy said.
The monitor
, Lessing thought suddenly. Something had suddenly gone
horribly wrong—could the boy really be sensing the source of the
trouble? Lessing felt a cold knot gather in the pit of his stomach. He
knew what happened when adult psi-contact struck a psi-high youngster's
mind. He had seen it a hundred times at the Farm. But even more—he
had felt it in his own mind, bursting from the child. Like a violent
physical blow, the hate and fear and suspicion and cruelty buried and
repressed in the adult mind, crushing suddenly into the raw receptors
of the child's mind like a smothering fog—it was a fearful thing. A
healthy youngster could survive it, even though the scar remained. But
this youngster was sick—
And yet
an animal instinctively seeks its own protection
. With
trembling fingers Lessing reached out and opened the baffle-snap on the
monitor. "Take it off, Tommy," he whispered.
The boy blinked in amazement, and pulled the grey helmet from his head.
Lessing felt the familiar prickly feeling run down his scalp as the
boy stared at him. He could feel deep in his own mind the cold chill
of terror radiating from the boy. Then, suddenly, it began to fade. A
sense of warmth—peace and security and comfort—swept in as the fear
faded from the boy's face.
The fire engine clattered to the floor.
They analyzed the tapes later, punching the data cards with greatest
care, filing them through the machines for the basic processing and
classification that all their data underwent. It was late that night
when they had the report back in their hands.
Dorffman stared at it angrily. "It's obviously wrong," he grated. "It
doesn't fit. Dave, it doesn't agree with
anything
we've observed
before. There must be an error."
"Of course," said Lessing. "According to the theory. The theory says
that adult psi-contact is deadly to the growing child. It smothers
their potential through repeated contact until it dries up completely.
We've proved that, haven't we? Time after time. Everything goes
according to the theory—except Tommy. But Tommy's psi-potential was
drying up there on the Farm, until the distortion was threatening the
balance of his mind. Then he made an adult contact, and we saw how he
bloomed." Lessing sank down to his desk wearily. "What are we going to
do, Jack? Formulate a separate theory for Tommy?"
"Of course not," said Dorffman. "The instruments were wrong. Somehow we
misread the data—"
"Didn't you see his
face
?" Lessing burst out. "Didn't you see how he
acted
? What do you want with an instrument reading?" He shook his
head. "It's no good, Jack. Something different happened here, something
we'd never counted on. It's something the theory just doesn't allow
for."
They sat silently for a while. Then Dorffman said: "What are you going
to do?"
"I don't know," said Lessing. "Maybe when we fell into this bramble
bush we blinded ourselves with the urge to classify—to line everything
up in neat rows like pins in a paper. Maybe we were so blind we missed
the path altogether."
"But the book is due! The Conference speech—"
"I think we'll make some changes in the book," Lessing said slowly.
"It'll be costly—but it might even be fun. It's a pretty dry, logical
presentation of ideas, as it stands. Very austere and authoritarian.
But a few revisions could change all that—" He rubbed his hands
together thoughtfully. "How about it, Jack? Do we have nerve enough to
be laughed at? Do you think we could stand a little discredit, making
silly asses of ourselves? Because when I finish this book, we'll be
laughed out of existence. There won't be any Authority in psionics for
a while—and maybe that way one of the lads who's
really
sniffing out
the trail will get somebody to listen to him!
"Get a pad, get a pencil! We've got work to do. And when we finish, I
think we'll send a carbon copy out Chicago way. Might even persuade
that puppy out there to come here and work for me—" | Adult psi contact increases a child's psionic ability so much it can cause a psychotic break. | Adult psi contact overwhelms the children's brains. It gives them migraines. | Adult psi contact overwhelms the children's nervous systems. It gives them nose bleeds. | Adult psi contact dampens the children's natural psionic abilities. Eventually, adult psi contact will snuff out a child's abilities altogether. | 3 |
60291_XQ25ASO2_3 | Why doesn't Tommy want to go back to the Farm? | BRAMBLE BUSH
BY ALAN E. NOURSE
There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise;
He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw what he had done, with all his might and main
He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again.
MOTHER GOOSE
Dr. David Lessing found Jack Dorffman and the boy waiting in his office
when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. Dorffman looked as
though he'd been running all night. There were dark pouches under his
eyes; his heavy unshaven face seemed to sag at every crease. Lessing
glanced sharply at his Field Director and sank down behind his desk
with a sigh. "All right, Jack—what's wrong?"
"This kid is driving me nuts," said Dorffman through clenched teeth.
"He's gone completely hay-wire. Nobody's been able to get near him
for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's
leaving the Farm. I talk to him, I sweat him down, I do everything but
tie him to the bed, and I waste my time. He's leaving the Farm. Period."
"So you bring him down here," said Lessing sourly. "The worst place he
could be, if something's really wrong." He looked across at the boy.
"Tommy? Come over and sit down."
There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin,
with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal
eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward
grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute
appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and
blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape.
The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear.
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently.
"I don't want to go back to the Farm," said the boy.
"Why?"
"I just don't. I hate it there."
"Are you frightened?"
The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly.
"Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?"
"No. Oh, no!"
"Then what?"
Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none
came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off—" He fingered
the grey plastic helmet.
"You think
that
would make you feel better?"
"It would, I know it would."
Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the
monitor is for, don't you?"
"It stops things from going out."
"That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator.
You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off,
away from the Farm."
The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there—" The
fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I
never want to go back."
"Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at
Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has
been going on for
three weeks
?"
"I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern—we see so
much of that up there."
"I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better
set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid
you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to
deal with this morning—the one who's threatening to upset the whole
Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with.
I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing
ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy
downstairs."
"Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman.
"Certainly! And Jack—in this case, be
sure
of it. If Tommy's in the
trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact
now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands."
Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was
from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book,
and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled.
Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical
Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck
up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm—yet he
hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And now, as the book
approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really
get back to work again.
The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the
International Psionics Conference:
Dear Dr. Lessing:
In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic
behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle
speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October 12th. A few remarks in
discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order—
They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the
scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His
earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going—but the
book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A
Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good
title—concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right.
And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a
guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and
baffling new science.
For they were floundering. When they were finally forced to recognize
that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds,
with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had
plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening
bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. Nothing worked, and
everything worked too well. They were trying to study phenomena which
made no sense, observing things that defied logic. Natural laws came
crashing down about their ears as they stood sadly by and watched
things happen which natural law said could never happen. They had never
been in this jungle before, nor in any jungle remotely like it. The
old rules didn't work here, the old methods of study failed. And the
more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush
became—
But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a
theory to work by—
At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "A gentleman to see you," the girl
said. "A Dr. Melrose. He's very impatient, sir."
He shut off the scanner and said, "Send him in, please."
Dr. Peter Melrose was tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark
mocking eyes. He wore a threadbare sport coat and a slouch. He offered
Lessing a bony hand, then flung himself into a chair as he stared about
the office in awe.
"I'm really overwhelmed," he said after a moment. "Within the
stronghold of psionic research at last. And face to face with the
Master in the trembling flesh!"
Lessing frowned. "Dr. Melrose, I don't quite understand—"
"Oh, it's just that I'm impressed," the young man said airily. "Of
course, I've seen old dried-up Authorities before—but never before
a brand spanking new one, just fresh out of the pupa, so to speak!"
He touched his forehead in a gesture of reverence. "I bow before the
Oracle. Speak, oh Motah, live forever! Cast a pearl at my feet!"
"If you've come here to be insulting," Lessing said coldly, "you're
just wasting time." He reached for the intercom switch.
"I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply,
"because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month
unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. And if you
don't think I can do it, you're in for quite a dumping."
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me—just what, exactly, do you want?"
"I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of
'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in
Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental
controls you keep talking about will actually bear. But mostly, I want
to see just what in psionic hell you're so busy making yourself an
Authority about." There was no laughter in the man's sharp brown eyes.
"You couldn't touch me with a ten foot pole at this conference,"
snapped Lessing.
The other man grinned. "Try me! We shook you up a little bit last year,
but you didn't seem to get the idea."
"Last year was different." Lessing scowled. "As for our 'fairy tale',
we happen to have a staggering body of evidence that says that it's
true."
"If the papers you've already published are a preview, we think it's
false as Satan."
"And our controls are above suspicion."
"So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said
Melrose. "We've done a lot of work on it, too."
"Oh, yes—I've heard about your work. Not bad, really. A little
misdirected, is all."
"According to your Theory, that is."
"Wildly unorthodox approach to psionics—but at least you're energetic
enough."
"We haven't been energetic enough to find an orthodox approach that got
us anywhere. We doubt if you have, either. But maybe we're all wrong."
Melrose grinned unpleasantly. "We're not unreasonable, your Majesty. We
just ask to be shown. If you dare, that is."
Lessing slammed his fist down on the desk angrily. "Have you got the
day to take a trip?"
"I've got 'til New Year."
Lessing shouted for his girl. "Get Dorffman up here. We're going to the
Farm this afternoon."
The girl nodded, then hesitated. "But what about your lunch?"
"Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest
here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us...."
Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels
and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the
Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the
rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in
the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing
briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the
long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less
than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed
north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside.
"What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along
through the afternoon sun.
"I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating."
Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of
beating the bushes with this—" He broke off to glare at young Melrose.
Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here."
"It's—unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped.
"Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day
school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even
used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here."
"Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying
to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis."
"Of course, you're sure you were measuring
something
."
"Oh, yes. We certainly were."
"Yet you said that you didn't know what."
"That's right," said Lessing. "We don't."
"And you don't know
why
your instruments measure whatever they're
measuring." The Chicago man's face was thoughtful. "In fact, you can't
really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at
all. It's not inconceivable that the
children
might be measuring the
instruments
, eh?"
Lessing blinked. "It's conceivable."
"Mmmm," said Melrose. "Sounds like a real firm foundation to build a
theory on."
"Why not?" Lessing growled. "It wouldn't be the first time the tail
wagged the dog. The psychiatrists never would have gotten out of their
rut if somebody hadn't gotten smart and realized that one of their new
drugs worked better in combatting schizophrenia when the doctor took
the medicine instead of the patient. That was quite a wall to climb."
"Yes, wasn't it," mused Melrose, scratching his bony jaw. "Only took
them seventy years to climb it, thanks to a certain man's theories.
I wonder how long it'll take psionics to crawl out of the pit you're
digging for it?"
"We're not digging any pit," Lessing exploded angrily. "We're
exploring—nothing more. A phenomenon exists. We've known that, one way
or another, for centuries. The fact that it doesn't seem to be bound by
the same sort of natural law we've observed elsewhere doesn't mean that
it isn't governed by natural law. But how can we define the law? How
can we define the limits of the phenomenon, for that matter? We can't
work in the dark forever—we've
got
to have a working hypothesis to
guide us."
"So you dreamed up this 'tadpole' idea," said Melrose sourly.
"For a working hypothesis—yes. We've known for a long time that every
human being has extrasensory potential to one degree or another. Not
just a few here and there—every single one. It's a differentiating
quality of the human mind. Just as the ability to think logically in a
crisis instead of giving way to panic is a differentiating quality."
"Fine," said Melrose. "Great. We can't
prove
that, of course, but
I'll play along."
Lessing glared at him. "When we began studying this psi-potential, we
found out some curious things. For one thing, it seemed to be immensely
more powerful and active in infants and children than in adults.
Somewhere along the line as a child grows up, something happens. We
don't know what. We do know that the child's psi-potential gradually
withdraws deeper and deeper into his mind, burying itself farther and
farther out of reach, just the way a tadpole's tail is absorbed deeper
and deeper into the growing frog until there just isn't any tail any
more." Lessing paused, packing tobacco into his pipe. "That's why we
have the Farm—to try to discover why. What forces that potential
underground? What buries it so deeply that adult human beings can't get
at it any more?"
"And you think you have an answer," said Melrose.
"We think we might be near an answer. We have a theory that explains
the available data."
The shuttle car bounced sharply as it left the highway automatics.
Dorffman took the controls. In a few moments they were skimming through
the high white gates of the Farm, slowing down at the entrance to a
long, low building.
"All right, young man—come along," said Lessing. "I think we can show
you our answer."
In the main office building they donned the close-fitting psionic
monitors required of all personnel at the Farm. They were of a
hard grey plastic material, with a network of wiring buried in the
substance, connected to a simple pocket-sized power source.
"The major problem," Lessing said, "has been to shield the children
from any external psionic stimuli, except those we wished to expose
them to. Our goal is a perfectly controlled psi environment. The
monitors are quite effective—a simple Renwick scrambler screen."
"It blocks off all types of psi activity?" asked Melrose.
"As far as we can measure, yes."
"Which may not be very far."
Jack Dorffman burst in: "What Dr. Lessing is saying is that they seem
effective for our purposes."
"But you don't know why," added Melrose.
"All right, we don't know why. Nobody knows why a Renwick screen
works—why blame us?" They were walking down the main corridor and out
through an open areaway. Behind the buildings was a broad playground. A
baseball game was in progress in one corner; across the field a group
of swings, slides, ring bars and other playground paraphernalia was in
heavy use. The place was teeming with youngsters, all shouting in a
fury of busy activity. Occasionally a helmeted supervisor hurried by;
one waved to them as she rescued a four-year-old from the parallel bars.
They crossed into the next building, where classes were in progress.
"Some of our children are here only briefly," Lessing explained as
they walked along, "and some have been here for years. We maintain a
top-ranking curriculum—your idea of a 'country day school' wasn't
so far afield at that—with scholarships supported by Hoffman Center
funds. Other children come to us—foundlings, desertees, children from
broken homes, children of all ages from infancy on. Sometimes they
stay until they have reached college age, or go on to jobs. As far as
psionics research is concerned, we are not trying to be teachers. We
are strictly observers. We try to place the youngsters in positions
where they can develope what potential they have—
without
the
presence of external psionic influences they would normally be subject
to. The results have been remarkable."
He led them into a long, narrow room with chairs and ash trays, facing
a wide grey glass wall. The room fell into darkness, and through the
grey glass they could see three children, about four years old, playing
in a large room.
"They're perfectly insulated from us," said Lessing. "A variety of
recording instruments are working. And before you ask, Dr. Melrose,
they are all empirical instruments, and they would all defy any
engineer's attempts to determine what makes them go. We don't know what
makes them go, and we don't care—they go. That's all we need. Like
that one, for instance—"
In the corner a flat screen was flickering, emitting a pale green
fluorescent light. It hung from the wall by two plastic rods which
penetrated into the children's room. There was no sign of a switch,
nor a power source. As the children moved about, the screen flickered.
Below it, a recording-tape clicked along in little spurts and starts of
activity.
"What are they doing?" Melrose asked after watching the children a few
moments.
"Those three seem to work as a team, somehow. Each one, individually,
had a fairly constant recordable psi potential of about seventeen on
the arbitrary scale we find useful here. Any two of them scale in at
thirty-four to thirty-six. Put the three together and they operate
somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred on the same scale."
Lessing smiled. "This is an isolated phenomenon—it doesn't hold for
any other three children on the Farm. Nor did we make any effort to
place them together—they drew each other like magnets. One of our
workers spent two weeks trying to find out why the instruments weren't
right. It wasn't the instruments, of course."
Lessing nodded to an attendant, and peered around at Melrose. "Now, I
want you to watch this very closely."
He opened a door and walked into the room with the children. The
fluorescent screen continued to flicker as the children ran to Lessing.
He inspected the block tower they were building, and stooped down to
talk to them, his lips moving soundlessly behind the observation wall.
The children laughed and jabbered, apparently intrigued by the game he
was proposing. He walked to the table and tapped the bottom block in
the tower with his thumb.
The tower quivered, and the screen blazed out with green light, but the
tower stood. Carefully Lessing jogged all the foundation blocks out of
place until the tower hung in midair, clearly unsupported. The children
watched it closely, and the foundation blocks inched still further out
of place....
Then, quite casually, Lessing lifted off his monitor. The children
continued staring at the tower as the screen gave three or four violent
bursts of green fire and went dark.
The block tower fell with a crash.
Moments later Lessing was back in the observation room, leaving the
children busily putting the tower back together. There was a little
smile on his lips as he saw Melrose's face. "Perhaps you're beginning
to see what I'm driving at," he said slowly.
"Yes," said Melrose. "I think I'm beginning to see." He scratched his
jaw. "You think that it's adult psi-contact that drives the child's
potential underground—that somehow adult contact acts like a damper, a
sort of colossal candle-snuffer."
"That's what I think," said Lessing.
"How do you know those children didn't make you take off your monitor?"
Lessing blinked. "Why should they?"
"Maybe they enjoy the crash when the blocks fall down."
"But that wouldn't make any difference, would it? The blocks still fall
down."
Melrose paced down the narrow room. "This is very good," he said
suddenly, his voice earnest. "You have fine facilities here, good
workers. And in spite of my flippancy, Dr. Lessing, I have never
imagined for a moment that you were not an acute observer and a
careful, highly imaginative worker. But suppose I told you, in perfect
faith, that we have data that flatly contradicts everything you've told
me today. Reproducible data, utterly incompatable with yours. What
would you say to that?"
"I'd say you were wrong," said Lessing. "You couldn't have such data.
According to the things I am certain are true, what you're saying is
sheer nonsense."
"And you'd express that opinion in a professional meeting?"
"I would."
"And as an Authority on psionic behavior patterns," said Melrose
slowly, "you would kill us then and there. You would strangle us
professionally, discredit anything we did, cut us off cold." The
tall man turned on him fiercely. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see
what danger you're in? If you publish your book now, you will become
an Authority in a field where the most devastating thing that could
possibly happen would be—
the appearance of an Authority
."
Lessing and Dorffman rode back to the Hoffman Center in grim silence.
At first Lessing pretended to work; finally he snapped off the tape
recorder in disgust and stared out the shuttle-car window. Melrose had
gone on to Idlewild to catch a jet back to Chicago. It was a relief to
see him go, Lessing thought, and tried to force the thin, angry man
firmly out of his mind. But somehow Melrose wouldn't force.
"Stop worrying about it," Dorffman urged. "He's a crackpot. He's
crawled way out on a limb, and now he's afraid your theory is going to
cut it off under him. Well, that's his worry, not yours." Dorffman's
face was intense. "Scientifically, you're on unshakeable ground. Every
great researcher has people like Melrose sniping at him. You just have
to throw them off and keep going."
Lessing shook his head. "Maybe. But this field of work is different
from any other, Jack. It doesn't follow the rules. Maybe scientific
grounds aren't right at all, in this case."
Dorffman snorted. "Surely there's nothing wrong with theorizing—"
"He wasn't objecting to the theory. He's afraid of what happens after
the theory."
"So it seems. But why?"
"Have you ever considered what makes a man an Authority?"
"He knows more about his field than anybody else does."
"He
seems
to, you mean. And therefore, anything he says about it
carries more weight than what anybody else says. Other workers follow
his lead. He developes ideas, formulates theories—and then
defends
them for all he's worth
."
"But why shouldn't he?"
"Because a man can't fight for his life and reputation and still keep
his objectivity," said Lessing. "And what if he just happens to be
wrong? Once he's an Authority the question of what's right and what's
wrong gets lost in the shuffle. It's
what he says
that counts."
"But we
know
you're right," Dorffman protested.
"Do we?"
"Of course we do! Look at our work! Look at what we've seen on the
Farm."
"Yes, I know." Lessing's voice was weary. "But first I think we'd
better look at Tommy Gilman, and the quicker we look, the better—"
A nurse greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. "We called
you at the Farm, but you'd already left. The boy—" She broke off
helplessly. "He's sick, Doctor. He's sicker than we ever imagined."
"What happened?"
"Nothing exactly—happened. I don't quite know how to describe it."
She hurried them down the corridor and opened a door into a large
children's playroom. "See what you think."
The boy sat stolidly in the corner of the room. He looked up as they
came in, but there was no flicker of recognition or pleasure on his
pale face. The monitor helmet was still on his head. He just sat there,
gripping a toy fire engine tightly in his hands.
Lessing crossed the room swiftly. "Tommy," he said.
The boy didn't even look at him. He stared stupidly at the fire engine.
"Tommy!" Lessing reached out for the toy. The boy drew back in terror,
clutching it to his chest. "Go away," he choked. "Go away, go away—"
When Lessing persisted the boy bent over swiftly and bit him hard on
the hand.
Lessing sat down on the table. "Tommy, listen to me." His voice was
gentle. "I won't try to take it again. I promise."
"Go away."
"Do you know who I am?"
Tommy's eyes shifted haltingly to Lessing's face. He nodded. "Go away."
"Why are you afraid, Tommy?"
"I hurt. My head hurts. I hurt all over. Go away."
"Why do you hurt?"
"I—can't get it—off," the boy said.
The monitor
, Lessing thought suddenly. Something had suddenly gone
horribly wrong—could the boy really be sensing the source of the
trouble? Lessing felt a cold knot gather in the pit of his stomach. He
knew what happened when adult psi-contact struck a psi-high youngster's
mind. He had seen it a hundred times at the Farm. But even more—he
had felt it in his own mind, bursting from the child. Like a violent
physical blow, the hate and fear and suspicion and cruelty buried and
repressed in the adult mind, crushing suddenly into the raw receptors
of the child's mind like a smothering fog—it was a fearful thing. A
healthy youngster could survive it, even though the scar remained. But
this youngster was sick—
And yet
an animal instinctively seeks its own protection
. With
trembling fingers Lessing reached out and opened the baffle-snap on the
monitor. "Take it off, Tommy," he whispered.
The boy blinked in amazement, and pulled the grey helmet from his head.
Lessing felt the familiar prickly feeling run down his scalp as the
boy stared at him. He could feel deep in his own mind the cold chill
of terror radiating from the boy. Then, suddenly, it began to fade. A
sense of warmth—peace and security and comfort—swept in as the fear
faded from the boy's face.
The fire engine clattered to the floor.
They analyzed the tapes later, punching the data cards with greatest
care, filing them through the machines for the basic processing and
classification that all their data underwent. It was late that night
when they had the report back in their hands.
Dorffman stared at it angrily. "It's obviously wrong," he grated. "It
doesn't fit. Dave, it doesn't agree with
anything
we've observed
before. There must be an error."
"Of course," said Lessing. "According to the theory. The theory says
that adult psi-contact is deadly to the growing child. It smothers
their potential through repeated contact until it dries up completely.
We've proved that, haven't we? Time after time. Everything goes
according to the theory—except Tommy. But Tommy's psi-potential was
drying up there on the Farm, until the distortion was threatening the
balance of his mind. Then he made an adult contact, and we saw how he
bloomed." Lessing sank down to his desk wearily. "What are we going to
do, Jack? Formulate a separate theory for Tommy?"
"Of course not," said Dorffman. "The instruments were wrong. Somehow we
misread the data—"
"Didn't you see his
face
?" Lessing burst out. "Didn't you see how he
acted
? What do you want with an instrument reading?" He shook his
head. "It's no good, Jack. Something different happened here, something
we'd never counted on. It's something the theory just doesn't allow
for."
They sat silently for a while. Then Dorffman said: "What are you going
to do?"
"I don't know," said Lessing. "Maybe when we fell into this bramble
bush we blinded ourselves with the urge to classify—to line everything
up in neat rows like pins in a paper. Maybe we were so blind we missed
the path altogether."
"But the book is due! The Conference speech—"
"I think we'll make some changes in the book," Lessing said slowly.
"It'll be costly—but it might even be fun. It's a pretty dry, logical
presentation of ideas, as it stands. Very austere and authoritarian.
But a few revisions could change all that—" He rubbed his hands
together thoughtfully. "How about it, Jack? Do we have nerve enough to
be laughed at? Do you think we could stand a little discredit, making
silly asses of ourselves? Because when I finish this book, we'll be
laughed out of existence. There won't be any Authority in psionics for
a while—and maybe that way one of the lads who's
really
sniffing out
the trail will get somebody to listen to him!
"Get a pad, get a pencil! We've got work to do. And when we finish, I
think we'll send a carbon copy out Chicago way. Might even persuade
that puppy out there to come here and work for me—" | Tommy misses his family and he wants to go home. | Tommy is tired of being experimented on. | Tommy is slowly going insane at the farm. | He doesn't feel good at the farm. | 3 |
60291_XQ25ASO2_4 | Where is the Hoffman Medical Center? | BRAMBLE BUSH
BY ALAN E. NOURSE
There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise;
He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw what he had done, with all his might and main
He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again.
MOTHER GOOSE
Dr. David Lessing found Jack Dorffman and the boy waiting in his office
when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. Dorffman looked as
though he'd been running all night. There were dark pouches under his
eyes; his heavy unshaven face seemed to sag at every crease. Lessing
glanced sharply at his Field Director and sank down behind his desk
with a sigh. "All right, Jack—what's wrong?"
"This kid is driving me nuts," said Dorffman through clenched teeth.
"He's gone completely hay-wire. Nobody's been able to get near him
for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's
leaving the Farm. I talk to him, I sweat him down, I do everything but
tie him to the bed, and I waste my time. He's leaving the Farm. Period."
"So you bring him down here," said Lessing sourly. "The worst place he
could be, if something's really wrong." He looked across at the boy.
"Tommy? Come over and sit down."
There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin,
with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal
eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward
grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute
appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and
blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape.
The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear.
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently.
"I don't want to go back to the Farm," said the boy.
"Why?"
"I just don't. I hate it there."
"Are you frightened?"
The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly.
"Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?"
"No. Oh, no!"
"Then what?"
Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none
came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off—" He fingered
the grey plastic helmet.
"You think
that
would make you feel better?"
"It would, I know it would."
Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the
monitor is for, don't you?"
"It stops things from going out."
"That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator.
You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off,
away from the Farm."
The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there—" The
fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I
never want to go back."
"Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at
Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has
been going on for
three weeks
?"
"I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern—we see so
much of that up there."
"I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better
set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid
you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to
deal with this morning—the one who's threatening to upset the whole
Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with.
I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing
ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy
downstairs."
"Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman.
"Certainly! And Jack—in this case, be
sure
of it. If Tommy's in the
trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact
now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands."
Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was
from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book,
and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled.
Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical
Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck
up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm—yet he
hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And now, as the book
approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really
get back to work again.
The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the
International Psionics Conference:
Dear Dr. Lessing:
In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic
behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle
speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October 12th. A few remarks in
discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order—
They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the
scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His
earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going—but the
book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A
Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good
title—concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right.
And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a
guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and
baffling new science.
For they were floundering. When they were finally forced to recognize
that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds,
with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had
plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening
bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. Nothing worked, and
everything worked too well. They were trying to study phenomena which
made no sense, observing things that defied logic. Natural laws came
crashing down about their ears as they stood sadly by and watched
things happen which natural law said could never happen. They had never
been in this jungle before, nor in any jungle remotely like it. The
old rules didn't work here, the old methods of study failed. And the
more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush
became—
But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a
theory to work by—
At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "A gentleman to see you," the girl
said. "A Dr. Melrose. He's very impatient, sir."
He shut off the scanner and said, "Send him in, please."
Dr. Peter Melrose was tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark
mocking eyes. He wore a threadbare sport coat and a slouch. He offered
Lessing a bony hand, then flung himself into a chair as he stared about
the office in awe.
"I'm really overwhelmed," he said after a moment. "Within the
stronghold of psionic research at last. And face to face with the
Master in the trembling flesh!"
Lessing frowned. "Dr. Melrose, I don't quite understand—"
"Oh, it's just that I'm impressed," the young man said airily. "Of
course, I've seen old dried-up Authorities before—but never before
a brand spanking new one, just fresh out of the pupa, so to speak!"
He touched his forehead in a gesture of reverence. "I bow before the
Oracle. Speak, oh Motah, live forever! Cast a pearl at my feet!"
"If you've come here to be insulting," Lessing said coldly, "you're
just wasting time." He reached for the intercom switch.
"I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply,
"because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month
unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. And if you
don't think I can do it, you're in for quite a dumping."
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me—just what, exactly, do you want?"
"I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of
'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in
Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental
controls you keep talking about will actually bear. But mostly, I want
to see just what in psionic hell you're so busy making yourself an
Authority about." There was no laughter in the man's sharp brown eyes.
"You couldn't touch me with a ten foot pole at this conference,"
snapped Lessing.
The other man grinned. "Try me! We shook you up a little bit last year,
but you didn't seem to get the idea."
"Last year was different." Lessing scowled. "As for our 'fairy tale',
we happen to have a staggering body of evidence that says that it's
true."
"If the papers you've already published are a preview, we think it's
false as Satan."
"And our controls are above suspicion."
"So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said
Melrose. "We've done a lot of work on it, too."
"Oh, yes—I've heard about your work. Not bad, really. A little
misdirected, is all."
"According to your Theory, that is."
"Wildly unorthodox approach to psionics—but at least you're energetic
enough."
"We haven't been energetic enough to find an orthodox approach that got
us anywhere. We doubt if you have, either. But maybe we're all wrong."
Melrose grinned unpleasantly. "We're not unreasonable, your Majesty. We
just ask to be shown. If you dare, that is."
Lessing slammed his fist down on the desk angrily. "Have you got the
day to take a trip?"
"I've got 'til New Year."
Lessing shouted for his girl. "Get Dorffman up here. We're going to the
Farm this afternoon."
The girl nodded, then hesitated. "But what about your lunch?"
"Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest
here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us...."
Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels
and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the
Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the
rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in
the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing
briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the
long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less
than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed
north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside.
"What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along
through the afternoon sun.
"I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating."
Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of
beating the bushes with this—" He broke off to glare at young Melrose.
Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here."
"It's—unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped.
"Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day
school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even
used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here."
"Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying
to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis."
"Of course, you're sure you were measuring
something
."
"Oh, yes. We certainly were."
"Yet you said that you didn't know what."
"That's right," said Lessing. "We don't."
"And you don't know
why
your instruments measure whatever they're
measuring." The Chicago man's face was thoughtful. "In fact, you can't
really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at
all. It's not inconceivable that the
children
might be measuring the
instruments
, eh?"
Lessing blinked. "It's conceivable."
"Mmmm," said Melrose. "Sounds like a real firm foundation to build a
theory on."
"Why not?" Lessing growled. "It wouldn't be the first time the tail
wagged the dog. The psychiatrists never would have gotten out of their
rut if somebody hadn't gotten smart and realized that one of their new
drugs worked better in combatting schizophrenia when the doctor took
the medicine instead of the patient. That was quite a wall to climb."
"Yes, wasn't it," mused Melrose, scratching his bony jaw. "Only took
them seventy years to climb it, thanks to a certain man's theories.
I wonder how long it'll take psionics to crawl out of the pit you're
digging for it?"
"We're not digging any pit," Lessing exploded angrily. "We're
exploring—nothing more. A phenomenon exists. We've known that, one way
or another, for centuries. The fact that it doesn't seem to be bound by
the same sort of natural law we've observed elsewhere doesn't mean that
it isn't governed by natural law. But how can we define the law? How
can we define the limits of the phenomenon, for that matter? We can't
work in the dark forever—we've
got
to have a working hypothesis to
guide us."
"So you dreamed up this 'tadpole' idea," said Melrose sourly.
"For a working hypothesis—yes. We've known for a long time that every
human being has extrasensory potential to one degree or another. Not
just a few here and there—every single one. It's a differentiating
quality of the human mind. Just as the ability to think logically in a
crisis instead of giving way to panic is a differentiating quality."
"Fine," said Melrose. "Great. We can't
prove
that, of course, but
I'll play along."
Lessing glared at him. "When we began studying this psi-potential, we
found out some curious things. For one thing, it seemed to be immensely
more powerful and active in infants and children than in adults.
Somewhere along the line as a child grows up, something happens. We
don't know what. We do know that the child's psi-potential gradually
withdraws deeper and deeper into his mind, burying itself farther and
farther out of reach, just the way a tadpole's tail is absorbed deeper
and deeper into the growing frog until there just isn't any tail any
more." Lessing paused, packing tobacco into his pipe. "That's why we
have the Farm—to try to discover why. What forces that potential
underground? What buries it so deeply that adult human beings can't get
at it any more?"
"And you think you have an answer," said Melrose.
"We think we might be near an answer. We have a theory that explains
the available data."
The shuttle car bounced sharply as it left the highway automatics.
Dorffman took the controls. In a few moments they were skimming through
the high white gates of the Farm, slowing down at the entrance to a
long, low building.
"All right, young man—come along," said Lessing. "I think we can show
you our answer."
In the main office building they donned the close-fitting psionic
monitors required of all personnel at the Farm. They were of a
hard grey plastic material, with a network of wiring buried in the
substance, connected to a simple pocket-sized power source.
"The major problem," Lessing said, "has been to shield the children
from any external psionic stimuli, except those we wished to expose
them to. Our goal is a perfectly controlled psi environment. The
monitors are quite effective—a simple Renwick scrambler screen."
"It blocks off all types of psi activity?" asked Melrose.
"As far as we can measure, yes."
"Which may not be very far."
Jack Dorffman burst in: "What Dr. Lessing is saying is that they seem
effective for our purposes."
"But you don't know why," added Melrose.
"All right, we don't know why. Nobody knows why a Renwick screen
works—why blame us?" They were walking down the main corridor and out
through an open areaway. Behind the buildings was a broad playground. A
baseball game was in progress in one corner; across the field a group
of swings, slides, ring bars and other playground paraphernalia was in
heavy use. The place was teeming with youngsters, all shouting in a
fury of busy activity. Occasionally a helmeted supervisor hurried by;
one waved to them as she rescued a four-year-old from the parallel bars.
They crossed into the next building, where classes were in progress.
"Some of our children are here only briefly," Lessing explained as
they walked along, "and some have been here for years. We maintain a
top-ranking curriculum—your idea of a 'country day school' wasn't
so far afield at that—with scholarships supported by Hoffman Center
funds. Other children come to us—foundlings, desertees, children from
broken homes, children of all ages from infancy on. Sometimes they
stay until they have reached college age, or go on to jobs. As far as
psionics research is concerned, we are not trying to be teachers. We
are strictly observers. We try to place the youngsters in positions
where they can develope what potential they have—
without
the
presence of external psionic influences they would normally be subject
to. The results have been remarkable."
He led them into a long, narrow room with chairs and ash trays, facing
a wide grey glass wall. The room fell into darkness, and through the
grey glass they could see three children, about four years old, playing
in a large room.
"They're perfectly insulated from us," said Lessing. "A variety of
recording instruments are working. And before you ask, Dr. Melrose,
they are all empirical instruments, and they would all defy any
engineer's attempts to determine what makes them go. We don't know what
makes them go, and we don't care—they go. That's all we need. Like
that one, for instance—"
In the corner a flat screen was flickering, emitting a pale green
fluorescent light. It hung from the wall by two plastic rods which
penetrated into the children's room. There was no sign of a switch,
nor a power source. As the children moved about, the screen flickered.
Below it, a recording-tape clicked along in little spurts and starts of
activity.
"What are they doing?" Melrose asked after watching the children a few
moments.
"Those three seem to work as a team, somehow. Each one, individually,
had a fairly constant recordable psi potential of about seventeen on
the arbitrary scale we find useful here. Any two of them scale in at
thirty-four to thirty-six. Put the three together and they operate
somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred on the same scale."
Lessing smiled. "This is an isolated phenomenon—it doesn't hold for
any other three children on the Farm. Nor did we make any effort to
place them together—they drew each other like magnets. One of our
workers spent two weeks trying to find out why the instruments weren't
right. It wasn't the instruments, of course."
Lessing nodded to an attendant, and peered around at Melrose. "Now, I
want you to watch this very closely."
He opened a door and walked into the room with the children. The
fluorescent screen continued to flicker as the children ran to Lessing.
He inspected the block tower they were building, and stooped down to
talk to them, his lips moving soundlessly behind the observation wall.
The children laughed and jabbered, apparently intrigued by the game he
was proposing. He walked to the table and tapped the bottom block in
the tower with his thumb.
The tower quivered, and the screen blazed out with green light, but the
tower stood. Carefully Lessing jogged all the foundation blocks out of
place until the tower hung in midair, clearly unsupported. The children
watched it closely, and the foundation blocks inched still further out
of place....
Then, quite casually, Lessing lifted off his monitor. The children
continued staring at the tower as the screen gave three or four violent
bursts of green fire and went dark.
The block tower fell with a crash.
Moments later Lessing was back in the observation room, leaving the
children busily putting the tower back together. There was a little
smile on his lips as he saw Melrose's face. "Perhaps you're beginning
to see what I'm driving at," he said slowly.
"Yes," said Melrose. "I think I'm beginning to see." He scratched his
jaw. "You think that it's adult psi-contact that drives the child's
potential underground—that somehow adult contact acts like a damper, a
sort of colossal candle-snuffer."
"That's what I think," said Lessing.
"How do you know those children didn't make you take off your monitor?"
Lessing blinked. "Why should they?"
"Maybe they enjoy the crash when the blocks fall down."
"But that wouldn't make any difference, would it? The blocks still fall
down."
Melrose paced down the narrow room. "This is very good," he said
suddenly, his voice earnest. "You have fine facilities here, good
workers. And in spite of my flippancy, Dr. Lessing, I have never
imagined for a moment that you were not an acute observer and a
careful, highly imaginative worker. But suppose I told you, in perfect
faith, that we have data that flatly contradicts everything you've told
me today. Reproducible data, utterly incompatable with yours. What
would you say to that?"
"I'd say you were wrong," said Lessing. "You couldn't have such data.
According to the things I am certain are true, what you're saying is
sheer nonsense."
"And you'd express that opinion in a professional meeting?"
"I would."
"And as an Authority on psionic behavior patterns," said Melrose
slowly, "you would kill us then and there. You would strangle us
professionally, discredit anything we did, cut us off cold." The
tall man turned on him fiercely. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see
what danger you're in? If you publish your book now, you will become
an Authority in a field where the most devastating thing that could
possibly happen would be—
the appearance of an Authority
."
Lessing and Dorffman rode back to the Hoffman Center in grim silence.
At first Lessing pretended to work; finally he snapped off the tape
recorder in disgust and stared out the shuttle-car window. Melrose had
gone on to Idlewild to catch a jet back to Chicago. It was a relief to
see him go, Lessing thought, and tried to force the thin, angry man
firmly out of his mind. But somehow Melrose wouldn't force.
"Stop worrying about it," Dorffman urged. "He's a crackpot. He's
crawled way out on a limb, and now he's afraid your theory is going to
cut it off under him. Well, that's his worry, not yours." Dorffman's
face was intense. "Scientifically, you're on unshakeable ground. Every
great researcher has people like Melrose sniping at him. You just have
to throw them off and keep going."
Lessing shook his head. "Maybe. But this field of work is different
from any other, Jack. It doesn't follow the rules. Maybe scientific
grounds aren't right at all, in this case."
Dorffman snorted. "Surely there's nothing wrong with theorizing—"
"He wasn't objecting to the theory. He's afraid of what happens after
the theory."
"So it seems. But why?"
"Have you ever considered what makes a man an Authority?"
"He knows more about his field than anybody else does."
"He
seems
to, you mean. And therefore, anything he says about it
carries more weight than what anybody else says. Other workers follow
his lead. He developes ideas, formulates theories—and then
defends
them for all he's worth
."
"But why shouldn't he?"
"Because a man can't fight for his life and reputation and still keep
his objectivity," said Lessing. "And what if he just happens to be
wrong? Once he's an Authority the question of what's right and what's
wrong gets lost in the shuffle. It's
what he says
that counts."
"But we
know
you're right," Dorffman protested.
"Do we?"
"Of course we do! Look at our work! Look at what we've seen on the
Farm."
"Yes, I know." Lessing's voice was weary. "But first I think we'd
better look at Tommy Gilman, and the quicker we look, the better—"
A nurse greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. "We called
you at the Farm, but you'd already left. The boy—" She broke off
helplessly. "He's sick, Doctor. He's sicker than we ever imagined."
"What happened?"
"Nothing exactly—happened. I don't quite know how to describe it."
She hurried them down the corridor and opened a door into a large
children's playroom. "See what you think."
The boy sat stolidly in the corner of the room. He looked up as they
came in, but there was no flicker of recognition or pleasure on his
pale face. The monitor helmet was still on his head. He just sat there,
gripping a toy fire engine tightly in his hands.
Lessing crossed the room swiftly. "Tommy," he said.
The boy didn't even look at him. He stared stupidly at the fire engine.
"Tommy!" Lessing reached out for the toy. The boy drew back in terror,
clutching it to his chest. "Go away," he choked. "Go away, go away—"
When Lessing persisted the boy bent over swiftly and bit him hard on
the hand.
Lessing sat down on the table. "Tommy, listen to me." His voice was
gentle. "I won't try to take it again. I promise."
"Go away."
"Do you know who I am?"
Tommy's eyes shifted haltingly to Lessing's face. He nodded. "Go away."
"Why are you afraid, Tommy?"
"I hurt. My head hurts. I hurt all over. Go away."
"Why do you hurt?"
"I—can't get it—off," the boy said.
The monitor
, Lessing thought suddenly. Something had suddenly gone
horribly wrong—could the boy really be sensing the source of the
trouble? Lessing felt a cold knot gather in the pit of his stomach. He
knew what happened when adult psi-contact struck a psi-high youngster's
mind. He had seen it a hundred times at the Farm. But even more—he
had felt it in his own mind, bursting from the child. Like a violent
physical blow, the hate and fear and suspicion and cruelty buried and
repressed in the adult mind, crushing suddenly into the raw receptors
of the child's mind like a smothering fog—it was a fearful thing. A
healthy youngster could survive it, even though the scar remained. But
this youngster was sick—
And yet
an animal instinctively seeks its own protection
. With
trembling fingers Lessing reached out and opened the baffle-snap on the
monitor. "Take it off, Tommy," he whispered.
The boy blinked in amazement, and pulled the grey helmet from his head.
Lessing felt the familiar prickly feeling run down his scalp as the
boy stared at him. He could feel deep in his own mind the cold chill
of terror radiating from the boy. Then, suddenly, it began to fade. A
sense of warmth—peace and security and comfort—swept in as the fear
faded from the boy's face.
The fire engine clattered to the floor.
They analyzed the tapes later, punching the data cards with greatest
care, filing them through the machines for the basic processing and
classification that all their data underwent. It was late that night
when they had the report back in their hands.
Dorffman stared at it angrily. "It's obviously wrong," he grated. "It
doesn't fit. Dave, it doesn't agree with
anything
we've observed
before. There must be an error."
"Of course," said Lessing. "According to the theory. The theory says
that adult psi-contact is deadly to the growing child. It smothers
their potential through repeated contact until it dries up completely.
We've proved that, haven't we? Time after time. Everything goes
according to the theory—except Tommy. But Tommy's psi-potential was
drying up there on the Farm, until the distortion was threatening the
balance of his mind. Then he made an adult contact, and we saw how he
bloomed." Lessing sank down to his desk wearily. "What are we going to
do, Jack? Formulate a separate theory for Tommy?"
"Of course not," said Dorffman. "The instruments were wrong. Somehow we
misread the data—"
"Didn't you see his
face
?" Lessing burst out. "Didn't you see how he
acted
? What do you want with an instrument reading?" He shook his
head. "It's no good, Jack. Something different happened here, something
we'd never counted on. It's something the theory just doesn't allow
for."
They sat silently for a while. Then Dorffman said: "What are you going
to do?"
"I don't know," said Lessing. "Maybe when we fell into this bramble
bush we blinded ourselves with the urge to classify—to line everything
up in neat rows like pins in a paper. Maybe we were so blind we missed
the path altogether."
"But the book is due! The Conference speech—"
"I think we'll make some changes in the book," Lessing said slowly.
"It'll be costly—but it might even be fun. It's a pretty dry, logical
presentation of ideas, as it stands. Very austere and authoritarian.
But a few revisions could change all that—" He rubbed his hands
together thoughtfully. "How about it, Jack? Do we have nerve enough to
be laughed at? Do you think we could stand a little discredit, making
silly asses of ourselves? Because when I finish this book, we'll be
laughed out of existence. There won't be any Authority in psionics for
a while—and maybe that way one of the lads who's
really
sniffing out
the trail will get somebody to listen to him!
"Get a pad, get a pencil! We've got work to do. And when we finish, I
think we'll send a carbon copy out Chicago way. Might even persuade
that puppy out there to come here and work for me—" | Newark | Westchester | Philadelphia | Trenton | 2 |
60291_XQ25ASO2_5 | Where is the Farm? | BRAMBLE BUSH
BY ALAN E. NOURSE
There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise;
He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw what he had done, with all his might and main
He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again.
MOTHER GOOSE
Dr. David Lessing found Jack Dorffman and the boy waiting in his office
when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. Dorffman looked as
though he'd been running all night. There were dark pouches under his
eyes; his heavy unshaven face seemed to sag at every crease. Lessing
glanced sharply at his Field Director and sank down behind his desk
with a sigh. "All right, Jack—what's wrong?"
"This kid is driving me nuts," said Dorffman through clenched teeth.
"He's gone completely hay-wire. Nobody's been able to get near him
for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's
leaving the Farm. I talk to him, I sweat him down, I do everything but
tie him to the bed, and I waste my time. He's leaving the Farm. Period."
"So you bring him down here," said Lessing sourly. "The worst place he
could be, if something's really wrong." He looked across at the boy.
"Tommy? Come over and sit down."
There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin,
with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal
eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward
grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute
appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and
blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape.
The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear.
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently.
"I don't want to go back to the Farm," said the boy.
"Why?"
"I just don't. I hate it there."
"Are you frightened?"
The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly.
"Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?"
"No. Oh, no!"
"Then what?"
Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none
came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off—" He fingered
the grey plastic helmet.
"You think
that
would make you feel better?"
"It would, I know it would."
Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the
monitor is for, don't you?"
"It stops things from going out."
"That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator.
You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off,
away from the Farm."
The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there—" The
fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I
never want to go back."
"Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at
Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has
been going on for
three weeks
?"
"I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern—we see so
much of that up there."
"I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better
set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid
you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to
deal with this morning—the one who's threatening to upset the whole
Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with.
I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing
ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy
downstairs."
"Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman.
"Certainly! And Jack—in this case, be
sure
of it. If Tommy's in the
trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact
now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands."
Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was
from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book,
and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled.
Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical
Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck
up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm—yet he
hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And now, as the book
approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really
get back to work again.
The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the
International Psionics Conference:
Dear Dr. Lessing:
In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic
behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle
speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October 12th. A few remarks in
discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order—
They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the
scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His
earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going—but the
book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A
Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good
title—concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right.
And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a
guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and
baffling new science.
For they were floundering. When they were finally forced to recognize
that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds,
with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had
plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening
bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. Nothing worked, and
everything worked too well. They were trying to study phenomena which
made no sense, observing things that defied logic. Natural laws came
crashing down about their ears as they stood sadly by and watched
things happen which natural law said could never happen. They had never
been in this jungle before, nor in any jungle remotely like it. The
old rules didn't work here, the old methods of study failed. And the
more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush
became—
But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a
theory to work by—
At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "A gentleman to see you," the girl
said. "A Dr. Melrose. He's very impatient, sir."
He shut off the scanner and said, "Send him in, please."
Dr. Peter Melrose was tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark
mocking eyes. He wore a threadbare sport coat and a slouch. He offered
Lessing a bony hand, then flung himself into a chair as he stared about
the office in awe.
"I'm really overwhelmed," he said after a moment. "Within the
stronghold of psionic research at last. And face to face with the
Master in the trembling flesh!"
Lessing frowned. "Dr. Melrose, I don't quite understand—"
"Oh, it's just that I'm impressed," the young man said airily. "Of
course, I've seen old dried-up Authorities before—but never before
a brand spanking new one, just fresh out of the pupa, so to speak!"
He touched his forehead in a gesture of reverence. "I bow before the
Oracle. Speak, oh Motah, live forever! Cast a pearl at my feet!"
"If you've come here to be insulting," Lessing said coldly, "you're
just wasting time." He reached for the intercom switch.
"I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply,
"because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month
unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. And if you
don't think I can do it, you're in for quite a dumping."
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me—just what, exactly, do you want?"
"I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of
'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in
Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental
controls you keep talking about will actually bear. But mostly, I want
to see just what in psionic hell you're so busy making yourself an
Authority about." There was no laughter in the man's sharp brown eyes.
"You couldn't touch me with a ten foot pole at this conference,"
snapped Lessing.
The other man grinned. "Try me! We shook you up a little bit last year,
but you didn't seem to get the idea."
"Last year was different." Lessing scowled. "As for our 'fairy tale',
we happen to have a staggering body of evidence that says that it's
true."
"If the papers you've already published are a preview, we think it's
false as Satan."
"And our controls are above suspicion."
"So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said
Melrose. "We've done a lot of work on it, too."
"Oh, yes—I've heard about your work. Not bad, really. A little
misdirected, is all."
"According to your Theory, that is."
"Wildly unorthodox approach to psionics—but at least you're energetic
enough."
"We haven't been energetic enough to find an orthodox approach that got
us anywhere. We doubt if you have, either. But maybe we're all wrong."
Melrose grinned unpleasantly. "We're not unreasonable, your Majesty. We
just ask to be shown. If you dare, that is."
Lessing slammed his fist down on the desk angrily. "Have you got the
day to take a trip?"
"I've got 'til New Year."
Lessing shouted for his girl. "Get Dorffman up here. We're going to the
Farm this afternoon."
The girl nodded, then hesitated. "But what about your lunch?"
"Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest
here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us...."
Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels
and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the
Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the
rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in
the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing
briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the
long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less
than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed
north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside.
"What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along
through the afternoon sun.
"I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating."
Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of
beating the bushes with this—" He broke off to glare at young Melrose.
Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here."
"It's—unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped.
"Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day
school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even
used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here."
"Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying
to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis."
"Of course, you're sure you were measuring
something
."
"Oh, yes. We certainly were."
"Yet you said that you didn't know what."
"That's right," said Lessing. "We don't."
"And you don't know
why
your instruments measure whatever they're
measuring." The Chicago man's face was thoughtful. "In fact, you can't
really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at
all. It's not inconceivable that the
children
might be measuring the
instruments
, eh?"
Lessing blinked. "It's conceivable."
"Mmmm," said Melrose. "Sounds like a real firm foundation to build a
theory on."
"Why not?" Lessing growled. "It wouldn't be the first time the tail
wagged the dog. The psychiatrists never would have gotten out of their
rut if somebody hadn't gotten smart and realized that one of their new
drugs worked better in combatting schizophrenia when the doctor took
the medicine instead of the patient. That was quite a wall to climb."
"Yes, wasn't it," mused Melrose, scratching his bony jaw. "Only took
them seventy years to climb it, thanks to a certain man's theories.
I wonder how long it'll take psionics to crawl out of the pit you're
digging for it?"
"We're not digging any pit," Lessing exploded angrily. "We're
exploring—nothing more. A phenomenon exists. We've known that, one way
or another, for centuries. The fact that it doesn't seem to be bound by
the same sort of natural law we've observed elsewhere doesn't mean that
it isn't governed by natural law. But how can we define the law? How
can we define the limits of the phenomenon, for that matter? We can't
work in the dark forever—we've
got
to have a working hypothesis to
guide us."
"So you dreamed up this 'tadpole' idea," said Melrose sourly.
"For a working hypothesis—yes. We've known for a long time that every
human being has extrasensory potential to one degree or another. Not
just a few here and there—every single one. It's a differentiating
quality of the human mind. Just as the ability to think logically in a
crisis instead of giving way to panic is a differentiating quality."
"Fine," said Melrose. "Great. We can't
prove
that, of course, but
I'll play along."
Lessing glared at him. "When we began studying this psi-potential, we
found out some curious things. For one thing, it seemed to be immensely
more powerful and active in infants and children than in adults.
Somewhere along the line as a child grows up, something happens. We
don't know what. We do know that the child's psi-potential gradually
withdraws deeper and deeper into his mind, burying itself farther and
farther out of reach, just the way a tadpole's tail is absorbed deeper
and deeper into the growing frog until there just isn't any tail any
more." Lessing paused, packing tobacco into his pipe. "That's why we
have the Farm—to try to discover why. What forces that potential
underground? What buries it so deeply that adult human beings can't get
at it any more?"
"And you think you have an answer," said Melrose.
"We think we might be near an answer. We have a theory that explains
the available data."
The shuttle car bounced sharply as it left the highway automatics.
Dorffman took the controls. In a few moments they were skimming through
the high white gates of the Farm, slowing down at the entrance to a
long, low building.
"All right, young man—come along," said Lessing. "I think we can show
you our answer."
In the main office building they donned the close-fitting psionic
monitors required of all personnel at the Farm. They were of a
hard grey plastic material, with a network of wiring buried in the
substance, connected to a simple pocket-sized power source.
"The major problem," Lessing said, "has been to shield the children
from any external psionic stimuli, except those we wished to expose
them to. Our goal is a perfectly controlled psi environment. The
monitors are quite effective—a simple Renwick scrambler screen."
"It blocks off all types of psi activity?" asked Melrose.
"As far as we can measure, yes."
"Which may not be very far."
Jack Dorffman burst in: "What Dr. Lessing is saying is that they seem
effective for our purposes."
"But you don't know why," added Melrose.
"All right, we don't know why. Nobody knows why a Renwick screen
works—why blame us?" They were walking down the main corridor and out
through an open areaway. Behind the buildings was a broad playground. A
baseball game was in progress in one corner; across the field a group
of swings, slides, ring bars and other playground paraphernalia was in
heavy use. The place was teeming with youngsters, all shouting in a
fury of busy activity. Occasionally a helmeted supervisor hurried by;
one waved to them as she rescued a four-year-old from the parallel bars.
They crossed into the next building, where classes were in progress.
"Some of our children are here only briefly," Lessing explained as
they walked along, "and some have been here for years. We maintain a
top-ranking curriculum—your idea of a 'country day school' wasn't
so far afield at that—with scholarships supported by Hoffman Center
funds. Other children come to us—foundlings, desertees, children from
broken homes, children of all ages from infancy on. Sometimes they
stay until they have reached college age, or go on to jobs. As far as
psionics research is concerned, we are not trying to be teachers. We
are strictly observers. We try to place the youngsters in positions
where they can develope what potential they have—
without
the
presence of external psionic influences they would normally be subject
to. The results have been remarkable."
He led them into a long, narrow room with chairs and ash trays, facing
a wide grey glass wall. The room fell into darkness, and through the
grey glass they could see three children, about four years old, playing
in a large room.
"They're perfectly insulated from us," said Lessing. "A variety of
recording instruments are working. And before you ask, Dr. Melrose,
they are all empirical instruments, and they would all defy any
engineer's attempts to determine what makes them go. We don't know what
makes them go, and we don't care—they go. That's all we need. Like
that one, for instance—"
In the corner a flat screen was flickering, emitting a pale green
fluorescent light. It hung from the wall by two plastic rods which
penetrated into the children's room. There was no sign of a switch,
nor a power source. As the children moved about, the screen flickered.
Below it, a recording-tape clicked along in little spurts and starts of
activity.
"What are they doing?" Melrose asked after watching the children a few
moments.
"Those three seem to work as a team, somehow. Each one, individually,
had a fairly constant recordable psi potential of about seventeen on
the arbitrary scale we find useful here. Any two of them scale in at
thirty-four to thirty-six. Put the three together and they operate
somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred on the same scale."
Lessing smiled. "This is an isolated phenomenon—it doesn't hold for
any other three children on the Farm. Nor did we make any effort to
place them together—they drew each other like magnets. One of our
workers spent two weeks trying to find out why the instruments weren't
right. It wasn't the instruments, of course."
Lessing nodded to an attendant, and peered around at Melrose. "Now, I
want you to watch this very closely."
He opened a door and walked into the room with the children. The
fluorescent screen continued to flicker as the children ran to Lessing.
He inspected the block tower they were building, and stooped down to
talk to them, his lips moving soundlessly behind the observation wall.
The children laughed and jabbered, apparently intrigued by the game he
was proposing. He walked to the table and tapped the bottom block in
the tower with his thumb.
The tower quivered, and the screen blazed out with green light, but the
tower stood. Carefully Lessing jogged all the foundation blocks out of
place until the tower hung in midair, clearly unsupported. The children
watched it closely, and the foundation blocks inched still further out
of place....
Then, quite casually, Lessing lifted off his monitor. The children
continued staring at the tower as the screen gave three or four violent
bursts of green fire and went dark.
The block tower fell with a crash.
Moments later Lessing was back in the observation room, leaving the
children busily putting the tower back together. There was a little
smile on his lips as he saw Melrose's face. "Perhaps you're beginning
to see what I'm driving at," he said slowly.
"Yes," said Melrose. "I think I'm beginning to see." He scratched his
jaw. "You think that it's adult psi-contact that drives the child's
potential underground—that somehow adult contact acts like a damper, a
sort of colossal candle-snuffer."
"That's what I think," said Lessing.
"How do you know those children didn't make you take off your monitor?"
Lessing blinked. "Why should they?"
"Maybe they enjoy the crash when the blocks fall down."
"But that wouldn't make any difference, would it? The blocks still fall
down."
Melrose paced down the narrow room. "This is very good," he said
suddenly, his voice earnest. "You have fine facilities here, good
workers. And in spite of my flippancy, Dr. Lessing, I have never
imagined for a moment that you were not an acute observer and a
careful, highly imaginative worker. But suppose I told you, in perfect
faith, that we have data that flatly contradicts everything you've told
me today. Reproducible data, utterly incompatable with yours. What
would you say to that?"
"I'd say you were wrong," said Lessing. "You couldn't have such data.
According to the things I am certain are true, what you're saying is
sheer nonsense."
"And you'd express that opinion in a professional meeting?"
"I would."
"And as an Authority on psionic behavior patterns," said Melrose
slowly, "you would kill us then and there. You would strangle us
professionally, discredit anything we did, cut us off cold." The
tall man turned on him fiercely. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see
what danger you're in? If you publish your book now, you will become
an Authority in a field where the most devastating thing that could
possibly happen would be—
the appearance of an Authority
."
Lessing and Dorffman rode back to the Hoffman Center in grim silence.
At first Lessing pretended to work; finally he snapped off the tape
recorder in disgust and stared out the shuttle-car window. Melrose had
gone on to Idlewild to catch a jet back to Chicago. It was a relief to
see him go, Lessing thought, and tried to force the thin, angry man
firmly out of his mind. But somehow Melrose wouldn't force.
"Stop worrying about it," Dorffman urged. "He's a crackpot. He's
crawled way out on a limb, and now he's afraid your theory is going to
cut it off under him. Well, that's his worry, not yours." Dorffman's
face was intense. "Scientifically, you're on unshakeable ground. Every
great researcher has people like Melrose sniping at him. You just have
to throw them off and keep going."
Lessing shook his head. "Maybe. But this field of work is different
from any other, Jack. It doesn't follow the rules. Maybe scientific
grounds aren't right at all, in this case."
Dorffman snorted. "Surely there's nothing wrong with theorizing—"
"He wasn't objecting to the theory. He's afraid of what happens after
the theory."
"So it seems. But why?"
"Have you ever considered what makes a man an Authority?"
"He knows more about his field than anybody else does."
"He
seems
to, you mean. And therefore, anything he says about it
carries more weight than what anybody else says. Other workers follow
his lead. He developes ideas, formulates theories—and then
defends
them for all he's worth
."
"But why shouldn't he?"
"Because a man can't fight for his life and reputation and still keep
his objectivity," said Lessing. "And what if he just happens to be
wrong? Once he's an Authority the question of what's right and what's
wrong gets lost in the shuffle. It's
what he says
that counts."
"But we
know
you're right," Dorffman protested.
"Do we?"
"Of course we do! Look at our work! Look at what we've seen on the
Farm."
"Yes, I know." Lessing's voice was weary. "But first I think we'd
better look at Tommy Gilman, and the quicker we look, the better—"
A nurse greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. "We called
you at the Farm, but you'd already left. The boy—" She broke off
helplessly. "He's sick, Doctor. He's sicker than we ever imagined."
"What happened?"
"Nothing exactly—happened. I don't quite know how to describe it."
She hurried them down the corridor and opened a door into a large
children's playroom. "See what you think."
The boy sat stolidly in the corner of the room. He looked up as they
came in, but there was no flicker of recognition or pleasure on his
pale face. The monitor helmet was still on his head. He just sat there,
gripping a toy fire engine tightly in his hands.
Lessing crossed the room swiftly. "Tommy," he said.
The boy didn't even look at him. He stared stupidly at the fire engine.
"Tommy!" Lessing reached out for the toy. The boy drew back in terror,
clutching it to his chest. "Go away," he choked. "Go away, go away—"
When Lessing persisted the boy bent over swiftly and bit him hard on
the hand.
Lessing sat down on the table. "Tommy, listen to me." His voice was
gentle. "I won't try to take it again. I promise."
"Go away."
"Do you know who I am?"
Tommy's eyes shifted haltingly to Lessing's face. He nodded. "Go away."
"Why are you afraid, Tommy?"
"I hurt. My head hurts. I hurt all over. Go away."
"Why do you hurt?"
"I—can't get it—off," the boy said.
The monitor
, Lessing thought suddenly. Something had suddenly gone
horribly wrong—could the boy really be sensing the source of the
trouble? Lessing felt a cold knot gather in the pit of his stomach. He
knew what happened when adult psi-contact struck a psi-high youngster's
mind. He had seen it a hundred times at the Farm. But even more—he
had felt it in his own mind, bursting from the child. Like a violent
physical blow, the hate and fear and suspicion and cruelty buried and
repressed in the adult mind, crushing suddenly into the raw receptors
of the child's mind like a smothering fog—it was a fearful thing. A
healthy youngster could survive it, even though the scar remained. But
this youngster was sick—
And yet
an animal instinctively seeks its own protection
. With
trembling fingers Lessing reached out and opened the baffle-snap on the
monitor. "Take it off, Tommy," he whispered.
The boy blinked in amazement, and pulled the grey helmet from his head.
Lessing felt the familiar prickly feeling run down his scalp as the
boy stared at him. He could feel deep in his own mind the cold chill
of terror radiating from the boy. Then, suddenly, it began to fade. A
sense of warmth—peace and security and comfort—swept in as the fear
faded from the boy's face.
The fire engine clattered to the floor.
They analyzed the tapes later, punching the data cards with greatest
care, filing them through the machines for the basic processing and
classification that all their data underwent. It was late that night
when they had the report back in their hands.
Dorffman stared at it angrily. "It's obviously wrong," he grated. "It
doesn't fit. Dave, it doesn't agree with
anything
we've observed
before. There must be an error."
"Of course," said Lessing. "According to the theory. The theory says
that adult psi-contact is deadly to the growing child. It smothers
their potential through repeated contact until it dries up completely.
We've proved that, haven't we? Time after time. Everything goes
according to the theory—except Tommy. But Tommy's psi-potential was
drying up there on the Farm, until the distortion was threatening the
balance of his mind. Then he made an adult contact, and we saw how he
bloomed." Lessing sank down to his desk wearily. "What are we going to
do, Jack? Formulate a separate theory for Tommy?"
"Of course not," said Dorffman. "The instruments were wrong. Somehow we
misread the data—"
"Didn't you see his
face
?" Lessing burst out. "Didn't you see how he
acted
? What do you want with an instrument reading?" He shook his
head. "It's no good, Jack. Something different happened here, something
we'd never counted on. It's something the theory just doesn't allow
for."
They sat silently for a while. Then Dorffman said: "What are you going
to do?"
"I don't know," said Lessing. "Maybe when we fell into this bramble
bush we blinded ourselves with the urge to classify—to line everything
up in neat rows like pins in a paper. Maybe we were so blind we missed
the path altogether."
"But the book is due! The Conference speech—"
"I think we'll make some changes in the book," Lessing said slowly.
"It'll be costly—but it might even be fun. It's a pretty dry, logical
presentation of ideas, as it stands. Very austere and authoritarian.
But a few revisions could change all that—" He rubbed his hands
together thoughtfully. "How about it, Jack? Do we have nerve enough to
be laughed at? Do you think we could stand a little discredit, making
silly asses of ourselves? Because when I finish this book, we'll be
laughed out of existence. There won't be any Authority in psionics for
a while—and maybe that way one of the lads who's
really
sniffing out
the trail will get somebody to listen to him!
"Get a pad, get a pencil! We've got work to do. And when we finish, I
think we'll send a carbon copy out Chicago way. Might even persuade
that puppy out there to come here and work for me—" | New Jersey | Illinois | Pennsylvania | Connecticut | 3 |
60291_XQ25ASO2_6 | Where is the conference next month? | BRAMBLE BUSH
BY ALAN E. NOURSE
There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise;
He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw what he had done, with all his might and main
He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again.
MOTHER GOOSE
Dr. David Lessing found Jack Dorffman and the boy waiting in his office
when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. Dorffman looked as
though he'd been running all night. There were dark pouches under his
eyes; his heavy unshaven face seemed to sag at every crease. Lessing
glanced sharply at his Field Director and sank down behind his desk
with a sigh. "All right, Jack—what's wrong?"
"This kid is driving me nuts," said Dorffman through clenched teeth.
"He's gone completely hay-wire. Nobody's been able to get near him
for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's
leaving the Farm. I talk to him, I sweat him down, I do everything but
tie him to the bed, and I waste my time. He's leaving the Farm. Period."
"So you bring him down here," said Lessing sourly. "The worst place he
could be, if something's really wrong." He looked across at the boy.
"Tommy? Come over and sit down."
There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin,
with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal
eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward
grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute
appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and
blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape.
The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear.
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently.
"I don't want to go back to the Farm," said the boy.
"Why?"
"I just don't. I hate it there."
"Are you frightened?"
The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly.
"Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?"
"No. Oh, no!"
"Then what?"
Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none
came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off—" He fingered
the grey plastic helmet.
"You think
that
would make you feel better?"
"It would, I know it would."
Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the
monitor is for, don't you?"
"It stops things from going out."
"That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator.
You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off,
away from the Farm."
The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there—" The
fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I
never want to go back."
"Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at
Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has
been going on for
three weeks
?"
"I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern—we see so
much of that up there."
"I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better
set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid
you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to
deal with this morning—the one who's threatening to upset the whole
Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with.
I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing
ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy
downstairs."
"Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman.
"Certainly! And Jack—in this case, be
sure
of it. If Tommy's in the
trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact
now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands."
Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was
from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book,
and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled.
Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical
Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck
up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm—yet he
hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And now, as the book
approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really
get back to work again.
The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the
International Psionics Conference:
Dear Dr. Lessing:
In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic
behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle
speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October 12th. A few remarks in
discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order—
They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the
scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His
earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going—but the
book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A
Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good
title—concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right.
And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a
guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and
baffling new science.
For they were floundering. When they were finally forced to recognize
that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds,
with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had
plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening
bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. Nothing worked, and
everything worked too well. They were trying to study phenomena which
made no sense, observing things that defied logic. Natural laws came
crashing down about their ears as they stood sadly by and watched
things happen which natural law said could never happen. They had never
been in this jungle before, nor in any jungle remotely like it. The
old rules didn't work here, the old methods of study failed. And the
more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush
became—
But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a
theory to work by—
At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "A gentleman to see you," the girl
said. "A Dr. Melrose. He's very impatient, sir."
He shut off the scanner and said, "Send him in, please."
Dr. Peter Melrose was tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark
mocking eyes. He wore a threadbare sport coat and a slouch. He offered
Lessing a bony hand, then flung himself into a chair as he stared about
the office in awe.
"I'm really overwhelmed," he said after a moment. "Within the
stronghold of psionic research at last. And face to face with the
Master in the trembling flesh!"
Lessing frowned. "Dr. Melrose, I don't quite understand—"
"Oh, it's just that I'm impressed," the young man said airily. "Of
course, I've seen old dried-up Authorities before—but never before
a brand spanking new one, just fresh out of the pupa, so to speak!"
He touched his forehead in a gesture of reverence. "I bow before the
Oracle. Speak, oh Motah, live forever! Cast a pearl at my feet!"
"If you've come here to be insulting," Lessing said coldly, "you're
just wasting time." He reached for the intercom switch.
"I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply,
"because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month
unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. And if you
don't think I can do it, you're in for quite a dumping."
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me—just what, exactly, do you want?"
"I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of
'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in
Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental
controls you keep talking about will actually bear. But mostly, I want
to see just what in psionic hell you're so busy making yourself an
Authority about." There was no laughter in the man's sharp brown eyes.
"You couldn't touch me with a ten foot pole at this conference,"
snapped Lessing.
The other man grinned. "Try me! We shook you up a little bit last year,
but you didn't seem to get the idea."
"Last year was different." Lessing scowled. "As for our 'fairy tale',
we happen to have a staggering body of evidence that says that it's
true."
"If the papers you've already published are a preview, we think it's
false as Satan."
"And our controls are above suspicion."
"So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said
Melrose. "We've done a lot of work on it, too."
"Oh, yes—I've heard about your work. Not bad, really. A little
misdirected, is all."
"According to your Theory, that is."
"Wildly unorthodox approach to psionics—but at least you're energetic
enough."
"We haven't been energetic enough to find an orthodox approach that got
us anywhere. We doubt if you have, either. But maybe we're all wrong."
Melrose grinned unpleasantly. "We're not unreasonable, your Majesty. We
just ask to be shown. If you dare, that is."
Lessing slammed his fist down on the desk angrily. "Have you got the
day to take a trip?"
"I've got 'til New Year."
Lessing shouted for his girl. "Get Dorffman up here. We're going to the
Farm this afternoon."
The girl nodded, then hesitated. "But what about your lunch?"
"Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest
here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us...."
Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels
and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the
Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the
rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in
the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing
briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the
long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less
than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed
north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside.
"What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along
through the afternoon sun.
"I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating."
Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of
beating the bushes with this—" He broke off to glare at young Melrose.
Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here."
"It's—unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped.
"Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day
school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even
used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here."
"Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying
to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis."
"Of course, you're sure you were measuring
something
."
"Oh, yes. We certainly were."
"Yet you said that you didn't know what."
"That's right," said Lessing. "We don't."
"And you don't know
why
your instruments measure whatever they're
measuring." The Chicago man's face was thoughtful. "In fact, you can't
really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at
all. It's not inconceivable that the
children
might be measuring the
instruments
, eh?"
Lessing blinked. "It's conceivable."
"Mmmm," said Melrose. "Sounds like a real firm foundation to build a
theory on."
"Why not?" Lessing growled. "It wouldn't be the first time the tail
wagged the dog. The psychiatrists never would have gotten out of their
rut if somebody hadn't gotten smart and realized that one of their new
drugs worked better in combatting schizophrenia when the doctor took
the medicine instead of the patient. That was quite a wall to climb."
"Yes, wasn't it," mused Melrose, scratching his bony jaw. "Only took
them seventy years to climb it, thanks to a certain man's theories.
I wonder how long it'll take psionics to crawl out of the pit you're
digging for it?"
"We're not digging any pit," Lessing exploded angrily. "We're
exploring—nothing more. A phenomenon exists. We've known that, one way
or another, for centuries. The fact that it doesn't seem to be bound by
the same sort of natural law we've observed elsewhere doesn't mean that
it isn't governed by natural law. But how can we define the law? How
can we define the limits of the phenomenon, for that matter? We can't
work in the dark forever—we've
got
to have a working hypothesis to
guide us."
"So you dreamed up this 'tadpole' idea," said Melrose sourly.
"For a working hypothesis—yes. We've known for a long time that every
human being has extrasensory potential to one degree or another. Not
just a few here and there—every single one. It's a differentiating
quality of the human mind. Just as the ability to think logically in a
crisis instead of giving way to panic is a differentiating quality."
"Fine," said Melrose. "Great. We can't
prove
that, of course, but
I'll play along."
Lessing glared at him. "When we began studying this psi-potential, we
found out some curious things. For one thing, it seemed to be immensely
more powerful and active in infants and children than in adults.
Somewhere along the line as a child grows up, something happens. We
don't know what. We do know that the child's psi-potential gradually
withdraws deeper and deeper into his mind, burying itself farther and
farther out of reach, just the way a tadpole's tail is absorbed deeper
and deeper into the growing frog until there just isn't any tail any
more." Lessing paused, packing tobacco into his pipe. "That's why we
have the Farm—to try to discover why. What forces that potential
underground? What buries it so deeply that adult human beings can't get
at it any more?"
"And you think you have an answer," said Melrose.
"We think we might be near an answer. We have a theory that explains
the available data."
The shuttle car bounced sharply as it left the highway automatics.
Dorffman took the controls. In a few moments they were skimming through
the high white gates of the Farm, slowing down at the entrance to a
long, low building.
"All right, young man—come along," said Lessing. "I think we can show
you our answer."
In the main office building they donned the close-fitting psionic
monitors required of all personnel at the Farm. They were of a
hard grey plastic material, with a network of wiring buried in the
substance, connected to a simple pocket-sized power source.
"The major problem," Lessing said, "has been to shield the children
from any external psionic stimuli, except those we wished to expose
them to. Our goal is a perfectly controlled psi environment. The
monitors are quite effective—a simple Renwick scrambler screen."
"It blocks off all types of psi activity?" asked Melrose.
"As far as we can measure, yes."
"Which may not be very far."
Jack Dorffman burst in: "What Dr. Lessing is saying is that they seem
effective for our purposes."
"But you don't know why," added Melrose.
"All right, we don't know why. Nobody knows why a Renwick screen
works—why blame us?" They were walking down the main corridor and out
through an open areaway. Behind the buildings was a broad playground. A
baseball game was in progress in one corner; across the field a group
of swings, slides, ring bars and other playground paraphernalia was in
heavy use. The place was teeming with youngsters, all shouting in a
fury of busy activity. Occasionally a helmeted supervisor hurried by;
one waved to them as she rescued a four-year-old from the parallel bars.
They crossed into the next building, where classes were in progress.
"Some of our children are here only briefly," Lessing explained as
they walked along, "and some have been here for years. We maintain a
top-ranking curriculum—your idea of a 'country day school' wasn't
so far afield at that—with scholarships supported by Hoffman Center
funds. Other children come to us—foundlings, desertees, children from
broken homes, children of all ages from infancy on. Sometimes they
stay until they have reached college age, or go on to jobs. As far as
psionics research is concerned, we are not trying to be teachers. We
are strictly observers. We try to place the youngsters in positions
where they can develope what potential they have—
without
the
presence of external psionic influences they would normally be subject
to. The results have been remarkable."
He led them into a long, narrow room with chairs and ash trays, facing
a wide grey glass wall. The room fell into darkness, and through the
grey glass they could see three children, about four years old, playing
in a large room.
"They're perfectly insulated from us," said Lessing. "A variety of
recording instruments are working. And before you ask, Dr. Melrose,
they are all empirical instruments, and they would all defy any
engineer's attempts to determine what makes them go. We don't know what
makes them go, and we don't care—they go. That's all we need. Like
that one, for instance—"
In the corner a flat screen was flickering, emitting a pale green
fluorescent light. It hung from the wall by two plastic rods which
penetrated into the children's room. There was no sign of a switch,
nor a power source. As the children moved about, the screen flickered.
Below it, a recording-tape clicked along in little spurts and starts of
activity.
"What are they doing?" Melrose asked after watching the children a few
moments.
"Those three seem to work as a team, somehow. Each one, individually,
had a fairly constant recordable psi potential of about seventeen on
the arbitrary scale we find useful here. Any two of them scale in at
thirty-four to thirty-six. Put the three together and they operate
somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred on the same scale."
Lessing smiled. "This is an isolated phenomenon—it doesn't hold for
any other three children on the Farm. Nor did we make any effort to
place them together—they drew each other like magnets. One of our
workers spent two weeks trying to find out why the instruments weren't
right. It wasn't the instruments, of course."
Lessing nodded to an attendant, and peered around at Melrose. "Now, I
want you to watch this very closely."
He opened a door and walked into the room with the children. The
fluorescent screen continued to flicker as the children ran to Lessing.
He inspected the block tower they were building, and stooped down to
talk to them, his lips moving soundlessly behind the observation wall.
The children laughed and jabbered, apparently intrigued by the game he
was proposing. He walked to the table and tapped the bottom block in
the tower with his thumb.
The tower quivered, and the screen blazed out with green light, but the
tower stood. Carefully Lessing jogged all the foundation blocks out of
place until the tower hung in midair, clearly unsupported. The children
watched it closely, and the foundation blocks inched still further out
of place....
Then, quite casually, Lessing lifted off his monitor. The children
continued staring at the tower as the screen gave three or four violent
bursts of green fire and went dark.
The block tower fell with a crash.
Moments later Lessing was back in the observation room, leaving the
children busily putting the tower back together. There was a little
smile on his lips as he saw Melrose's face. "Perhaps you're beginning
to see what I'm driving at," he said slowly.
"Yes," said Melrose. "I think I'm beginning to see." He scratched his
jaw. "You think that it's adult psi-contact that drives the child's
potential underground—that somehow adult contact acts like a damper, a
sort of colossal candle-snuffer."
"That's what I think," said Lessing.
"How do you know those children didn't make you take off your monitor?"
Lessing blinked. "Why should they?"
"Maybe they enjoy the crash when the blocks fall down."
"But that wouldn't make any difference, would it? The blocks still fall
down."
Melrose paced down the narrow room. "This is very good," he said
suddenly, his voice earnest. "You have fine facilities here, good
workers. And in spite of my flippancy, Dr. Lessing, I have never
imagined for a moment that you were not an acute observer and a
careful, highly imaginative worker. But suppose I told you, in perfect
faith, that we have data that flatly contradicts everything you've told
me today. Reproducible data, utterly incompatable with yours. What
would you say to that?"
"I'd say you were wrong," said Lessing. "You couldn't have such data.
According to the things I am certain are true, what you're saying is
sheer nonsense."
"And you'd express that opinion in a professional meeting?"
"I would."
"And as an Authority on psionic behavior patterns," said Melrose
slowly, "you would kill us then and there. You would strangle us
professionally, discredit anything we did, cut us off cold." The
tall man turned on him fiercely. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see
what danger you're in? If you publish your book now, you will become
an Authority in a field where the most devastating thing that could
possibly happen would be—
the appearance of an Authority
."
Lessing and Dorffman rode back to the Hoffman Center in grim silence.
At first Lessing pretended to work; finally he snapped off the tape
recorder in disgust and stared out the shuttle-car window. Melrose had
gone on to Idlewild to catch a jet back to Chicago. It was a relief to
see him go, Lessing thought, and tried to force the thin, angry man
firmly out of his mind. But somehow Melrose wouldn't force.
"Stop worrying about it," Dorffman urged. "He's a crackpot. He's
crawled way out on a limb, and now he's afraid your theory is going to
cut it off under him. Well, that's his worry, not yours." Dorffman's
face was intense. "Scientifically, you're on unshakeable ground. Every
great researcher has people like Melrose sniping at him. You just have
to throw them off and keep going."
Lessing shook his head. "Maybe. But this field of work is different
from any other, Jack. It doesn't follow the rules. Maybe scientific
grounds aren't right at all, in this case."
Dorffman snorted. "Surely there's nothing wrong with theorizing—"
"He wasn't objecting to the theory. He's afraid of what happens after
the theory."
"So it seems. But why?"
"Have you ever considered what makes a man an Authority?"
"He knows more about his field than anybody else does."
"He
seems
to, you mean. And therefore, anything he says about it
carries more weight than what anybody else says. Other workers follow
his lead. He developes ideas, formulates theories—and then
defends
them for all he's worth
."
"But why shouldn't he?"
"Because a man can't fight for his life and reputation and still keep
his objectivity," said Lessing. "And what if he just happens to be
wrong? Once he's an Authority the question of what's right and what's
wrong gets lost in the shuffle. It's
what he says
that counts."
"But we
know
you're right," Dorffman protested.
"Do we?"
"Of course we do! Look at our work! Look at what we've seen on the
Farm."
"Yes, I know." Lessing's voice was weary. "But first I think we'd
better look at Tommy Gilman, and the quicker we look, the better—"
A nurse greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. "We called
you at the Farm, but you'd already left. The boy—" She broke off
helplessly. "He's sick, Doctor. He's sicker than we ever imagined."
"What happened?"
"Nothing exactly—happened. I don't quite know how to describe it."
She hurried them down the corridor and opened a door into a large
children's playroom. "See what you think."
The boy sat stolidly in the corner of the room. He looked up as they
came in, but there was no flicker of recognition or pleasure on his
pale face. The monitor helmet was still on his head. He just sat there,
gripping a toy fire engine tightly in his hands.
Lessing crossed the room swiftly. "Tommy," he said.
The boy didn't even look at him. He stared stupidly at the fire engine.
"Tommy!" Lessing reached out for the toy. The boy drew back in terror,
clutching it to his chest. "Go away," he choked. "Go away, go away—"
When Lessing persisted the boy bent over swiftly and bit him hard on
the hand.
Lessing sat down on the table. "Tommy, listen to me." His voice was
gentle. "I won't try to take it again. I promise."
"Go away."
"Do you know who I am?"
Tommy's eyes shifted haltingly to Lessing's face. He nodded. "Go away."
"Why are you afraid, Tommy?"
"I hurt. My head hurts. I hurt all over. Go away."
"Why do you hurt?"
"I—can't get it—off," the boy said.
The monitor
, Lessing thought suddenly. Something had suddenly gone
horribly wrong—could the boy really be sensing the source of the
trouble? Lessing felt a cold knot gather in the pit of his stomach. He
knew what happened when adult psi-contact struck a psi-high youngster's
mind. He had seen it a hundred times at the Farm. But even more—he
had felt it in his own mind, bursting from the child. Like a violent
physical blow, the hate and fear and suspicion and cruelty buried and
repressed in the adult mind, crushing suddenly into the raw receptors
of the child's mind like a smothering fog—it was a fearful thing. A
healthy youngster could survive it, even though the scar remained. But
this youngster was sick—
And yet
an animal instinctively seeks its own protection
. With
trembling fingers Lessing reached out and opened the baffle-snap on the
monitor. "Take it off, Tommy," he whispered.
The boy blinked in amazement, and pulled the grey helmet from his head.
Lessing felt the familiar prickly feeling run down his scalp as the
boy stared at him. He could feel deep in his own mind the cold chill
of terror radiating from the boy. Then, suddenly, it began to fade. A
sense of warmth—peace and security and comfort—swept in as the fear
faded from the boy's face.
The fire engine clattered to the floor.
They analyzed the tapes later, punching the data cards with greatest
care, filing them through the machines for the basic processing and
classification that all their data underwent. It was late that night
when they had the report back in their hands.
Dorffman stared at it angrily. "It's obviously wrong," he grated. "It
doesn't fit. Dave, it doesn't agree with
anything
we've observed
before. There must be an error."
"Of course," said Lessing. "According to the theory. The theory says
that adult psi-contact is deadly to the growing child. It smothers
their potential through repeated contact until it dries up completely.
We've proved that, haven't we? Time after time. Everything goes
according to the theory—except Tommy. But Tommy's psi-potential was
drying up there on the Farm, until the distortion was threatening the
balance of his mind. Then he made an adult contact, and we saw how he
bloomed." Lessing sank down to his desk wearily. "What are we going to
do, Jack? Formulate a separate theory for Tommy?"
"Of course not," said Dorffman. "The instruments were wrong. Somehow we
misread the data—"
"Didn't you see his
face
?" Lessing burst out. "Didn't you see how he
acted
? What do you want with an instrument reading?" He shook his
head. "It's no good, Jack. Something different happened here, something
we'd never counted on. It's something the theory just doesn't allow
for."
They sat silently for a while. Then Dorffman said: "What are you going
to do?"
"I don't know," said Lessing. "Maybe when we fell into this bramble
bush we blinded ourselves with the urge to classify—to line everything
up in neat rows like pins in a paper. Maybe we were so blind we missed
the path altogether."
"But the book is due! The Conference speech—"
"I think we'll make some changes in the book," Lessing said slowly.
"It'll be costly—but it might even be fun. It's a pretty dry, logical
presentation of ideas, as it stands. Very austere and authoritarian.
But a few revisions could change all that—" He rubbed his hands
together thoughtfully. "How about it, Jack? Do we have nerve enough to
be laughed at? Do you think we could stand a little discredit, making
silly asses of ourselves? Because when I finish this book, we'll be
laughed out of existence. There won't be any Authority in psionics for
a while—and maybe that way one of the lads who's
really
sniffing out
the trail will get somebody to listen to him!
"Get a pad, get a pencil! We've got work to do. And when we finish, I
think we'll send a carbon copy out Chicago way. Might even persuade
that puppy out there to come here and work for me—" | Illinois | New Jersey | Connecticut | Pennsylvania | 0 |
60291_XQ25ASO2_7 | Why are the grey helmets necessary? | BRAMBLE BUSH
BY ALAN E. NOURSE
There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise;
He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw what he had done, with all his might and main
He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again.
MOTHER GOOSE
Dr. David Lessing found Jack Dorffman and the boy waiting in his office
when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. Dorffman looked as
though he'd been running all night. There were dark pouches under his
eyes; his heavy unshaven face seemed to sag at every crease. Lessing
glanced sharply at his Field Director and sank down behind his desk
with a sigh. "All right, Jack—what's wrong?"
"This kid is driving me nuts," said Dorffman through clenched teeth.
"He's gone completely hay-wire. Nobody's been able to get near him
for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's
leaving the Farm. I talk to him, I sweat him down, I do everything but
tie him to the bed, and I waste my time. He's leaving the Farm. Period."
"So you bring him down here," said Lessing sourly. "The worst place he
could be, if something's really wrong." He looked across at the boy.
"Tommy? Come over and sit down."
There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin,
with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal
eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward
grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute
appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and
blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape.
The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear.
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently.
"I don't want to go back to the Farm," said the boy.
"Why?"
"I just don't. I hate it there."
"Are you frightened?"
The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly.
"Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?"
"No. Oh, no!"
"Then what?"
Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none
came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off—" He fingered
the grey plastic helmet.
"You think
that
would make you feel better?"
"It would, I know it would."
Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the
monitor is for, don't you?"
"It stops things from going out."
"That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator.
You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off,
away from the Farm."
The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there—" The
fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I
never want to go back."
"Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at
Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has
been going on for
three weeks
?"
"I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern—we see so
much of that up there."
"I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better
set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid
you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to
deal with this morning—the one who's threatening to upset the whole
Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with.
I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing
ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy
downstairs."
"Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman.
"Certainly! And Jack—in this case, be
sure
of it. If Tommy's in the
trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact
now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands."
Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was
from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book,
and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled.
Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical
Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck
up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm—yet he
hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And now, as the book
approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really
get back to work again.
The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the
International Psionics Conference:
Dear Dr. Lessing:
In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic
behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle
speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October 12th. A few remarks in
discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order—
They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the
scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His
earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going—but the
book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A
Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good
title—concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right.
And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a
guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and
baffling new science.
For they were floundering. When they were finally forced to recognize
that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds,
with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had
plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening
bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. Nothing worked, and
everything worked too well. They were trying to study phenomena which
made no sense, observing things that defied logic. Natural laws came
crashing down about their ears as they stood sadly by and watched
things happen which natural law said could never happen. They had never
been in this jungle before, nor in any jungle remotely like it. The
old rules didn't work here, the old methods of study failed. And the
more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush
became—
But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a
theory to work by—
At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "A gentleman to see you," the girl
said. "A Dr. Melrose. He's very impatient, sir."
He shut off the scanner and said, "Send him in, please."
Dr. Peter Melrose was tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark
mocking eyes. He wore a threadbare sport coat and a slouch. He offered
Lessing a bony hand, then flung himself into a chair as he stared about
the office in awe.
"I'm really overwhelmed," he said after a moment. "Within the
stronghold of psionic research at last. And face to face with the
Master in the trembling flesh!"
Lessing frowned. "Dr. Melrose, I don't quite understand—"
"Oh, it's just that I'm impressed," the young man said airily. "Of
course, I've seen old dried-up Authorities before—but never before
a brand spanking new one, just fresh out of the pupa, so to speak!"
He touched his forehead in a gesture of reverence. "I bow before the
Oracle. Speak, oh Motah, live forever! Cast a pearl at my feet!"
"If you've come here to be insulting," Lessing said coldly, "you're
just wasting time." He reached for the intercom switch.
"I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply,
"because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month
unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. And if you
don't think I can do it, you're in for quite a dumping."
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me—just what, exactly, do you want?"
"I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of
'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in
Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental
controls you keep talking about will actually bear. But mostly, I want
to see just what in psionic hell you're so busy making yourself an
Authority about." There was no laughter in the man's sharp brown eyes.
"You couldn't touch me with a ten foot pole at this conference,"
snapped Lessing.
The other man grinned. "Try me! We shook you up a little bit last year,
but you didn't seem to get the idea."
"Last year was different." Lessing scowled. "As for our 'fairy tale',
we happen to have a staggering body of evidence that says that it's
true."
"If the papers you've already published are a preview, we think it's
false as Satan."
"And our controls are above suspicion."
"So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said
Melrose. "We've done a lot of work on it, too."
"Oh, yes—I've heard about your work. Not bad, really. A little
misdirected, is all."
"According to your Theory, that is."
"Wildly unorthodox approach to psionics—but at least you're energetic
enough."
"We haven't been energetic enough to find an orthodox approach that got
us anywhere. We doubt if you have, either. But maybe we're all wrong."
Melrose grinned unpleasantly. "We're not unreasonable, your Majesty. We
just ask to be shown. If you dare, that is."
Lessing slammed his fist down on the desk angrily. "Have you got the
day to take a trip?"
"I've got 'til New Year."
Lessing shouted for his girl. "Get Dorffman up here. We're going to the
Farm this afternoon."
The girl nodded, then hesitated. "But what about your lunch?"
"Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest
here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us...."
Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels
and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the
Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the
rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in
the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing
briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the
long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less
than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed
north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside.
"What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along
through the afternoon sun.
"I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating."
Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of
beating the bushes with this—" He broke off to glare at young Melrose.
Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here."
"It's—unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped.
"Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day
school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even
used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here."
"Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying
to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis."
"Of course, you're sure you were measuring
something
."
"Oh, yes. We certainly were."
"Yet you said that you didn't know what."
"That's right," said Lessing. "We don't."
"And you don't know
why
your instruments measure whatever they're
measuring." The Chicago man's face was thoughtful. "In fact, you can't
really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at
all. It's not inconceivable that the
children
might be measuring the
instruments
, eh?"
Lessing blinked. "It's conceivable."
"Mmmm," said Melrose. "Sounds like a real firm foundation to build a
theory on."
"Why not?" Lessing growled. "It wouldn't be the first time the tail
wagged the dog. The psychiatrists never would have gotten out of their
rut if somebody hadn't gotten smart and realized that one of their new
drugs worked better in combatting schizophrenia when the doctor took
the medicine instead of the patient. That was quite a wall to climb."
"Yes, wasn't it," mused Melrose, scratching his bony jaw. "Only took
them seventy years to climb it, thanks to a certain man's theories.
I wonder how long it'll take psionics to crawl out of the pit you're
digging for it?"
"We're not digging any pit," Lessing exploded angrily. "We're
exploring—nothing more. A phenomenon exists. We've known that, one way
or another, for centuries. The fact that it doesn't seem to be bound by
the same sort of natural law we've observed elsewhere doesn't mean that
it isn't governed by natural law. But how can we define the law? How
can we define the limits of the phenomenon, for that matter? We can't
work in the dark forever—we've
got
to have a working hypothesis to
guide us."
"So you dreamed up this 'tadpole' idea," said Melrose sourly.
"For a working hypothesis—yes. We've known for a long time that every
human being has extrasensory potential to one degree or another. Not
just a few here and there—every single one. It's a differentiating
quality of the human mind. Just as the ability to think logically in a
crisis instead of giving way to panic is a differentiating quality."
"Fine," said Melrose. "Great. We can't
prove
that, of course, but
I'll play along."
Lessing glared at him. "When we began studying this psi-potential, we
found out some curious things. For one thing, it seemed to be immensely
more powerful and active in infants and children than in adults.
Somewhere along the line as a child grows up, something happens. We
don't know what. We do know that the child's psi-potential gradually
withdraws deeper and deeper into his mind, burying itself farther and
farther out of reach, just the way a tadpole's tail is absorbed deeper
and deeper into the growing frog until there just isn't any tail any
more." Lessing paused, packing tobacco into his pipe. "That's why we
have the Farm—to try to discover why. What forces that potential
underground? What buries it so deeply that adult human beings can't get
at it any more?"
"And you think you have an answer," said Melrose.
"We think we might be near an answer. We have a theory that explains
the available data."
The shuttle car bounced sharply as it left the highway automatics.
Dorffman took the controls. In a few moments they were skimming through
the high white gates of the Farm, slowing down at the entrance to a
long, low building.
"All right, young man—come along," said Lessing. "I think we can show
you our answer."
In the main office building they donned the close-fitting psionic
monitors required of all personnel at the Farm. They were of a
hard grey plastic material, with a network of wiring buried in the
substance, connected to a simple pocket-sized power source.
"The major problem," Lessing said, "has been to shield the children
from any external psionic stimuli, except those we wished to expose
them to. Our goal is a perfectly controlled psi environment. The
monitors are quite effective—a simple Renwick scrambler screen."
"It blocks off all types of psi activity?" asked Melrose.
"As far as we can measure, yes."
"Which may not be very far."
Jack Dorffman burst in: "What Dr. Lessing is saying is that they seem
effective for our purposes."
"But you don't know why," added Melrose.
"All right, we don't know why. Nobody knows why a Renwick screen
works—why blame us?" They were walking down the main corridor and out
through an open areaway. Behind the buildings was a broad playground. A
baseball game was in progress in one corner; across the field a group
of swings, slides, ring bars and other playground paraphernalia was in
heavy use. The place was teeming with youngsters, all shouting in a
fury of busy activity. Occasionally a helmeted supervisor hurried by;
one waved to them as she rescued a four-year-old from the parallel bars.
They crossed into the next building, where classes were in progress.
"Some of our children are here only briefly," Lessing explained as
they walked along, "and some have been here for years. We maintain a
top-ranking curriculum—your idea of a 'country day school' wasn't
so far afield at that—with scholarships supported by Hoffman Center
funds. Other children come to us—foundlings, desertees, children from
broken homes, children of all ages from infancy on. Sometimes they
stay until they have reached college age, or go on to jobs. As far as
psionics research is concerned, we are not trying to be teachers. We
are strictly observers. We try to place the youngsters in positions
where they can develope what potential they have—
without
the
presence of external psionic influences they would normally be subject
to. The results have been remarkable."
He led them into a long, narrow room with chairs and ash trays, facing
a wide grey glass wall. The room fell into darkness, and through the
grey glass they could see three children, about four years old, playing
in a large room.
"They're perfectly insulated from us," said Lessing. "A variety of
recording instruments are working. And before you ask, Dr. Melrose,
they are all empirical instruments, and they would all defy any
engineer's attempts to determine what makes them go. We don't know what
makes them go, and we don't care—they go. That's all we need. Like
that one, for instance—"
In the corner a flat screen was flickering, emitting a pale green
fluorescent light. It hung from the wall by two plastic rods which
penetrated into the children's room. There was no sign of a switch,
nor a power source. As the children moved about, the screen flickered.
Below it, a recording-tape clicked along in little spurts and starts of
activity.
"What are they doing?" Melrose asked after watching the children a few
moments.
"Those three seem to work as a team, somehow. Each one, individually,
had a fairly constant recordable psi potential of about seventeen on
the arbitrary scale we find useful here. Any two of them scale in at
thirty-four to thirty-six. Put the three together and they operate
somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred on the same scale."
Lessing smiled. "This is an isolated phenomenon—it doesn't hold for
any other three children on the Farm. Nor did we make any effort to
place them together—they drew each other like magnets. One of our
workers spent two weeks trying to find out why the instruments weren't
right. It wasn't the instruments, of course."
Lessing nodded to an attendant, and peered around at Melrose. "Now, I
want you to watch this very closely."
He opened a door and walked into the room with the children. The
fluorescent screen continued to flicker as the children ran to Lessing.
He inspected the block tower they were building, and stooped down to
talk to them, his lips moving soundlessly behind the observation wall.
The children laughed and jabbered, apparently intrigued by the game he
was proposing. He walked to the table and tapped the bottom block in
the tower with his thumb.
The tower quivered, and the screen blazed out with green light, but the
tower stood. Carefully Lessing jogged all the foundation blocks out of
place until the tower hung in midair, clearly unsupported. The children
watched it closely, and the foundation blocks inched still further out
of place....
Then, quite casually, Lessing lifted off his monitor. The children
continued staring at the tower as the screen gave three or four violent
bursts of green fire and went dark.
The block tower fell with a crash.
Moments later Lessing was back in the observation room, leaving the
children busily putting the tower back together. There was a little
smile on his lips as he saw Melrose's face. "Perhaps you're beginning
to see what I'm driving at," he said slowly.
"Yes," said Melrose. "I think I'm beginning to see." He scratched his
jaw. "You think that it's adult psi-contact that drives the child's
potential underground—that somehow adult contact acts like a damper, a
sort of colossal candle-snuffer."
"That's what I think," said Lessing.
"How do you know those children didn't make you take off your monitor?"
Lessing blinked. "Why should they?"
"Maybe they enjoy the crash when the blocks fall down."
"But that wouldn't make any difference, would it? The blocks still fall
down."
Melrose paced down the narrow room. "This is very good," he said
suddenly, his voice earnest. "You have fine facilities here, good
workers. And in spite of my flippancy, Dr. Lessing, I have never
imagined for a moment that you were not an acute observer and a
careful, highly imaginative worker. But suppose I told you, in perfect
faith, that we have data that flatly contradicts everything you've told
me today. Reproducible data, utterly incompatable with yours. What
would you say to that?"
"I'd say you were wrong," said Lessing. "You couldn't have such data.
According to the things I am certain are true, what you're saying is
sheer nonsense."
"And you'd express that opinion in a professional meeting?"
"I would."
"And as an Authority on psionic behavior patterns," said Melrose
slowly, "you would kill us then and there. You would strangle us
professionally, discredit anything we did, cut us off cold." The
tall man turned on him fiercely. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see
what danger you're in? If you publish your book now, you will become
an Authority in a field where the most devastating thing that could
possibly happen would be—
the appearance of an Authority
."
Lessing and Dorffman rode back to the Hoffman Center in grim silence.
At first Lessing pretended to work; finally he snapped off the tape
recorder in disgust and stared out the shuttle-car window. Melrose had
gone on to Idlewild to catch a jet back to Chicago. It was a relief to
see him go, Lessing thought, and tried to force the thin, angry man
firmly out of his mind. But somehow Melrose wouldn't force.
"Stop worrying about it," Dorffman urged. "He's a crackpot. He's
crawled way out on a limb, and now he's afraid your theory is going to
cut it off under him. Well, that's his worry, not yours." Dorffman's
face was intense. "Scientifically, you're on unshakeable ground. Every
great researcher has people like Melrose sniping at him. You just have
to throw them off and keep going."
Lessing shook his head. "Maybe. But this field of work is different
from any other, Jack. It doesn't follow the rules. Maybe scientific
grounds aren't right at all, in this case."
Dorffman snorted. "Surely there's nothing wrong with theorizing—"
"He wasn't objecting to the theory. He's afraid of what happens after
the theory."
"So it seems. But why?"
"Have you ever considered what makes a man an Authority?"
"He knows more about his field than anybody else does."
"He
seems
to, you mean. And therefore, anything he says about it
carries more weight than what anybody else says. Other workers follow
his lead. He developes ideas, formulates theories—and then
defends
them for all he's worth
."
"But why shouldn't he?"
"Because a man can't fight for his life and reputation and still keep
his objectivity," said Lessing. "And what if he just happens to be
wrong? Once he's an Authority the question of what's right and what's
wrong gets lost in the shuffle. It's
what he says
that counts."
"But we
know
you're right," Dorffman protested.
"Do we?"
"Of course we do! Look at our work! Look at what we've seen on the
Farm."
"Yes, I know." Lessing's voice was weary. "But first I think we'd
better look at Tommy Gilman, and the quicker we look, the better—"
A nurse greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. "We called
you at the Farm, but you'd already left. The boy—" She broke off
helplessly. "He's sick, Doctor. He's sicker than we ever imagined."
"What happened?"
"Nothing exactly—happened. I don't quite know how to describe it."
She hurried them down the corridor and opened a door into a large
children's playroom. "See what you think."
The boy sat stolidly in the corner of the room. He looked up as they
came in, but there was no flicker of recognition or pleasure on his
pale face. The monitor helmet was still on his head. He just sat there,
gripping a toy fire engine tightly in his hands.
Lessing crossed the room swiftly. "Tommy," he said.
The boy didn't even look at him. He stared stupidly at the fire engine.
"Tommy!" Lessing reached out for the toy. The boy drew back in terror,
clutching it to his chest. "Go away," he choked. "Go away, go away—"
When Lessing persisted the boy bent over swiftly and bit him hard on
the hand.
Lessing sat down on the table. "Tommy, listen to me." His voice was
gentle. "I won't try to take it again. I promise."
"Go away."
"Do you know who I am?"
Tommy's eyes shifted haltingly to Lessing's face. He nodded. "Go away."
"Why are you afraid, Tommy?"
"I hurt. My head hurts. I hurt all over. Go away."
"Why do you hurt?"
"I—can't get it—off," the boy said.
The monitor
, Lessing thought suddenly. Something had suddenly gone
horribly wrong—could the boy really be sensing the source of the
trouble? Lessing felt a cold knot gather in the pit of his stomach. He
knew what happened when adult psi-contact struck a psi-high youngster's
mind. He had seen it a hundred times at the Farm. But even more—he
had felt it in his own mind, bursting from the child. Like a violent
physical blow, the hate and fear and suspicion and cruelty buried and
repressed in the adult mind, crushing suddenly into the raw receptors
of the child's mind like a smothering fog—it was a fearful thing. A
healthy youngster could survive it, even though the scar remained. But
this youngster was sick—
And yet
an animal instinctively seeks its own protection
. With
trembling fingers Lessing reached out and opened the baffle-snap on the
monitor. "Take it off, Tommy," he whispered.
The boy blinked in amazement, and pulled the grey helmet from his head.
Lessing felt the familiar prickly feeling run down his scalp as the
boy stared at him. He could feel deep in his own mind the cold chill
of terror radiating from the boy. Then, suddenly, it began to fade. A
sense of warmth—peace and security and comfort—swept in as the fear
faded from the boy's face.
The fire engine clattered to the floor.
They analyzed the tapes later, punching the data cards with greatest
care, filing them through the machines for the basic processing and
classification that all their data underwent. It was late that night
when they had the report back in their hands.
Dorffman stared at it angrily. "It's obviously wrong," he grated. "It
doesn't fit. Dave, it doesn't agree with
anything
we've observed
before. There must be an error."
"Of course," said Lessing. "According to the theory. The theory says
that adult psi-contact is deadly to the growing child. It smothers
their potential through repeated contact until it dries up completely.
We've proved that, haven't we? Time after time. Everything goes
according to the theory—except Tommy. But Tommy's psi-potential was
drying up there on the Farm, until the distortion was threatening the
balance of his mind. Then he made an adult contact, and we saw how he
bloomed." Lessing sank down to his desk wearily. "What are we going to
do, Jack? Formulate a separate theory for Tommy?"
"Of course not," said Dorffman. "The instruments were wrong. Somehow we
misread the data—"
"Didn't you see his
face
?" Lessing burst out. "Didn't you see how he
acted
? What do you want with an instrument reading?" He shook his
head. "It's no good, Jack. Something different happened here, something
we'd never counted on. It's something the theory just doesn't allow
for."
They sat silently for a while. Then Dorffman said: "What are you going
to do?"
"I don't know," said Lessing. "Maybe when we fell into this bramble
bush we blinded ourselves with the urge to classify—to line everything
up in neat rows like pins in a paper. Maybe we were so blind we missed
the path altogether."
"But the book is due! The Conference speech—"
"I think we'll make some changes in the book," Lessing said slowly.
"It'll be costly—but it might even be fun. It's a pretty dry, logical
presentation of ideas, as it stands. Very austere and authoritarian.
But a few revisions could change all that—" He rubbed his hands
together thoughtfully. "How about it, Jack? Do we have nerve enough to
be laughed at? Do you think we could stand a little discredit, making
silly asses of ourselves? Because when I finish this book, we'll be
laughed out of existence. There won't be any Authority in psionics for
a while—and maybe that way one of the lads who's
really
sniffing out
the trail will get somebody to listen to him!
"Get a pad, get a pencil! We've got work to do. And when we finish, I
think we'll send a carbon copy out Chicago way. Might even persuade
that puppy out there to come here and work for me—" | The helmets block external psionic forces. | The helmets improve the reception of external psionic forces. | The helmets are for safety, as the children are heavily medicated and at high risk for falling. | The helmets amplify the childrens' psychic abilities. | 0 |
60291_XQ25ASO2_8 | Why is Melrose so opposed to Lessing publishing his book? | BRAMBLE BUSH
BY ALAN E. NOURSE
There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise;
He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw what he had done, with all his might and main
He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again.
MOTHER GOOSE
Dr. David Lessing found Jack Dorffman and the boy waiting in his office
when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. Dorffman looked as
though he'd been running all night. There were dark pouches under his
eyes; his heavy unshaven face seemed to sag at every crease. Lessing
glanced sharply at his Field Director and sank down behind his desk
with a sigh. "All right, Jack—what's wrong?"
"This kid is driving me nuts," said Dorffman through clenched teeth.
"He's gone completely hay-wire. Nobody's been able to get near him
for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's
leaving the Farm. I talk to him, I sweat him down, I do everything but
tie him to the bed, and I waste my time. He's leaving the Farm. Period."
"So you bring him down here," said Lessing sourly. "The worst place he
could be, if something's really wrong." He looked across at the boy.
"Tommy? Come over and sit down."
There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin,
with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal
eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward
grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute
appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and
blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape.
The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear.
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently.
"I don't want to go back to the Farm," said the boy.
"Why?"
"I just don't. I hate it there."
"Are you frightened?"
The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly.
"Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?"
"No. Oh, no!"
"Then what?"
Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none
came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off—" He fingered
the grey plastic helmet.
"You think
that
would make you feel better?"
"It would, I know it would."
Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the
monitor is for, don't you?"
"It stops things from going out."
"That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator.
You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off,
away from the Farm."
The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there—" The
fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I
never want to go back."
"Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at
Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has
been going on for
three weeks
?"
"I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern—we see so
much of that up there."
"I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better
set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid
you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to
deal with this morning—the one who's threatening to upset the whole
Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with.
I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing
ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy
downstairs."
"Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman.
"Certainly! And Jack—in this case, be
sure
of it. If Tommy's in the
trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact
now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands."
Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was
from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book,
and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled.
Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical
Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck
up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm—yet he
hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And now, as the book
approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really
get back to work again.
The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the
International Psionics Conference:
Dear Dr. Lessing:
In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic
behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle
speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October 12th. A few remarks in
discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order—
They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the
scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His
earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going—but the
book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A
Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good
title—concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right.
And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a
guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and
baffling new science.
For they were floundering. When they were finally forced to recognize
that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds,
with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had
plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening
bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. Nothing worked, and
everything worked too well. They were trying to study phenomena which
made no sense, observing things that defied logic. Natural laws came
crashing down about their ears as they stood sadly by and watched
things happen which natural law said could never happen. They had never
been in this jungle before, nor in any jungle remotely like it. The
old rules didn't work here, the old methods of study failed. And the
more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush
became—
But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a
theory to work by—
At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "A gentleman to see you," the girl
said. "A Dr. Melrose. He's very impatient, sir."
He shut off the scanner and said, "Send him in, please."
Dr. Peter Melrose was tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark
mocking eyes. He wore a threadbare sport coat and a slouch. He offered
Lessing a bony hand, then flung himself into a chair as he stared about
the office in awe.
"I'm really overwhelmed," he said after a moment. "Within the
stronghold of psionic research at last. And face to face with the
Master in the trembling flesh!"
Lessing frowned. "Dr. Melrose, I don't quite understand—"
"Oh, it's just that I'm impressed," the young man said airily. "Of
course, I've seen old dried-up Authorities before—but never before
a brand spanking new one, just fresh out of the pupa, so to speak!"
He touched his forehead in a gesture of reverence. "I bow before the
Oracle. Speak, oh Motah, live forever! Cast a pearl at my feet!"
"If you've come here to be insulting," Lessing said coldly, "you're
just wasting time." He reached for the intercom switch.
"I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply,
"because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month
unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. And if you
don't think I can do it, you're in for quite a dumping."
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me—just what, exactly, do you want?"
"I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of
'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in
Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental
controls you keep talking about will actually bear. But mostly, I want
to see just what in psionic hell you're so busy making yourself an
Authority about." There was no laughter in the man's sharp brown eyes.
"You couldn't touch me with a ten foot pole at this conference,"
snapped Lessing.
The other man grinned. "Try me! We shook you up a little bit last year,
but you didn't seem to get the idea."
"Last year was different." Lessing scowled. "As for our 'fairy tale',
we happen to have a staggering body of evidence that says that it's
true."
"If the papers you've already published are a preview, we think it's
false as Satan."
"And our controls are above suspicion."
"So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said
Melrose. "We've done a lot of work on it, too."
"Oh, yes—I've heard about your work. Not bad, really. A little
misdirected, is all."
"According to your Theory, that is."
"Wildly unorthodox approach to psionics—but at least you're energetic
enough."
"We haven't been energetic enough to find an orthodox approach that got
us anywhere. We doubt if you have, either. But maybe we're all wrong."
Melrose grinned unpleasantly. "We're not unreasonable, your Majesty. We
just ask to be shown. If you dare, that is."
Lessing slammed his fist down on the desk angrily. "Have you got the
day to take a trip?"
"I've got 'til New Year."
Lessing shouted for his girl. "Get Dorffman up here. We're going to the
Farm this afternoon."
The girl nodded, then hesitated. "But what about your lunch?"
"Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest
here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us...."
Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels
and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the
Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the
rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in
the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing
briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the
long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less
than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed
north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside.
"What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along
through the afternoon sun.
"I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating."
Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of
beating the bushes with this—" He broke off to glare at young Melrose.
Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here."
"It's—unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped.
"Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day
school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even
used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here."
"Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying
to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis."
"Of course, you're sure you were measuring
something
."
"Oh, yes. We certainly were."
"Yet you said that you didn't know what."
"That's right," said Lessing. "We don't."
"And you don't know
why
your instruments measure whatever they're
measuring." The Chicago man's face was thoughtful. "In fact, you can't
really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at
all. It's not inconceivable that the
children
might be measuring the
instruments
, eh?"
Lessing blinked. "It's conceivable."
"Mmmm," said Melrose. "Sounds like a real firm foundation to build a
theory on."
"Why not?" Lessing growled. "It wouldn't be the first time the tail
wagged the dog. The psychiatrists never would have gotten out of their
rut if somebody hadn't gotten smart and realized that one of their new
drugs worked better in combatting schizophrenia when the doctor took
the medicine instead of the patient. That was quite a wall to climb."
"Yes, wasn't it," mused Melrose, scratching his bony jaw. "Only took
them seventy years to climb it, thanks to a certain man's theories.
I wonder how long it'll take psionics to crawl out of the pit you're
digging for it?"
"We're not digging any pit," Lessing exploded angrily. "We're
exploring—nothing more. A phenomenon exists. We've known that, one way
or another, for centuries. The fact that it doesn't seem to be bound by
the same sort of natural law we've observed elsewhere doesn't mean that
it isn't governed by natural law. But how can we define the law? How
can we define the limits of the phenomenon, for that matter? We can't
work in the dark forever—we've
got
to have a working hypothesis to
guide us."
"So you dreamed up this 'tadpole' idea," said Melrose sourly.
"For a working hypothesis—yes. We've known for a long time that every
human being has extrasensory potential to one degree or another. Not
just a few here and there—every single one. It's a differentiating
quality of the human mind. Just as the ability to think logically in a
crisis instead of giving way to panic is a differentiating quality."
"Fine," said Melrose. "Great. We can't
prove
that, of course, but
I'll play along."
Lessing glared at him. "When we began studying this psi-potential, we
found out some curious things. For one thing, it seemed to be immensely
more powerful and active in infants and children than in adults.
Somewhere along the line as a child grows up, something happens. We
don't know what. We do know that the child's psi-potential gradually
withdraws deeper and deeper into his mind, burying itself farther and
farther out of reach, just the way a tadpole's tail is absorbed deeper
and deeper into the growing frog until there just isn't any tail any
more." Lessing paused, packing tobacco into his pipe. "That's why we
have the Farm—to try to discover why. What forces that potential
underground? What buries it so deeply that adult human beings can't get
at it any more?"
"And you think you have an answer," said Melrose.
"We think we might be near an answer. We have a theory that explains
the available data."
The shuttle car bounced sharply as it left the highway automatics.
Dorffman took the controls. In a few moments they were skimming through
the high white gates of the Farm, slowing down at the entrance to a
long, low building.
"All right, young man—come along," said Lessing. "I think we can show
you our answer."
In the main office building they donned the close-fitting psionic
monitors required of all personnel at the Farm. They were of a
hard grey plastic material, with a network of wiring buried in the
substance, connected to a simple pocket-sized power source.
"The major problem," Lessing said, "has been to shield the children
from any external psionic stimuli, except those we wished to expose
them to. Our goal is a perfectly controlled psi environment. The
monitors are quite effective—a simple Renwick scrambler screen."
"It blocks off all types of psi activity?" asked Melrose.
"As far as we can measure, yes."
"Which may not be very far."
Jack Dorffman burst in: "What Dr. Lessing is saying is that they seem
effective for our purposes."
"But you don't know why," added Melrose.
"All right, we don't know why. Nobody knows why a Renwick screen
works—why blame us?" They were walking down the main corridor and out
through an open areaway. Behind the buildings was a broad playground. A
baseball game was in progress in one corner; across the field a group
of swings, slides, ring bars and other playground paraphernalia was in
heavy use. The place was teeming with youngsters, all shouting in a
fury of busy activity. Occasionally a helmeted supervisor hurried by;
one waved to them as she rescued a four-year-old from the parallel bars.
They crossed into the next building, where classes were in progress.
"Some of our children are here only briefly," Lessing explained as
they walked along, "and some have been here for years. We maintain a
top-ranking curriculum—your idea of a 'country day school' wasn't
so far afield at that—with scholarships supported by Hoffman Center
funds. Other children come to us—foundlings, desertees, children from
broken homes, children of all ages from infancy on. Sometimes they
stay until they have reached college age, or go on to jobs. As far as
psionics research is concerned, we are not trying to be teachers. We
are strictly observers. We try to place the youngsters in positions
where they can develope what potential they have—
without
the
presence of external psionic influences they would normally be subject
to. The results have been remarkable."
He led them into a long, narrow room with chairs and ash trays, facing
a wide grey glass wall. The room fell into darkness, and through the
grey glass they could see three children, about four years old, playing
in a large room.
"They're perfectly insulated from us," said Lessing. "A variety of
recording instruments are working. And before you ask, Dr. Melrose,
they are all empirical instruments, and they would all defy any
engineer's attempts to determine what makes them go. We don't know what
makes them go, and we don't care—they go. That's all we need. Like
that one, for instance—"
In the corner a flat screen was flickering, emitting a pale green
fluorescent light. It hung from the wall by two plastic rods which
penetrated into the children's room. There was no sign of a switch,
nor a power source. As the children moved about, the screen flickered.
Below it, a recording-tape clicked along in little spurts and starts of
activity.
"What are they doing?" Melrose asked after watching the children a few
moments.
"Those three seem to work as a team, somehow. Each one, individually,
had a fairly constant recordable psi potential of about seventeen on
the arbitrary scale we find useful here. Any two of them scale in at
thirty-four to thirty-six. Put the three together and they operate
somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred on the same scale."
Lessing smiled. "This is an isolated phenomenon—it doesn't hold for
any other three children on the Farm. Nor did we make any effort to
place them together—they drew each other like magnets. One of our
workers spent two weeks trying to find out why the instruments weren't
right. It wasn't the instruments, of course."
Lessing nodded to an attendant, and peered around at Melrose. "Now, I
want you to watch this very closely."
He opened a door and walked into the room with the children. The
fluorescent screen continued to flicker as the children ran to Lessing.
He inspected the block tower they were building, and stooped down to
talk to them, his lips moving soundlessly behind the observation wall.
The children laughed and jabbered, apparently intrigued by the game he
was proposing. He walked to the table and tapped the bottom block in
the tower with his thumb.
The tower quivered, and the screen blazed out with green light, but the
tower stood. Carefully Lessing jogged all the foundation blocks out of
place until the tower hung in midair, clearly unsupported. The children
watched it closely, and the foundation blocks inched still further out
of place....
Then, quite casually, Lessing lifted off his monitor. The children
continued staring at the tower as the screen gave three or four violent
bursts of green fire and went dark.
The block tower fell with a crash.
Moments later Lessing was back in the observation room, leaving the
children busily putting the tower back together. There was a little
smile on his lips as he saw Melrose's face. "Perhaps you're beginning
to see what I'm driving at," he said slowly.
"Yes," said Melrose. "I think I'm beginning to see." He scratched his
jaw. "You think that it's adult psi-contact that drives the child's
potential underground—that somehow adult contact acts like a damper, a
sort of colossal candle-snuffer."
"That's what I think," said Lessing.
"How do you know those children didn't make you take off your monitor?"
Lessing blinked. "Why should they?"
"Maybe they enjoy the crash when the blocks fall down."
"But that wouldn't make any difference, would it? The blocks still fall
down."
Melrose paced down the narrow room. "This is very good," he said
suddenly, his voice earnest. "You have fine facilities here, good
workers. And in spite of my flippancy, Dr. Lessing, I have never
imagined for a moment that you were not an acute observer and a
careful, highly imaginative worker. But suppose I told you, in perfect
faith, that we have data that flatly contradicts everything you've told
me today. Reproducible data, utterly incompatable with yours. What
would you say to that?"
"I'd say you were wrong," said Lessing. "You couldn't have such data.
According to the things I am certain are true, what you're saying is
sheer nonsense."
"And you'd express that opinion in a professional meeting?"
"I would."
"And as an Authority on psionic behavior patterns," said Melrose
slowly, "you would kill us then and there. You would strangle us
professionally, discredit anything we did, cut us off cold." The
tall man turned on him fiercely. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see
what danger you're in? If you publish your book now, you will become
an Authority in a field where the most devastating thing that could
possibly happen would be—
the appearance of an Authority
."
Lessing and Dorffman rode back to the Hoffman Center in grim silence.
At first Lessing pretended to work; finally he snapped off the tape
recorder in disgust and stared out the shuttle-car window. Melrose had
gone on to Idlewild to catch a jet back to Chicago. It was a relief to
see him go, Lessing thought, and tried to force the thin, angry man
firmly out of his mind. But somehow Melrose wouldn't force.
"Stop worrying about it," Dorffman urged. "He's a crackpot. He's
crawled way out on a limb, and now he's afraid your theory is going to
cut it off under him. Well, that's his worry, not yours." Dorffman's
face was intense. "Scientifically, you're on unshakeable ground. Every
great researcher has people like Melrose sniping at him. You just have
to throw them off and keep going."
Lessing shook his head. "Maybe. But this field of work is different
from any other, Jack. It doesn't follow the rules. Maybe scientific
grounds aren't right at all, in this case."
Dorffman snorted. "Surely there's nothing wrong with theorizing—"
"He wasn't objecting to the theory. He's afraid of what happens after
the theory."
"So it seems. But why?"
"Have you ever considered what makes a man an Authority?"
"He knows more about his field than anybody else does."
"He
seems
to, you mean. And therefore, anything he says about it
carries more weight than what anybody else says. Other workers follow
his lead. He developes ideas, formulates theories—and then
defends
them for all he's worth
."
"But why shouldn't he?"
"Because a man can't fight for his life and reputation and still keep
his objectivity," said Lessing. "And what if he just happens to be
wrong? Once he's an Authority the question of what's right and what's
wrong gets lost in the shuffle. It's
what he says
that counts."
"But we
know
you're right," Dorffman protested.
"Do we?"
"Of course we do! Look at our work! Look at what we've seen on the
Farm."
"Yes, I know." Lessing's voice was weary. "But first I think we'd
better look at Tommy Gilman, and the quicker we look, the better—"
A nurse greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. "We called
you at the Farm, but you'd already left. The boy—" She broke off
helplessly. "He's sick, Doctor. He's sicker than we ever imagined."
"What happened?"
"Nothing exactly—happened. I don't quite know how to describe it."
She hurried them down the corridor and opened a door into a large
children's playroom. "See what you think."
The boy sat stolidly in the corner of the room. He looked up as they
came in, but there was no flicker of recognition or pleasure on his
pale face. The monitor helmet was still on his head. He just sat there,
gripping a toy fire engine tightly in his hands.
Lessing crossed the room swiftly. "Tommy," he said.
The boy didn't even look at him. He stared stupidly at the fire engine.
"Tommy!" Lessing reached out for the toy. The boy drew back in terror,
clutching it to his chest. "Go away," he choked. "Go away, go away—"
When Lessing persisted the boy bent over swiftly and bit him hard on
the hand.
Lessing sat down on the table. "Tommy, listen to me." His voice was
gentle. "I won't try to take it again. I promise."
"Go away."
"Do you know who I am?"
Tommy's eyes shifted haltingly to Lessing's face. He nodded. "Go away."
"Why are you afraid, Tommy?"
"I hurt. My head hurts. I hurt all over. Go away."
"Why do you hurt?"
"I—can't get it—off," the boy said.
The monitor
, Lessing thought suddenly. Something had suddenly gone
horribly wrong—could the boy really be sensing the source of the
trouble? Lessing felt a cold knot gather in the pit of his stomach. He
knew what happened when adult psi-contact struck a psi-high youngster's
mind. He had seen it a hundred times at the Farm. But even more—he
had felt it in his own mind, bursting from the child. Like a violent
physical blow, the hate and fear and suspicion and cruelty buried and
repressed in the adult mind, crushing suddenly into the raw receptors
of the child's mind like a smothering fog—it was a fearful thing. A
healthy youngster could survive it, even though the scar remained. But
this youngster was sick—
And yet
an animal instinctively seeks its own protection
. With
trembling fingers Lessing reached out and opened the baffle-snap on the
monitor. "Take it off, Tommy," he whispered.
The boy blinked in amazement, and pulled the grey helmet from his head.
Lessing felt the familiar prickly feeling run down his scalp as the
boy stared at him. He could feel deep in his own mind the cold chill
of terror radiating from the boy. Then, suddenly, it began to fade. A
sense of warmth—peace and security and comfort—swept in as the fear
faded from the boy's face.
The fire engine clattered to the floor.
They analyzed the tapes later, punching the data cards with greatest
care, filing them through the machines for the basic processing and
classification that all their data underwent. It was late that night
when they had the report back in their hands.
Dorffman stared at it angrily. "It's obviously wrong," he grated. "It
doesn't fit. Dave, it doesn't agree with
anything
we've observed
before. There must be an error."
"Of course," said Lessing. "According to the theory. The theory says
that adult psi-contact is deadly to the growing child. It smothers
their potential through repeated contact until it dries up completely.
We've proved that, haven't we? Time after time. Everything goes
according to the theory—except Tommy. But Tommy's psi-potential was
drying up there on the Farm, until the distortion was threatening the
balance of his mind. Then he made an adult contact, and we saw how he
bloomed." Lessing sank down to his desk wearily. "What are we going to
do, Jack? Formulate a separate theory for Tommy?"
"Of course not," said Dorffman. "The instruments were wrong. Somehow we
misread the data—"
"Didn't you see his
face
?" Lessing burst out. "Didn't you see how he
acted
? What do you want with an instrument reading?" He shook his
head. "It's no good, Jack. Something different happened here, something
we'd never counted on. It's something the theory just doesn't allow
for."
They sat silently for a while. Then Dorffman said: "What are you going
to do?"
"I don't know," said Lessing. "Maybe when we fell into this bramble
bush we blinded ourselves with the urge to classify—to line everything
up in neat rows like pins in a paper. Maybe we were so blind we missed
the path altogether."
"But the book is due! The Conference speech—"
"I think we'll make some changes in the book," Lessing said slowly.
"It'll be costly—but it might even be fun. It's a pretty dry, logical
presentation of ideas, as it stands. Very austere and authoritarian.
But a few revisions could change all that—" He rubbed his hands
together thoughtfully. "How about it, Jack? Do we have nerve enough to
be laughed at? Do you think we could stand a little discredit, making
silly asses of ourselves? Because when I finish this book, we'll be
laughed out of existence. There won't be any Authority in psionics for
a while—and maybe that way one of the lads who's
really
sniffing out
the trail will get somebody to listen to him!
"Get a pad, get a pencil! We've got work to do. And when we finish, I
think we'll send a carbon copy out Chicago way. Might even persuade
that puppy out there to come here and work for me—" | The field of psionics is new. If Lessing turns out to be wrong, the whole field of study could be discredited. | Lessing is Melrose's closest friend. He doesn't want to see Lessing embarrassed if his theory is proved wrong. | Melrose runs a task force against the publishing of junk science. | Melrose is also studying psionics and wants to delay Lessing by any means so that he can publish first. | 0 |
60291_XQ25ASO2_9 | How did the children come to be at the Farm? | BRAMBLE BUSH
BY ALAN E. NOURSE
There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise;
He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw what he had done, with all his might and main
He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again.
MOTHER GOOSE
Dr. David Lessing found Jack Dorffman and the boy waiting in his office
when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. Dorffman looked as
though he'd been running all night. There were dark pouches under his
eyes; his heavy unshaven face seemed to sag at every crease. Lessing
glanced sharply at his Field Director and sank down behind his desk
with a sigh. "All right, Jack—what's wrong?"
"This kid is driving me nuts," said Dorffman through clenched teeth.
"He's gone completely hay-wire. Nobody's been able to get near him
for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's
leaving the Farm. I talk to him, I sweat him down, I do everything but
tie him to the bed, and I waste my time. He's leaving the Farm. Period."
"So you bring him down here," said Lessing sourly. "The worst place he
could be, if something's really wrong." He looked across at the boy.
"Tommy? Come over and sit down."
There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin,
with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal
eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward
grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute
appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and
blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape.
The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear.
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently.
"I don't want to go back to the Farm," said the boy.
"Why?"
"I just don't. I hate it there."
"Are you frightened?"
The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly.
"Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?"
"No. Oh, no!"
"Then what?"
Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none
came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off—" He fingered
the grey plastic helmet.
"You think
that
would make you feel better?"
"It would, I know it would."
Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the
monitor is for, don't you?"
"It stops things from going out."
"That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator.
You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off,
away from the Farm."
The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there—" The
fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I
never want to go back."
"Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at
Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has
been going on for
three weeks
?"
"I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern—we see so
much of that up there."
"I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better
set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid
you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to
deal with this morning—the one who's threatening to upset the whole
Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with.
I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing
ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy
downstairs."
"Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman.
"Certainly! And Jack—in this case, be
sure
of it. If Tommy's in the
trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact
now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands."
Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was
from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book,
and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled.
Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical
Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck
up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm—yet he
hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And now, as the book
approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really
get back to work again.
The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the
International Psionics Conference:
Dear Dr. Lessing:
In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic
behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle
speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October 12th. A few remarks in
discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order—
They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the
scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His
earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going—but the
book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A
Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good
title—concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right.
And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a
guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and
baffling new science.
For they were floundering. When they were finally forced to recognize
that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds,
with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had
plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening
bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. Nothing worked, and
everything worked too well. They were trying to study phenomena which
made no sense, observing things that defied logic. Natural laws came
crashing down about their ears as they stood sadly by and watched
things happen which natural law said could never happen. They had never
been in this jungle before, nor in any jungle remotely like it. The
old rules didn't work here, the old methods of study failed. And the
more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush
became—
But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a
theory to work by—
At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "A gentleman to see you," the girl
said. "A Dr. Melrose. He's very impatient, sir."
He shut off the scanner and said, "Send him in, please."
Dr. Peter Melrose was tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark
mocking eyes. He wore a threadbare sport coat and a slouch. He offered
Lessing a bony hand, then flung himself into a chair as he stared about
the office in awe.
"I'm really overwhelmed," he said after a moment. "Within the
stronghold of psionic research at last. And face to face with the
Master in the trembling flesh!"
Lessing frowned. "Dr. Melrose, I don't quite understand—"
"Oh, it's just that I'm impressed," the young man said airily. "Of
course, I've seen old dried-up Authorities before—but never before
a brand spanking new one, just fresh out of the pupa, so to speak!"
He touched his forehead in a gesture of reverence. "I bow before the
Oracle. Speak, oh Motah, live forever! Cast a pearl at my feet!"
"If you've come here to be insulting," Lessing said coldly, "you're
just wasting time." He reached for the intercom switch.
"I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply,
"because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month
unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. And if you
don't think I can do it, you're in for quite a dumping."
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me—just what, exactly, do you want?"
"I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of
'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in
Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental
controls you keep talking about will actually bear. But mostly, I want
to see just what in psionic hell you're so busy making yourself an
Authority about." There was no laughter in the man's sharp brown eyes.
"You couldn't touch me with a ten foot pole at this conference,"
snapped Lessing.
The other man grinned. "Try me! We shook you up a little bit last year,
but you didn't seem to get the idea."
"Last year was different." Lessing scowled. "As for our 'fairy tale',
we happen to have a staggering body of evidence that says that it's
true."
"If the papers you've already published are a preview, we think it's
false as Satan."
"And our controls are above suspicion."
"So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said
Melrose. "We've done a lot of work on it, too."
"Oh, yes—I've heard about your work. Not bad, really. A little
misdirected, is all."
"According to your Theory, that is."
"Wildly unorthodox approach to psionics—but at least you're energetic
enough."
"We haven't been energetic enough to find an orthodox approach that got
us anywhere. We doubt if you have, either. But maybe we're all wrong."
Melrose grinned unpleasantly. "We're not unreasonable, your Majesty. We
just ask to be shown. If you dare, that is."
Lessing slammed his fist down on the desk angrily. "Have you got the
day to take a trip?"
"I've got 'til New Year."
Lessing shouted for his girl. "Get Dorffman up here. We're going to the
Farm this afternoon."
The girl nodded, then hesitated. "But what about your lunch?"
"Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest
here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us...."
Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels
and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the
Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the
rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in
the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing
briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the
long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less
than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed
north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside.
"What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along
through the afternoon sun.
"I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating."
Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of
beating the bushes with this—" He broke off to glare at young Melrose.
Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here."
"It's—unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped.
"Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day
school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even
used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here."
"Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying
to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis."
"Of course, you're sure you were measuring
something
."
"Oh, yes. We certainly were."
"Yet you said that you didn't know what."
"That's right," said Lessing. "We don't."
"And you don't know
why
your instruments measure whatever they're
measuring." The Chicago man's face was thoughtful. "In fact, you can't
really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at
all. It's not inconceivable that the
children
might be measuring the
instruments
, eh?"
Lessing blinked. "It's conceivable."
"Mmmm," said Melrose. "Sounds like a real firm foundation to build a
theory on."
"Why not?" Lessing growled. "It wouldn't be the first time the tail
wagged the dog. The psychiatrists never would have gotten out of their
rut if somebody hadn't gotten smart and realized that one of their new
drugs worked better in combatting schizophrenia when the doctor took
the medicine instead of the patient. That was quite a wall to climb."
"Yes, wasn't it," mused Melrose, scratching his bony jaw. "Only took
them seventy years to climb it, thanks to a certain man's theories.
I wonder how long it'll take psionics to crawl out of the pit you're
digging for it?"
"We're not digging any pit," Lessing exploded angrily. "We're
exploring—nothing more. A phenomenon exists. We've known that, one way
or another, for centuries. The fact that it doesn't seem to be bound by
the same sort of natural law we've observed elsewhere doesn't mean that
it isn't governed by natural law. But how can we define the law? How
can we define the limits of the phenomenon, for that matter? We can't
work in the dark forever—we've
got
to have a working hypothesis to
guide us."
"So you dreamed up this 'tadpole' idea," said Melrose sourly.
"For a working hypothesis—yes. We've known for a long time that every
human being has extrasensory potential to one degree or another. Not
just a few here and there—every single one. It's a differentiating
quality of the human mind. Just as the ability to think logically in a
crisis instead of giving way to panic is a differentiating quality."
"Fine," said Melrose. "Great. We can't
prove
that, of course, but
I'll play along."
Lessing glared at him. "When we began studying this psi-potential, we
found out some curious things. For one thing, it seemed to be immensely
more powerful and active in infants and children than in adults.
Somewhere along the line as a child grows up, something happens. We
don't know what. We do know that the child's psi-potential gradually
withdraws deeper and deeper into his mind, burying itself farther and
farther out of reach, just the way a tadpole's tail is absorbed deeper
and deeper into the growing frog until there just isn't any tail any
more." Lessing paused, packing tobacco into his pipe. "That's why we
have the Farm—to try to discover why. What forces that potential
underground? What buries it so deeply that adult human beings can't get
at it any more?"
"And you think you have an answer," said Melrose.
"We think we might be near an answer. We have a theory that explains
the available data."
The shuttle car bounced sharply as it left the highway automatics.
Dorffman took the controls. In a few moments they were skimming through
the high white gates of the Farm, slowing down at the entrance to a
long, low building.
"All right, young man—come along," said Lessing. "I think we can show
you our answer."
In the main office building they donned the close-fitting psionic
monitors required of all personnel at the Farm. They were of a
hard grey plastic material, with a network of wiring buried in the
substance, connected to a simple pocket-sized power source.
"The major problem," Lessing said, "has been to shield the children
from any external psionic stimuli, except those we wished to expose
them to. Our goal is a perfectly controlled psi environment. The
monitors are quite effective—a simple Renwick scrambler screen."
"It blocks off all types of psi activity?" asked Melrose.
"As far as we can measure, yes."
"Which may not be very far."
Jack Dorffman burst in: "What Dr. Lessing is saying is that they seem
effective for our purposes."
"But you don't know why," added Melrose.
"All right, we don't know why. Nobody knows why a Renwick screen
works—why blame us?" They were walking down the main corridor and out
through an open areaway. Behind the buildings was a broad playground. A
baseball game was in progress in one corner; across the field a group
of swings, slides, ring bars and other playground paraphernalia was in
heavy use. The place was teeming with youngsters, all shouting in a
fury of busy activity. Occasionally a helmeted supervisor hurried by;
one waved to them as she rescued a four-year-old from the parallel bars.
They crossed into the next building, where classes were in progress.
"Some of our children are here only briefly," Lessing explained as
they walked along, "and some have been here for years. We maintain a
top-ranking curriculum—your idea of a 'country day school' wasn't
so far afield at that—with scholarships supported by Hoffman Center
funds. Other children come to us—foundlings, desertees, children from
broken homes, children of all ages from infancy on. Sometimes they
stay until they have reached college age, or go on to jobs. As far as
psionics research is concerned, we are not trying to be teachers. We
are strictly observers. We try to place the youngsters in positions
where they can develope what potential they have—
without
the
presence of external psionic influences they would normally be subject
to. The results have been remarkable."
He led them into a long, narrow room with chairs and ash trays, facing
a wide grey glass wall. The room fell into darkness, and through the
grey glass they could see three children, about four years old, playing
in a large room.
"They're perfectly insulated from us," said Lessing. "A variety of
recording instruments are working. And before you ask, Dr. Melrose,
they are all empirical instruments, and they would all defy any
engineer's attempts to determine what makes them go. We don't know what
makes them go, and we don't care—they go. That's all we need. Like
that one, for instance—"
In the corner a flat screen was flickering, emitting a pale green
fluorescent light. It hung from the wall by two plastic rods which
penetrated into the children's room. There was no sign of a switch,
nor a power source. As the children moved about, the screen flickered.
Below it, a recording-tape clicked along in little spurts and starts of
activity.
"What are they doing?" Melrose asked after watching the children a few
moments.
"Those three seem to work as a team, somehow. Each one, individually,
had a fairly constant recordable psi potential of about seventeen on
the arbitrary scale we find useful here. Any two of them scale in at
thirty-four to thirty-six. Put the three together and they operate
somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred on the same scale."
Lessing smiled. "This is an isolated phenomenon—it doesn't hold for
any other three children on the Farm. Nor did we make any effort to
place them together—they drew each other like magnets. One of our
workers spent two weeks trying to find out why the instruments weren't
right. It wasn't the instruments, of course."
Lessing nodded to an attendant, and peered around at Melrose. "Now, I
want you to watch this very closely."
He opened a door and walked into the room with the children. The
fluorescent screen continued to flicker as the children ran to Lessing.
He inspected the block tower they were building, and stooped down to
talk to them, his lips moving soundlessly behind the observation wall.
The children laughed and jabbered, apparently intrigued by the game he
was proposing. He walked to the table and tapped the bottom block in
the tower with his thumb.
The tower quivered, and the screen blazed out with green light, but the
tower stood. Carefully Lessing jogged all the foundation blocks out of
place until the tower hung in midair, clearly unsupported. The children
watched it closely, and the foundation blocks inched still further out
of place....
Then, quite casually, Lessing lifted off his monitor. The children
continued staring at the tower as the screen gave three or four violent
bursts of green fire and went dark.
The block tower fell with a crash.
Moments later Lessing was back in the observation room, leaving the
children busily putting the tower back together. There was a little
smile on his lips as he saw Melrose's face. "Perhaps you're beginning
to see what I'm driving at," he said slowly.
"Yes," said Melrose. "I think I'm beginning to see." He scratched his
jaw. "You think that it's adult psi-contact that drives the child's
potential underground—that somehow adult contact acts like a damper, a
sort of colossal candle-snuffer."
"That's what I think," said Lessing.
"How do you know those children didn't make you take off your monitor?"
Lessing blinked. "Why should they?"
"Maybe they enjoy the crash when the blocks fall down."
"But that wouldn't make any difference, would it? The blocks still fall
down."
Melrose paced down the narrow room. "This is very good," he said
suddenly, his voice earnest. "You have fine facilities here, good
workers. And in spite of my flippancy, Dr. Lessing, I have never
imagined for a moment that you were not an acute observer and a
careful, highly imaginative worker. But suppose I told you, in perfect
faith, that we have data that flatly contradicts everything you've told
me today. Reproducible data, utterly incompatable with yours. What
would you say to that?"
"I'd say you were wrong," said Lessing. "You couldn't have such data.
According to the things I am certain are true, what you're saying is
sheer nonsense."
"And you'd express that opinion in a professional meeting?"
"I would."
"And as an Authority on psionic behavior patterns," said Melrose
slowly, "you would kill us then and there. You would strangle us
professionally, discredit anything we did, cut us off cold." The
tall man turned on him fiercely. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see
what danger you're in? If you publish your book now, you will become
an Authority in a field where the most devastating thing that could
possibly happen would be—
the appearance of an Authority
."
Lessing and Dorffman rode back to the Hoffman Center in grim silence.
At first Lessing pretended to work; finally he snapped off the tape
recorder in disgust and stared out the shuttle-car window. Melrose had
gone on to Idlewild to catch a jet back to Chicago. It was a relief to
see him go, Lessing thought, and tried to force the thin, angry man
firmly out of his mind. But somehow Melrose wouldn't force.
"Stop worrying about it," Dorffman urged. "He's a crackpot. He's
crawled way out on a limb, and now he's afraid your theory is going to
cut it off under him. Well, that's his worry, not yours." Dorffman's
face was intense. "Scientifically, you're on unshakeable ground. Every
great researcher has people like Melrose sniping at him. You just have
to throw them off and keep going."
Lessing shook his head. "Maybe. But this field of work is different
from any other, Jack. It doesn't follow the rules. Maybe scientific
grounds aren't right at all, in this case."
Dorffman snorted. "Surely there's nothing wrong with theorizing—"
"He wasn't objecting to the theory. He's afraid of what happens after
the theory."
"So it seems. But why?"
"Have you ever considered what makes a man an Authority?"
"He knows more about his field than anybody else does."
"He
seems
to, you mean. And therefore, anything he says about it
carries more weight than what anybody else says. Other workers follow
his lead. He developes ideas, formulates theories—and then
defends
them for all he's worth
."
"But why shouldn't he?"
"Because a man can't fight for his life and reputation and still keep
his objectivity," said Lessing. "And what if he just happens to be
wrong? Once he's an Authority the question of what's right and what's
wrong gets lost in the shuffle. It's
what he says
that counts."
"But we
know
you're right," Dorffman protested.
"Do we?"
"Of course we do! Look at our work! Look at what we've seen on the
Farm."
"Yes, I know." Lessing's voice was weary. "But first I think we'd
better look at Tommy Gilman, and the quicker we look, the better—"
A nurse greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. "We called
you at the Farm, but you'd already left. The boy—" She broke off
helplessly. "He's sick, Doctor. He's sicker than we ever imagined."
"What happened?"
"Nothing exactly—happened. I don't quite know how to describe it."
She hurried them down the corridor and opened a door into a large
children's playroom. "See what you think."
The boy sat stolidly in the corner of the room. He looked up as they
came in, but there was no flicker of recognition or pleasure on his
pale face. The monitor helmet was still on his head. He just sat there,
gripping a toy fire engine tightly in his hands.
Lessing crossed the room swiftly. "Tommy," he said.
The boy didn't even look at him. He stared stupidly at the fire engine.
"Tommy!" Lessing reached out for the toy. The boy drew back in terror,
clutching it to his chest. "Go away," he choked. "Go away, go away—"
When Lessing persisted the boy bent over swiftly and bit him hard on
the hand.
Lessing sat down on the table. "Tommy, listen to me." His voice was
gentle. "I won't try to take it again. I promise."
"Go away."
"Do you know who I am?"
Tommy's eyes shifted haltingly to Lessing's face. He nodded. "Go away."
"Why are you afraid, Tommy?"
"I hurt. My head hurts. I hurt all over. Go away."
"Why do you hurt?"
"I—can't get it—off," the boy said.
The monitor
, Lessing thought suddenly. Something had suddenly gone
horribly wrong—could the boy really be sensing the source of the
trouble? Lessing felt a cold knot gather in the pit of his stomach. He
knew what happened when adult psi-contact struck a psi-high youngster's
mind. He had seen it a hundred times at the Farm. But even more—he
had felt it in his own mind, bursting from the child. Like a violent
physical blow, the hate and fear and suspicion and cruelty buried and
repressed in the adult mind, crushing suddenly into the raw receptors
of the child's mind like a smothering fog—it was a fearful thing. A
healthy youngster could survive it, even though the scar remained. But
this youngster was sick—
And yet
an animal instinctively seeks its own protection
. With
trembling fingers Lessing reached out and opened the baffle-snap on the
monitor. "Take it off, Tommy," he whispered.
The boy blinked in amazement, and pulled the grey helmet from his head.
Lessing felt the familiar prickly feeling run down his scalp as the
boy stared at him. He could feel deep in his own mind the cold chill
of terror radiating from the boy. Then, suddenly, it began to fade. A
sense of warmth—peace and security and comfort—swept in as the fear
faded from the boy's face.
The fire engine clattered to the floor.
They analyzed the tapes later, punching the data cards with greatest
care, filing them through the machines for the basic processing and
classification that all their data underwent. It was late that night
when they had the report back in their hands.
Dorffman stared at it angrily. "It's obviously wrong," he grated. "It
doesn't fit. Dave, it doesn't agree with
anything
we've observed
before. There must be an error."
"Of course," said Lessing. "According to the theory. The theory says
that adult psi-contact is deadly to the growing child. It smothers
their potential through repeated contact until it dries up completely.
We've proved that, haven't we? Time after time. Everything goes
according to the theory—except Tommy. But Tommy's psi-potential was
drying up there on the Farm, until the distortion was threatening the
balance of his mind. Then he made an adult contact, and we saw how he
bloomed." Lessing sank down to his desk wearily. "What are we going to
do, Jack? Formulate a separate theory for Tommy?"
"Of course not," said Dorffman. "The instruments were wrong. Somehow we
misread the data—"
"Didn't you see his
face
?" Lessing burst out. "Didn't you see how he
acted
? What do you want with an instrument reading?" He shook his
head. "It's no good, Jack. Something different happened here, something
we'd never counted on. It's something the theory just doesn't allow
for."
They sat silently for a while. Then Dorffman said: "What are you going
to do?"
"I don't know," said Lessing. "Maybe when we fell into this bramble
bush we blinded ourselves with the urge to classify—to line everything
up in neat rows like pins in a paper. Maybe we were so blind we missed
the path altogether."
"But the book is due! The Conference speech—"
"I think we'll make some changes in the book," Lessing said slowly.
"It'll be costly—but it might even be fun. It's a pretty dry, logical
presentation of ideas, as it stands. Very austere and authoritarian.
But a few revisions could change all that—" He rubbed his hands
together thoughtfully. "How about it, Jack? Do we have nerve enough to
be laughed at? Do you think we could stand a little discredit, making
silly asses of ourselves? Because when I finish this book, we'll be
laughed out of existence. There won't be any Authority in psionics for
a while—and maybe that way one of the lads who's
really
sniffing out
the trail will get somebody to listen to him!
"Get a pad, get a pencil! We've got work to do. And when we finish, I
think we'll send a carbon copy out Chicago way. Might even persuade
that puppy out there to come here and work for me—" | Dr. Lessing bought them from their parents. | Some children are sent to the Farm by their parents for boarding school. Others are orphans and runaways. | The children come from migrant and refugee camps. | Dr. Lessing bought them from human traffickers. | 1 |
60291_XQ25ASO2_10 | Why does the block tower fall down? | BRAMBLE BUSH
BY ALAN E. NOURSE
There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise;
He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw what he had done, with all his might and main
He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again.
MOTHER GOOSE
Dr. David Lessing found Jack Dorffman and the boy waiting in his office
when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. Dorffman looked as
though he'd been running all night. There were dark pouches under his
eyes; his heavy unshaven face seemed to sag at every crease. Lessing
glanced sharply at his Field Director and sank down behind his desk
with a sigh. "All right, Jack—what's wrong?"
"This kid is driving me nuts," said Dorffman through clenched teeth.
"He's gone completely hay-wire. Nobody's been able to get near him
for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's
leaving the Farm. I talk to him, I sweat him down, I do everything but
tie him to the bed, and I waste my time. He's leaving the Farm. Period."
"So you bring him down here," said Lessing sourly. "The worst place he
could be, if something's really wrong." He looked across at the boy.
"Tommy? Come over and sit down."
There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin,
with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal
eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward
grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute
appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and
blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape.
The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear.
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently.
"I don't want to go back to the Farm," said the boy.
"Why?"
"I just don't. I hate it there."
"Are you frightened?"
The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly.
"Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?"
"No. Oh, no!"
"Then what?"
Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none
came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off—" He fingered
the grey plastic helmet.
"You think
that
would make you feel better?"
"It would, I know it would."
Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the
monitor is for, don't you?"
"It stops things from going out."
"That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator.
You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off,
away from the Farm."
The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there—" The
fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I
never want to go back."
"Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at
Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has
been going on for
three weeks
?"
"I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern—we see so
much of that up there."
"I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better
set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid
you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to
deal with this morning—the one who's threatening to upset the whole
Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with.
I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing
ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy
downstairs."
"Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman.
"Certainly! And Jack—in this case, be
sure
of it. If Tommy's in the
trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact
now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands."
Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was
from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book,
and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled.
Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical
Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck
up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm—yet he
hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And now, as the book
approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really
get back to work again.
The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the
International Psionics Conference:
Dear Dr. Lessing:
In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic
behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle
speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October 12th. A few remarks in
discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order—
They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the
scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His
earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going—but the
book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A
Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good
title—concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right.
And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a
guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and
baffling new science.
For they were floundering. When they were finally forced to recognize
that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds,
with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had
plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening
bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. Nothing worked, and
everything worked too well. They were trying to study phenomena which
made no sense, observing things that defied logic. Natural laws came
crashing down about their ears as they stood sadly by and watched
things happen which natural law said could never happen. They had never
been in this jungle before, nor in any jungle remotely like it. The
old rules didn't work here, the old methods of study failed. And the
more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush
became—
But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a
theory to work by—
At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "A gentleman to see you," the girl
said. "A Dr. Melrose. He's very impatient, sir."
He shut off the scanner and said, "Send him in, please."
Dr. Peter Melrose was tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark
mocking eyes. He wore a threadbare sport coat and a slouch. He offered
Lessing a bony hand, then flung himself into a chair as he stared about
the office in awe.
"I'm really overwhelmed," he said after a moment. "Within the
stronghold of psionic research at last. And face to face with the
Master in the trembling flesh!"
Lessing frowned. "Dr. Melrose, I don't quite understand—"
"Oh, it's just that I'm impressed," the young man said airily. "Of
course, I've seen old dried-up Authorities before—but never before
a brand spanking new one, just fresh out of the pupa, so to speak!"
He touched his forehead in a gesture of reverence. "I bow before the
Oracle. Speak, oh Motah, live forever! Cast a pearl at my feet!"
"If you've come here to be insulting," Lessing said coldly, "you're
just wasting time." He reached for the intercom switch.
"I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply,
"because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month
unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. And if you
don't think I can do it, you're in for quite a dumping."
Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me—just what, exactly, do you want?"
"I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of
'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in
Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental
controls you keep talking about will actually bear. But mostly, I want
to see just what in psionic hell you're so busy making yourself an
Authority about." There was no laughter in the man's sharp brown eyes.
"You couldn't touch me with a ten foot pole at this conference,"
snapped Lessing.
The other man grinned. "Try me! We shook you up a little bit last year,
but you didn't seem to get the idea."
"Last year was different." Lessing scowled. "As for our 'fairy tale',
we happen to have a staggering body of evidence that says that it's
true."
"If the papers you've already published are a preview, we think it's
false as Satan."
"And our controls are above suspicion."
"So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said
Melrose. "We've done a lot of work on it, too."
"Oh, yes—I've heard about your work. Not bad, really. A little
misdirected, is all."
"According to your Theory, that is."
"Wildly unorthodox approach to psionics—but at least you're energetic
enough."
"We haven't been energetic enough to find an orthodox approach that got
us anywhere. We doubt if you have, either. But maybe we're all wrong."
Melrose grinned unpleasantly. "We're not unreasonable, your Majesty. We
just ask to be shown. If you dare, that is."
Lessing slammed his fist down on the desk angrily. "Have you got the
day to take a trip?"
"I've got 'til New Year."
Lessing shouted for his girl. "Get Dorffman up here. We're going to the
Farm this afternoon."
The girl nodded, then hesitated. "But what about your lunch?"
"Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest
here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us...."
Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels
and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the
Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the
rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in
the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing
briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the
long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less
than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed
north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside.
"What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along
through the afternoon sun.
"I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating."
Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of
beating the bushes with this—" He broke off to glare at young Melrose.
Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here."
"It's—unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped.
"Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day
school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even
used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here."
"Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying
to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis."
"Of course, you're sure you were measuring
something
."
"Oh, yes. We certainly were."
"Yet you said that you didn't know what."
"That's right," said Lessing. "We don't."
"And you don't know
why
your instruments measure whatever they're
measuring." The Chicago man's face was thoughtful. "In fact, you can't
really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at
all. It's not inconceivable that the
children
might be measuring the
instruments
, eh?"
Lessing blinked. "It's conceivable."
"Mmmm," said Melrose. "Sounds like a real firm foundation to build a
theory on."
"Why not?" Lessing growled. "It wouldn't be the first time the tail
wagged the dog. The psychiatrists never would have gotten out of their
rut if somebody hadn't gotten smart and realized that one of their new
drugs worked better in combatting schizophrenia when the doctor took
the medicine instead of the patient. That was quite a wall to climb."
"Yes, wasn't it," mused Melrose, scratching his bony jaw. "Only took
them seventy years to climb it, thanks to a certain man's theories.
I wonder how long it'll take psionics to crawl out of the pit you're
digging for it?"
"We're not digging any pit," Lessing exploded angrily. "We're
exploring—nothing more. A phenomenon exists. We've known that, one way
or another, for centuries. The fact that it doesn't seem to be bound by
the same sort of natural law we've observed elsewhere doesn't mean that
it isn't governed by natural law. But how can we define the law? How
can we define the limits of the phenomenon, for that matter? We can't
work in the dark forever—we've
got
to have a working hypothesis to
guide us."
"So you dreamed up this 'tadpole' idea," said Melrose sourly.
"For a working hypothesis—yes. We've known for a long time that every
human being has extrasensory potential to one degree or another. Not
just a few here and there—every single one. It's a differentiating
quality of the human mind. Just as the ability to think logically in a
crisis instead of giving way to panic is a differentiating quality."
"Fine," said Melrose. "Great. We can't
prove
that, of course, but
I'll play along."
Lessing glared at him. "When we began studying this psi-potential, we
found out some curious things. For one thing, it seemed to be immensely
more powerful and active in infants and children than in adults.
Somewhere along the line as a child grows up, something happens. We
don't know what. We do know that the child's psi-potential gradually
withdraws deeper and deeper into his mind, burying itself farther and
farther out of reach, just the way a tadpole's tail is absorbed deeper
and deeper into the growing frog until there just isn't any tail any
more." Lessing paused, packing tobacco into his pipe. "That's why we
have the Farm—to try to discover why. What forces that potential
underground? What buries it so deeply that adult human beings can't get
at it any more?"
"And you think you have an answer," said Melrose.
"We think we might be near an answer. We have a theory that explains
the available data."
The shuttle car bounced sharply as it left the highway automatics.
Dorffman took the controls. In a few moments they were skimming through
the high white gates of the Farm, slowing down at the entrance to a
long, low building.
"All right, young man—come along," said Lessing. "I think we can show
you our answer."
In the main office building they donned the close-fitting psionic
monitors required of all personnel at the Farm. They were of a
hard grey plastic material, with a network of wiring buried in the
substance, connected to a simple pocket-sized power source.
"The major problem," Lessing said, "has been to shield the children
from any external psionic stimuli, except those we wished to expose
them to. Our goal is a perfectly controlled psi environment. The
monitors are quite effective—a simple Renwick scrambler screen."
"It blocks off all types of psi activity?" asked Melrose.
"As far as we can measure, yes."
"Which may not be very far."
Jack Dorffman burst in: "What Dr. Lessing is saying is that they seem
effective for our purposes."
"But you don't know why," added Melrose.
"All right, we don't know why. Nobody knows why a Renwick screen
works—why blame us?" They were walking down the main corridor and out
through an open areaway. Behind the buildings was a broad playground. A
baseball game was in progress in one corner; across the field a group
of swings, slides, ring bars and other playground paraphernalia was in
heavy use. The place was teeming with youngsters, all shouting in a
fury of busy activity. Occasionally a helmeted supervisor hurried by;
one waved to them as she rescued a four-year-old from the parallel bars.
They crossed into the next building, where classes were in progress.
"Some of our children are here only briefly," Lessing explained as
they walked along, "and some have been here for years. We maintain a
top-ranking curriculum—your idea of a 'country day school' wasn't
so far afield at that—with scholarships supported by Hoffman Center
funds. Other children come to us—foundlings, desertees, children from
broken homes, children of all ages from infancy on. Sometimes they
stay until they have reached college age, or go on to jobs. As far as
psionics research is concerned, we are not trying to be teachers. We
are strictly observers. We try to place the youngsters in positions
where they can develope what potential they have—
without
the
presence of external psionic influences they would normally be subject
to. The results have been remarkable."
He led them into a long, narrow room with chairs and ash trays, facing
a wide grey glass wall. The room fell into darkness, and through the
grey glass they could see three children, about four years old, playing
in a large room.
"They're perfectly insulated from us," said Lessing. "A variety of
recording instruments are working. And before you ask, Dr. Melrose,
they are all empirical instruments, and they would all defy any
engineer's attempts to determine what makes them go. We don't know what
makes them go, and we don't care—they go. That's all we need. Like
that one, for instance—"
In the corner a flat screen was flickering, emitting a pale green
fluorescent light. It hung from the wall by two plastic rods which
penetrated into the children's room. There was no sign of a switch,
nor a power source. As the children moved about, the screen flickered.
Below it, a recording-tape clicked along in little spurts and starts of
activity.
"What are they doing?" Melrose asked after watching the children a few
moments.
"Those three seem to work as a team, somehow. Each one, individually,
had a fairly constant recordable psi potential of about seventeen on
the arbitrary scale we find useful here. Any two of them scale in at
thirty-four to thirty-six. Put the three together and they operate
somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred on the same scale."
Lessing smiled. "This is an isolated phenomenon—it doesn't hold for
any other three children on the Farm. Nor did we make any effort to
place them together—they drew each other like magnets. One of our
workers spent two weeks trying to find out why the instruments weren't
right. It wasn't the instruments, of course."
Lessing nodded to an attendant, and peered around at Melrose. "Now, I
want you to watch this very closely."
He opened a door and walked into the room with the children. The
fluorescent screen continued to flicker as the children ran to Lessing.
He inspected the block tower they were building, and stooped down to
talk to them, his lips moving soundlessly behind the observation wall.
The children laughed and jabbered, apparently intrigued by the game he
was proposing. He walked to the table and tapped the bottom block in
the tower with his thumb.
The tower quivered, and the screen blazed out with green light, but the
tower stood. Carefully Lessing jogged all the foundation blocks out of
place until the tower hung in midair, clearly unsupported. The children
watched it closely, and the foundation blocks inched still further out
of place....
Then, quite casually, Lessing lifted off his monitor. The children
continued staring at the tower as the screen gave three or four violent
bursts of green fire and went dark.
The block tower fell with a crash.
Moments later Lessing was back in the observation room, leaving the
children busily putting the tower back together. There was a little
smile on his lips as he saw Melrose's face. "Perhaps you're beginning
to see what I'm driving at," he said slowly.
"Yes," said Melrose. "I think I'm beginning to see." He scratched his
jaw. "You think that it's adult psi-contact that drives the child's
potential underground—that somehow adult contact acts like a damper, a
sort of colossal candle-snuffer."
"That's what I think," said Lessing.
"How do you know those children didn't make you take off your monitor?"
Lessing blinked. "Why should they?"
"Maybe they enjoy the crash when the blocks fall down."
"But that wouldn't make any difference, would it? The blocks still fall
down."
Melrose paced down the narrow room. "This is very good," he said
suddenly, his voice earnest. "You have fine facilities here, good
workers. And in spite of my flippancy, Dr. Lessing, I have never
imagined for a moment that you were not an acute observer and a
careful, highly imaginative worker. But suppose I told you, in perfect
faith, that we have data that flatly contradicts everything you've told
me today. Reproducible data, utterly incompatable with yours. What
would you say to that?"
"I'd say you were wrong," said Lessing. "You couldn't have such data.
According to the things I am certain are true, what you're saying is
sheer nonsense."
"And you'd express that opinion in a professional meeting?"
"I would."
"And as an Authority on psionic behavior patterns," said Melrose
slowly, "you would kill us then and there. You would strangle us
professionally, discredit anything we did, cut us off cold." The
tall man turned on him fiercely. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see
what danger you're in? If you publish your book now, you will become
an Authority in a field where the most devastating thing that could
possibly happen would be—
the appearance of an Authority
."
Lessing and Dorffman rode back to the Hoffman Center in grim silence.
At first Lessing pretended to work; finally he snapped off the tape
recorder in disgust and stared out the shuttle-car window. Melrose had
gone on to Idlewild to catch a jet back to Chicago. It was a relief to
see him go, Lessing thought, and tried to force the thin, angry man
firmly out of his mind. But somehow Melrose wouldn't force.
"Stop worrying about it," Dorffman urged. "He's a crackpot. He's
crawled way out on a limb, and now he's afraid your theory is going to
cut it off under him. Well, that's his worry, not yours." Dorffman's
face was intense. "Scientifically, you're on unshakeable ground. Every
great researcher has people like Melrose sniping at him. You just have
to throw them off and keep going."
Lessing shook his head. "Maybe. But this field of work is different
from any other, Jack. It doesn't follow the rules. Maybe scientific
grounds aren't right at all, in this case."
Dorffman snorted. "Surely there's nothing wrong with theorizing—"
"He wasn't objecting to the theory. He's afraid of what happens after
the theory."
"So it seems. But why?"
"Have you ever considered what makes a man an Authority?"
"He knows more about his field than anybody else does."
"He
seems
to, you mean. And therefore, anything he says about it
carries more weight than what anybody else says. Other workers follow
his lead. He developes ideas, formulates theories—and then
defends
them for all he's worth
."
"But why shouldn't he?"
"Because a man can't fight for his life and reputation and still keep
his objectivity," said Lessing. "And what if he just happens to be
wrong? Once he's an Authority the question of what's right and what's
wrong gets lost in the shuffle. It's
what he says
that counts."
"But we
know
you're right," Dorffman protested.
"Do we?"
"Of course we do! Look at our work! Look at what we've seen on the
Farm."
"Yes, I know." Lessing's voice was weary. "But first I think we'd
better look at Tommy Gilman, and the quicker we look, the better—"
A nurse greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. "We called
you at the Farm, but you'd already left. The boy—" She broke off
helplessly. "He's sick, Doctor. He's sicker than we ever imagined."
"What happened?"
"Nothing exactly—happened. I don't quite know how to describe it."
She hurried them down the corridor and opened a door into a large
children's playroom. "See what you think."
The boy sat stolidly in the corner of the room. He looked up as they
came in, but there was no flicker of recognition or pleasure on his
pale face. The monitor helmet was still on his head. He just sat there,
gripping a toy fire engine tightly in his hands.
Lessing crossed the room swiftly. "Tommy," he said.
The boy didn't even look at him. He stared stupidly at the fire engine.
"Tommy!" Lessing reached out for the toy. The boy drew back in terror,
clutching it to his chest. "Go away," he choked. "Go away, go away—"
When Lessing persisted the boy bent over swiftly and bit him hard on
the hand.
Lessing sat down on the table. "Tommy, listen to me." His voice was
gentle. "I won't try to take it again. I promise."
"Go away."
"Do you know who I am?"
Tommy's eyes shifted haltingly to Lessing's face. He nodded. "Go away."
"Why are you afraid, Tommy?"
"I hurt. My head hurts. I hurt all over. Go away."
"Why do you hurt?"
"I—can't get it—off," the boy said.
The monitor
, Lessing thought suddenly. Something had suddenly gone
horribly wrong—could the boy really be sensing the source of the
trouble? Lessing felt a cold knot gather in the pit of his stomach. He
knew what happened when adult psi-contact struck a psi-high youngster's
mind. He had seen it a hundred times at the Farm. But even more—he
had felt it in his own mind, bursting from the child. Like a violent
physical blow, the hate and fear and suspicion and cruelty buried and
repressed in the adult mind, crushing suddenly into the raw receptors
of the child's mind like a smothering fog—it was a fearful thing. A
healthy youngster could survive it, even though the scar remained. But
this youngster was sick—
And yet
an animal instinctively seeks its own protection
. With
trembling fingers Lessing reached out and opened the baffle-snap on the
monitor. "Take it off, Tommy," he whispered.
The boy blinked in amazement, and pulled the grey helmet from his head.
Lessing felt the familiar prickly feeling run down his scalp as the
boy stared at him. He could feel deep in his own mind the cold chill
of terror radiating from the boy. Then, suddenly, it began to fade. A
sense of warmth—peace and security and comfort—swept in as the fear
faded from the boy's face.
The fire engine clattered to the floor.
They analyzed the tapes later, punching the data cards with greatest
care, filing them through the machines for the basic processing and
classification that all their data underwent. It was late that night
when they had the report back in their hands.
Dorffman stared at it angrily. "It's obviously wrong," he grated. "It
doesn't fit. Dave, it doesn't agree with
anything
we've observed
before. There must be an error."
"Of course," said Lessing. "According to the theory. The theory says
that adult psi-contact is deadly to the growing child. It smothers
their potential through repeated contact until it dries up completely.
We've proved that, haven't we? Time after time. Everything goes
according to the theory—except Tommy. But Tommy's psi-potential was
drying up there on the Farm, until the distortion was threatening the
balance of his mind. Then he made an adult contact, and we saw how he
bloomed." Lessing sank down to his desk wearily. "What are we going to
do, Jack? Formulate a separate theory for Tommy?"
"Of course not," said Dorffman. "The instruments were wrong. Somehow we
misread the data—"
"Didn't you see his
face
?" Lessing burst out. "Didn't you see how he
acted
? What do you want with an instrument reading?" He shook his
head. "It's no good, Jack. Something different happened here, something
we'd never counted on. It's something the theory just doesn't allow
for."
They sat silently for a while. Then Dorffman said: "What are you going
to do?"
"I don't know," said Lessing. "Maybe when we fell into this bramble
bush we blinded ourselves with the urge to classify—to line everything
up in neat rows like pins in a paper. Maybe we were so blind we missed
the path altogether."
"But the book is due! The Conference speech—"
"I think we'll make some changes in the book," Lessing said slowly.
"It'll be costly—but it might even be fun. It's a pretty dry, logical
presentation of ideas, as it stands. Very austere and authoritarian.
But a few revisions could change all that—" He rubbed his hands
together thoughtfully. "How about it, Jack? Do we have nerve enough to
be laughed at? Do you think we could stand a little discredit, making
silly asses of ourselves? Because when I finish this book, we'll be
laughed out of existence. There won't be any Authority in psionics for
a while—and maybe that way one of the lads who's
really
sniffing out
the trail will get somebody to listen to him!
"Get a pad, get a pencil! We've got work to do. And when we finish, I
think we'll send a carbon copy out Chicago way. Might even persuade
that puppy out there to come here and work for me—" | Lessing removed his helmet. | The children used their psi powers to influence Lessing into removing his helmet. | The children removed their helmets. | Unknown. It is too early in the field of psi research to accurately determine the answer. | 3 |
29196_O6U0UM5D_1 | How is Lane able to hover over the buildings? | MUTINEER
By ROBERT J. SHEA
For every weapon there was a defense, but not against
the deadliest weapon—man himself!
Raging
, Trooper Lane
hovered three thousand
feet above Tammany Square.
The cool cybrain surgically
implanted in him was working
on the problem. But Lane
had no more patience. They'd
sweat, he thought, hating the
chill air-currents that threw
his hovering body this way
and that. He glared down at
the three towers bordering on
the Square. He spat, and
watched the little white speck
fall, fall.
Lock me up in barracks.
All I wanted was a
little time off. Did I fight in
Chi for them? Damn right I
did. Just a little time off, so
I shouldn't blow my top. Now
the lid's gone.
He was going over all their
heads. He'd bowled those city
cops over like paper dolls,
back at the Armory. The
black dog was on Lane's back.
Old Mayor himself was going
to hear about it.
Why not? Ain't old Mayor
the CinC of the Newyork
Troopers?
The humming paragrav-paks
embedded beneath his
shoulder blades held him
motionless above Newyork's
three administrative towers.
Tammany Hall. Mayor's Palace.
Court House. Lane cursed
his stupidity. He hadn't found
out which one was which
ahead of time.
They keep
Troopers in the Armory and
teach them how to fight. They
don't teach them about their
own city, that they'll be fighting
for. There's no time. From
seven years old up, Troopers
have too much to learn about
fighting.
The Mayor was behind one
of those thousands of windows.
Old cybrain, a gift from the
Trooper surgeons, compliments
of the city, would have
to figure out which one. Blood
churned in his veins, nerves
shrieked with impatience.
Lane waited for the electronic
brain to come up with the answer.
Then his head jerked up, to
a distant buzz. There were
cops coming. Two black paragrav-boats
whirred along the
translucent underside of Newyork's
anti-missile force-shield,
the Shell.
Old cybrain better be fast.
Damn fast!
The cybrain jolted an impulse
through his spine. Lane
somersaulted. Cybrain had
taken charge of his motor
nerves. Lane's own mind was
just along for the ride.
His
body snapped into a
stiff dive position. He began
to plummet down, picking
up speed. His mailed hands
glittered like arrowheads out
in front. They pointed to a
particular window in one of
the towers. A predatory excitement
rippled through him
as he sailed down through the
air. It was like going into
battle again. A little red-white-and-green
flag fluttered
on a staff below the window.
Whose flag? The city flag was
orange and blue. He shrugged
away the problem. Cybrain
knew what it was doing.
The little finger of his right
hand vibrated in its metal
sheath. A pale vibray leaped
from the lensed fingertip.
Breakthrough! The glasstic
pane dissolved. Lane streamed
through the window.
The paragrav-paks cut off.
Lane dropped lightly to the
floor, inside the room, in battle-crouch.
A 3V set was yammering.
A girl screamed. Lane's
hand shot out automatically.
A finger vibrated. Out of the
corner of his eye, Lane saw
the girl fold to the floor. There
was no one else in the room.
Lane, still in a crouch, chewed
his lip.
The Mayor?
His head swung around and
he peered at the 3V set. He
saw his own face.
"Lashing police with his
vibray," said the announcer,
"Lane broke through the cordon
surrounding Manhattan
Armory. Two policemen were
killed, four others seriously
injured. Tammany Hall has
warned that this man is extremely
dangerous. Citizens
are cautioned to keep clear of
him. Lane is an insane killer.
He is armed with the latest
military weapons. A built-in
electronic brain controls his
reflexes—"
"At ease with that jazz,"
said Lane, and a sheathed finger
snapped out. There was a
loud bang. The 3V screen dissolved
into a puddle of glasstic.
The Mayor.
Lane strode to the window.
The two police boats were
hovering above the towers.
Lane's mailed hand snapped
open a pouch at his belt. He
flipped a fist-sized cube to the
floor.
The force-bomb "exploded"—swelled
or inflated, really,
but with the speed of a blast.
Lane glanced out the window.
A section of the energy globe
bellied out from above. It
shaded the view from his window
and re-entered the tower
wall just below.
Now the girl.
He turned back to the room.
"Wake up, outa-towner." He
gave the blonde girl a light
dose of the vibray to slap her
awake.
"Who are you?" she said,
shakily.
Lane grinned. "Trooper
Lane, of the Newyork Special
Troops, is all." He threw her
a mock salute. "You from
outa-town, girlie. I ain't seen
a Newyork girl with yellow
hair in years. Orange or
green is the action. Whatcha
doing in the Mayor's room?"
The
girl pushed herself to
her feet. Built, Lane saw.
She was pretty and clean-looking,
very out-of-town. She
held herself straight and her
blue-violet eyes snapped at
him.
"What the devil do you
think you're doing, soldier? I
am a diplomat of the Grassroots
Republic of Mars. This
is an embassy, if you know
what that means."
"I don't," said Lane, unconcerned.
"Well, you should have had
brains enough to honor the
flag outside this window.
That's the Martian flag, soldier.
If you've never heard of
diplomatic immunity, you'll
suffer for your ignorance."
Her large, dark eyes narrowed.
"Who sent you?"
"My cybrain sent me."
She went openmouthed.
"You're
Lane
."
"I'm the guy they told you
about on the 3V. Where's the
Mayor? Ain't this his place?"
"No. No, you're in the
wrong room. The wrong building.
That's the Mayor's suite
over there." She pointed. "See
where the balcony is? This is
the Embassy suite. If you
want the Mayor you'll have to
go over there."
"Whaddaya know," said
Lane. "Cybrain didn't know,
no more than me."
The girl noticed the dark
swell of the force-globe.
"What's that out there?"
"Force-screen. Nothing gets
past, except maybe a full-size
blaster-beam. Keeps cops out.
Keeps you in. You anybody
important?"
"I told you, I'm an ambassador.
From Mars. I'm on a
diplomatic mission."
"Yeah? Mars a big city?"
She stared at him, violet
eyes wide. "The
planet
Mars."
"Planet? Oh,
that
Mars.
Sure, I've heard of it—you
gotta go by spaceship. What's
your name?"
"Gerri Kin. Look, Lane,
holding me is no good. It'll
just get you in worse trouble.
What are you trying to do?"
"I wanna see the Mayor. Me
and my buddies, we just come
back from fighting in Chi,
Gerri. We won. They got a
new Mayor out there in Chi.
He takes orders from Newyork."
Gerri Kin said, "That's
what the force-domes did. The
perfect defense. But also the
road to the return to city-states.
Anarchy."
Lane said, "Yeah? Well, we
done what they wanted us to
do. We did the fighting for
them. So we come back home
to Newyork and they lock us
up in the Armory. Won't pay
us. Won't let us go nowhere.
They had cops guarding us.
City cops." Lane sneered. "I
busted out. I wanna see the
Mayor and find out why we
can't have time off. I don't
play games, Gerri. I go right
to the top."
Lane broke off. There was
a hum outside the window. He
whirled and stared out. The
rounded black hulls of the two
police paragrav-boats were
nosing toward the force-screen.
Lane could read the
white numbers painted on
their bows.
A loudspeaker shouted into
the room: "Come out of there,
Lane, or we'll blast you out."
"You can't," Lane called.
"This girl from Mars is here."
"I repeat, Lane—come out
or we'll blast you out."
Lane turned to the girl. "I
thought you were important."
She
stood there with her
hands together, calmly
looking at him. "I am. But
you are too, to them. Mars is
millions of miles away, and
you're right across the Square
from the Mayor's suite."
"Yeah, but—" Lane shook
his head and turned back to
the window. "All right, look!
Move them boats away and
I'll let this girl out!"
"No deal, Lane. We're coming
in." The police boats
backed away slowly, then shot
straight up, out of the line of
vision.
Lane looked down at the
Square. Far below, the long,
gleaming barrel of a blaster
cannon caught the dim light
filtering down through Newyork's
Shell. The cannon trundled
into the Square on its
olive-drab, box-shaped caterpillar
mounting and took up a
position equidistant from the
bases of the three towers.
Now a rumble of many
voices rose from below. Lane
stared down to see a large
crowd gathering in Tammany
Square. Sound trucks were
rolling to a stop around the
edges of the crowd. The people
were all looking up.
Lane looked across the
Square. The windows of the
tower opposite, the ones he
could see clearly, were crowded
with faces. There were
white dot faces on the balcony
that Gerri Kin had pointed
out as the Mayor's suite.
The voice of a 3V newscaster
rolled up from the Square,
reechoing against the tower
walls.
"Lane is holding the Martian
Ambassador, Gerri Kin,
hostage. You can see the Martian
tricolor behind his force-globe.
Police are bringing up
blaster cannon. Lane's defense
is a globe of energy
similar to the one which protects
Newyork from aerial attack."
Lane grinned back at Gerri
Kin. "Whole town's down
there." Then his grin faded.
Nice-looking, nice-talking girl
like this probably cared a lot
more about dying than he did.
Why the hell didn't they give
him a chance to let her out?
Maybe he could do it now.
Cybrain said no. It said the
second he dropped his force-screen,
they'd blast this room
to hell. Poor girl from Mars,
she didn't have a chance.
Gerri Kin put her hand to
her forehead. "Why did you
have to pick my room? Why
did they send me to this crazy
city? Private soldiers. Twenty
million people living under
a Shell like worms in a corpse.
Earth is sick and it's going to
kill me. What's going to happen?"
Lane looked sadly at her.
Only two kinds of girls ever
went near a Trooper—the
crazy ones and the ones the
city paid. Why did he have to
be so near getting killed when
he met one he liked? Now that
she was showing a little less
fear and anger, she was talking
straight to him. She was
good, but she wasn't acting as
if she was too good for him.
"They'll start shooting pretty
quick," said Lane. "I'm
sorry about you."
"I wish I could write a letter
to my parents," she said.
"What?"
"Didn't you understand
what I said?"
"What's a letter?"
"You don't know where
Mars is. You don't know what
a letter is. You probably can't
even read and write!"
Lane
shrugged. He carried
on the conversation disinterestedly,
professionally relaxed
before battle. "What's
these things I can't do? They
important?"
"Yes. The more I see of this
city and its people, the more
important I realize they are.
You know how to fight, don't
you? I'll bet you're perfect
with those weapons."
"Listen. They been training
me to fight since I was a little
kid. Why shouldn't I be a
great little fighter?"
"Specialization," said the
girl from Mars.
"What?"
"Specialization. Everyone
I've met in this city is a specialist.
SocioSpecs run the
government. TechnoSpecs run
the machinery. Troopers fight
the wars. And ninety per cent
of the people don't work at all
because they're not trained to
do anything."
"The Fans," said Lane.
"They got it soft. That's them
down there, come to watch the
fight."
"You know why you were
kept in the Armory, Lane? I
heard them talking about it,
at the dinner I went to last
night."
"Why?"
"Because they're afraid of
the Troopers. You men did too
good a job out in Chi. You are
the deadliest weapon that has
ever been made. You. Single
airborne infantrymen!"
Lane said, "They told us in
Trooper Academy that it's the
men that win the wars."
"Yes, but people had forgotten
it until the SocioSpecs of
Newyork came up with the
Troopers. Before the Troopers,
governments concentrated
on the big weapons, the
missiles, the bombs. And the
cities, with the Shells, were
safe from bombs. They learned
to be self-sufficient under
the Shells. They were so safe,
so isolated, that national governments
collapsed. But you
Troopers wiped out that feeling
of security, when you infiltrated
Chi and conquered
it."
"We scared them, huh?"
Gerri said, "You scared
them so much that they were
afraid to let you have a furlough
in the city when you
came back. Afraid you Troopers
would realize that you
could easily take over the city
if you wanted to. You scared
them so much that they'll let
me be killed. They'll actually
risk trouble with Mars just to
kill you."
"I'm sorry about you. I
mean it, I like—"
At that moment a titanic,
ear-splitting explosion hurled
him to the carpet, deafened
and blinded him.
He recovered and saw Gerri
a few feet away, dazed, groping
on hands and knees.
Lane jumped to the window,
looked quickly, sprang
back. Cybrain pumped orders
to his nervous system.
"Blaster cannon," he said.
"But just one. Gotcha, cybrain.
I can beat that."
He picked up the black box
that generated his protective
screen. Snapping it open with
thumb-pressure, he turned a
small dial. Then he waited.
Again an enormous, brain-shattering
concussion.
Again Lane and Gerri were
thrown to the floor. But this
time there was a second explosion
and a blinding flash
from below.
Lane laughed boyishly and
ran to the window.
"Look!" he called to Gerri.
There
was a huge gap in
the crowd below. The
pavement was blackened and
shattered to rubble. In and
around the open space
sprawled dozens of tiny black
figures, not moving.
"Backfire," said Lane. "I set
the screen to throw their
blaster beam right back at
them."
"And they knew you might—and
yet they let a crowd
congregate!"
Gerri reeled away from the
window, sick.
Lane said, "I can do that a
couple times more, but it
burns out the force-globe.
Then I'm dead."
He heard the 3V newscaster's
amplified voice: "—approximately
fifty killed. But
Lane is through now. He has
been able to outthink police
with the help of his cybrain.
Now police are feeding the
problem to their giant analogue
computer in the sub-basement
of the Court House.
The police analogue computer
will be able to outthink Lane's
cybrain, will predict Lane's
moves in advance. Four more
blaster cannon are coming
down Broadway—"
"Why don't they clear those
people out of the Square?"
Gerri cried.
"What? Oh, the Fans—nobody
clears them out." He
paused. "I got one more
chance to try." He raised a
mailed glove to his mouth and
pressed a small stud in the
wrist. He said, "Trooper HQ,
this is Lane."
A voice spoke in his helmet.
"Lane, this is Trooper
HQ. We figured you'd call."
"Get me Colonel Klett."
Thirty seconds passed. Lane
could hear the clank of caterpillar
treads as the mobile
blaster cannon rolled into
Tammany Square.
The voice of the commanding
officer of the Troopers
rasped into Lane's ear:
"Meat-head! You broke out
against my orders!
Now
look
at you!"
"I knew you didn't mean
them orders, sir."
"If you get out of there
alive, I'll hang you for disobeying
them!"
"Yes, sir. Sir, there's a girl
here—somebody important—from
Mars. You know, the
planet. Sir, she told me we
could take over the city if we
got loose. That right, sir?"
There was a pause. "Your
girl from Mars is right, Lane.
But it's too late now. If we
had moved first, captured the
city government, we might
have done it. But they're
ready for us. They'd chop us
down with blaster cannon."
"Sir, I'm asking for help. I
know you're on my side."
"I am, Lane." The voice of
Colonel Klett was lower. "I'd
never admit it if you had a
chance of getting out of there
alive. You've had it, son. I'd
only lose more men trying to
rescue you. When they feed
the data into that analogue
computer, you're finished."
"Yes, sir."
"I'm sorry, Lane."
"Yes, sir. Over and out."
Lane pressed the stud on
his gauntlet again. He turned
to Gerri.
"You're okay. I wish I
could let you out. Old cybrain
says I can't. Says if I drop the
force-globe for a second,
they'll fire into the room, and
then we'll both be dead."
Gerri
stood with folded
arms and looked at him.
"Do what you have to do. As
far as I can see, you're the
only person in this city that
has even a little bit of right
on his side."
Lane laughed. "Any of them
purple-haired broads I know
would be crazy scared. You're
different."
"When my grandparents
landed on Mars, they found
out that selfishness was a luxury.
Martians can't afford
it."
Lane frowned with the effort
of thinking. "You said I
had a little right on my side.
That's a good feeling. Nobody
ever told me to feel that way
about myself before. It'll be
better to die knowing that."
"I know," she said.
The amplified voice from
below said, "The police analogue
computer is now hooked
directly to the controls of the
blaster cannon battery. It will
outguess Lane's cybrain and
check his moves ahead of
time."
Lane looked at Gerri. "How
about giving me a kiss before
they get us? Be nice if I kissed
a girl like you just once in
my life."
She smiled and walked forward.
"You deserve it, Lane."
He kissed her and it filled
him with longings for things
he couldn't name. Then he
stepped back and shook his
head. "It ain't right you
should get killed. If I take a
dive out that window, they
shoot at me, not in here."
"And kill you all the sooner."
"Better than getting burned
up in this lousy little room.
You also got right on your
side. There's too many damn
Troopers and not enough good
persons like you. Old cybrain
says stay here, but I don't
guess I will. I'm gonna pay
you back for that kiss."
"But you're safe in here!"
"Worry about yourself, not
about me." Lane picked up the
force-bomb and handed it to
her. "When I say now, press
this. Then take your hand off,
real fast. It'll shut off the
screen for a second."
He stepped up on to the
window ledge. Automatically,
the cybrain cut in his paragrav-paks.
"So long, outa-towner.
Now!
"
He jumped. He was hurtling
across the Square when the
blaster cannons opened up.
They weren't aimed at the
window where the little red-white-and-green
tricolor was
flying. But they weren't aimed
at Lane, either. They were
shooting wild.
Which way now? Looks
like I got a chance. Old cybrain
says fly right for the
cannons.
He saw the Mayor's balcony
ahead.
Go to hell, old cybrain.
I'm doing all right by myself.
I come to see the Mayor, and
I'm gonna see him.
Lane plunged forward. He
heard the shouts of frightened
men.
He swooped over the balcony
railing. A man was
pointing a blaster pistol at
him. There were five men
on the balcony—emergency!
Years of training and cybrain
took over. Lane's hand shot
out, fingers vibrating. As he
dropped to the balcony floor in
battle-crouch, the men slumped
around him.
He had seen the man with
the blaster pistol before. It
was the Mayor of Newyork.
Lane stood for a moment in
the midst of the sprawled
men, the shrieks of the crowd
floating up to him. Then he
raised his glove to his lips. He
made contact with Manhattan
Armory.
"Colonel Klett, sir. You
said if we captured the city
government we might have a
chance. Well, I captured the
city government. What do we
do with it now?"
Lane
was uncomfortable in
his dress uniform. First
there had been a ceremony in
Tammany Square inaugurating
Newyork's new Military
Protectorate, and honoring
Trooper Lane. Now there was
a formal dinner. Colonel Klett
and Gerri Kin sat on either
side of Lane.
Klett said, "Call me an opportunist
if you like, Miss
Kin, my government will be
stable, and Mars can negotiate
with it." He was a lean, sharp-featured
man with deep
grooves in his face, and gray
hair.
Gerri shook her head. "Recognition
for a new government
takes time. I'm going
back to Mars, and I think
they'll send another ambassador
next time. Nothing personal—I
just don't like it
here."
Lane said, "I'm going to
Mars, too."
"Did she ask you to?" demanded
Klett.
Lane shook his head. "She's
got too much class for me. But
I like what she told me about
Mars. It's healthy, like."
Klett frowned. "If I thought
there was a gram of talent involved
in your capture of the
Mayor, Lane, I'd never release
you from duty. But I
know better. You beat that
analogue computer by sheer
stupidity—by disregarding
your cybrain."
Lane said, "It wasn't so stupid
if it worked."
"That's what bothers me. It
calls for a revision in our tactics.
We've got a way of beating
those big computers now,
should anyone use them
against us."
"I just didn't want her to
be hurt."
"Exactly. The computer
could outguess a machine, like
your cybrain. But you introduced
a totally unpredictable
factor—human emotion.
Which proves what I, as a
military man, have always
maintained—that the deadliest
weapon in man's arsenal
is still, and will always be, the
individual soldier."
"What you just said there,
sir," said Lane. "That's why
I'm leaving Newyork."
"What do you mean?" asked
Colonel Klett.
"I'm tired of being a weapon,
sir. I want to be a human
being."
END
Work is the elimination of the traces of work.
—Michelangelo
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
If
July 1959.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | He has anti-gravity boots. | He is in a helicopter. | He has a jet pack. | He has anti-gravity devices implanted in his body. | 3 |
29196_O6U0UM5D_2 | Why are the police willing to risk the life of Gerri to kill Lane? | MUTINEER
By ROBERT J. SHEA
For every weapon there was a defense, but not against
the deadliest weapon—man himself!
Raging
, Trooper Lane
hovered three thousand
feet above Tammany Square.
The cool cybrain surgically
implanted in him was working
on the problem. But Lane
had no more patience. They'd
sweat, he thought, hating the
chill air-currents that threw
his hovering body this way
and that. He glared down at
the three towers bordering on
the Square. He spat, and
watched the little white speck
fall, fall.
Lock me up in barracks.
All I wanted was a
little time off. Did I fight in
Chi for them? Damn right I
did. Just a little time off, so
I shouldn't blow my top. Now
the lid's gone.
He was going over all their
heads. He'd bowled those city
cops over like paper dolls,
back at the Armory. The
black dog was on Lane's back.
Old Mayor himself was going
to hear about it.
Why not? Ain't old Mayor
the CinC of the Newyork
Troopers?
The humming paragrav-paks
embedded beneath his
shoulder blades held him
motionless above Newyork's
three administrative towers.
Tammany Hall. Mayor's Palace.
Court House. Lane cursed
his stupidity. He hadn't found
out which one was which
ahead of time.
They keep
Troopers in the Armory and
teach them how to fight. They
don't teach them about their
own city, that they'll be fighting
for. There's no time. From
seven years old up, Troopers
have too much to learn about
fighting.
The Mayor was behind one
of those thousands of windows.
Old cybrain, a gift from the
Trooper surgeons, compliments
of the city, would have
to figure out which one. Blood
churned in his veins, nerves
shrieked with impatience.
Lane waited for the electronic
brain to come up with the answer.
Then his head jerked up, to
a distant buzz. There were
cops coming. Two black paragrav-boats
whirred along the
translucent underside of Newyork's
anti-missile force-shield,
the Shell.
Old cybrain better be fast.
Damn fast!
The cybrain jolted an impulse
through his spine. Lane
somersaulted. Cybrain had
taken charge of his motor
nerves. Lane's own mind was
just along for the ride.
His
body snapped into a
stiff dive position. He began
to plummet down, picking
up speed. His mailed hands
glittered like arrowheads out
in front. They pointed to a
particular window in one of
the towers. A predatory excitement
rippled through him
as he sailed down through the
air. It was like going into
battle again. A little red-white-and-green
flag fluttered
on a staff below the window.
Whose flag? The city flag was
orange and blue. He shrugged
away the problem. Cybrain
knew what it was doing.
The little finger of his right
hand vibrated in its metal
sheath. A pale vibray leaped
from the lensed fingertip.
Breakthrough! The glasstic
pane dissolved. Lane streamed
through the window.
The paragrav-paks cut off.
Lane dropped lightly to the
floor, inside the room, in battle-crouch.
A 3V set was yammering.
A girl screamed. Lane's
hand shot out automatically.
A finger vibrated. Out of the
corner of his eye, Lane saw
the girl fold to the floor. There
was no one else in the room.
Lane, still in a crouch, chewed
his lip.
The Mayor?
His head swung around and
he peered at the 3V set. He
saw his own face.
"Lashing police with his
vibray," said the announcer,
"Lane broke through the cordon
surrounding Manhattan
Armory. Two policemen were
killed, four others seriously
injured. Tammany Hall has
warned that this man is extremely
dangerous. Citizens
are cautioned to keep clear of
him. Lane is an insane killer.
He is armed with the latest
military weapons. A built-in
electronic brain controls his
reflexes—"
"At ease with that jazz,"
said Lane, and a sheathed finger
snapped out. There was a
loud bang. The 3V screen dissolved
into a puddle of glasstic.
The Mayor.
Lane strode to the window.
The two police boats were
hovering above the towers.
Lane's mailed hand snapped
open a pouch at his belt. He
flipped a fist-sized cube to the
floor.
The force-bomb "exploded"—swelled
or inflated, really,
but with the speed of a blast.
Lane glanced out the window.
A section of the energy globe
bellied out from above. It
shaded the view from his window
and re-entered the tower
wall just below.
Now the girl.
He turned back to the room.
"Wake up, outa-towner." He
gave the blonde girl a light
dose of the vibray to slap her
awake.
"Who are you?" she said,
shakily.
Lane grinned. "Trooper
Lane, of the Newyork Special
Troops, is all." He threw her
a mock salute. "You from
outa-town, girlie. I ain't seen
a Newyork girl with yellow
hair in years. Orange or
green is the action. Whatcha
doing in the Mayor's room?"
The
girl pushed herself to
her feet. Built, Lane saw.
She was pretty and clean-looking,
very out-of-town. She
held herself straight and her
blue-violet eyes snapped at
him.
"What the devil do you
think you're doing, soldier? I
am a diplomat of the Grassroots
Republic of Mars. This
is an embassy, if you know
what that means."
"I don't," said Lane, unconcerned.
"Well, you should have had
brains enough to honor the
flag outside this window.
That's the Martian flag, soldier.
If you've never heard of
diplomatic immunity, you'll
suffer for your ignorance."
Her large, dark eyes narrowed.
"Who sent you?"
"My cybrain sent me."
She went openmouthed.
"You're
Lane
."
"I'm the guy they told you
about on the 3V. Where's the
Mayor? Ain't this his place?"
"No. No, you're in the
wrong room. The wrong building.
That's the Mayor's suite
over there." She pointed. "See
where the balcony is? This is
the Embassy suite. If you
want the Mayor you'll have to
go over there."
"Whaddaya know," said
Lane. "Cybrain didn't know,
no more than me."
The girl noticed the dark
swell of the force-globe.
"What's that out there?"
"Force-screen. Nothing gets
past, except maybe a full-size
blaster-beam. Keeps cops out.
Keeps you in. You anybody
important?"
"I told you, I'm an ambassador.
From Mars. I'm on a
diplomatic mission."
"Yeah? Mars a big city?"
She stared at him, violet
eyes wide. "The
planet
Mars."
"Planet? Oh,
that
Mars.
Sure, I've heard of it—you
gotta go by spaceship. What's
your name?"
"Gerri Kin. Look, Lane,
holding me is no good. It'll
just get you in worse trouble.
What are you trying to do?"
"I wanna see the Mayor. Me
and my buddies, we just come
back from fighting in Chi,
Gerri. We won. They got a
new Mayor out there in Chi.
He takes orders from Newyork."
Gerri Kin said, "That's
what the force-domes did. The
perfect defense. But also the
road to the return to city-states.
Anarchy."
Lane said, "Yeah? Well, we
done what they wanted us to
do. We did the fighting for
them. So we come back home
to Newyork and they lock us
up in the Armory. Won't pay
us. Won't let us go nowhere.
They had cops guarding us.
City cops." Lane sneered. "I
busted out. I wanna see the
Mayor and find out why we
can't have time off. I don't
play games, Gerri. I go right
to the top."
Lane broke off. There was
a hum outside the window. He
whirled and stared out. The
rounded black hulls of the two
police paragrav-boats were
nosing toward the force-screen.
Lane could read the
white numbers painted on
their bows.
A loudspeaker shouted into
the room: "Come out of there,
Lane, or we'll blast you out."
"You can't," Lane called.
"This girl from Mars is here."
"I repeat, Lane—come out
or we'll blast you out."
Lane turned to the girl. "I
thought you were important."
She
stood there with her
hands together, calmly
looking at him. "I am. But
you are too, to them. Mars is
millions of miles away, and
you're right across the Square
from the Mayor's suite."
"Yeah, but—" Lane shook
his head and turned back to
the window. "All right, look!
Move them boats away and
I'll let this girl out!"
"No deal, Lane. We're coming
in." The police boats
backed away slowly, then shot
straight up, out of the line of
vision.
Lane looked down at the
Square. Far below, the long,
gleaming barrel of a blaster
cannon caught the dim light
filtering down through Newyork's
Shell. The cannon trundled
into the Square on its
olive-drab, box-shaped caterpillar
mounting and took up a
position equidistant from the
bases of the three towers.
Now a rumble of many
voices rose from below. Lane
stared down to see a large
crowd gathering in Tammany
Square. Sound trucks were
rolling to a stop around the
edges of the crowd. The people
were all looking up.
Lane looked across the
Square. The windows of the
tower opposite, the ones he
could see clearly, were crowded
with faces. There were
white dot faces on the balcony
that Gerri Kin had pointed
out as the Mayor's suite.
The voice of a 3V newscaster
rolled up from the Square,
reechoing against the tower
walls.
"Lane is holding the Martian
Ambassador, Gerri Kin,
hostage. You can see the Martian
tricolor behind his force-globe.
Police are bringing up
blaster cannon. Lane's defense
is a globe of energy
similar to the one which protects
Newyork from aerial attack."
Lane grinned back at Gerri
Kin. "Whole town's down
there." Then his grin faded.
Nice-looking, nice-talking girl
like this probably cared a lot
more about dying than he did.
Why the hell didn't they give
him a chance to let her out?
Maybe he could do it now.
Cybrain said no. It said the
second he dropped his force-screen,
they'd blast this room
to hell. Poor girl from Mars,
she didn't have a chance.
Gerri Kin put her hand to
her forehead. "Why did you
have to pick my room? Why
did they send me to this crazy
city? Private soldiers. Twenty
million people living under
a Shell like worms in a corpse.
Earth is sick and it's going to
kill me. What's going to happen?"
Lane looked sadly at her.
Only two kinds of girls ever
went near a Trooper—the
crazy ones and the ones the
city paid. Why did he have to
be so near getting killed when
he met one he liked? Now that
she was showing a little less
fear and anger, she was talking
straight to him. She was
good, but she wasn't acting as
if she was too good for him.
"They'll start shooting pretty
quick," said Lane. "I'm
sorry about you."
"I wish I could write a letter
to my parents," she said.
"What?"
"Didn't you understand
what I said?"
"What's a letter?"
"You don't know where
Mars is. You don't know what
a letter is. You probably can't
even read and write!"
Lane
shrugged. He carried
on the conversation disinterestedly,
professionally relaxed
before battle. "What's
these things I can't do? They
important?"
"Yes. The more I see of this
city and its people, the more
important I realize they are.
You know how to fight, don't
you? I'll bet you're perfect
with those weapons."
"Listen. They been training
me to fight since I was a little
kid. Why shouldn't I be a
great little fighter?"
"Specialization," said the
girl from Mars.
"What?"
"Specialization. Everyone
I've met in this city is a specialist.
SocioSpecs run the
government. TechnoSpecs run
the machinery. Troopers fight
the wars. And ninety per cent
of the people don't work at all
because they're not trained to
do anything."
"The Fans," said Lane.
"They got it soft. That's them
down there, come to watch the
fight."
"You know why you were
kept in the Armory, Lane? I
heard them talking about it,
at the dinner I went to last
night."
"Why?"
"Because they're afraid of
the Troopers. You men did too
good a job out in Chi. You are
the deadliest weapon that has
ever been made. You. Single
airborne infantrymen!"
Lane said, "They told us in
Trooper Academy that it's the
men that win the wars."
"Yes, but people had forgotten
it until the SocioSpecs of
Newyork came up with the
Troopers. Before the Troopers,
governments concentrated
on the big weapons, the
missiles, the bombs. And the
cities, with the Shells, were
safe from bombs. They learned
to be self-sufficient under
the Shells. They were so safe,
so isolated, that national governments
collapsed. But you
Troopers wiped out that feeling
of security, when you infiltrated
Chi and conquered
it."
"We scared them, huh?"
Gerri said, "You scared
them so much that they were
afraid to let you have a furlough
in the city when you
came back. Afraid you Troopers
would realize that you
could easily take over the city
if you wanted to. You scared
them so much that they'll let
me be killed. They'll actually
risk trouble with Mars just to
kill you."
"I'm sorry about you. I
mean it, I like—"
At that moment a titanic,
ear-splitting explosion hurled
him to the carpet, deafened
and blinded him.
He recovered and saw Gerri
a few feet away, dazed, groping
on hands and knees.
Lane jumped to the window,
looked quickly, sprang
back. Cybrain pumped orders
to his nervous system.
"Blaster cannon," he said.
"But just one. Gotcha, cybrain.
I can beat that."
He picked up the black box
that generated his protective
screen. Snapping it open with
thumb-pressure, he turned a
small dial. Then he waited.
Again an enormous, brain-shattering
concussion.
Again Lane and Gerri were
thrown to the floor. But this
time there was a second explosion
and a blinding flash
from below.
Lane laughed boyishly and
ran to the window.
"Look!" he called to Gerri.
There
was a huge gap in
the crowd below. The
pavement was blackened and
shattered to rubble. In and
around the open space
sprawled dozens of tiny black
figures, not moving.
"Backfire," said Lane. "I set
the screen to throw their
blaster beam right back at
them."
"And they knew you might—and
yet they let a crowd
congregate!"
Gerri reeled away from the
window, sick.
Lane said, "I can do that a
couple times more, but it
burns out the force-globe.
Then I'm dead."
He heard the 3V newscaster's
amplified voice: "—approximately
fifty killed. But
Lane is through now. He has
been able to outthink police
with the help of his cybrain.
Now police are feeding the
problem to their giant analogue
computer in the sub-basement
of the Court House.
The police analogue computer
will be able to outthink Lane's
cybrain, will predict Lane's
moves in advance. Four more
blaster cannon are coming
down Broadway—"
"Why don't they clear those
people out of the Square?"
Gerri cried.
"What? Oh, the Fans—nobody
clears them out." He
paused. "I got one more
chance to try." He raised a
mailed glove to his mouth and
pressed a small stud in the
wrist. He said, "Trooper HQ,
this is Lane."
A voice spoke in his helmet.
"Lane, this is Trooper
HQ. We figured you'd call."
"Get me Colonel Klett."
Thirty seconds passed. Lane
could hear the clank of caterpillar
treads as the mobile
blaster cannon rolled into
Tammany Square.
The voice of the commanding
officer of the Troopers
rasped into Lane's ear:
"Meat-head! You broke out
against my orders!
Now
look
at you!"
"I knew you didn't mean
them orders, sir."
"If you get out of there
alive, I'll hang you for disobeying
them!"
"Yes, sir. Sir, there's a girl
here—somebody important—from
Mars. You know, the
planet. Sir, she told me we
could take over the city if we
got loose. That right, sir?"
There was a pause. "Your
girl from Mars is right, Lane.
But it's too late now. If we
had moved first, captured the
city government, we might
have done it. But they're
ready for us. They'd chop us
down with blaster cannon."
"Sir, I'm asking for help. I
know you're on my side."
"I am, Lane." The voice of
Colonel Klett was lower. "I'd
never admit it if you had a
chance of getting out of there
alive. You've had it, son. I'd
only lose more men trying to
rescue you. When they feed
the data into that analogue
computer, you're finished."
"Yes, sir."
"I'm sorry, Lane."
"Yes, sir. Over and out."
Lane pressed the stud on
his gauntlet again. He turned
to Gerri.
"You're okay. I wish I
could let you out. Old cybrain
says I can't. Says if I drop the
force-globe for a second,
they'll fire into the room, and
then we'll both be dead."
Gerri
stood with folded
arms and looked at him.
"Do what you have to do. As
far as I can see, you're the
only person in this city that
has even a little bit of right
on his side."
Lane laughed. "Any of them
purple-haired broads I know
would be crazy scared. You're
different."
"When my grandparents
landed on Mars, they found
out that selfishness was a luxury.
Martians can't afford
it."
Lane frowned with the effort
of thinking. "You said I
had a little right on my side.
That's a good feeling. Nobody
ever told me to feel that way
about myself before. It'll be
better to die knowing that."
"I know," she said.
The amplified voice from
below said, "The police analogue
computer is now hooked
directly to the controls of the
blaster cannon battery. It will
outguess Lane's cybrain and
check his moves ahead of
time."
Lane looked at Gerri. "How
about giving me a kiss before
they get us? Be nice if I kissed
a girl like you just once in
my life."
She smiled and walked forward.
"You deserve it, Lane."
He kissed her and it filled
him with longings for things
he couldn't name. Then he
stepped back and shook his
head. "It ain't right you
should get killed. If I take a
dive out that window, they
shoot at me, not in here."
"And kill you all the sooner."
"Better than getting burned
up in this lousy little room.
You also got right on your
side. There's too many damn
Troopers and not enough good
persons like you. Old cybrain
says stay here, but I don't
guess I will. I'm gonna pay
you back for that kiss."
"But you're safe in here!"
"Worry about yourself, not
about me." Lane picked up the
force-bomb and handed it to
her. "When I say now, press
this. Then take your hand off,
real fast. It'll shut off the
screen for a second."
He stepped up on to the
window ledge. Automatically,
the cybrain cut in his paragrav-paks.
"So long, outa-towner.
Now!
"
He jumped. He was hurtling
across the Square when the
blaster cannons opened up.
They weren't aimed at the
window where the little red-white-and-green
tricolor was
flying. But they weren't aimed
at Lane, either. They were
shooting wild.
Which way now? Looks
like I got a chance. Old cybrain
says fly right for the
cannons.
He saw the Mayor's balcony
ahead.
Go to hell, old cybrain.
I'm doing all right by myself.
I come to see the Mayor, and
I'm gonna see him.
Lane plunged forward. He
heard the shouts of frightened
men.
He swooped over the balcony
railing. A man was
pointing a blaster pistol at
him. There were five men
on the balcony—emergency!
Years of training and cybrain
took over. Lane's hand shot
out, fingers vibrating. As he
dropped to the balcony floor in
battle-crouch, the men slumped
around him.
He had seen the man with
the blaster pistol before. It
was the Mayor of Newyork.
Lane stood for a moment in
the midst of the sprawled
men, the shrieks of the crowd
floating up to him. Then he
raised his glove to his lips. He
made contact with Manhattan
Armory.
"Colonel Klett, sir. You
said if we captured the city
government we might have a
chance. Well, I captured the
city government. What do we
do with it now?"
Lane
was uncomfortable in
his dress uniform. First
there had been a ceremony in
Tammany Square inaugurating
Newyork's new Military
Protectorate, and honoring
Trooper Lane. Now there was
a formal dinner. Colonel Klett
and Gerri Kin sat on either
side of Lane.
Klett said, "Call me an opportunist
if you like, Miss
Kin, my government will be
stable, and Mars can negotiate
with it." He was a lean, sharp-featured
man with deep
grooves in his face, and gray
hair.
Gerri shook her head. "Recognition
for a new government
takes time. I'm going
back to Mars, and I think
they'll send another ambassador
next time. Nothing personal—I
just don't like it
here."
Lane said, "I'm going to
Mars, too."
"Did she ask you to?" demanded
Klett.
Lane shook his head. "She's
got too much class for me. But
I like what she told me about
Mars. It's healthy, like."
Klett frowned. "If I thought
there was a gram of talent involved
in your capture of the
Mayor, Lane, I'd never release
you from duty. But I
know better. You beat that
analogue computer by sheer
stupidity—by disregarding
your cybrain."
Lane said, "It wasn't so stupid
if it worked."
"That's what bothers me. It
calls for a revision in our tactics.
We've got a way of beating
those big computers now,
should anyone use them
against us."
"I just didn't want her to
be hurt."
"Exactly. The computer
could outguess a machine, like
your cybrain. But you introduced
a totally unpredictable
factor—human emotion.
Which proves what I, as a
military man, have always
maintained—that the deadliest
weapon in man's arsenal
is still, and will always be, the
individual soldier."
"What you just said there,
sir," said Lane. "That's why
I'm leaving Newyork."
"What do you mean?" asked
Colonel Klett.
"I'm tired of being a weapon,
sir. I want to be a human
being."
END
Work is the elimination of the traces of work.
—Michelangelo
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
If
July 1959.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | Lane is too dangerous to be left alive. They can't risk him escaping just so they can rescue Gerri. | They think Lane may be infected with a biological weapon. | The police don't care if they kill Martians. | They don't believe that Gerri is in the room with Lane. | 0 |
29196_O6U0UM5D_3 | How does Gerri feel about Earth? | MUTINEER
By ROBERT J. SHEA
For every weapon there was a defense, but not against
the deadliest weapon—man himself!
Raging
, Trooper Lane
hovered three thousand
feet above Tammany Square.
The cool cybrain surgically
implanted in him was working
on the problem. But Lane
had no more patience. They'd
sweat, he thought, hating the
chill air-currents that threw
his hovering body this way
and that. He glared down at
the three towers bordering on
the Square. He spat, and
watched the little white speck
fall, fall.
Lock me up in barracks.
All I wanted was a
little time off. Did I fight in
Chi for them? Damn right I
did. Just a little time off, so
I shouldn't blow my top. Now
the lid's gone.
He was going over all their
heads. He'd bowled those city
cops over like paper dolls,
back at the Armory. The
black dog was on Lane's back.
Old Mayor himself was going
to hear about it.
Why not? Ain't old Mayor
the CinC of the Newyork
Troopers?
The humming paragrav-paks
embedded beneath his
shoulder blades held him
motionless above Newyork's
three administrative towers.
Tammany Hall. Mayor's Palace.
Court House. Lane cursed
his stupidity. He hadn't found
out which one was which
ahead of time.
They keep
Troopers in the Armory and
teach them how to fight. They
don't teach them about their
own city, that they'll be fighting
for. There's no time. From
seven years old up, Troopers
have too much to learn about
fighting.
The Mayor was behind one
of those thousands of windows.
Old cybrain, a gift from the
Trooper surgeons, compliments
of the city, would have
to figure out which one. Blood
churned in his veins, nerves
shrieked with impatience.
Lane waited for the electronic
brain to come up with the answer.
Then his head jerked up, to
a distant buzz. There were
cops coming. Two black paragrav-boats
whirred along the
translucent underside of Newyork's
anti-missile force-shield,
the Shell.
Old cybrain better be fast.
Damn fast!
The cybrain jolted an impulse
through his spine. Lane
somersaulted. Cybrain had
taken charge of his motor
nerves. Lane's own mind was
just along for the ride.
His
body snapped into a
stiff dive position. He began
to plummet down, picking
up speed. His mailed hands
glittered like arrowheads out
in front. They pointed to a
particular window in one of
the towers. A predatory excitement
rippled through him
as he sailed down through the
air. It was like going into
battle again. A little red-white-and-green
flag fluttered
on a staff below the window.
Whose flag? The city flag was
orange and blue. He shrugged
away the problem. Cybrain
knew what it was doing.
The little finger of his right
hand vibrated in its metal
sheath. A pale vibray leaped
from the lensed fingertip.
Breakthrough! The glasstic
pane dissolved. Lane streamed
through the window.
The paragrav-paks cut off.
Lane dropped lightly to the
floor, inside the room, in battle-crouch.
A 3V set was yammering.
A girl screamed. Lane's
hand shot out automatically.
A finger vibrated. Out of the
corner of his eye, Lane saw
the girl fold to the floor. There
was no one else in the room.
Lane, still in a crouch, chewed
his lip.
The Mayor?
His head swung around and
he peered at the 3V set. He
saw his own face.
"Lashing police with his
vibray," said the announcer,
"Lane broke through the cordon
surrounding Manhattan
Armory. Two policemen were
killed, four others seriously
injured. Tammany Hall has
warned that this man is extremely
dangerous. Citizens
are cautioned to keep clear of
him. Lane is an insane killer.
He is armed with the latest
military weapons. A built-in
electronic brain controls his
reflexes—"
"At ease with that jazz,"
said Lane, and a sheathed finger
snapped out. There was a
loud bang. The 3V screen dissolved
into a puddle of glasstic.
The Mayor.
Lane strode to the window.
The two police boats were
hovering above the towers.
Lane's mailed hand snapped
open a pouch at his belt. He
flipped a fist-sized cube to the
floor.
The force-bomb "exploded"—swelled
or inflated, really,
but with the speed of a blast.
Lane glanced out the window.
A section of the energy globe
bellied out from above. It
shaded the view from his window
and re-entered the tower
wall just below.
Now the girl.
He turned back to the room.
"Wake up, outa-towner." He
gave the blonde girl a light
dose of the vibray to slap her
awake.
"Who are you?" she said,
shakily.
Lane grinned. "Trooper
Lane, of the Newyork Special
Troops, is all." He threw her
a mock salute. "You from
outa-town, girlie. I ain't seen
a Newyork girl with yellow
hair in years. Orange or
green is the action. Whatcha
doing in the Mayor's room?"
The
girl pushed herself to
her feet. Built, Lane saw.
She was pretty and clean-looking,
very out-of-town. She
held herself straight and her
blue-violet eyes snapped at
him.
"What the devil do you
think you're doing, soldier? I
am a diplomat of the Grassroots
Republic of Mars. This
is an embassy, if you know
what that means."
"I don't," said Lane, unconcerned.
"Well, you should have had
brains enough to honor the
flag outside this window.
That's the Martian flag, soldier.
If you've never heard of
diplomatic immunity, you'll
suffer for your ignorance."
Her large, dark eyes narrowed.
"Who sent you?"
"My cybrain sent me."
She went openmouthed.
"You're
Lane
."
"I'm the guy they told you
about on the 3V. Where's the
Mayor? Ain't this his place?"
"No. No, you're in the
wrong room. The wrong building.
That's the Mayor's suite
over there." She pointed. "See
where the balcony is? This is
the Embassy suite. If you
want the Mayor you'll have to
go over there."
"Whaddaya know," said
Lane. "Cybrain didn't know,
no more than me."
The girl noticed the dark
swell of the force-globe.
"What's that out there?"
"Force-screen. Nothing gets
past, except maybe a full-size
blaster-beam. Keeps cops out.
Keeps you in. You anybody
important?"
"I told you, I'm an ambassador.
From Mars. I'm on a
diplomatic mission."
"Yeah? Mars a big city?"
She stared at him, violet
eyes wide. "The
planet
Mars."
"Planet? Oh,
that
Mars.
Sure, I've heard of it—you
gotta go by spaceship. What's
your name?"
"Gerri Kin. Look, Lane,
holding me is no good. It'll
just get you in worse trouble.
What are you trying to do?"
"I wanna see the Mayor. Me
and my buddies, we just come
back from fighting in Chi,
Gerri. We won. They got a
new Mayor out there in Chi.
He takes orders from Newyork."
Gerri Kin said, "That's
what the force-domes did. The
perfect defense. But also the
road to the return to city-states.
Anarchy."
Lane said, "Yeah? Well, we
done what they wanted us to
do. We did the fighting for
them. So we come back home
to Newyork and they lock us
up in the Armory. Won't pay
us. Won't let us go nowhere.
They had cops guarding us.
City cops." Lane sneered. "I
busted out. I wanna see the
Mayor and find out why we
can't have time off. I don't
play games, Gerri. I go right
to the top."
Lane broke off. There was
a hum outside the window. He
whirled and stared out. The
rounded black hulls of the two
police paragrav-boats were
nosing toward the force-screen.
Lane could read the
white numbers painted on
their bows.
A loudspeaker shouted into
the room: "Come out of there,
Lane, or we'll blast you out."
"You can't," Lane called.
"This girl from Mars is here."
"I repeat, Lane—come out
or we'll blast you out."
Lane turned to the girl. "I
thought you were important."
She
stood there with her
hands together, calmly
looking at him. "I am. But
you are too, to them. Mars is
millions of miles away, and
you're right across the Square
from the Mayor's suite."
"Yeah, but—" Lane shook
his head and turned back to
the window. "All right, look!
Move them boats away and
I'll let this girl out!"
"No deal, Lane. We're coming
in." The police boats
backed away slowly, then shot
straight up, out of the line of
vision.
Lane looked down at the
Square. Far below, the long,
gleaming barrel of a blaster
cannon caught the dim light
filtering down through Newyork's
Shell. The cannon trundled
into the Square on its
olive-drab, box-shaped caterpillar
mounting and took up a
position equidistant from the
bases of the three towers.
Now a rumble of many
voices rose from below. Lane
stared down to see a large
crowd gathering in Tammany
Square. Sound trucks were
rolling to a stop around the
edges of the crowd. The people
were all looking up.
Lane looked across the
Square. The windows of the
tower opposite, the ones he
could see clearly, were crowded
with faces. There were
white dot faces on the balcony
that Gerri Kin had pointed
out as the Mayor's suite.
The voice of a 3V newscaster
rolled up from the Square,
reechoing against the tower
walls.
"Lane is holding the Martian
Ambassador, Gerri Kin,
hostage. You can see the Martian
tricolor behind his force-globe.
Police are bringing up
blaster cannon. Lane's defense
is a globe of energy
similar to the one which protects
Newyork from aerial attack."
Lane grinned back at Gerri
Kin. "Whole town's down
there." Then his grin faded.
Nice-looking, nice-talking girl
like this probably cared a lot
more about dying than he did.
Why the hell didn't they give
him a chance to let her out?
Maybe he could do it now.
Cybrain said no. It said the
second he dropped his force-screen,
they'd blast this room
to hell. Poor girl from Mars,
she didn't have a chance.
Gerri Kin put her hand to
her forehead. "Why did you
have to pick my room? Why
did they send me to this crazy
city? Private soldiers. Twenty
million people living under
a Shell like worms in a corpse.
Earth is sick and it's going to
kill me. What's going to happen?"
Lane looked sadly at her.
Only two kinds of girls ever
went near a Trooper—the
crazy ones and the ones the
city paid. Why did he have to
be so near getting killed when
he met one he liked? Now that
she was showing a little less
fear and anger, she was talking
straight to him. She was
good, but she wasn't acting as
if she was too good for him.
"They'll start shooting pretty
quick," said Lane. "I'm
sorry about you."
"I wish I could write a letter
to my parents," she said.
"What?"
"Didn't you understand
what I said?"
"What's a letter?"
"You don't know where
Mars is. You don't know what
a letter is. You probably can't
even read and write!"
Lane
shrugged. He carried
on the conversation disinterestedly,
professionally relaxed
before battle. "What's
these things I can't do? They
important?"
"Yes. The more I see of this
city and its people, the more
important I realize they are.
You know how to fight, don't
you? I'll bet you're perfect
with those weapons."
"Listen. They been training
me to fight since I was a little
kid. Why shouldn't I be a
great little fighter?"
"Specialization," said the
girl from Mars.
"What?"
"Specialization. Everyone
I've met in this city is a specialist.
SocioSpecs run the
government. TechnoSpecs run
the machinery. Troopers fight
the wars. And ninety per cent
of the people don't work at all
because they're not trained to
do anything."
"The Fans," said Lane.
"They got it soft. That's them
down there, come to watch the
fight."
"You know why you were
kept in the Armory, Lane? I
heard them talking about it,
at the dinner I went to last
night."
"Why?"
"Because they're afraid of
the Troopers. You men did too
good a job out in Chi. You are
the deadliest weapon that has
ever been made. You. Single
airborne infantrymen!"
Lane said, "They told us in
Trooper Academy that it's the
men that win the wars."
"Yes, but people had forgotten
it until the SocioSpecs of
Newyork came up with the
Troopers. Before the Troopers,
governments concentrated
on the big weapons, the
missiles, the bombs. And the
cities, with the Shells, were
safe from bombs. They learned
to be self-sufficient under
the Shells. They were so safe,
so isolated, that national governments
collapsed. But you
Troopers wiped out that feeling
of security, when you infiltrated
Chi and conquered
it."
"We scared them, huh?"
Gerri said, "You scared
them so much that they were
afraid to let you have a furlough
in the city when you
came back. Afraid you Troopers
would realize that you
could easily take over the city
if you wanted to. You scared
them so much that they'll let
me be killed. They'll actually
risk trouble with Mars just to
kill you."
"I'm sorry about you. I
mean it, I like—"
At that moment a titanic,
ear-splitting explosion hurled
him to the carpet, deafened
and blinded him.
He recovered and saw Gerri
a few feet away, dazed, groping
on hands and knees.
Lane jumped to the window,
looked quickly, sprang
back. Cybrain pumped orders
to his nervous system.
"Blaster cannon," he said.
"But just one. Gotcha, cybrain.
I can beat that."
He picked up the black box
that generated his protective
screen. Snapping it open with
thumb-pressure, he turned a
small dial. Then he waited.
Again an enormous, brain-shattering
concussion.
Again Lane and Gerri were
thrown to the floor. But this
time there was a second explosion
and a blinding flash
from below.
Lane laughed boyishly and
ran to the window.
"Look!" he called to Gerri.
There
was a huge gap in
the crowd below. The
pavement was blackened and
shattered to rubble. In and
around the open space
sprawled dozens of tiny black
figures, not moving.
"Backfire," said Lane. "I set
the screen to throw their
blaster beam right back at
them."
"And they knew you might—and
yet they let a crowd
congregate!"
Gerri reeled away from the
window, sick.
Lane said, "I can do that a
couple times more, but it
burns out the force-globe.
Then I'm dead."
He heard the 3V newscaster's
amplified voice: "—approximately
fifty killed. But
Lane is through now. He has
been able to outthink police
with the help of his cybrain.
Now police are feeding the
problem to their giant analogue
computer in the sub-basement
of the Court House.
The police analogue computer
will be able to outthink Lane's
cybrain, will predict Lane's
moves in advance. Four more
blaster cannon are coming
down Broadway—"
"Why don't they clear those
people out of the Square?"
Gerri cried.
"What? Oh, the Fans—nobody
clears them out." He
paused. "I got one more
chance to try." He raised a
mailed glove to his mouth and
pressed a small stud in the
wrist. He said, "Trooper HQ,
this is Lane."
A voice spoke in his helmet.
"Lane, this is Trooper
HQ. We figured you'd call."
"Get me Colonel Klett."
Thirty seconds passed. Lane
could hear the clank of caterpillar
treads as the mobile
blaster cannon rolled into
Tammany Square.
The voice of the commanding
officer of the Troopers
rasped into Lane's ear:
"Meat-head! You broke out
against my orders!
Now
look
at you!"
"I knew you didn't mean
them orders, sir."
"If you get out of there
alive, I'll hang you for disobeying
them!"
"Yes, sir. Sir, there's a girl
here—somebody important—from
Mars. You know, the
planet. Sir, she told me we
could take over the city if we
got loose. That right, sir?"
There was a pause. "Your
girl from Mars is right, Lane.
But it's too late now. If we
had moved first, captured the
city government, we might
have done it. But they're
ready for us. They'd chop us
down with blaster cannon."
"Sir, I'm asking for help. I
know you're on my side."
"I am, Lane." The voice of
Colonel Klett was lower. "I'd
never admit it if you had a
chance of getting out of there
alive. You've had it, son. I'd
only lose more men trying to
rescue you. When they feed
the data into that analogue
computer, you're finished."
"Yes, sir."
"I'm sorry, Lane."
"Yes, sir. Over and out."
Lane pressed the stud on
his gauntlet again. He turned
to Gerri.
"You're okay. I wish I
could let you out. Old cybrain
says I can't. Says if I drop the
force-globe for a second,
they'll fire into the room, and
then we'll both be dead."
Gerri
stood with folded
arms and looked at him.
"Do what you have to do. As
far as I can see, you're the
only person in this city that
has even a little bit of right
on his side."
Lane laughed. "Any of them
purple-haired broads I know
would be crazy scared. You're
different."
"When my grandparents
landed on Mars, they found
out that selfishness was a luxury.
Martians can't afford
it."
Lane frowned with the effort
of thinking. "You said I
had a little right on my side.
That's a good feeling. Nobody
ever told me to feel that way
about myself before. It'll be
better to die knowing that."
"I know," she said.
The amplified voice from
below said, "The police analogue
computer is now hooked
directly to the controls of the
blaster cannon battery. It will
outguess Lane's cybrain and
check his moves ahead of
time."
Lane looked at Gerri. "How
about giving me a kiss before
they get us? Be nice if I kissed
a girl like you just once in
my life."
She smiled and walked forward.
"You deserve it, Lane."
He kissed her and it filled
him with longings for things
he couldn't name. Then he
stepped back and shook his
head. "It ain't right you
should get killed. If I take a
dive out that window, they
shoot at me, not in here."
"And kill you all the sooner."
"Better than getting burned
up in this lousy little room.
You also got right on your
side. There's too many damn
Troopers and not enough good
persons like you. Old cybrain
says stay here, but I don't
guess I will. I'm gonna pay
you back for that kiss."
"But you're safe in here!"
"Worry about yourself, not
about me." Lane picked up the
force-bomb and handed it to
her. "When I say now, press
this. Then take your hand off,
real fast. It'll shut off the
screen for a second."
He stepped up on to the
window ledge. Automatically,
the cybrain cut in his paragrav-paks.
"So long, outa-towner.
Now!
"
He jumped. He was hurtling
across the Square when the
blaster cannons opened up.
They weren't aimed at the
window where the little red-white-and-green
tricolor was
flying. But they weren't aimed
at Lane, either. They were
shooting wild.
Which way now? Looks
like I got a chance. Old cybrain
says fly right for the
cannons.
He saw the Mayor's balcony
ahead.
Go to hell, old cybrain.
I'm doing all right by myself.
I come to see the Mayor, and
I'm gonna see him.
Lane plunged forward. He
heard the shouts of frightened
men.
He swooped over the balcony
railing. A man was
pointing a blaster pistol at
him. There were five men
on the balcony—emergency!
Years of training and cybrain
took over. Lane's hand shot
out, fingers vibrating. As he
dropped to the balcony floor in
battle-crouch, the men slumped
around him.
He had seen the man with
the blaster pistol before. It
was the Mayor of Newyork.
Lane stood for a moment in
the midst of the sprawled
men, the shrieks of the crowd
floating up to him. Then he
raised his glove to his lips. He
made contact with Manhattan
Armory.
"Colonel Klett, sir. You
said if we captured the city
government we might have a
chance. Well, I captured the
city government. What do we
do with it now?"
Lane
was uncomfortable in
his dress uniform. First
there had been a ceremony in
Tammany Square inaugurating
Newyork's new Military
Protectorate, and honoring
Trooper Lane. Now there was
a formal dinner. Colonel Klett
and Gerri Kin sat on either
side of Lane.
Klett said, "Call me an opportunist
if you like, Miss
Kin, my government will be
stable, and Mars can negotiate
with it." He was a lean, sharp-featured
man with deep
grooves in his face, and gray
hair.
Gerri shook her head. "Recognition
for a new government
takes time. I'm going
back to Mars, and I think
they'll send another ambassador
next time. Nothing personal—I
just don't like it
here."
Lane said, "I'm going to
Mars, too."
"Did she ask you to?" demanded
Klett.
Lane shook his head. "She's
got too much class for me. But
I like what she told me about
Mars. It's healthy, like."
Klett frowned. "If I thought
there was a gram of talent involved
in your capture of the
Mayor, Lane, I'd never release
you from duty. But I
know better. You beat that
analogue computer by sheer
stupidity—by disregarding
your cybrain."
Lane said, "It wasn't so stupid
if it worked."
"That's what bothers me. It
calls for a revision in our tactics.
We've got a way of beating
those big computers now,
should anyone use them
against us."
"I just didn't want her to
be hurt."
"Exactly. The computer
could outguess a machine, like
your cybrain. But you introduced
a totally unpredictable
factor—human emotion.
Which proves what I, as a
military man, have always
maintained—that the deadliest
weapon in man's arsenal
is still, and will always be, the
individual soldier."
"What you just said there,
sir," said Lane. "That's why
I'm leaving Newyork."
"What do you mean?" asked
Colonel Klett.
"I'm tired of being a weapon,
sir. I want to be a human
being."
END
Work is the elimination of the traces of work.
—Michelangelo
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
If
July 1959.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | Gerri does not like the Earth. The climate is terrible. | She does not like Earth. She thinks the people are uncivilized. | She loves Earth. She is going to move to Earth permanently. | Gerri likes the Earth, it's the Earthlings she's not sure about. | 1 |
29196_O6U0UM5D_4 | Why is Lane so child-like? | MUTINEER
By ROBERT J. SHEA
For every weapon there was a defense, but not against
the deadliest weapon—man himself!
Raging
, Trooper Lane
hovered three thousand
feet above Tammany Square.
The cool cybrain surgically
implanted in him was working
on the problem. But Lane
had no more patience. They'd
sweat, he thought, hating the
chill air-currents that threw
his hovering body this way
and that. He glared down at
the three towers bordering on
the Square. He spat, and
watched the little white speck
fall, fall.
Lock me up in barracks.
All I wanted was a
little time off. Did I fight in
Chi for them? Damn right I
did. Just a little time off, so
I shouldn't blow my top. Now
the lid's gone.
He was going over all their
heads. He'd bowled those city
cops over like paper dolls,
back at the Armory. The
black dog was on Lane's back.
Old Mayor himself was going
to hear about it.
Why not? Ain't old Mayor
the CinC of the Newyork
Troopers?
The humming paragrav-paks
embedded beneath his
shoulder blades held him
motionless above Newyork's
three administrative towers.
Tammany Hall. Mayor's Palace.
Court House. Lane cursed
his stupidity. He hadn't found
out which one was which
ahead of time.
They keep
Troopers in the Armory and
teach them how to fight. They
don't teach them about their
own city, that they'll be fighting
for. There's no time. From
seven years old up, Troopers
have too much to learn about
fighting.
The Mayor was behind one
of those thousands of windows.
Old cybrain, a gift from the
Trooper surgeons, compliments
of the city, would have
to figure out which one. Blood
churned in his veins, nerves
shrieked with impatience.
Lane waited for the electronic
brain to come up with the answer.
Then his head jerked up, to
a distant buzz. There were
cops coming. Two black paragrav-boats
whirred along the
translucent underside of Newyork's
anti-missile force-shield,
the Shell.
Old cybrain better be fast.
Damn fast!
The cybrain jolted an impulse
through his spine. Lane
somersaulted. Cybrain had
taken charge of his motor
nerves. Lane's own mind was
just along for the ride.
His
body snapped into a
stiff dive position. He began
to plummet down, picking
up speed. His mailed hands
glittered like arrowheads out
in front. They pointed to a
particular window in one of
the towers. A predatory excitement
rippled through him
as he sailed down through the
air. It was like going into
battle again. A little red-white-and-green
flag fluttered
on a staff below the window.
Whose flag? The city flag was
orange and blue. He shrugged
away the problem. Cybrain
knew what it was doing.
The little finger of his right
hand vibrated in its metal
sheath. A pale vibray leaped
from the lensed fingertip.
Breakthrough! The glasstic
pane dissolved. Lane streamed
through the window.
The paragrav-paks cut off.
Lane dropped lightly to the
floor, inside the room, in battle-crouch.
A 3V set was yammering.
A girl screamed. Lane's
hand shot out automatically.
A finger vibrated. Out of the
corner of his eye, Lane saw
the girl fold to the floor. There
was no one else in the room.
Lane, still in a crouch, chewed
his lip.
The Mayor?
His head swung around and
he peered at the 3V set. He
saw his own face.
"Lashing police with his
vibray," said the announcer,
"Lane broke through the cordon
surrounding Manhattan
Armory. Two policemen were
killed, four others seriously
injured. Tammany Hall has
warned that this man is extremely
dangerous. Citizens
are cautioned to keep clear of
him. Lane is an insane killer.
He is armed with the latest
military weapons. A built-in
electronic brain controls his
reflexes—"
"At ease with that jazz,"
said Lane, and a sheathed finger
snapped out. There was a
loud bang. The 3V screen dissolved
into a puddle of glasstic.
The Mayor.
Lane strode to the window.
The two police boats were
hovering above the towers.
Lane's mailed hand snapped
open a pouch at his belt. He
flipped a fist-sized cube to the
floor.
The force-bomb "exploded"—swelled
or inflated, really,
but with the speed of a blast.
Lane glanced out the window.
A section of the energy globe
bellied out from above. It
shaded the view from his window
and re-entered the tower
wall just below.
Now the girl.
He turned back to the room.
"Wake up, outa-towner." He
gave the blonde girl a light
dose of the vibray to slap her
awake.
"Who are you?" she said,
shakily.
Lane grinned. "Trooper
Lane, of the Newyork Special
Troops, is all." He threw her
a mock salute. "You from
outa-town, girlie. I ain't seen
a Newyork girl with yellow
hair in years. Orange or
green is the action. Whatcha
doing in the Mayor's room?"
The
girl pushed herself to
her feet. Built, Lane saw.
She was pretty and clean-looking,
very out-of-town. She
held herself straight and her
blue-violet eyes snapped at
him.
"What the devil do you
think you're doing, soldier? I
am a diplomat of the Grassroots
Republic of Mars. This
is an embassy, if you know
what that means."
"I don't," said Lane, unconcerned.
"Well, you should have had
brains enough to honor the
flag outside this window.
That's the Martian flag, soldier.
If you've never heard of
diplomatic immunity, you'll
suffer for your ignorance."
Her large, dark eyes narrowed.
"Who sent you?"
"My cybrain sent me."
She went openmouthed.
"You're
Lane
."
"I'm the guy they told you
about on the 3V. Where's the
Mayor? Ain't this his place?"
"No. No, you're in the
wrong room. The wrong building.
That's the Mayor's suite
over there." She pointed. "See
where the balcony is? This is
the Embassy suite. If you
want the Mayor you'll have to
go over there."
"Whaddaya know," said
Lane. "Cybrain didn't know,
no more than me."
The girl noticed the dark
swell of the force-globe.
"What's that out there?"
"Force-screen. Nothing gets
past, except maybe a full-size
blaster-beam. Keeps cops out.
Keeps you in. You anybody
important?"
"I told you, I'm an ambassador.
From Mars. I'm on a
diplomatic mission."
"Yeah? Mars a big city?"
She stared at him, violet
eyes wide. "The
planet
Mars."
"Planet? Oh,
that
Mars.
Sure, I've heard of it—you
gotta go by spaceship. What's
your name?"
"Gerri Kin. Look, Lane,
holding me is no good. It'll
just get you in worse trouble.
What are you trying to do?"
"I wanna see the Mayor. Me
and my buddies, we just come
back from fighting in Chi,
Gerri. We won. They got a
new Mayor out there in Chi.
He takes orders from Newyork."
Gerri Kin said, "That's
what the force-domes did. The
perfect defense. But also the
road to the return to city-states.
Anarchy."
Lane said, "Yeah? Well, we
done what they wanted us to
do. We did the fighting for
them. So we come back home
to Newyork and they lock us
up in the Armory. Won't pay
us. Won't let us go nowhere.
They had cops guarding us.
City cops." Lane sneered. "I
busted out. I wanna see the
Mayor and find out why we
can't have time off. I don't
play games, Gerri. I go right
to the top."
Lane broke off. There was
a hum outside the window. He
whirled and stared out. The
rounded black hulls of the two
police paragrav-boats were
nosing toward the force-screen.
Lane could read the
white numbers painted on
their bows.
A loudspeaker shouted into
the room: "Come out of there,
Lane, or we'll blast you out."
"You can't," Lane called.
"This girl from Mars is here."
"I repeat, Lane—come out
or we'll blast you out."
Lane turned to the girl. "I
thought you were important."
She
stood there with her
hands together, calmly
looking at him. "I am. But
you are too, to them. Mars is
millions of miles away, and
you're right across the Square
from the Mayor's suite."
"Yeah, but—" Lane shook
his head and turned back to
the window. "All right, look!
Move them boats away and
I'll let this girl out!"
"No deal, Lane. We're coming
in." The police boats
backed away slowly, then shot
straight up, out of the line of
vision.
Lane looked down at the
Square. Far below, the long,
gleaming barrel of a blaster
cannon caught the dim light
filtering down through Newyork's
Shell. The cannon trundled
into the Square on its
olive-drab, box-shaped caterpillar
mounting and took up a
position equidistant from the
bases of the three towers.
Now a rumble of many
voices rose from below. Lane
stared down to see a large
crowd gathering in Tammany
Square. Sound trucks were
rolling to a stop around the
edges of the crowd. The people
were all looking up.
Lane looked across the
Square. The windows of the
tower opposite, the ones he
could see clearly, were crowded
with faces. There were
white dot faces on the balcony
that Gerri Kin had pointed
out as the Mayor's suite.
The voice of a 3V newscaster
rolled up from the Square,
reechoing against the tower
walls.
"Lane is holding the Martian
Ambassador, Gerri Kin,
hostage. You can see the Martian
tricolor behind his force-globe.
Police are bringing up
blaster cannon. Lane's defense
is a globe of energy
similar to the one which protects
Newyork from aerial attack."
Lane grinned back at Gerri
Kin. "Whole town's down
there." Then his grin faded.
Nice-looking, nice-talking girl
like this probably cared a lot
more about dying than he did.
Why the hell didn't they give
him a chance to let her out?
Maybe he could do it now.
Cybrain said no. It said the
second he dropped his force-screen,
they'd blast this room
to hell. Poor girl from Mars,
she didn't have a chance.
Gerri Kin put her hand to
her forehead. "Why did you
have to pick my room? Why
did they send me to this crazy
city? Private soldiers. Twenty
million people living under
a Shell like worms in a corpse.
Earth is sick and it's going to
kill me. What's going to happen?"
Lane looked sadly at her.
Only two kinds of girls ever
went near a Trooper—the
crazy ones and the ones the
city paid. Why did he have to
be so near getting killed when
he met one he liked? Now that
she was showing a little less
fear and anger, she was talking
straight to him. She was
good, but she wasn't acting as
if she was too good for him.
"They'll start shooting pretty
quick," said Lane. "I'm
sorry about you."
"I wish I could write a letter
to my parents," she said.
"What?"
"Didn't you understand
what I said?"
"What's a letter?"
"You don't know where
Mars is. You don't know what
a letter is. You probably can't
even read and write!"
Lane
shrugged. He carried
on the conversation disinterestedly,
professionally relaxed
before battle. "What's
these things I can't do? They
important?"
"Yes. The more I see of this
city and its people, the more
important I realize they are.
You know how to fight, don't
you? I'll bet you're perfect
with those weapons."
"Listen. They been training
me to fight since I was a little
kid. Why shouldn't I be a
great little fighter?"
"Specialization," said the
girl from Mars.
"What?"
"Specialization. Everyone
I've met in this city is a specialist.
SocioSpecs run the
government. TechnoSpecs run
the machinery. Troopers fight
the wars. And ninety per cent
of the people don't work at all
because they're not trained to
do anything."
"The Fans," said Lane.
"They got it soft. That's them
down there, come to watch the
fight."
"You know why you were
kept in the Armory, Lane? I
heard them talking about it,
at the dinner I went to last
night."
"Why?"
"Because they're afraid of
the Troopers. You men did too
good a job out in Chi. You are
the deadliest weapon that has
ever been made. You. Single
airborne infantrymen!"
Lane said, "They told us in
Trooper Academy that it's the
men that win the wars."
"Yes, but people had forgotten
it until the SocioSpecs of
Newyork came up with the
Troopers. Before the Troopers,
governments concentrated
on the big weapons, the
missiles, the bombs. And the
cities, with the Shells, were
safe from bombs. They learned
to be self-sufficient under
the Shells. They were so safe,
so isolated, that national governments
collapsed. But you
Troopers wiped out that feeling
of security, when you infiltrated
Chi and conquered
it."
"We scared them, huh?"
Gerri said, "You scared
them so much that they were
afraid to let you have a furlough
in the city when you
came back. Afraid you Troopers
would realize that you
could easily take over the city
if you wanted to. You scared
them so much that they'll let
me be killed. They'll actually
risk trouble with Mars just to
kill you."
"I'm sorry about you. I
mean it, I like—"
At that moment a titanic,
ear-splitting explosion hurled
him to the carpet, deafened
and blinded him.
He recovered and saw Gerri
a few feet away, dazed, groping
on hands and knees.
Lane jumped to the window,
looked quickly, sprang
back. Cybrain pumped orders
to his nervous system.
"Blaster cannon," he said.
"But just one. Gotcha, cybrain.
I can beat that."
He picked up the black box
that generated his protective
screen. Snapping it open with
thumb-pressure, he turned a
small dial. Then he waited.
Again an enormous, brain-shattering
concussion.
Again Lane and Gerri were
thrown to the floor. But this
time there was a second explosion
and a blinding flash
from below.
Lane laughed boyishly and
ran to the window.
"Look!" he called to Gerri.
There
was a huge gap in
the crowd below. The
pavement was blackened and
shattered to rubble. In and
around the open space
sprawled dozens of tiny black
figures, not moving.
"Backfire," said Lane. "I set
the screen to throw their
blaster beam right back at
them."
"And they knew you might—and
yet they let a crowd
congregate!"
Gerri reeled away from the
window, sick.
Lane said, "I can do that a
couple times more, but it
burns out the force-globe.
Then I'm dead."
He heard the 3V newscaster's
amplified voice: "—approximately
fifty killed. But
Lane is through now. He has
been able to outthink police
with the help of his cybrain.
Now police are feeding the
problem to their giant analogue
computer in the sub-basement
of the Court House.
The police analogue computer
will be able to outthink Lane's
cybrain, will predict Lane's
moves in advance. Four more
blaster cannon are coming
down Broadway—"
"Why don't they clear those
people out of the Square?"
Gerri cried.
"What? Oh, the Fans—nobody
clears them out." He
paused. "I got one more
chance to try." He raised a
mailed glove to his mouth and
pressed a small stud in the
wrist. He said, "Trooper HQ,
this is Lane."
A voice spoke in his helmet.
"Lane, this is Trooper
HQ. We figured you'd call."
"Get me Colonel Klett."
Thirty seconds passed. Lane
could hear the clank of caterpillar
treads as the mobile
blaster cannon rolled into
Tammany Square.
The voice of the commanding
officer of the Troopers
rasped into Lane's ear:
"Meat-head! You broke out
against my orders!
Now
look
at you!"
"I knew you didn't mean
them orders, sir."
"If you get out of there
alive, I'll hang you for disobeying
them!"
"Yes, sir. Sir, there's a girl
here—somebody important—from
Mars. You know, the
planet. Sir, she told me we
could take over the city if we
got loose. That right, sir?"
There was a pause. "Your
girl from Mars is right, Lane.
But it's too late now. If we
had moved first, captured the
city government, we might
have done it. But they're
ready for us. They'd chop us
down with blaster cannon."
"Sir, I'm asking for help. I
know you're on my side."
"I am, Lane." The voice of
Colonel Klett was lower. "I'd
never admit it if you had a
chance of getting out of there
alive. You've had it, son. I'd
only lose more men trying to
rescue you. When they feed
the data into that analogue
computer, you're finished."
"Yes, sir."
"I'm sorry, Lane."
"Yes, sir. Over and out."
Lane pressed the stud on
his gauntlet again. He turned
to Gerri.
"You're okay. I wish I
could let you out. Old cybrain
says I can't. Says if I drop the
force-globe for a second,
they'll fire into the room, and
then we'll both be dead."
Gerri
stood with folded
arms and looked at him.
"Do what you have to do. As
far as I can see, you're the
only person in this city that
has even a little bit of right
on his side."
Lane laughed. "Any of them
purple-haired broads I know
would be crazy scared. You're
different."
"When my grandparents
landed on Mars, they found
out that selfishness was a luxury.
Martians can't afford
it."
Lane frowned with the effort
of thinking. "You said I
had a little right on my side.
That's a good feeling. Nobody
ever told me to feel that way
about myself before. It'll be
better to die knowing that."
"I know," she said.
The amplified voice from
below said, "The police analogue
computer is now hooked
directly to the controls of the
blaster cannon battery. It will
outguess Lane's cybrain and
check his moves ahead of
time."
Lane looked at Gerri. "How
about giving me a kiss before
they get us? Be nice if I kissed
a girl like you just once in
my life."
She smiled and walked forward.
"You deserve it, Lane."
He kissed her and it filled
him with longings for things
he couldn't name. Then he
stepped back and shook his
head. "It ain't right you
should get killed. If I take a
dive out that window, they
shoot at me, not in here."
"And kill you all the sooner."
"Better than getting burned
up in this lousy little room.
You also got right on your
side. There's too many damn
Troopers and not enough good
persons like you. Old cybrain
says stay here, but I don't
guess I will. I'm gonna pay
you back for that kiss."
"But you're safe in here!"
"Worry about yourself, not
about me." Lane picked up the
force-bomb and handed it to
her. "When I say now, press
this. Then take your hand off,
real fast. It'll shut off the
screen for a second."
He stepped up on to the
window ledge. Automatically,
the cybrain cut in his paragrav-paks.
"So long, outa-towner.
Now!
"
He jumped. He was hurtling
across the Square when the
blaster cannons opened up.
They weren't aimed at the
window where the little red-white-and-green
tricolor was
flying. But they weren't aimed
at Lane, either. They were
shooting wild.
Which way now? Looks
like I got a chance. Old cybrain
says fly right for the
cannons.
He saw the Mayor's balcony
ahead.
Go to hell, old cybrain.
I'm doing all right by myself.
I come to see the Mayor, and
I'm gonna see him.
Lane plunged forward. He
heard the shouts of frightened
men.
He swooped over the balcony
railing. A man was
pointing a blaster pistol at
him. There were five men
on the balcony—emergency!
Years of training and cybrain
took over. Lane's hand shot
out, fingers vibrating. As he
dropped to the balcony floor in
battle-crouch, the men slumped
around him.
He had seen the man with
the blaster pistol before. It
was the Mayor of Newyork.
Lane stood for a moment in
the midst of the sprawled
men, the shrieks of the crowd
floating up to him. Then he
raised his glove to his lips. He
made contact with Manhattan
Armory.
"Colonel Klett, sir. You
said if we captured the city
government we might have a
chance. Well, I captured the
city government. What do we
do with it now?"
Lane
was uncomfortable in
his dress uniform. First
there had been a ceremony in
Tammany Square inaugurating
Newyork's new Military
Protectorate, and honoring
Trooper Lane. Now there was
a formal dinner. Colonel Klett
and Gerri Kin sat on either
side of Lane.
Klett said, "Call me an opportunist
if you like, Miss
Kin, my government will be
stable, and Mars can negotiate
with it." He was a lean, sharp-featured
man with deep
grooves in his face, and gray
hair.
Gerri shook her head. "Recognition
for a new government
takes time. I'm going
back to Mars, and I think
they'll send another ambassador
next time. Nothing personal—I
just don't like it
here."
Lane said, "I'm going to
Mars, too."
"Did she ask you to?" demanded
Klett.
Lane shook his head. "She's
got too much class for me. But
I like what she told me about
Mars. It's healthy, like."
Klett frowned. "If I thought
there was a gram of talent involved
in your capture of the
Mayor, Lane, I'd never release
you from duty. But I
know better. You beat that
analogue computer by sheer
stupidity—by disregarding
your cybrain."
Lane said, "It wasn't so stupid
if it worked."
"That's what bothers me. It
calls for a revision in our tactics.
We've got a way of beating
those big computers now,
should anyone use them
against us."
"I just didn't want her to
be hurt."
"Exactly. The computer
could outguess a machine, like
your cybrain. But you introduced
a totally unpredictable
factor—human emotion.
Which proves what I, as a
military man, have always
maintained—that the deadliest
weapon in man's arsenal
is still, and will always be, the
individual soldier."
"What you just said there,
sir," said Lane. "That's why
I'm leaving Newyork."
"What do you mean?" asked
Colonel Klett.
"I'm tired of being a weapon,
sir. I want to be a human
being."
END
Work is the elimination of the traces of work.
—Michelangelo
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
If
July 1959.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | All men are child-like. | Lane was never given a proper education, only fighting instruction. | Lane is controlled by the Cybrain. His own brain never had the chance to develop properly. | Lane has been a Trooper since he was seven years old. | 1 |
29196_O6U0UM5D_5 | What is a cybrain? | MUTINEER
By ROBERT J. SHEA
For every weapon there was a defense, but not against
the deadliest weapon—man himself!
Raging
, Trooper Lane
hovered three thousand
feet above Tammany Square.
The cool cybrain surgically
implanted in him was working
on the problem. But Lane
had no more patience. They'd
sweat, he thought, hating the
chill air-currents that threw
his hovering body this way
and that. He glared down at
the three towers bordering on
the Square. He spat, and
watched the little white speck
fall, fall.
Lock me up in barracks.
All I wanted was a
little time off. Did I fight in
Chi for them? Damn right I
did. Just a little time off, so
I shouldn't blow my top. Now
the lid's gone.
He was going over all their
heads. He'd bowled those city
cops over like paper dolls,
back at the Armory. The
black dog was on Lane's back.
Old Mayor himself was going
to hear about it.
Why not? Ain't old Mayor
the CinC of the Newyork
Troopers?
The humming paragrav-paks
embedded beneath his
shoulder blades held him
motionless above Newyork's
three administrative towers.
Tammany Hall. Mayor's Palace.
Court House. Lane cursed
his stupidity. He hadn't found
out which one was which
ahead of time.
They keep
Troopers in the Armory and
teach them how to fight. They
don't teach them about their
own city, that they'll be fighting
for. There's no time. From
seven years old up, Troopers
have too much to learn about
fighting.
The Mayor was behind one
of those thousands of windows.
Old cybrain, a gift from the
Trooper surgeons, compliments
of the city, would have
to figure out which one. Blood
churned in his veins, nerves
shrieked with impatience.
Lane waited for the electronic
brain to come up with the answer.
Then his head jerked up, to
a distant buzz. There were
cops coming. Two black paragrav-boats
whirred along the
translucent underside of Newyork's
anti-missile force-shield,
the Shell.
Old cybrain better be fast.
Damn fast!
The cybrain jolted an impulse
through his spine. Lane
somersaulted. Cybrain had
taken charge of his motor
nerves. Lane's own mind was
just along for the ride.
His
body snapped into a
stiff dive position. He began
to plummet down, picking
up speed. His mailed hands
glittered like arrowheads out
in front. They pointed to a
particular window in one of
the towers. A predatory excitement
rippled through him
as he sailed down through the
air. It was like going into
battle again. A little red-white-and-green
flag fluttered
on a staff below the window.
Whose flag? The city flag was
orange and blue. He shrugged
away the problem. Cybrain
knew what it was doing.
The little finger of his right
hand vibrated in its metal
sheath. A pale vibray leaped
from the lensed fingertip.
Breakthrough! The glasstic
pane dissolved. Lane streamed
through the window.
The paragrav-paks cut off.
Lane dropped lightly to the
floor, inside the room, in battle-crouch.
A 3V set was yammering.
A girl screamed. Lane's
hand shot out automatically.
A finger vibrated. Out of the
corner of his eye, Lane saw
the girl fold to the floor. There
was no one else in the room.
Lane, still in a crouch, chewed
his lip.
The Mayor?
His head swung around and
he peered at the 3V set. He
saw his own face.
"Lashing police with his
vibray," said the announcer,
"Lane broke through the cordon
surrounding Manhattan
Armory. Two policemen were
killed, four others seriously
injured. Tammany Hall has
warned that this man is extremely
dangerous. Citizens
are cautioned to keep clear of
him. Lane is an insane killer.
He is armed with the latest
military weapons. A built-in
electronic brain controls his
reflexes—"
"At ease with that jazz,"
said Lane, and a sheathed finger
snapped out. There was a
loud bang. The 3V screen dissolved
into a puddle of glasstic.
The Mayor.
Lane strode to the window.
The two police boats were
hovering above the towers.
Lane's mailed hand snapped
open a pouch at his belt. He
flipped a fist-sized cube to the
floor.
The force-bomb "exploded"—swelled
or inflated, really,
but with the speed of a blast.
Lane glanced out the window.
A section of the energy globe
bellied out from above. It
shaded the view from his window
and re-entered the tower
wall just below.
Now the girl.
He turned back to the room.
"Wake up, outa-towner." He
gave the blonde girl a light
dose of the vibray to slap her
awake.
"Who are you?" she said,
shakily.
Lane grinned. "Trooper
Lane, of the Newyork Special
Troops, is all." He threw her
a mock salute. "You from
outa-town, girlie. I ain't seen
a Newyork girl with yellow
hair in years. Orange or
green is the action. Whatcha
doing in the Mayor's room?"
The
girl pushed herself to
her feet. Built, Lane saw.
She was pretty and clean-looking,
very out-of-town. She
held herself straight and her
blue-violet eyes snapped at
him.
"What the devil do you
think you're doing, soldier? I
am a diplomat of the Grassroots
Republic of Mars. This
is an embassy, if you know
what that means."
"I don't," said Lane, unconcerned.
"Well, you should have had
brains enough to honor the
flag outside this window.
That's the Martian flag, soldier.
If you've never heard of
diplomatic immunity, you'll
suffer for your ignorance."
Her large, dark eyes narrowed.
"Who sent you?"
"My cybrain sent me."
She went openmouthed.
"You're
Lane
."
"I'm the guy they told you
about on the 3V. Where's the
Mayor? Ain't this his place?"
"No. No, you're in the
wrong room. The wrong building.
That's the Mayor's suite
over there." She pointed. "See
where the balcony is? This is
the Embassy suite. If you
want the Mayor you'll have to
go over there."
"Whaddaya know," said
Lane. "Cybrain didn't know,
no more than me."
The girl noticed the dark
swell of the force-globe.
"What's that out there?"
"Force-screen. Nothing gets
past, except maybe a full-size
blaster-beam. Keeps cops out.
Keeps you in. You anybody
important?"
"I told you, I'm an ambassador.
From Mars. I'm on a
diplomatic mission."
"Yeah? Mars a big city?"
She stared at him, violet
eyes wide. "The
planet
Mars."
"Planet? Oh,
that
Mars.
Sure, I've heard of it—you
gotta go by spaceship. What's
your name?"
"Gerri Kin. Look, Lane,
holding me is no good. It'll
just get you in worse trouble.
What are you trying to do?"
"I wanna see the Mayor. Me
and my buddies, we just come
back from fighting in Chi,
Gerri. We won. They got a
new Mayor out there in Chi.
He takes orders from Newyork."
Gerri Kin said, "That's
what the force-domes did. The
perfect defense. But also the
road to the return to city-states.
Anarchy."
Lane said, "Yeah? Well, we
done what they wanted us to
do. We did the fighting for
them. So we come back home
to Newyork and they lock us
up in the Armory. Won't pay
us. Won't let us go nowhere.
They had cops guarding us.
City cops." Lane sneered. "I
busted out. I wanna see the
Mayor and find out why we
can't have time off. I don't
play games, Gerri. I go right
to the top."
Lane broke off. There was
a hum outside the window. He
whirled and stared out. The
rounded black hulls of the two
police paragrav-boats were
nosing toward the force-screen.
Lane could read the
white numbers painted on
their bows.
A loudspeaker shouted into
the room: "Come out of there,
Lane, or we'll blast you out."
"You can't," Lane called.
"This girl from Mars is here."
"I repeat, Lane—come out
or we'll blast you out."
Lane turned to the girl. "I
thought you were important."
She
stood there with her
hands together, calmly
looking at him. "I am. But
you are too, to them. Mars is
millions of miles away, and
you're right across the Square
from the Mayor's suite."
"Yeah, but—" Lane shook
his head and turned back to
the window. "All right, look!
Move them boats away and
I'll let this girl out!"
"No deal, Lane. We're coming
in." The police boats
backed away slowly, then shot
straight up, out of the line of
vision.
Lane looked down at the
Square. Far below, the long,
gleaming barrel of a blaster
cannon caught the dim light
filtering down through Newyork's
Shell. The cannon trundled
into the Square on its
olive-drab, box-shaped caterpillar
mounting and took up a
position equidistant from the
bases of the three towers.
Now a rumble of many
voices rose from below. Lane
stared down to see a large
crowd gathering in Tammany
Square. Sound trucks were
rolling to a stop around the
edges of the crowd. The people
were all looking up.
Lane looked across the
Square. The windows of the
tower opposite, the ones he
could see clearly, were crowded
with faces. There were
white dot faces on the balcony
that Gerri Kin had pointed
out as the Mayor's suite.
The voice of a 3V newscaster
rolled up from the Square,
reechoing against the tower
walls.
"Lane is holding the Martian
Ambassador, Gerri Kin,
hostage. You can see the Martian
tricolor behind his force-globe.
Police are bringing up
blaster cannon. Lane's defense
is a globe of energy
similar to the one which protects
Newyork from aerial attack."
Lane grinned back at Gerri
Kin. "Whole town's down
there." Then his grin faded.
Nice-looking, nice-talking girl
like this probably cared a lot
more about dying than he did.
Why the hell didn't they give
him a chance to let her out?
Maybe he could do it now.
Cybrain said no. It said the
second he dropped his force-screen,
they'd blast this room
to hell. Poor girl from Mars,
she didn't have a chance.
Gerri Kin put her hand to
her forehead. "Why did you
have to pick my room? Why
did they send me to this crazy
city? Private soldiers. Twenty
million people living under
a Shell like worms in a corpse.
Earth is sick and it's going to
kill me. What's going to happen?"
Lane looked sadly at her.
Only two kinds of girls ever
went near a Trooper—the
crazy ones and the ones the
city paid. Why did he have to
be so near getting killed when
he met one he liked? Now that
she was showing a little less
fear and anger, she was talking
straight to him. She was
good, but she wasn't acting as
if she was too good for him.
"They'll start shooting pretty
quick," said Lane. "I'm
sorry about you."
"I wish I could write a letter
to my parents," she said.
"What?"
"Didn't you understand
what I said?"
"What's a letter?"
"You don't know where
Mars is. You don't know what
a letter is. You probably can't
even read and write!"
Lane
shrugged. He carried
on the conversation disinterestedly,
professionally relaxed
before battle. "What's
these things I can't do? They
important?"
"Yes. The more I see of this
city and its people, the more
important I realize they are.
You know how to fight, don't
you? I'll bet you're perfect
with those weapons."
"Listen. They been training
me to fight since I was a little
kid. Why shouldn't I be a
great little fighter?"
"Specialization," said the
girl from Mars.
"What?"
"Specialization. Everyone
I've met in this city is a specialist.
SocioSpecs run the
government. TechnoSpecs run
the machinery. Troopers fight
the wars. And ninety per cent
of the people don't work at all
because they're not trained to
do anything."
"The Fans," said Lane.
"They got it soft. That's them
down there, come to watch the
fight."
"You know why you were
kept in the Armory, Lane? I
heard them talking about it,
at the dinner I went to last
night."
"Why?"
"Because they're afraid of
the Troopers. You men did too
good a job out in Chi. You are
the deadliest weapon that has
ever been made. You. Single
airborne infantrymen!"
Lane said, "They told us in
Trooper Academy that it's the
men that win the wars."
"Yes, but people had forgotten
it until the SocioSpecs of
Newyork came up with the
Troopers. Before the Troopers,
governments concentrated
on the big weapons, the
missiles, the bombs. And the
cities, with the Shells, were
safe from bombs. They learned
to be self-sufficient under
the Shells. They were so safe,
so isolated, that national governments
collapsed. But you
Troopers wiped out that feeling
of security, when you infiltrated
Chi and conquered
it."
"We scared them, huh?"
Gerri said, "You scared
them so much that they were
afraid to let you have a furlough
in the city when you
came back. Afraid you Troopers
would realize that you
could easily take over the city
if you wanted to. You scared
them so much that they'll let
me be killed. They'll actually
risk trouble with Mars just to
kill you."
"I'm sorry about you. I
mean it, I like—"
At that moment a titanic,
ear-splitting explosion hurled
him to the carpet, deafened
and blinded him.
He recovered and saw Gerri
a few feet away, dazed, groping
on hands and knees.
Lane jumped to the window,
looked quickly, sprang
back. Cybrain pumped orders
to his nervous system.
"Blaster cannon," he said.
"But just one. Gotcha, cybrain.
I can beat that."
He picked up the black box
that generated his protective
screen. Snapping it open with
thumb-pressure, he turned a
small dial. Then he waited.
Again an enormous, brain-shattering
concussion.
Again Lane and Gerri were
thrown to the floor. But this
time there was a second explosion
and a blinding flash
from below.
Lane laughed boyishly and
ran to the window.
"Look!" he called to Gerri.
There
was a huge gap in
the crowd below. The
pavement was blackened and
shattered to rubble. In and
around the open space
sprawled dozens of tiny black
figures, not moving.
"Backfire," said Lane. "I set
the screen to throw their
blaster beam right back at
them."
"And they knew you might—and
yet they let a crowd
congregate!"
Gerri reeled away from the
window, sick.
Lane said, "I can do that a
couple times more, but it
burns out the force-globe.
Then I'm dead."
He heard the 3V newscaster's
amplified voice: "—approximately
fifty killed. But
Lane is through now. He has
been able to outthink police
with the help of his cybrain.
Now police are feeding the
problem to their giant analogue
computer in the sub-basement
of the Court House.
The police analogue computer
will be able to outthink Lane's
cybrain, will predict Lane's
moves in advance. Four more
blaster cannon are coming
down Broadway—"
"Why don't they clear those
people out of the Square?"
Gerri cried.
"What? Oh, the Fans—nobody
clears them out." He
paused. "I got one more
chance to try." He raised a
mailed glove to his mouth and
pressed a small stud in the
wrist. He said, "Trooper HQ,
this is Lane."
A voice spoke in his helmet.
"Lane, this is Trooper
HQ. We figured you'd call."
"Get me Colonel Klett."
Thirty seconds passed. Lane
could hear the clank of caterpillar
treads as the mobile
blaster cannon rolled into
Tammany Square.
The voice of the commanding
officer of the Troopers
rasped into Lane's ear:
"Meat-head! You broke out
against my orders!
Now
look
at you!"
"I knew you didn't mean
them orders, sir."
"If you get out of there
alive, I'll hang you for disobeying
them!"
"Yes, sir. Sir, there's a girl
here—somebody important—from
Mars. You know, the
planet. Sir, she told me we
could take over the city if we
got loose. That right, sir?"
There was a pause. "Your
girl from Mars is right, Lane.
But it's too late now. If we
had moved first, captured the
city government, we might
have done it. But they're
ready for us. They'd chop us
down with blaster cannon."
"Sir, I'm asking for help. I
know you're on my side."
"I am, Lane." The voice of
Colonel Klett was lower. "I'd
never admit it if you had a
chance of getting out of there
alive. You've had it, son. I'd
only lose more men trying to
rescue you. When they feed
the data into that analogue
computer, you're finished."
"Yes, sir."
"I'm sorry, Lane."
"Yes, sir. Over and out."
Lane pressed the stud on
his gauntlet again. He turned
to Gerri.
"You're okay. I wish I
could let you out. Old cybrain
says I can't. Says if I drop the
force-globe for a second,
they'll fire into the room, and
then we'll both be dead."
Gerri
stood with folded
arms and looked at him.
"Do what you have to do. As
far as I can see, you're the
only person in this city that
has even a little bit of right
on his side."
Lane laughed. "Any of them
purple-haired broads I know
would be crazy scared. You're
different."
"When my grandparents
landed on Mars, they found
out that selfishness was a luxury.
Martians can't afford
it."
Lane frowned with the effort
of thinking. "You said I
had a little right on my side.
That's a good feeling. Nobody
ever told me to feel that way
about myself before. It'll be
better to die knowing that."
"I know," she said.
The amplified voice from
below said, "The police analogue
computer is now hooked
directly to the controls of the
blaster cannon battery. It will
outguess Lane's cybrain and
check his moves ahead of
time."
Lane looked at Gerri. "How
about giving me a kiss before
they get us? Be nice if I kissed
a girl like you just once in
my life."
She smiled and walked forward.
"You deserve it, Lane."
He kissed her and it filled
him with longings for things
he couldn't name. Then he
stepped back and shook his
head. "It ain't right you
should get killed. If I take a
dive out that window, they
shoot at me, not in here."
"And kill you all the sooner."
"Better than getting burned
up in this lousy little room.
You also got right on your
side. There's too many damn
Troopers and not enough good
persons like you. Old cybrain
says stay here, but I don't
guess I will. I'm gonna pay
you back for that kiss."
"But you're safe in here!"
"Worry about yourself, not
about me." Lane picked up the
force-bomb and handed it to
her. "When I say now, press
this. Then take your hand off,
real fast. It'll shut off the
screen for a second."
He stepped up on to the
window ledge. Automatically,
the cybrain cut in his paragrav-paks.
"So long, outa-towner.
Now!
"
He jumped. He was hurtling
across the Square when the
blaster cannons opened up.
They weren't aimed at the
window where the little red-white-and-green
tricolor was
flying. But they weren't aimed
at Lane, either. They were
shooting wild.
Which way now? Looks
like I got a chance. Old cybrain
says fly right for the
cannons.
He saw the Mayor's balcony
ahead.
Go to hell, old cybrain.
I'm doing all right by myself.
I come to see the Mayor, and
I'm gonna see him.
Lane plunged forward. He
heard the shouts of frightened
men.
He swooped over the balcony
railing. A man was
pointing a blaster pistol at
him. There were five men
on the balcony—emergency!
Years of training and cybrain
took over. Lane's hand shot
out, fingers vibrating. As he
dropped to the balcony floor in
battle-crouch, the men slumped
around him.
He had seen the man with
the blaster pistol before. It
was the Mayor of Newyork.
Lane stood for a moment in
the midst of the sprawled
men, the shrieks of the crowd
floating up to him. Then he
raised his glove to his lips. He
made contact with Manhattan
Armory.
"Colonel Klett, sir. You
said if we captured the city
government we might have a
chance. Well, I captured the
city government. What do we
do with it now?"
Lane
was uncomfortable in
his dress uniform. First
there had been a ceremony in
Tammany Square inaugurating
Newyork's new Military
Protectorate, and honoring
Trooper Lane. Now there was
a formal dinner. Colonel Klett
and Gerri Kin sat on either
side of Lane.
Klett said, "Call me an opportunist
if you like, Miss
Kin, my government will be
stable, and Mars can negotiate
with it." He was a lean, sharp-featured
man with deep
grooves in his face, and gray
hair.
Gerri shook her head. "Recognition
for a new government
takes time. I'm going
back to Mars, and I think
they'll send another ambassador
next time. Nothing personal—I
just don't like it
here."
Lane said, "I'm going to
Mars, too."
"Did she ask you to?" demanded
Klett.
Lane shook his head. "She's
got too much class for me. But
I like what she told me about
Mars. It's healthy, like."
Klett frowned. "If I thought
there was a gram of talent involved
in your capture of the
Mayor, Lane, I'd never release
you from duty. But I
know better. You beat that
analogue computer by sheer
stupidity—by disregarding
your cybrain."
Lane said, "It wasn't so stupid
if it worked."
"That's what bothers me. It
calls for a revision in our tactics.
We've got a way of beating
those big computers now,
should anyone use them
against us."
"I just didn't want her to
be hurt."
"Exactly. The computer
could outguess a machine, like
your cybrain. But you introduced
a totally unpredictable
factor—human emotion.
Which proves what I, as a
military man, have always
maintained—that the deadliest
weapon in man's arsenal
is still, and will always be, the
individual soldier."
"What you just said there,
sir," said Lane. "That's why
I'm leaving Newyork."
"What do you mean?" asked
Colonel Klett.
"I'm tired of being a weapon,
sir. I want to be a human
being."
END
Work is the elimination of the traces of work.
—Michelangelo
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
If
July 1959.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | A cybrain is a cybernetic brain. The cybrain is in control of the Newyork Special Troops, like a hive mind. | A cybrain is a dispatch system that sends the Newyork Special Troops on their assignments. | A cybrain is a cybernetic brain. Cybrains are implanted in soldiers to make them the ultimate weapons. | A cybrain is an AI handler. Each of the Newyork Specail Troops has a cybrain which is their only contact to the command center. | 2 |
29196_O6U0UM5D_6 | Why can't Lane read or write? | MUTINEER
By ROBERT J. SHEA
For every weapon there was a defense, but not against
the deadliest weapon—man himself!
Raging
, Trooper Lane
hovered three thousand
feet above Tammany Square.
The cool cybrain surgically
implanted in him was working
on the problem. But Lane
had no more patience. They'd
sweat, he thought, hating the
chill air-currents that threw
his hovering body this way
and that. He glared down at
the three towers bordering on
the Square. He spat, and
watched the little white speck
fall, fall.
Lock me up in barracks.
All I wanted was a
little time off. Did I fight in
Chi for them? Damn right I
did. Just a little time off, so
I shouldn't blow my top. Now
the lid's gone.
He was going over all their
heads. He'd bowled those city
cops over like paper dolls,
back at the Armory. The
black dog was on Lane's back.
Old Mayor himself was going
to hear about it.
Why not? Ain't old Mayor
the CinC of the Newyork
Troopers?
The humming paragrav-paks
embedded beneath his
shoulder blades held him
motionless above Newyork's
three administrative towers.
Tammany Hall. Mayor's Palace.
Court House. Lane cursed
his stupidity. He hadn't found
out which one was which
ahead of time.
They keep
Troopers in the Armory and
teach them how to fight. They
don't teach them about their
own city, that they'll be fighting
for. There's no time. From
seven years old up, Troopers
have too much to learn about
fighting.
The Mayor was behind one
of those thousands of windows.
Old cybrain, a gift from the
Trooper surgeons, compliments
of the city, would have
to figure out which one. Blood
churned in his veins, nerves
shrieked with impatience.
Lane waited for the electronic
brain to come up with the answer.
Then his head jerked up, to
a distant buzz. There were
cops coming. Two black paragrav-boats
whirred along the
translucent underside of Newyork's
anti-missile force-shield,
the Shell.
Old cybrain better be fast.
Damn fast!
The cybrain jolted an impulse
through his spine. Lane
somersaulted. Cybrain had
taken charge of his motor
nerves. Lane's own mind was
just along for the ride.
His
body snapped into a
stiff dive position. He began
to plummet down, picking
up speed. His mailed hands
glittered like arrowheads out
in front. They pointed to a
particular window in one of
the towers. A predatory excitement
rippled through him
as he sailed down through the
air. It was like going into
battle again. A little red-white-and-green
flag fluttered
on a staff below the window.
Whose flag? The city flag was
orange and blue. He shrugged
away the problem. Cybrain
knew what it was doing.
The little finger of his right
hand vibrated in its metal
sheath. A pale vibray leaped
from the lensed fingertip.
Breakthrough! The glasstic
pane dissolved. Lane streamed
through the window.
The paragrav-paks cut off.
Lane dropped lightly to the
floor, inside the room, in battle-crouch.
A 3V set was yammering.
A girl screamed. Lane's
hand shot out automatically.
A finger vibrated. Out of the
corner of his eye, Lane saw
the girl fold to the floor. There
was no one else in the room.
Lane, still in a crouch, chewed
his lip.
The Mayor?
His head swung around and
he peered at the 3V set. He
saw his own face.
"Lashing police with his
vibray," said the announcer,
"Lane broke through the cordon
surrounding Manhattan
Armory. Two policemen were
killed, four others seriously
injured. Tammany Hall has
warned that this man is extremely
dangerous. Citizens
are cautioned to keep clear of
him. Lane is an insane killer.
He is armed with the latest
military weapons. A built-in
electronic brain controls his
reflexes—"
"At ease with that jazz,"
said Lane, and a sheathed finger
snapped out. There was a
loud bang. The 3V screen dissolved
into a puddle of glasstic.
The Mayor.
Lane strode to the window.
The two police boats were
hovering above the towers.
Lane's mailed hand snapped
open a pouch at his belt. He
flipped a fist-sized cube to the
floor.
The force-bomb "exploded"—swelled
or inflated, really,
but with the speed of a blast.
Lane glanced out the window.
A section of the energy globe
bellied out from above. It
shaded the view from his window
and re-entered the tower
wall just below.
Now the girl.
He turned back to the room.
"Wake up, outa-towner." He
gave the blonde girl a light
dose of the vibray to slap her
awake.
"Who are you?" she said,
shakily.
Lane grinned. "Trooper
Lane, of the Newyork Special
Troops, is all." He threw her
a mock salute. "You from
outa-town, girlie. I ain't seen
a Newyork girl with yellow
hair in years. Orange or
green is the action. Whatcha
doing in the Mayor's room?"
The
girl pushed herself to
her feet. Built, Lane saw.
She was pretty and clean-looking,
very out-of-town. She
held herself straight and her
blue-violet eyes snapped at
him.
"What the devil do you
think you're doing, soldier? I
am a diplomat of the Grassroots
Republic of Mars. This
is an embassy, if you know
what that means."
"I don't," said Lane, unconcerned.
"Well, you should have had
brains enough to honor the
flag outside this window.
That's the Martian flag, soldier.
If you've never heard of
diplomatic immunity, you'll
suffer for your ignorance."
Her large, dark eyes narrowed.
"Who sent you?"
"My cybrain sent me."
She went openmouthed.
"You're
Lane
."
"I'm the guy they told you
about on the 3V. Where's the
Mayor? Ain't this his place?"
"No. No, you're in the
wrong room. The wrong building.
That's the Mayor's suite
over there." She pointed. "See
where the balcony is? This is
the Embassy suite. If you
want the Mayor you'll have to
go over there."
"Whaddaya know," said
Lane. "Cybrain didn't know,
no more than me."
The girl noticed the dark
swell of the force-globe.
"What's that out there?"
"Force-screen. Nothing gets
past, except maybe a full-size
blaster-beam. Keeps cops out.
Keeps you in. You anybody
important?"
"I told you, I'm an ambassador.
From Mars. I'm on a
diplomatic mission."
"Yeah? Mars a big city?"
She stared at him, violet
eyes wide. "The
planet
Mars."
"Planet? Oh,
that
Mars.
Sure, I've heard of it—you
gotta go by spaceship. What's
your name?"
"Gerri Kin. Look, Lane,
holding me is no good. It'll
just get you in worse trouble.
What are you trying to do?"
"I wanna see the Mayor. Me
and my buddies, we just come
back from fighting in Chi,
Gerri. We won. They got a
new Mayor out there in Chi.
He takes orders from Newyork."
Gerri Kin said, "That's
what the force-domes did. The
perfect defense. But also the
road to the return to city-states.
Anarchy."
Lane said, "Yeah? Well, we
done what they wanted us to
do. We did the fighting for
them. So we come back home
to Newyork and they lock us
up in the Armory. Won't pay
us. Won't let us go nowhere.
They had cops guarding us.
City cops." Lane sneered. "I
busted out. I wanna see the
Mayor and find out why we
can't have time off. I don't
play games, Gerri. I go right
to the top."
Lane broke off. There was
a hum outside the window. He
whirled and stared out. The
rounded black hulls of the two
police paragrav-boats were
nosing toward the force-screen.
Lane could read the
white numbers painted on
their bows.
A loudspeaker shouted into
the room: "Come out of there,
Lane, or we'll blast you out."
"You can't," Lane called.
"This girl from Mars is here."
"I repeat, Lane—come out
or we'll blast you out."
Lane turned to the girl. "I
thought you were important."
She
stood there with her
hands together, calmly
looking at him. "I am. But
you are too, to them. Mars is
millions of miles away, and
you're right across the Square
from the Mayor's suite."
"Yeah, but—" Lane shook
his head and turned back to
the window. "All right, look!
Move them boats away and
I'll let this girl out!"
"No deal, Lane. We're coming
in." The police boats
backed away slowly, then shot
straight up, out of the line of
vision.
Lane looked down at the
Square. Far below, the long,
gleaming barrel of a blaster
cannon caught the dim light
filtering down through Newyork's
Shell. The cannon trundled
into the Square on its
olive-drab, box-shaped caterpillar
mounting and took up a
position equidistant from the
bases of the three towers.
Now a rumble of many
voices rose from below. Lane
stared down to see a large
crowd gathering in Tammany
Square. Sound trucks were
rolling to a stop around the
edges of the crowd. The people
were all looking up.
Lane looked across the
Square. The windows of the
tower opposite, the ones he
could see clearly, were crowded
with faces. There were
white dot faces on the balcony
that Gerri Kin had pointed
out as the Mayor's suite.
The voice of a 3V newscaster
rolled up from the Square,
reechoing against the tower
walls.
"Lane is holding the Martian
Ambassador, Gerri Kin,
hostage. You can see the Martian
tricolor behind his force-globe.
Police are bringing up
blaster cannon. Lane's defense
is a globe of energy
similar to the one which protects
Newyork from aerial attack."
Lane grinned back at Gerri
Kin. "Whole town's down
there." Then his grin faded.
Nice-looking, nice-talking girl
like this probably cared a lot
more about dying than he did.
Why the hell didn't they give
him a chance to let her out?
Maybe he could do it now.
Cybrain said no. It said the
second he dropped his force-screen,
they'd blast this room
to hell. Poor girl from Mars,
she didn't have a chance.
Gerri Kin put her hand to
her forehead. "Why did you
have to pick my room? Why
did they send me to this crazy
city? Private soldiers. Twenty
million people living under
a Shell like worms in a corpse.
Earth is sick and it's going to
kill me. What's going to happen?"
Lane looked sadly at her.
Only two kinds of girls ever
went near a Trooper—the
crazy ones and the ones the
city paid. Why did he have to
be so near getting killed when
he met one he liked? Now that
she was showing a little less
fear and anger, she was talking
straight to him. She was
good, but she wasn't acting as
if she was too good for him.
"They'll start shooting pretty
quick," said Lane. "I'm
sorry about you."
"I wish I could write a letter
to my parents," she said.
"What?"
"Didn't you understand
what I said?"
"What's a letter?"
"You don't know where
Mars is. You don't know what
a letter is. You probably can't
even read and write!"
Lane
shrugged. He carried
on the conversation disinterestedly,
professionally relaxed
before battle. "What's
these things I can't do? They
important?"
"Yes. The more I see of this
city and its people, the more
important I realize they are.
You know how to fight, don't
you? I'll bet you're perfect
with those weapons."
"Listen. They been training
me to fight since I was a little
kid. Why shouldn't I be a
great little fighter?"
"Specialization," said the
girl from Mars.
"What?"
"Specialization. Everyone
I've met in this city is a specialist.
SocioSpecs run the
government. TechnoSpecs run
the machinery. Troopers fight
the wars. And ninety per cent
of the people don't work at all
because they're not trained to
do anything."
"The Fans," said Lane.
"They got it soft. That's them
down there, come to watch the
fight."
"You know why you were
kept in the Armory, Lane? I
heard them talking about it,
at the dinner I went to last
night."
"Why?"
"Because they're afraid of
the Troopers. You men did too
good a job out in Chi. You are
the deadliest weapon that has
ever been made. You. Single
airborne infantrymen!"
Lane said, "They told us in
Trooper Academy that it's the
men that win the wars."
"Yes, but people had forgotten
it until the SocioSpecs of
Newyork came up with the
Troopers. Before the Troopers,
governments concentrated
on the big weapons, the
missiles, the bombs. And the
cities, with the Shells, were
safe from bombs. They learned
to be self-sufficient under
the Shells. They were so safe,
so isolated, that national governments
collapsed. But you
Troopers wiped out that feeling
of security, when you infiltrated
Chi and conquered
it."
"We scared them, huh?"
Gerri said, "You scared
them so much that they were
afraid to let you have a furlough
in the city when you
came back. Afraid you Troopers
would realize that you
could easily take over the city
if you wanted to. You scared
them so much that they'll let
me be killed. They'll actually
risk trouble with Mars just to
kill you."
"I'm sorry about you. I
mean it, I like—"
At that moment a titanic,
ear-splitting explosion hurled
him to the carpet, deafened
and blinded him.
He recovered and saw Gerri
a few feet away, dazed, groping
on hands and knees.
Lane jumped to the window,
looked quickly, sprang
back. Cybrain pumped orders
to his nervous system.
"Blaster cannon," he said.
"But just one. Gotcha, cybrain.
I can beat that."
He picked up the black box
that generated his protective
screen. Snapping it open with
thumb-pressure, he turned a
small dial. Then he waited.
Again an enormous, brain-shattering
concussion.
Again Lane and Gerri were
thrown to the floor. But this
time there was a second explosion
and a blinding flash
from below.
Lane laughed boyishly and
ran to the window.
"Look!" he called to Gerri.
There
was a huge gap in
the crowd below. The
pavement was blackened and
shattered to rubble. In and
around the open space
sprawled dozens of tiny black
figures, not moving.
"Backfire," said Lane. "I set
the screen to throw their
blaster beam right back at
them."
"And they knew you might—and
yet they let a crowd
congregate!"
Gerri reeled away from the
window, sick.
Lane said, "I can do that a
couple times more, but it
burns out the force-globe.
Then I'm dead."
He heard the 3V newscaster's
amplified voice: "—approximately
fifty killed. But
Lane is through now. He has
been able to outthink police
with the help of his cybrain.
Now police are feeding the
problem to their giant analogue
computer in the sub-basement
of the Court House.
The police analogue computer
will be able to outthink Lane's
cybrain, will predict Lane's
moves in advance. Four more
blaster cannon are coming
down Broadway—"
"Why don't they clear those
people out of the Square?"
Gerri cried.
"What? Oh, the Fans—nobody
clears them out." He
paused. "I got one more
chance to try." He raised a
mailed glove to his mouth and
pressed a small stud in the
wrist. He said, "Trooper HQ,
this is Lane."
A voice spoke in his helmet.
"Lane, this is Trooper
HQ. We figured you'd call."
"Get me Colonel Klett."
Thirty seconds passed. Lane
could hear the clank of caterpillar
treads as the mobile
blaster cannon rolled into
Tammany Square.
The voice of the commanding
officer of the Troopers
rasped into Lane's ear:
"Meat-head! You broke out
against my orders!
Now
look
at you!"
"I knew you didn't mean
them orders, sir."
"If you get out of there
alive, I'll hang you for disobeying
them!"
"Yes, sir. Sir, there's a girl
here—somebody important—from
Mars. You know, the
planet. Sir, she told me we
could take over the city if we
got loose. That right, sir?"
There was a pause. "Your
girl from Mars is right, Lane.
But it's too late now. If we
had moved first, captured the
city government, we might
have done it. But they're
ready for us. They'd chop us
down with blaster cannon."
"Sir, I'm asking for help. I
know you're on my side."
"I am, Lane." The voice of
Colonel Klett was lower. "I'd
never admit it if you had a
chance of getting out of there
alive. You've had it, son. I'd
only lose more men trying to
rescue you. When they feed
the data into that analogue
computer, you're finished."
"Yes, sir."
"I'm sorry, Lane."
"Yes, sir. Over and out."
Lane pressed the stud on
his gauntlet again. He turned
to Gerri.
"You're okay. I wish I
could let you out. Old cybrain
says I can't. Says if I drop the
force-globe for a second,
they'll fire into the room, and
then we'll both be dead."
Gerri
stood with folded
arms and looked at him.
"Do what you have to do. As
far as I can see, you're the
only person in this city that
has even a little bit of right
on his side."
Lane laughed. "Any of them
purple-haired broads I know
would be crazy scared. You're
different."
"When my grandparents
landed on Mars, they found
out that selfishness was a luxury.
Martians can't afford
it."
Lane frowned with the effort
of thinking. "You said I
had a little right on my side.
That's a good feeling. Nobody
ever told me to feel that way
about myself before. It'll be
better to die knowing that."
"I know," she said.
The amplified voice from
below said, "The police analogue
computer is now hooked
directly to the controls of the
blaster cannon battery. It will
outguess Lane's cybrain and
check his moves ahead of
time."
Lane looked at Gerri. "How
about giving me a kiss before
they get us? Be nice if I kissed
a girl like you just once in
my life."
She smiled and walked forward.
"You deserve it, Lane."
He kissed her and it filled
him with longings for things
he couldn't name. Then he
stepped back and shook his
head. "It ain't right you
should get killed. If I take a
dive out that window, they
shoot at me, not in here."
"And kill you all the sooner."
"Better than getting burned
up in this lousy little room.
You also got right on your
side. There's too many damn
Troopers and not enough good
persons like you. Old cybrain
says stay here, but I don't
guess I will. I'm gonna pay
you back for that kiss."
"But you're safe in here!"
"Worry about yourself, not
about me." Lane picked up the
force-bomb and handed it to
her. "When I say now, press
this. Then take your hand off,
real fast. It'll shut off the
screen for a second."
He stepped up on to the
window ledge. Automatically,
the cybrain cut in his paragrav-paks.
"So long, outa-towner.
Now!
"
He jumped. He was hurtling
across the Square when the
blaster cannons opened up.
They weren't aimed at the
window where the little red-white-and-green
tricolor was
flying. But they weren't aimed
at Lane, either. They were
shooting wild.
Which way now? Looks
like I got a chance. Old cybrain
says fly right for the
cannons.
He saw the Mayor's balcony
ahead.
Go to hell, old cybrain.
I'm doing all right by myself.
I come to see the Mayor, and
I'm gonna see him.
Lane plunged forward. He
heard the shouts of frightened
men.
He swooped over the balcony
railing. A man was
pointing a blaster pistol at
him. There were five men
on the balcony—emergency!
Years of training and cybrain
took over. Lane's hand shot
out, fingers vibrating. As he
dropped to the balcony floor in
battle-crouch, the men slumped
around him.
He had seen the man with
the blaster pistol before. It
was the Mayor of Newyork.
Lane stood for a moment in
the midst of the sprawled
men, the shrieks of the crowd
floating up to him. Then he
raised his glove to his lips. He
made contact with Manhattan
Armory.
"Colonel Klett, sir. You
said if we captured the city
government we might have a
chance. Well, I captured the
city government. What do we
do with it now?"
Lane
was uncomfortable in
his dress uniform. First
there had been a ceremony in
Tammany Square inaugurating
Newyork's new Military
Protectorate, and honoring
Trooper Lane. Now there was
a formal dinner. Colonel Klett
and Gerri Kin sat on either
side of Lane.
Klett said, "Call me an opportunist
if you like, Miss
Kin, my government will be
stable, and Mars can negotiate
with it." He was a lean, sharp-featured
man with deep
grooves in his face, and gray
hair.
Gerri shook her head. "Recognition
for a new government
takes time. I'm going
back to Mars, and I think
they'll send another ambassador
next time. Nothing personal—I
just don't like it
here."
Lane said, "I'm going to
Mars, too."
"Did she ask you to?" demanded
Klett.
Lane shook his head. "She's
got too much class for me. But
I like what she told me about
Mars. It's healthy, like."
Klett frowned. "If I thought
there was a gram of talent involved
in your capture of the
Mayor, Lane, I'd never release
you from duty. But I
know better. You beat that
analogue computer by sheer
stupidity—by disregarding
your cybrain."
Lane said, "It wasn't so stupid
if it worked."
"That's what bothers me. It
calls for a revision in our tactics.
We've got a way of beating
those big computers now,
should anyone use them
against us."
"I just didn't want her to
be hurt."
"Exactly. The computer
could outguess a machine, like
your cybrain. But you introduced
a totally unpredictable
factor—human emotion.
Which proves what I, as a
military man, have always
maintained—that the deadliest
weapon in man's arsenal
is still, and will always be, the
individual soldier."
"What you just said there,
sir," said Lane. "That's why
I'm leaving Newyork."
"What do you mean?" asked
Colonel Klett.
"I'm tired of being a weapon,
sir. I want to be a human
being."
END
Work is the elimination of the traces of work.
—Michelangelo
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
If
July 1959.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | When the cybrain was installed, Lane's own brain was wiped clean. | Lane is dyslexic. He got frustrated trying to learn and gave up. | Teaching the soldiers how to read and write would only lead to rational thinking. The soldiers might start to question orders. Therefore, they are only taught fighting. | Lane has only been schooled in soldiering since he was seven. He was taught to fight, nothing else. | 3 |
29196_O6U0UM5D_7 | Why does Gerri kiss Lane? | MUTINEER
By ROBERT J. SHEA
For every weapon there was a defense, but not against
the deadliest weapon—man himself!
Raging
, Trooper Lane
hovered three thousand
feet above Tammany Square.
The cool cybrain surgically
implanted in him was working
on the problem. But Lane
had no more patience. They'd
sweat, he thought, hating the
chill air-currents that threw
his hovering body this way
and that. He glared down at
the three towers bordering on
the Square. He spat, and
watched the little white speck
fall, fall.
Lock me up in barracks.
All I wanted was a
little time off. Did I fight in
Chi for them? Damn right I
did. Just a little time off, so
I shouldn't blow my top. Now
the lid's gone.
He was going over all their
heads. He'd bowled those city
cops over like paper dolls,
back at the Armory. The
black dog was on Lane's back.
Old Mayor himself was going
to hear about it.
Why not? Ain't old Mayor
the CinC of the Newyork
Troopers?
The humming paragrav-paks
embedded beneath his
shoulder blades held him
motionless above Newyork's
three administrative towers.
Tammany Hall. Mayor's Palace.
Court House. Lane cursed
his stupidity. He hadn't found
out which one was which
ahead of time.
They keep
Troopers in the Armory and
teach them how to fight. They
don't teach them about their
own city, that they'll be fighting
for. There's no time. From
seven years old up, Troopers
have too much to learn about
fighting.
The Mayor was behind one
of those thousands of windows.
Old cybrain, a gift from the
Trooper surgeons, compliments
of the city, would have
to figure out which one. Blood
churned in his veins, nerves
shrieked with impatience.
Lane waited for the electronic
brain to come up with the answer.
Then his head jerked up, to
a distant buzz. There were
cops coming. Two black paragrav-boats
whirred along the
translucent underside of Newyork's
anti-missile force-shield,
the Shell.
Old cybrain better be fast.
Damn fast!
The cybrain jolted an impulse
through his spine. Lane
somersaulted. Cybrain had
taken charge of his motor
nerves. Lane's own mind was
just along for the ride.
His
body snapped into a
stiff dive position. He began
to plummet down, picking
up speed. His mailed hands
glittered like arrowheads out
in front. They pointed to a
particular window in one of
the towers. A predatory excitement
rippled through him
as he sailed down through the
air. It was like going into
battle again. A little red-white-and-green
flag fluttered
on a staff below the window.
Whose flag? The city flag was
orange and blue. He shrugged
away the problem. Cybrain
knew what it was doing.
The little finger of his right
hand vibrated in its metal
sheath. A pale vibray leaped
from the lensed fingertip.
Breakthrough! The glasstic
pane dissolved. Lane streamed
through the window.
The paragrav-paks cut off.
Lane dropped lightly to the
floor, inside the room, in battle-crouch.
A 3V set was yammering.
A girl screamed. Lane's
hand shot out automatically.
A finger vibrated. Out of the
corner of his eye, Lane saw
the girl fold to the floor. There
was no one else in the room.
Lane, still in a crouch, chewed
his lip.
The Mayor?
His head swung around and
he peered at the 3V set. He
saw his own face.
"Lashing police with his
vibray," said the announcer,
"Lane broke through the cordon
surrounding Manhattan
Armory. Two policemen were
killed, four others seriously
injured. Tammany Hall has
warned that this man is extremely
dangerous. Citizens
are cautioned to keep clear of
him. Lane is an insane killer.
He is armed with the latest
military weapons. A built-in
electronic brain controls his
reflexes—"
"At ease with that jazz,"
said Lane, and a sheathed finger
snapped out. There was a
loud bang. The 3V screen dissolved
into a puddle of glasstic.
The Mayor.
Lane strode to the window.
The two police boats were
hovering above the towers.
Lane's mailed hand snapped
open a pouch at his belt. He
flipped a fist-sized cube to the
floor.
The force-bomb "exploded"—swelled
or inflated, really,
but with the speed of a blast.
Lane glanced out the window.
A section of the energy globe
bellied out from above. It
shaded the view from his window
and re-entered the tower
wall just below.
Now the girl.
He turned back to the room.
"Wake up, outa-towner." He
gave the blonde girl a light
dose of the vibray to slap her
awake.
"Who are you?" she said,
shakily.
Lane grinned. "Trooper
Lane, of the Newyork Special
Troops, is all." He threw her
a mock salute. "You from
outa-town, girlie. I ain't seen
a Newyork girl with yellow
hair in years. Orange or
green is the action. Whatcha
doing in the Mayor's room?"
The
girl pushed herself to
her feet. Built, Lane saw.
She was pretty and clean-looking,
very out-of-town. She
held herself straight and her
blue-violet eyes snapped at
him.
"What the devil do you
think you're doing, soldier? I
am a diplomat of the Grassroots
Republic of Mars. This
is an embassy, if you know
what that means."
"I don't," said Lane, unconcerned.
"Well, you should have had
brains enough to honor the
flag outside this window.
That's the Martian flag, soldier.
If you've never heard of
diplomatic immunity, you'll
suffer for your ignorance."
Her large, dark eyes narrowed.
"Who sent you?"
"My cybrain sent me."
She went openmouthed.
"You're
Lane
."
"I'm the guy they told you
about on the 3V. Where's the
Mayor? Ain't this his place?"
"No. No, you're in the
wrong room. The wrong building.
That's the Mayor's suite
over there." She pointed. "See
where the balcony is? This is
the Embassy suite. If you
want the Mayor you'll have to
go over there."
"Whaddaya know," said
Lane. "Cybrain didn't know,
no more than me."
The girl noticed the dark
swell of the force-globe.
"What's that out there?"
"Force-screen. Nothing gets
past, except maybe a full-size
blaster-beam. Keeps cops out.
Keeps you in. You anybody
important?"
"I told you, I'm an ambassador.
From Mars. I'm on a
diplomatic mission."
"Yeah? Mars a big city?"
She stared at him, violet
eyes wide. "The
planet
Mars."
"Planet? Oh,
that
Mars.
Sure, I've heard of it—you
gotta go by spaceship. What's
your name?"
"Gerri Kin. Look, Lane,
holding me is no good. It'll
just get you in worse trouble.
What are you trying to do?"
"I wanna see the Mayor. Me
and my buddies, we just come
back from fighting in Chi,
Gerri. We won. They got a
new Mayor out there in Chi.
He takes orders from Newyork."
Gerri Kin said, "That's
what the force-domes did. The
perfect defense. But also the
road to the return to city-states.
Anarchy."
Lane said, "Yeah? Well, we
done what they wanted us to
do. We did the fighting for
them. So we come back home
to Newyork and they lock us
up in the Armory. Won't pay
us. Won't let us go nowhere.
They had cops guarding us.
City cops." Lane sneered. "I
busted out. I wanna see the
Mayor and find out why we
can't have time off. I don't
play games, Gerri. I go right
to the top."
Lane broke off. There was
a hum outside the window. He
whirled and stared out. The
rounded black hulls of the two
police paragrav-boats were
nosing toward the force-screen.
Lane could read the
white numbers painted on
their bows.
A loudspeaker shouted into
the room: "Come out of there,
Lane, or we'll blast you out."
"You can't," Lane called.
"This girl from Mars is here."
"I repeat, Lane—come out
or we'll blast you out."
Lane turned to the girl. "I
thought you were important."
She
stood there with her
hands together, calmly
looking at him. "I am. But
you are too, to them. Mars is
millions of miles away, and
you're right across the Square
from the Mayor's suite."
"Yeah, but—" Lane shook
his head and turned back to
the window. "All right, look!
Move them boats away and
I'll let this girl out!"
"No deal, Lane. We're coming
in." The police boats
backed away slowly, then shot
straight up, out of the line of
vision.
Lane looked down at the
Square. Far below, the long,
gleaming barrel of a blaster
cannon caught the dim light
filtering down through Newyork's
Shell. The cannon trundled
into the Square on its
olive-drab, box-shaped caterpillar
mounting and took up a
position equidistant from the
bases of the three towers.
Now a rumble of many
voices rose from below. Lane
stared down to see a large
crowd gathering in Tammany
Square. Sound trucks were
rolling to a stop around the
edges of the crowd. The people
were all looking up.
Lane looked across the
Square. The windows of the
tower opposite, the ones he
could see clearly, were crowded
with faces. There were
white dot faces on the balcony
that Gerri Kin had pointed
out as the Mayor's suite.
The voice of a 3V newscaster
rolled up from the Square,
reechoing against the tower
walls.
"Lane is holding the Martian
Ambassador, Gerri Kin,
hostage. You can see the Martian
tricolor behind his force-globe.
Police are bringing up
blaster cannon. Lane's defense
is a globe of energy
similar to the one which protects
Newyork from aerial attack."
Lane grinned back at Gerri
Kin. "Whole town's down
there." Then his grin faded.
Nice-looking, nice-talking girl
like this probably cared a lot
more about dying than he did.
Why the hell didn't they give
him a chance to let her out?
Maybe he could do it now.
Cybrain said no. It said the
second he dropped his force-screen,
they'd blast this room
to hell. Poor girl from Mars,
she didn't have a chance.
Gerri Kin put her hand to
her forehead. "Why did you
have to pick my room? Why
did they send me to this crazy
city? Private soldiers. Twenty
million people living under
a Shell like worms in a corpse.
Earth is sick and it's going to
kill me. What's going to happen?"
Lane looked sadly at her.
Only two kinds of girls ever
went near a Trooper—the
crazy ones and the ones the
city paid. Why did he have to
be so near getting killed when
he met one he liked? Now that
she was showing a little less
fear and anger, she was talking
straight to him. She was
good, but she wasn't acting as
if she was too good for him.
"They'll start shooting pretty
quick," said Lane. "I'm
sorry about you."
"I wish I could write a letter
to my parents," she said.
"What?"
"Didn't you understand
what I said?"
"What's a letter?"
"You don't know where
Mars is. You don't know what
a letter is. You probably can't
even read and write!"
Lane
shrugged. He carried
on the conversation disinterestedly,
professionally relaxed
before battle. "What's
these things I can't do? They
important?"
"Yes. The more I see of this
city and its people, the more
important I realize they are.
You know how to fight, don't
you? I'll bet you're perfect
with those weapons."
"Listen. They been training
me to fight since I was a little
kid. Why shouldn't I be a
great little fighter?"
"Specialization," said the
girl from Mars.
"What?"
"Specialization. Everyone
I've met in this city is a specialist.
SocioSpecs run the
government. TechnoSpecs run
the machinery. Troopers fight
the wars. And ninety per cent
of the people don't work at all
because they're not trained to
do anything."
"The Fans," said Lane.
"They got it soft. That's them
down there, come to watch the
fight."
"You know why you were
kept in the Armory, Lane? I
heard them talking about it,
at the dinner I went to last
night."
"Why?"
"Because they're afraid of
the Troopers. You men did too
good a job out in Chi. You are
the deadliest weapon that has
ever been made. You. Single
airborne infantrymen!"
Lane said, "They told us in
Trooper Academy that it's the
men that win the wars."
"Yes, but people had forgotten
it until the SocioSpecs of
Newyork came up with the
Troopers. Before the Troopers,
governments concentrated
on the big weapons, the
missiles, the bombs. And the
cities, with the Shells, were
safe from bombs. They learned
to be self-sufficient under
the Shells. They were so safe,
so isolated, that national governments
collapsed. But you
Troopers wiped out that feeling
of security, when you infiltrated
Chi and conquered
it."
"We scared them, huh?"
Gerri said, "You scared
them so much that they were
afraid to let you have a furlough
in the city when you
came back. Afraid you Troopers
would realize that you
could easily take over the city
if you wanted to. You scared
them so much that they'll let
me be killed. They'll actually
risk trouble with Mars just to
kill you."
"I'm sorry about you. I
mean it, I like—"
At that moment a titanic,
ear-splitting explosion hurled
him to the carpet, deafened
and blinded him.
He recovered and saw Gerri
a few feet away, dazed, groping
on hands and knees.
Lane jumped to the window,
looked quickly, sprang
back. Cybrain pumped orders
to his nervous system.
"Blaster cannon," he said.
"But just one. Gotcha, cybrain.
I can beat that."
He picked up the black box
that generated his protective
screen. Snapping it open with
thumb-pressure, he turned a
small dial. Then he waited.
Again an enormous, brain-shattering
concussion.
Again Lane and Gerri were
thrown to the floor. But this
time there was a second explosion
and a blinding flash
from below.
Lane laughed boyishly and
ran to the window.
"Look!" he called to Gerri.
There
was a huge gap in
the crowd below. The
pavement was blackened and
shattered to rubble. In and
around the open space
sprawled dozens of tiny black
figures, not moving.
"Backfire," said Lane. "I set
the screen to throw their
blaster beam right back at
them."
"And they knew you might—and
yet they let a crowd
congregate!"
Gerri reeled away from the
window, sick.
Lane said, "I can do that a
couple times more, but it
burns out the force-globe.
Then I'm dead."
He heard the 3V newscaster's
amplified voice: "—approximately
fifty killed. But
Lane is through now. He has
been able to outthink police
with the help of his cybrain.
Now police are feeding the
problem to their giant analogue
computer in the sub-basement
of the Court House.
The police analogue computer
will be able to outthink Lane's
cybrain, will predict Lane's
moves in advance. Four more
blaster cannon are coming
down Broadway—"
"Why don't they clear those
people out of the Square?"
Gerri cried.
"What? Oh, the Fans—nobody
clears them out." He
paused. "I got one more
chance to try." He raised a
mailed glove to his mouth and
pressed a small stud in the
wrist. He said, "Trooper HQ,
this is Lane."
A voice spoke in his helmet.
"Lane, this is Trooper
HQ. We figured you'd call."
"Get me Colonel Klett."
Thirty seconds passed. Lane
could hear the clank of caterpillar
treads as the mobile
blaster cannon rolled into
Tammany Square.
The voice of the commanding
officer of the Troopers
rasped into Lane's ear:
"Meat-head! You broke out
against my orders!
Now
look
at you!"
"I knew you didn't mean
them orders, sir."
"If you get out of there
alive, I'll hang you for disobeying
them!"
"Yes, sir. Sir, there's a girl
here—somebody important—from
Mars. You know, the
planet. Sir, she told me we
could take over the city if we
got loose. That right, sir?"
There was a pause. "Your
girl from Mars is right, Lane.
But it's too late now. If we
had moved first, captured the
city government, we might
have done it. But they're
ready for us. They'd chop us
down with blaster cannon."
"Sir, I'm asking for help. I
know you're on my side."
"I am, Lane." The voice of
Colonel Klett was lower. "I'd
never admit it if you had a
chance of getting out of there
alive. You've had it, son. I'd
only lose more men trying to
rescue you. When they feed
the data into that analogue
computer, you're finished."
"Yes, sir."
"I'm sorry, Lane."
"Yes, sir. Over and out."
Lane pressed the stud on
his gauntlet again. He turned
to Gerri.
"You're okay. I wish I
could let you out. Old cybrain
says I can't. Says if I drop the
force-globe for a second,
they'll fire into the room, and
then we'll both be dead."
Gerri
stood with folded
arms and looked at him.
"Do what you have to do. As
far as I can see, you're the
only person in this city that
has even a little bit of right
on his side."
Lane laughed. "Any of them
purple-haired broads I know
would be crazy scared. You're
different."
"When my grandparents
landed on Mars, they found
out that selfishness was a luxury.
Martians can't afford
it."
Lane frowned with the effort
of thinking. "You said I
had a little right on my side.
That's a good feeling. Nobody
ever told me to feel that way
about myself before. It'll be
better to die knowing that."
"I know," she said.
The amplified voice from
below said, "The police analogue
computer is now hooked
directly to the controls of the
blaster cannon battery. It will
outguess Lane's cybrain and
check his moves ahead of
time."
Lane looked at Gerri. "How
about giving me a kiss before
they get us? Be nice if I kissed
a girl like you just once in
my life."
She smiled and walked forward.
"You deserve it, Lane."
He kissed her and it filled
him with longings for things
he couldn't name. Then he
stepped back and shook his
head. "It ain't right you
should get killed. If I take a
dive out that window, they
shoot at me, not in here."
"And kill you all the sooner."
"Better than getting burned
up in this lousy little room.
You also got right on your
side. There's too many damn
Troopers and not enough good
persons like you. Old cybrain
says stay here, but I don't
guess I will. I'm gonna pay
you back for that kiss."
"But you're safe in here!"
"Worry about yourself, not
about me." Lane picked up the
force-bomb and handed it to
her. "When I say now, press
this. Then take your hand off,
real fast. It'll shut off the
screen for a second."
He stepped up on to the
window ledge. Automatically,
the cybrain cut in his paragrav-paks.
"So long, outa-towner.
Now!
"
He jumped. He was hurtling
across the Square when the
blaster cannons opened up.
They weren't aimed at the
window where the little red-white-and-green
tricolor was
flying. But they weren't aimed
at Lane, either. They were
shooting wild.
Which way now? Looks
like I got a chance. Old cybrain
says fly right for the
cannons.
He saw the Mayor's balcony
ahead.
Go to hell, old cybrain.
I'm doing all right by myself.
I come to see the Mayor, and
I'm gonna see him.
Lane plunged forward. He
heard the shouts of frightened
men.
He swooped over the balcony
railing. A man was
pointing a blaster pistol at
him. There were five men
on the balcony—emergency!
Years of training and cybrain
took over. Lane's hand shot
out, fingers vibrating. As he
dropped to the balcony floor in
battle-crouch, the men slumped
around him.
He had seen the man with
the blaster pistol before. It
was the Mayor of Newyork.
Lane stood for a moment in
the midst of the sprawled
men, the shrieks of the crowd
floating up to him. Then he
raised his glove to his lips. He
made contact with Manhattan
Armory.
"Colonel Klett, sir. You
said if we captured the city
government we might have a
chance. Well, I captured the
city government. What do we
do with it now?"
Lane
was uncomfortable in
his dress uniform. First
there had been a ceremony in
Tammany Square inaugurating
Newyork's new Military
Protectorate, and honoring
Trooper Lane. Now there was
a formal dinner. Colonel Klett
and Gerri Kin sat on either
side of Lane.
Klett said, "Call me an opportunist
if you like, Miss
Kin, my government will be
stable, and Mars can negotiate
with it." He was a lean, sharp-featured
man with deep
grooves in his face, and gray
hair.
Gerri shook her head. "Recognition
for a new government
takes time. I'm going
back to Mars, and I think
they'll send another ambassador
next time. Nothing personal—I
just don't like it
here."
Lane said, "I'm going to
Mars, too."
"Did she ask you to?" demanded
Klett.
Lane shook his head. "She's
got too much class for me. But
I like what she told me about
Mars. It's healthy, like."
Klett frowned. "If I thought
there was a gram of talent involved
in your capture of the
Mayor, Lane, I'd never release
you from duty. But I
know better. You beat that
analogue computer by sheer
stupidity—by disregarding
your cybrain."
Lane said, "It wasn't so stupid
if it worked."
"That's what bothers me. It
calls for a revision in our tactics.
We've got a way of beating
those big computers now,
should anyone use them
against us."
"I just didn't want her to
be hurt."
"Exactly. The computer
could outguess a machine, like
your cybrain. But you introduced
a totally unpredictable
factor—human emotion.
Which proves what I, as a
military man, have always
maintained—that the deadliest
weapon in man's arsenal
is still, and will always be, the
individual soldier."
"What you just said there,
sir," said Lane. "That's why
I'm leaving Newyork."
"What do you mean?" asked
Colonel Klett.
"I'm tired of being a weapon,
sir. I want to be a human
being."
END
Work is the elimination of the traces of work.
—Michelangelo
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
If
July 1959.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | She pities him. | She is terrified he'll kill her if she doesn't. | She likes Lane. | He is trying to save her life. | 0 |
29196_O6U0UM5D_8 | Why do the police believe the analogue computer can defeat Lane? | MUTINEER
By ROBERT J. SHEA
For every weapon there was a defense, but not against
the deadliest weapon—man himself!
Raging
, Trooper Lane
hovered three thousand
feet above Tammany Square.
The cool cybrain surgically
implanted in him was working
on the problem. But Lane
had no more patience. They'd
sweat, he thought, hating the
chill air-currents that threw
his hovering body this way
and that. He glared down at
the three towers bordering on
the Square. He spat, and
watched the little white speck
fall, fall.
Lock me up in barracks.
All I wanted was a
little time off. Did I fight in
Chi for them? Damn right I
did. Just a little time off, so
I shouldn't blow my top. Now
the lid's gone.
He was going over all their
heads. He'd bowled those city
cops over like paper dolls,
back at the Armory. The
black dog was on Lane's back.
Old Mayor himself was going
to hear about it.
Why not? Ain't old Mayor
the CinC of the Newyork
Troopers?
The humming paragrav-paks
embedded beneath his
shoulder blades held him
motionless above Newyork's
three administrative towers.
Tammany Hall. Mayor's Palace.
Court House. Lane cursed
his stupidity. He hadn't found
out which one was which
ahead of time.
They keep
Troopers in the Armory and
teach them how to fight. They
don't teach them about their
own city, that they'll be fighting
for. There's no time. From
seven years old up, Troopers
have too much to learn about
fighting.
The Mayor was behind one
of those thousands of windows.
Old cybrain, a gift from the
Trooper surgeons, compliments
of the city, would have
to figure out which one. Blood
churned in his veins, nerves
shrieked with impatience.
Lane waited for the electronic
brain to come up with the answer.
Then his head jerked up, to
a distant buzz. There were
cops coming. Two black paragrav-boats
whirred along the
translucent underside of Newyork's
anti-missile force-shield,
the Shell.
Old cybrain better be fast.
Damn fast!
The cybrain jolted an impulse
through his spine. Lane
somersaulted. Cybrain had
taken charge of his motor
nerves. Lane's own mind was
just along for the ride.
His
body snapped into a
stiff dive position. He began
to plummet down, picking
up speed. His mailed hands
glittered like arrowheads out
in front. They pointed to a
particular window in one of
the towers. A predatory excitement
rippled through him
as he sailed down through the
air. It was like going into
battle again. A little red-white-and-green
flag fluttered
on a staff below the window.
Whose flag? The city flag was
orange and blue. He shrugged
away the problem. Cybrain
knew what it was doing.
The little finger of his right
hand vibrated in its metal
sheath. A pale vibray leaped
from the lensed fingertip.
Breakthrough! The glasstic
pane dissolved. Lane streamed
through the window.
The paragrav-paks cut off.
Lane dropped lightly to the
floor, inside the room, in battle-crouch.
A 3V set was yammering.
A girl screamed. Lane's
hand shot out automatically.
A finger vibrated. Out of the
corner of his eye, Lane saw
the girl fold to the floor. There
was no one else in the room.
Lane, still in a crouch, chewed
his lip.
The Mayor?
His head swung around and
he peered at the 3V set. He
saw his own face.
"Lashing police with his
vibray," said the announcer,
"Lane broke through the cordon
surrounding Manhattan
Armory. Two policemen were
killed, four others seriously
injured. Tammany Hall has
warned that this man is extremely
dangerous. Citizens
are cautioned to keep clear of
him. Lane is an insane killer.
He is armed with the latest
military weapons. A built-in
electronic brain controls his
reflexes—"
"At ease with that jazz,"
said Lane, and a sheathed finger
snapped out. There was a
loud bang. The 3V screen dissolved
into a puddle of glasstic.
The Mayor.
Lane strode to the window.
The two police boats were
hovering above the towers.
Lane's mailed hand snapped
open a pouch at his belt. He
flipped a fist-sized cube to the
floor.
The force-bomb "exploded"—swelled
or inflated, really,
but with the speed of a blast.
Lane glanced out the window.
A section of the energy globe
bellied out from above. It
shaded the view from his window
and re-entered the tower
wall just below.
Now the girl.
He turned back to the room.
"Wake up, outa-towner." He
gave the blonde girl a light
dose of the vibray to slap her
awake.
"Who are you?" she said,
shakily.
Lane grinned. "Trooper
Lane, of the Newyork Special
Troops, is all." He threw her
a mock salute. "You from
outa-town, girlie. I ain't seen
a Newyork girl with yellow
hair in years. Orange or
green is the action. Whatcha
doing in the Mayor's room?"
The
girl pushed herself to
her feet. Built, Lane saw.
She was pretty and clean-looking,
very out-of-town. She
held herself straight and her
blue-violet eyes snapped at
him.
"What the devil do you
think you're doing, soldier? I
am a diplomat of the Grassroots
Republic of Mars. This
is an embassy, if you know
what that means."
"I don't," said Lane, unconcerned.
"Well, you should have had
brains enough to honor the
flag outside this window.
That's the Martian flag, soldier.
If you've never heard of
diplomatic immunity, you'll
suffer for your ignorance."
Her large, dark eyes narrowed.
"Who sent you?"
"My cybrain sent me."
She went openmouthed.
"You're
Lane
."
"I'm the guy they told you
about on the 3V. Where's the
Mayor? Ain't this his place?"
"No. No, you're in the
wrong room. The wrong building.
That's the Mayor's suite
over there." She pointed. "See
where the balcony is? This is
the Embassy suite. If you
want the Mayor you'll have to
go over there."
"Whaddaya know," said
Lane. "Cybrain didn't know,
no more than me."
The girl noticed the dark
swell of the force-globe.
"What's that out there?"
"Force-screen. Nothing gets
past, except maybe a full-size
blaster-beam. Keeps cops out.
Keeps you in. You anybody
important?"
"I told you, I'm an ambassador.
From Mars. I'm on a
diplomatic mission."
"Yeah? Mars a big city?"
She stared at him, violet
eyes wide. "The
planet
Mars."
"Planet? Oh,
that
Mars.
Sure, I've heard of it—you
gotta go by spaceship. What's
your name?"
"Gerri Kin. Look, Lane,
holding me is no good. It'll
just get you in worse trouble.
What are you trying to do?"
"I wanna see the Mayor. Me
and my buddies, we just come
back from fighting in Chi,
Gerri. We won. They got a
new Mayor out there in Chi.
He takes orders from Newyork."
Gerri Kin said, "That's
what the force-domes did. The
perfect defense. But also the
road to the return to city-states.
Anarchy."
Lane said, "Yeah? Well, we
done what they wanted us to
do. We did the fighting for
them. So we come back home
to Newyork and they lock us
up in the Armory. Won't pay
us. Won't let us go nowhere.
They had cops guarding us.
City cops." Lane sneered. "I
busted out. I wanna see the
Mayor and find out why we
can't have time off. I don't
play games, Gerri. I go right
to the top."
Lane broke off. There was
a hum outside the window. He
whirled and stared out. The
rounded black hulls of the two
police paragrav-boats were
nosing toward the force-screen.
Lane could read the
white numbers painted on
their bows.
A loudspeaker shouted into
the room: "Come out of there,
Lane, or we'll blast you out."
"You can't," Lane called.
"This girl from Mars is here."
"I repeat, Lane—come out
or we'll blast you out."
Lane turned to the girl. "I
thought you were important."
She
stood there with her
hands together, calmly
looking at him. "I am. But
you are too, to them. Mars is
millions of miles away, and
you're right across the Square
from the Mayor's suite."
"Yeah, but—" Lane shook
his head and turned back to
the window. "All right, look!
Move them boats away and
I'll let this girl out!"
"No deal, Lane. We're coming
in." The police boats
backed away slowly, then shot
straight up, out of the line of
vision.
Lane looked down at the
Square. Far below, the long,
gleaming barrel of a blaster
cannon caught the dim light
filtering down through Newyork's
Shell. The cannon trundled
into the Square on its
olive-drab, box-shaped caterpillar
mounting and took up a
position equidistant from the
bases of the three towers.
Now a rumble of many
voices rose from below. Lane
stared down to see a large
crowd gathering in Tammany
Square. Sound trucks were
rolling to a stop around the
edges of the crowd. The people
were all looking up.
Lane looked across the
Square. The windows of the
tower opposite, the ones he
could see clearly, were crowded
with faces. There were
white dot faces on the balcony
that Gerri Kin had pointed
out as the Mayor's suite.
The voice of a 3V newscaster
rolled up from the Square,
reechoing against the tower
walls.
"Lane is holding the Martian
Ambassador, Gerri Kin,
hostage. You can see the Martian
tricolor behind his force-globe.
Police are bringing up
blaster cannon. Lane's defense
is a globe of energy
similar to the one which protects
Newyork from aerial attack."
Lane grinned back at Gerri
Kin. "Whole town's down
there." Then his grin faded.
Nice-looking, nice-talking girl
like this probably cared a lot
more about dying than he did.
Why the hell didn't they give
him a chance to let her out?
Maybe he could do it now.
Cybrain said no. It said the
second he dropped his force-screen,
they'd blast this room
to hell. Poor girl from Mars,
she didn't have a chance.
Gerri Kin put her hand to
her forehead. "Why did you
have to pick my room? Why
did they send me to this crazy
city? Private soldiers. Twenty
million people living under
a Shell like worms in a corpse.
Earth is sick and it's going to
kill me. What's going to happen?"
Lane looked sadly at her.
Only two kinds of girls ever
went near a Trooper—the
crazy ones and the ones the
city paid. Why did he have to
be so near getting killed when
he met one he liked? Now that
she was showing a little less
fear and anger, she was talking
straight to him. She was
good, but she wasn't acting as
if she was too good for him.
"They'll start shooting pretty
quick," said Lane. "I'm
sorry about you."
"I wish I could write a letter
to my parents," she said.
"What?"
"Didn't you understand
what I said?"
"What's a letter?"
"You don't know where
Mars is. You don't know what
a letter is. You probably can't
even read and write!"
Lane
shrugged. He carried
on the conversation disinterestedly,
professionally relaxed
before battle. "What's
these things I can't do? They
important?"
"Yes. The more I see of this
city and its people, the more
important I realize they are.
You know how to fight, don't
you? I'll bet you're perfect
with those weapons."
"Listen. They been training
me to fight since I was a little
kid. Why shouldn't I be a
great little fighter?"
"Specialization," said the
girl from Mars.
"What?"
"Specialization. Everyone
I've met in this city is a specialist.
SocioSpecs run the
government. TechnoSpecs run
the machinery. Troopers fight
the wars. And ninety per cent
of the people don't work at all
because they're not trained to
do anything."
"The Fans," said Lane.
"They got it soft. That's them
down there, come to watch the
fight."
"You know why you were
kept in the Armory, Lane? I
heard them talking about it,
at the dinner I went to last
night."
"Why?"
"Because they're afraid of
the Troopers. You men did too
good a job out in Chi. You are
the deadliest weapon that has
ever been made. You. Single
airborne infantrymen!"
Lane said, "They told us in
Trooper Academy that it's the
men that win the wars."
"Yes, but people had forgotten
it until the SocioSpecs of
Newyork came up with the
Troopers. Before the Troopers,
governments concentrated
on the big weapons, the
missiles, the bombs. And the
cities, with the Shells, were
safe from bombs. They learned
to be self-sufficient under
the Shells. They were so safe,
so isolated, that national governments
collapsed. But you
Troopers wiped out that feeling
of security, when you infiltrated
Chi and conquered
it."
"We scared them, huh?"
Gerri said, "You scared
them so much that they were
afraid to let you have a furlough
in the city when you
came back. Afraid you Troopers
would realize that you
could easily take over the city
if you wanted to. You scared
them so much that they'll let
me be killed. They'll actually
risk trouble with Mars just to
kill you."
"I'm sorry about you. I
mean it, I like—"
At that moment a titanic,
ear-splitting explosion hurled
him to the carpet, deafened
and blinded him.
He recovered and saw Gerri
a few feet away, dazed, groping
on hands and knees.
Lane jumped to the window,
looked quickly, sprang
back. Cybrain pumped orders
to his nervous system.
"Blaster cannon," he said.
"But just one. Gotcha, cybrain.
I can beat that."
He picked up the black box
that generated his protective
screen. Snapping it open with
thumb-pressure, he turned a
small dial. Then he waited.
Again an enormous, brain-shattering
concussion.
Again Lane and Gerri were
thrown to the floor. But this
time there was a second explosion
and a blinding flash
from below.
Lane laughed boyishly and
ran to the window.
"Look!" he called to Gerri.
There
was a huge gap in
the crowd below. The
pavement was blackened and
shattered to rubble. In and
around the open space
sprawled dozens of tiny black
figures, not moving.
"Backfire," said Lane. "I set
the screen to throw their
blaster beam right back at
them."
"And they knew you might—and
yet they let a crowd
congregate!"
Gerri reeled away from the
window, sick.
Lane said, "I can do that a
couple times more, but it
burns out the force-globe.
Then I'm dead."
He heard the 3V newscaster's
amplified voice: "—approximately
fifty killed. But
Lane is through now. He has
been able to outthink police
with the help of his cybrain.
Now police are feeding the
problem to their giant analogue
computer in the sub-basement
of the Court House.
The police analogue computer
will be able to outthink Lane's
cybrain, will predict Lane's
moves in advance. Four more
blaster cannon are coming
down Broadway—"
"Why don't they clear those
people out of the Square?"
Gerri cried.
"What? Oh, the Fans—nobody
clears them out." He
paused. "I got one more
chance to try." He raised a
mailed glove to his mouth and
pressed a small stud in the
wrist. He said, "Trooper HQ,
this is Lane."
A voice spoke in his helmet.
"Lane, this is Trooper
HQ. We figured you'd call."
"Get me Colonel Klett."
Thirty seconds passed. Lane
could hear the clank of caterpillar
treads as the mobile
blaster cannon rolled into
Tammany Square.
The voice of the commanding
officer of the Troopers
rasped into Lane's ear:
"Meat-head! You broke out
against my orders!
Now
look
at you!"
"I knew you didn't mean
them orders, sir."
"If you get out of there
alive, I'll hang you for disobeying
them!"
"Yes, sir. Sir, there's a girl
here—somebody important—from
Mars. You know, the
planet. Sir, she told me we
could take over the city if we
got loose. That right, sir?"
There was a pause. "Your
girl from Mars is right, Lane.
But it's too late now. If we
had moved first, captured the
city government, we might
have done it. But they're
ready for us. They'd chop us
down with blaster cannon."
"Sir, I'm asking for help. I
know you're on my side."
"I am, Lane." The voice of
Colonel Klett was lower. "I'd
never admit it if you had a
chance of getting out of there
alive. You've had it, son. I'd
only lose more men trying to
rescue you. When they feed
the data into that analogue
computer, you're finished."
"Yes, sir."
"I'm sorry, Lane."
"Yes, sir. Over and out."
Lane pressed the stud on
his gauntlet again. He turned
to Gerri.
"You're okay. I wish I
could let you out. Old cybrain
says I can't. Says if I drop the
force-globe for a second,
they'll fire into the room, and
then we'll both be dead."
Gerri
stood with folded
arms and looked at him.
"Do what you have to do. As
far as I can see, you're the
only person in this city that
has even a little bit of right
on his side."
Lane laughed. "Any of them
purple-haired broads I know
would be crazy scared. You're
different."
"When my grandparents
landed on Mars, they found
out that selfishness was a luxury.
Martians can't afford
it."
Lane frowned with the effort
of thinking. "You said I
had a little right on my side.
That's a good feeling. Nobody
ever told me to feel that way
about myself before. It'll be
better to die knowing that."
"I know," she said.
The amplified voice from
below said, "The police analogue
computer is now hooked
directly to the controls of the
blaster cannon battery. It will
outguess Lane's cybrain and
check his moves ahead of
time."
Lane looked at Gerri. "How
about giving me a kiss before
they get us? Be nice if I kissed
a girl like you just once in
my life."
She smiled and walked forward.
"You deserve it, Lane."
He kissed her and it filled
him with longings for things
he couldn't name. Then he
stepped back and shook his
head. "It ain't right you
should get killed. If I take a
dive out that window, they
shoot at me, not in here."
"And kill you all the sooner."
"Better than getting burned
up in this lousy little room.
You also got right on your
side. There's too many damn
Troopers and not enough good
persons like you. Old cybrain
says stay here, but I don't
guess I will. I'm gonna pay
you back for that kiss."
"But you're safe in here!"
"Worry about yourself, not
about me." Lane picked up the
force-bomb and handed it to
her. "When I say now, press
this. Then take your hand off,
real fast. It'll shut off the
screen for a second."
He stepped up on to the
window ledge. Automatically,
the cybrain cut in his paragrav-paks.
"So long, outa-towner.
Now!
"
He jumped. He was hurtling
across the Square when the
blaster cannons opened up.
They weren't aimed at the
window where the little red-white-and-green
tricolor was
flying. But they weren't aimed
at Lane, either. They were
shooting wild.
Which way now? Looks
like I got a chance. Old cybrain
says fly right for the
cannons.
He saw the Mayor's balcony
ahead.
Go to hell, old cybrain.
I'm doing all right by myself.
I come to see the Mayor, and
I'm gonna see him.
Lane plunged forward. He
heard the shouts of frightened
men.
He swooped over the balcony
railing. A man was
pointing a blaster pistol at
him. There were five men
on the balcony—emergency!
Years of training and cybrain
took over. Lane's hand shot
out, fingers vibrating. As he
dropped to the balcony floor in
battle-crouch, the men slumped
around him.
He had seen the man with
the blaster pistol before. It
was the Mayor of Newyork.
Lane stood for a moment in
the midst of the sprawled
men, the shrieks of the crowd
floating up to him. Then he
raised his glove to his lips. He
made contact with Manhattan
Armory.
"Colonel Klett, sir. You
said if we captured the city
government we might have a
chance. Well, I captured the
city government. What do we
do with it now?"
Lane
was uncomfortable in
his dress uniform. First
there had been a ceremony in
Tammany Square inaugurating
Newyork's new Military
Protectorate, and honoring
Trooper Lane. Now there was
a formal dinner. Colonel Klett
and Gerri Kin sat on either
side of Lane.
Klett said, "Call me an opportunist
if you like, Miss
Kin, my government will be
stable, and Mars can negotiate
with it." He was a lean, sharp-featured
man with deep
grooves in his face, and gray
hair.
Gerri shook her head. "Recognition
for a new government
takes time. I'm going
back to Mars, and I think
they'll send another ambassador
next time. Nothing personal—I
just don't like it
here."
Lane said, "I'm going to
Mars, too."
"Did she ask you to?" demanded
Klett.
Lane shook his head. "She's
got too much class for me. But
I like what she told me about
Mars. It's healthy, like."
Klett frowned. "If I thought
there was a gram of talent involved
in your capture of the
Mayor, Lane, I'd never release
you from duty. But I
know better. You beat that
analogue computer by sheer
stupidity—by disregarding
your cybrain."
Lane said, "It wasn't so stupid
if it worked."
"That's what bothers me. It
calls for a revision in our tactics.
We've got a way of beating
those big computers now,
should anyone use them
against us."
"I just didn't want her to
be hurt."
"Exactly. The computer
could outguess a machine, like
your cybrain. But you introduced
a totally unpredictable
factor—human emotion.
Which proves what I, as a
military man, have always
maintained—that the deadliest
weapon in man's arsenal
is still, and will always be, the
individual soldier."
"What you just said there,
sir," said Lane. "That's why
I'm leaving Newyork."
"What do you mean?" asked
Colonel Klett.
"I'm tired of being a weapon,
sir. I want to be a human
being."
END
Work is the elimination of the traces of work.
—Michelangelo
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
If
July 1959.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | The police are fooling themselves. The analogue computer cannot hope to compete with the cybrain. | The analogue computer is much larger and more powerful than the cybrain. | The cybrains are an extension of the analogue computer. | The cybrains do not have the advanced processor the analogue computer does. | 1 |
99920_U7PIXLPN_2 | What state bureaucracy development saved Europe after WWII? | COMPLEXITY AND HUMANITY
We have all seen the images. Volunteers pitching in. People working day
and night; coming up with the most ingenious, improvised solutions to
everything from food and shelter to communications and security. Working
together; patching up the fabric that is rent. Disaster, natural or
otherwise, is a breakdown of systems. For a time, chaos reigns. For a
time, what will happen in the next five minutes, five hours, and five
days is unknown. All we have to rely on are our wits, fortitude, and
common humanity
Contemporary life is not chaotic, in the colloquial sense we apply to
disaster zones. It is, however, complex and rapidly changing; much more
so than life was in the past; even the very near past. Life, of course,
was never simple. But the fact that day-to-day behaviors in Shenzhen and
Bangalore have direct and immediate effects on people from Wichita to
Strasbourg, from Rio de Janeiro to Sydney, or that unscrupulous lenders
and careless borrowers in the United States can upend economic
expectations everywhere else in the world, no matter how carefully
others have planned, means that there are many more moving parts that
affect each other. And from this scale of practical effects, complexity
emerges. New things too were ever under the sun; but the systematic
application of knowledge to the creation of new knowledge, innovation to
innovation, and information to making more information has become
pervasive; and with it the knowledge that next year will be very
different than this. The Web, after all, is less than a generation old.
These two features−the global scale of interdependence of human action,
and the systematic acceleration of innovation, make contemporary life a
bit like a slow motion disaster, in one important respect. Its very
unpredictability makes it unwise to build systems that take too much
away from what human beings do best: look, think, innovate, adapt,
discuss, learn, and repeat. That is why we have seen many more systems
take on a loose, human centric model in the last decade and a half: from
the radical divergence of Toyota’s production system from the highly
structured model put in place by Henry Ford, to the Internet’s radical
departure from the AT&T system that preceded it, and on to the way
Wikipedia constructs human knowledge on the fly, incrementally, in ways
that would have been seen, until recently, as too chaotic ever to work
(and are still seen so be many). But it is time we acknowledge that
systems work best by making work human.
Modern Times
Modern times were hard enough. Trains and planes, telegraph and
telephone, all brought many people into the same causal space. The
solution to this increased complexity in the late 19th, early 20th
century was to increase the role of structure and improve its design.
During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, this type of
rationalization took the form of ever-more complex managed systems, with
crisp specification of roles, lines of authority, communication and
control.
In business, this rationalization was typified by Fredrick Taylor’s
Scientific Management, later embodied in Henry Ford’s assembly line. The
ambition of these approaches was to specify everything that needed doing
in minute detail, to enforce it through monitoring and rewards, and
later to build it into the very technology of work−the assembly line.
The idea was to eliminate human error and variability in the face of
change by removing thinking to the system, and thus neutralizing the
variability of the human beings who worked it. Few images captured that
time, and what it did to humanity, more vividly than Charlie Chaplin’s
assembly line worker in Modern Times.
At the same time, government experienced the rise of bureaucratization
and the administrative state. Nowhere was this done more brutally than
in the totalitarian states of mid-century. But the impulse to build
fully-specified systems, designed by experts, monitored and controlled
so as to limit human greed and error and to manage uncertainty, was
basic and widespread. It underlay the development of the enormously
successful state bureaucracies that responded to the Great Depression
with the New Deal. It took shape in the Marshall Plan to pull Europe out
of the material abyss into which it had been plunged by World War II,
and shepherded Japan’s industrial regeneration from it. In technical
systems too, we saw in mid-century marvels like the AT&T telephone
system and the IBM mainframe. For a moment in history, these large scale
managed systems were achieving efficiencies that seemed to overwhelm
competing models: from the Tennessee Valley Authority to Sputnik, from
Watson’s IBM to General Motors. Yet, to list these paragons from today’s
perspective is already to presage the demise of the belief in their
inevitable victory.
The increasing recognition of the limits of command-and-control systems
led to a new approach; but it turned out to be a retrenchment, not an
abandonment, of the goal of perfect rationalization of systems design,
which assumed much of the human away. What replaced planning and control
in these systems was the myth of perfect markets. This was achieved
through a hyper-simplification of human nature, wedded to mathematical
modeling of what hyper-simplified selfish rational actors, looking only
to their own interests, would do under diverse conditions. This approach
was widespread and influential; it still is. And yet it led to such
unforgettable gems as trying to understand why people do, or do not, use
condoms by writing sentences like: “The expected utility (EU) of unsafe
sex for m and for f is equal to the benefits (B) of unsafe sex minus its
expected costs, and is given by EUm = B - C(1-Pm)(Pf) and EUf = B -
C(1-Pf)(Pm),” and believing that you will learn anything useful about
lust and desire, recklessness and helplessness, or how to slow down the
transmission of AIDS. Only by concocting such a thin model of
humanity−no more than the economists’ utility curve−and neglecting any
complexities of social interactions that could not be conveyed through
prices, could the appearance of rationalization be maintained. Like
bureaucratic rationalization, perfect-market rationalization also had
successes. But, like its predecessor, its limits as an approach to human
systems design are becoming cleare
Work, Trust and Play
Pricing perfectly requires perfect information. And perfect information,
while always an illusion, has become an ever receding dream in a world
of constant, rapid change and complex global interactions. What we are
seeing instead is the rise of human systems that increasingly shy away
from either control or perfect pricing. Not that there isn’t control.
Not that there aren’t markets. And not that either of these approaches
to coordinating human action will disappear. But these managed systems
are becoming increasingly interlaced with looser structures, which
invite and enable more engaged human action by drawing on intrinsic
motivations and social relations. Dress codes and a culture of play in
the workplace in Silicon Valley, like the one day per week that Google
employees can use to play at whatever ideas they like, do not exist to
make the most innovative region in the United States a Ludic paradise,
gratifying employees at the expense of productivity, but rather to
engage the human and social in the pursuit of what is, in the long term,
the only core business competency−innovation. Wikipedia has eclipsed all
the commercial encyclopedias except Britannica not by issuing a large
IPO and hiring the smartest guys in the room, but by building an open
and inviting system that lets people learn together and pursue their
passion for knowledge, and each other’s company.
The set of human systems necessary for action in this complex,
unpredictable set of conditions, combining rationalization with human
agency, learning and adaptation, is as different from managed systems
and perfect markets as the new Toyota is from the old General Motors, or
as the Internet now is from AT&T then. The hallmarks of these newer
systems are: (a) location of authority and practical capacity to act at
the edges of the system, where potentialities for sensing the
environment, identifying opportunities and challenges to action and
acting upon them, are located; (b) an emphasis on the human: on trust,
cooperation, judgment and insight; (c) communication over the lifetime
of the interaction; and (d) loosely-coupled systems: systems in which
the regularities and dependencies among objects and processes are less
strictly associated with each other; where actions and interactions can
occur through multiple systems simultaneously, have room to fail,
maneuver, and be reoriented to fit changing conditions and new learning,
or shift from one system to another to achieve a solution.
Consider first of all the triumph of Toyota over the programs of Taylor
and Ford. Taylorism was typified by the ambition to measure and specify
all human and material elements of the production system. The ambition
of scientific management was to offer a single, integrated system where
all human variance (the source of slothful shirking and inept error)
could be isolated and controlled. Fordism took that ambition and
embedded the managerial knowledge in the technological platform of the
assembly line, guided by a multitude of rigid task specifications and
routines. Toyota Production System, by comparison, has a substantially
smaller number of roles that are also more loosely defined, with a
reliance on small teams where each team member can perform all tasks,
and who are encouraged to experiment, improve, fail, adapt, but above
all communicate. The system is built on trust and a cooperative dynamic.
The enterprise functions through a managerial control system, but also
through social cooperation mechanisms built around teamwork and trust.
However, even Toyota might be bested in this respect by the even more
loosely coupled networks of innovation and supply represented by
Taiwanese original-design manufacturers.
But let us also consider the system in question that has made this work
possible, the Internet, and compare it to the design principles of the
AT&T network in its heyday. Unlike the Internet, AT&T’s network was
fully managed. Mid-century, the company even retained ownership of the
phones at the endpoints, arguing that it needed to prohibit customers
from connecting unlicensed phones to the system (ostensibly to ensure
proper functioning of the networking and monitoring of customer
behavior, although it didn’t hurt either that this policy effectively
excluded competitors). This generated profit, but any substantial
technical innovations required the approval of management and a
re-engineering of the entire network. The Internet, on the other hand,
was designed to be as general as possible. The network hardware merely
delivers packets of data using standardized addressing information. The
hard processing work−manipulating a humanly-meaningful communication (a
letter or a song, a video or a software package) and breaking it up into
a stream of packets−was to be done by its edge devices, in this case
computers owned by users. This system allowed the breathtaking rate of
innovation that we have seen, while also creating certain
vulnerabilities in online security.
These vulnerabilities have led some to argue that a new system to manage
the Internet is needed. We see first of all that doubts about trust and
security on the Internet arise precisely because the network was
originally designed for people who could more-or-less trust each other,
and offloaded security from the network to the edges. As the network
grew and users diversified, trust (the practical belief that other human
agents in the system were competent and benign, or at least sincere)
declined. This decline was met with arguments in favor of building
security into the technical system, both at its core, in the network
elements themselves, and at its periphery, through “trusted computing.”
A “trusted computer” will, for example, not run a program or document
that its owner wants to run, unless it has received authorization from
some other locus: be it the copyright owner, the virus protection
company, or the employer. This is thought to be the most completely
effective means of preventing copyright infringement or system failure,
and preserving corporate security (these are the main reasons offered
for implementing such systems). Trusted computing in this form is the
ultimate reversal of the human-centric, loosely-coupled design approach
of the Internet. Instead of locating authority and capacity to act at
the endpoints, where human beings are located and can make decisions
about what is worthwhile, it implements the belief that
machines−technical systems−are trustworthy, while their human users are
malevolent, incompetent, or both.
Reintroducing the Human
Taylorism, the Bell system and trusted computing are all efforts to
remove human agency from action and replace it with well-designed,
tightly-bound systems. That is, the specifications and regularities of
the system are such that they control or direct action and learning over
time. Human agency, learning, communication and adaptation are minimized
in managed systems, if not eliminated, and the knowledge in the system
comes from the outside, from the designer, in the initial design over
time, and through observation of the system’s performance by someone
standing outside its constraints−a manager or systems designer. By
contrast, loosely-coupled systems affirmatively eschew this level of
control, and build in room for human agency, experimentation, failure,
communication, learning and adaptation. Loose-coupling is central to the
new systems. It is a feature of system design that leaves room for human
agency over time, only imperfectly constraining and enabling any given
action by the system itself. By creating such domains of human agency,
system designers are accepting the limitations of design and foresight,
and building in the possibilities of learning over time through action
in the system, by agents acting within
To deal with the new complexity of contemporary life we need to
re-introduce the human into the design of systems. We must put the soul
back into the system. If years of work on artificial intelligence have
taught us anything, it is that what makes for human insight is extremely
difficult to replicate or systematize. At the center of these new
systems, then, sits a human being who has a capacity to make judgments,
experiment, learn and adapt. But enabling human agency also provides
scope of action for human frailty. Although this idea is most alien to
the mainstream of system design in the twentieth century, we must now
turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality−our
ability to think of others and their needs, and to choose for ourselves
goals consistent with a broader social concern than merely our own
self-interest. The challenge of the near future is to build systems that
will allow us to be largely free to inquire, experiment, learn and
communicate, that will encourage us to cooperate, and that will avoid
the worst of what human beings are capable of, and elicit what is best.
Free software, Wikipedia, Creative Commons and the thousands of emerging
human practices of productive social cooperation in the networked
information economy give us real existence proofs that human-centric
systems can not merely exist, but thrive, as can the human beings and
social relations that make them. | Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management | of unsafe sex minus its | The Marshall Plan | The Tennessee Valley Authority | 2 |
99920_U7PIXLPN_3 | What does Google do for their employees to foster innovation? | COMPLEXITY AND HUMANITY
We have all seen the images. Volunteers pitching in. People working day
and night; coming up with the most ingenious, improvised solutions to
everything from food and shelter to communications and security. Working
together; patching up the fabric that is rent. Disaster, natural or
otherwise, is a breakdown of systems. For a time, chaos reigns. For a
time, what will happen in the next five minutes, five hours, and five
days is unknown. All we have to rely on are our wits, fortitude, and
common humanity
Contemporary life is not chaotic, in the colloquial sense we apply to
disaster zones. It is, however, complex and rapidly changing; much more
so than life was in the past; even the very near past. Life, of course,
was never simple. But the fact that day-to-day behaviors in Shenzhen and
Bangalore have direct and immediate effects on people from Wichita to
Strasbourg, from Rio de Janeiro to Sydney, or that unscrupulous lenders
and careless borrowers in the United States can upend economic
expectations everywhere else in the world, no matter how carefully
others have planned, means that there are many more moving parts that
affect each other. And from this scale of practical effects, complexity
emerges. New things too were ever under the sun; but the systematic
application of knowledge to the creation of new knowledge, innovation to
innovation, and information to making more information has become
pervasive; and with it the knowledge that next year will be very
different than this. The Web, after all, is less than a generation old.
These two features−the global scale of interdependence of human action,
and the systematic acceleration of innovation, make contemporary life a
bit like a slow motion disaster, in one important respect. Its very
unpredictability makes it unwise to build systems that take too much
away from what human beings do best: look, think, innovate, adapt,
discuss, learn, and repeat. That is why we have seen many more systems
take on a loose, human centric model in the last decade and a half: from
the radical divergence of Toyota’s production system from the highly
structured model put in place by Henry Ford, to the Internet’s radical
departure from the AT&T system that preceded it, and on to the way
Wikipedia constructs human knowledge on the fly, incrementally, in ways
that would have been seen, until recently, as too chaotic ever to work
(and are still seen so be many). But it is time we acknowledge that
systems work best by making work human.
Modern Times
Modern times were hard enough. Trains and planes, telegraph and
telephone, all brought many people into the same causal space. The
solution to this increased complexity in the late 19th, early 20th
century was to increase the role of structure and improve its design.
During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, this type of
rationalization took the form of ever-more complex managed systems, with
crisp specification of roles, lines of authority, communication and
control.
In business, this rationalization was typified by Fredrick Taylor’s
Scientific Management, later embodied in Henry Ford’s assembly line. The
ambition of these approaches was to specify everything that needed doing
in minute detail, to enforce it through monitoring and rewards, and
later to build it into the very technology of work−the assembly line.
The idea was to eliminate human error and variability in the face of
change by removing thinking to the system, and thus neutralizing the
variability of the human beings who worked it. Few images captured that
time, and what it did to humanity, more vividly than Charlie Chaplin’s
assembly line worker in Modern Times.
At the same time, government experienced the rise of bureaucratization
and the administrative state. Nowhere was this done more brutally than
in the totalitarian states of mid-century. But the impulse to build
fully-specified systems, designed by experts, monitored and controlled
so as to limit human greed and error and to manage uncertainty, was
basic and widespread. It underlay the development of the enormously
successful state bureaucracies that responded to the Great Depression
with the New Deal. It took shape in the Marshall Plan to pull Europe out
of the material abyss into which it had been plunged by World War II,
and shepherded Japan’s industrial regeneration from it. In technical
systems too, we saw in mid-century marvels like the AT&T telephone
system and the IBM mainframe. For a moment in history, these large scale
managed systems were achieving efficiencies that seemed to overwhelm
competing models: from the Tennessee Valley Authority to Sputnik, from
Watson’s IBM to General Motors. Yet, to list these paragons from today’s
perspective is already to presage the demise of the belief in their
inevitable victory.
The increasing recognition of the limits of command-and-control systems
led to a new approach; but it turned out to be a retrenchment, not an
abandonment, of the goal of perfect rationalization of systems design,
which assumed much of the human away. What replaced planning and control
in these systems was the myth of perfect markets. This was achieved
through a hyper-simplification of human nature, wedded to mathematical
modeling of what hyper-simplified selfish rational actors, looking only
to their own interests, would do under diverse conditions. This approach
was widespread and influential; it still is. And yet it led to such
unforgettable gems as trying to understand why people do, or do not, use
condoms by writing sentences like: “The expected utility (EU) of unsafe
sex for m and for f is equal to the benefits (B) of unsafe sex minus its
expected costs, and is given by EUm = B - C(1-Pm)(Pf) and EUf = B -
C(1-Pf)(Pm),” and believing that you will learn anything useful about
lust and desire, recklessness and helplessness, or how to slow down the
transmission of AIDS. Only by concocting such a thin model of
humanity−no more than the economists’ utility curve−and neglecting any
complexities of social interactions that could not be conveyed through
prices, could the appearance of rationalization be maintained. Like
bureaucratic rationalization, perfect-market rationalization also had
successes. But, like its predecessor, its limits as an approach to human
systems design are becoming cleare
Work, Trust and Play
Pricing perfectly requires perfect information. And perfect information,
while always an illusion, has become an ever receding dream in a world
of constant, rapid change and complex global interactions. What we are
seeing instead is the rise of human systems that increasingly shy away
from either control or perfect pricing. Not that there isn’t control.
Not that there aren’t markets. And not that either of these approaches
to coordinating human action will disappear. But these managed systems
are becoming increasingly interlaced with looser structures, which
invite and enable more engaged human action by drawing on intrinsic
motivations and social relations. Dress codes and a culture of play in
the workplace in Silicon Valley, like the one day per week that Google
employees can use to play at whatever ideas they like, do not exist to
make the most innovative region in the United States a Ludic paradise,
gratifying employees at the expense of productivity, but rather to
engage the human and social in the pursuit of what is, in the long term,
the only core business competency−innovation. Wikipedia has eclipsed all
the commercial encyclopedias except Britannica not by issuing a large
IPO and hiring the smartest guys in the room, but by building an open
and inviting system that lets people learn together and pursue their
passion for knowledge, and each other’s company.
The set of human systems necessary for action in this complex,
unpredictable set of conditions, combining rationalization with human
agency, learning and adaptation, is as different from managed systems
and perfect markets as the new Toyota is from the old General Motors, or
as the Internet now is from AT&T then. The hallmarks of these newer
systems are: (a) location of authority and practical capacity to act at
the edges of the system, where potentialities for sensing the
environment, identifying opportunities and challenges to action and
acting upon them, are located; (b) an emphasis on the human: on trust,
cooperation, judgment and insight; (c) communication over the lifetime
of the interaction; and (d) loosely-coupled systems: systems in which
the regularities and dependencies among objects and processes are less
strictly associated with each other; where actions and interactions can
occur through multiple systems simultaneously, have room to fail,
maneuver, and be reoriented to fit changing conditions and new learning,
or shift from one system to another to achieve a solution.
Consider first of all the triumph of Toyota over the programs of Taylor
and Ford. Taylorism was typified by the ambition to measure and specify
all human and material elements of the production system. The ambition
of scientific management was to offer a single, integrated system where
all human variance (the source of slothful shirking and inept error)
could be isolated and controlled. Fordism took that ambition and
embedded the managerial knowledge in the technological platform of the
assembly line, guided by a multitude of rigid task specifications and
routines. Toyota Production System, by comparison, has a substantially
smaller number of roles that are also more loosely defined, with a
reliance on small teams where each team member can perform all tasks,
and who are encouraged to experiment, improve, fail, adapt, but above
all communicate. The system is built on trust and a cooperative dynamic.
The enterprise functions through a managerial control system, but also
through social cooperation mechanisms built around teamwork and trust.
However, even Toyota might be bested in this respect by the even more
loosely coupled networks of innovation and supply represented by
Taiwanese original-design manufacturers.
But let us also consider the system in question that has made this work
possible, the Internet, and compare it to the design principles of the
AT&T network in its heyday. Unlike the Internet, AT&T’s network was
fully managed. Mid-century, the company even retained ownership of the
phones at the endpoints, arguing that it needed to prohibit customers
from connecting unlicensed phones to the system (ostensibly to ensure
proper functioning of the networking and monitoring of customer
behavior, although it didn’t hurt either that this policy effectively
excluded competitors). This generated profit, but any substantial
technical innovations required the approval of management and a
re-engineering of the entire network. The Internet, on the other hand,
was designed to be as general as possible. The network hardware merely
delivers packets of data using standardized addressing information. The
hard processing work−manipulating a humanly-meaningful communication (a
letter or a song, a video or a software package) and breaking it up into
a stream of packets−was to be done by its edge devices, in this case
computers owned by users. This system allowed the breathtaking rate of
innovation that we have seen, while also creating certain
vulnerabilities in online security.
These vulnerabilities have led some to argue that a new system to manage
the Internet is needed. We see first of all that doubts about trust and
security on the Internet arise precisely because the network was
originally designed for people who could more-or-less trust each other,
and offloaded security from the network to the edges. As the network
grew and users diversified, trust (the practical belief that other human
agents in the system were competent and benign, or at least sincere)
declined. This decline was met with arguments in favor of building
security into the technical system, both at its core, in the network
elements themselves, and at its periphery, through “trusted computing.”
A “trusted computer” will, for example, not run a program or document
that its owner wants to run, unless it has received authorization from
some other locus: be it the copyright owner, the virus protection
company, or the employer. This is thought to be the most completely
effective means of preventing copyright infringement or system failure,
and preserving corporate security (these are the main reasons offered
for implementing such systems). Trusted computing in this form is the
ultimate reversal of the human-centric, loosely-coupled design approach
of the Internet. Instead of locating authority and capacity to act at
the endpoints, where human beings are located and can make decisions
about what is worthwhile, it implements the belief that
machines−technical systems−are trustworthy, while their human users are
malevolent, incompetent, or both.
Reintroducing the Human
Taylorism, the Bell system and trusted computing are all efforts to
remove human agency from action and replace it with well-designed,
tightly-bound systems. That is, the specifications and regularities of
the system are such that they control or direct action and learning over
time. Human agency, learning, communication and adaptation are minimized
in managed systems, if not eliminated, and the knowledge in the system
comes from the outside, from the designer, in the initial design over
time, and through observation of the system’s performance by someone
standing outside its constraints−a manager or systems designer. By
contrast, loosely-coupled systems affirmatively eschew this level of
control, and build in room for human agency, experimentation, failure,
communication, learning and adaptation. Loose-coupling is central to the
new systems. It is a feature of system design that leaves room for human
agency over time, only imperfectly constraining and enabling any given
action by the system itself. By creating such domains of human agency,
system designers are accepting the limitations of design and foresight,
and building in the possibilities of learning over time through action
in the system, by agents acting within
To deal with the new complexity of contemporary life we need to
re-introduce the human into the design of systems. We must put the soul
back into the system. If years of work on artificial intelligence have
taught us anything, it is that what makes for human insight is extremely
difficult to replicate or systematize. At the center of these new
systems, then, sits a human being who has a capacity to make judgments,
experiment, learn and adapt. But enabling human agency also provides
scope of action for human frailty. Although this idea is most alien to
the mainstream of system design in the twentieth century, we must now
turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality−our
ability to think of others and their needs, and to choose for ourselves
goals consistent with a broader social concern than merely our own
self-interest. The challenge of the near future is to build systems that
will allow us to be largely free to inquire, experiment, learn and
communicate, that will encourage us to cooperate, and that will avoid
the worst of what human beings are capable of, and elicit what is best.
Free software, Wikipedia, Creative Commons and the thousands of emerging
human practices of productive social cooperation in the networked
information economy give us real existence proofs that human-centric
systems can not merely exist, but thrive, as can the human beings and
social relations that make them. | They use Segways on the Google campus and in the buildings. | of unsafe sex minus its | One day a week, they can pursue whatever ideas they like. | They have a culture of play. | 2 |
99920_U7PIXLPN_5 | What typified Taylorism? | COMPLEXITY AND HUMANITY
We have all seen the images. Volunteers pitching in. People working day
and night; coming up with the most ingenious, improvised solutions to
everything from food and shelter to communications and security. Working
together; patching up the fabric that is rent. Disaster, natural or
otherwise, is a breakdown of systems. For a time, chaos reigns. For a
time, what will happen in the next five minutes, five hours, and five
days is unknown. All we have to rely on are our wits, fortitude, and
common humanity
Contemporary life is not chaotic, in the colloquial sense we apply to
disaster zones. It is, however, complex and rapidly changing; much more
so than life was in the past; even the very near past. Life, of course,
was never simple. But the fact that day-to-day behaviors in Shenzhen and
Bangalore have direct and immediate effects on people from Wichita to
Strasbourg, from Rio de Janeiro to Sydney, or that unscrupulous lenders
and careless borrowers in the United States can upend economic
expectations everywhere else in the world, no matter how carefully
others have planned, means that there are many more moving parts that
affect each other. And from this scale of practical effects, complexity
emerges. New things too were ever under the sun; but the systematic
application of knowledge to the creation of new knowledge, innovation to
innovation, and information to making more information has become
pervasive; and with it the knowledge that next year will be very
different than this. The Web, after all, is less than a generation old.
These two features−the global scale of interdependence of human action,
and the systematic acceleration of innovation, make contemporary life a
bit like a slow motion disaster, in one important respect. Its very
unpredictability makes it unwise to build systems that take too much
away from what human beings do best: look, think, innovate, adapt,
discuss, learn, and repeat. That is why we have seen many more systems
take on a loose, human centric model in the last decade and a half: from
the radical divergence of Toyota’s production system from the highly
structured model put in place by Henry Ford, to the Internet’s radical
departure from the AT&T system that preceded it, and on to the way
Wikipedia constructs human knowledge on the fly, incrementally, in ways
that would have been seen, until recently, as too chaotic ever to work
(and are still seen so be many). But it is time we acknowledge that
systems work best by making work human.
Modern Times
Modern times were hard enough. Trains and planes, telegraph and
telephone, all brought many people into the same causal space. The
solution to this increased complexity in the late 19th, early 20th
century was to increase the role of structure and improve its design.
During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, this type of
rationalization took the form of ever-more complex managed systems, with
crisp specification of roles, lines of authority, communication and
control.
In business, this rationalization was typified by Fredrick Taylor’s
Scientific Management, later embodied in Henry Ford’s assembly line. The
ambition of these approaches was to specify everything that needed doing
in minute detail, to enforce it through monitoring and rewards, and
later to build it into the very technology of work−the assembly line.
The idea was to eliminate human error and variability in the face of
change by removing thinking to the system, and thus neutralizing the
variability of the human beings who worked it. Few images captured that
time, and what it did to humanity, more vividly than Charlie Chaplin’s
assembly line worker in Modern Times.
At the same time, government experienced the rise of bureaucratization
and the administrative state. Nowhere was this done more brutally than
in the totalitarian states of mid-century. But the impulse to build
fully-specified systems, designed by experts, monitored and controlled
so as to limit human greed and error and to manage uncertainty, was
basic and widespread. It underlay the development of the enormously
successful state bureaucracies that responded to the Great Depression
with the New Deal. It took shape in the Marshall Plan to pull Europe out
of the material abyss into which it had been plunged by World War II,
and shepherded Japan’s industrial regeneration from it. In technical
systems too, we saw in mid-century marvels like the AT&T telephone
system and the IBM mainframe. For a moment in history, these large scale
managed systems were achieving efficiencies that seemed to overwhelm
competing models: from the Tennessee Valley Authority to Sputnik, from
Watson’s IBM to General Motors. Yet, to list these paragons from today’s
perspective is already to presage the demise of the belief in their
inevitable victory.
The increasing recognition of the limits of command-and-control systems
led to a new approach; but it turned out to be a retrenchment, not an
abandonment, of the goal of perfect rationalization of systems design,
which assumed much of the human away. What replaced planning and control
in these systems was the myth of perfect markets. This was achieved
through a hyper-simplification of human nature, wedded to mathematical
modeling of what hyper-simplified selfish rational actors, looking only
to their own interests, would do under diverse conditions. This approach
was widespread and influential; it still is. And yet it led to such
unforgettable gems as trying to understand why people do, or do not, use
condoms by writing sentences like: “The expected utility (EU) of unsafe
sex for m and for f is equal to the benefits (B) of unsafe sex minus its
expected costs, and is given by EUm = B - C(1-Pm)(Pf) and EUf = B -
C(1-Pf)(Pm),” and believing that you will learn anything useful about
lust and desire, recklessness and helplessness, or how to slow down the
transmission of AIDS. Only by concocting such a thin model of
humanity−no more than the economists’ utility curve−and neglecting any
complexities of social interactions that could not be conveyed through
prices, could the appearance of rationalization be maintained. Like
bureaucratic rationalization, perfect-market rationalization also had
successes. But, like its predecessor, its limits as an approach to human
systems design are becoming cleare
Work, Trust and Play
Pricing perfectly requires perfect information. And perfect information,
while always an illusion, has become an ever receding dream in a world
of constant, rapid change and complex global interactions. What we are
seeing instead is the rise of human systems that increasingly shy away
from either control or perfect pricing. Not that there isn’t control.
Not that there aren’t markets. And not that either of these approaches
to coordinating human action will disappear. But these managed systems
are becoming increasingly interlaced with looser structures, which
invite and enable more engaged human action by drawing on intrinsic
motivations and social relations. Dress codes and a culture of play in
the workplace in Silicon Valley, like the one day per week that Google
employees can use to play at whatever ideas they like, do not exist to
make the most innovative region in the United States a Ludic paradise,
gratifying employees at the expense of productivity, but rather to
engage the human and social in the pursuit of what is, in the long term,
the only core business competency−innovation. Wikipedia has eclipsed all
the commercial encyclopedias except Britannica not by issuing a large
IPO and hiring the smartest guys in the room, but by building an open
and inviting system that lets people learn together and pursue their
passion for knowledge, and each other’s company.
The set of human systems necessary for action in this complex,
unpredictable set of conditions, combining rationalization with human
agency, learning and adaptation, is as different from managed systems
and perfect markets as the new Toyota is from the old General Motors, or
as the Internet now is from AT&T then. The hallmarks of these newer
systems are: (a) location of authority and practical capacity to act at
the edges of the system, where potentialities for sensing the
environment, identifying opportunities and challenges to action and
acting upon them, are located; (b) an emphasis on the human: on trust,
cooperation, judgment and insight; (c) communication over the lifetime
of the interaction; and (d) loosely-coupled systems: systems in which
the regularities and dependencies among objects and processes are less
strictly associated with each other; where actions and interactions can
occur through multiple systems simultaneously, have room to fail,
maneuver, and be reoriented to fit changing conditions and new learning,
or shift from one system to another to achieve a solution.
Consider first of all the triumph of Toyota over the programs of Taylor
and Ford. Taylorism was typified by the ambition to measure and specify
all human and material elements of the production system. The ambition
of scientific management was to offer a single, integrated system where
all human variance (the source of slothful shirking and inept error)
could be isolated and controlled. Fordism took that ambition and
embedded the managerial knowledge in the technological platform of the
assembly line, guided by a multitude of rigid task specifications and
routines. Toyota Production System, by comparison, has a substantially
smaller number of roles that are also more loosely defined, with a
reliance on small teams where each team member can perform all tasks,
and who are encouraged to experiment, improve, fail, adapt, but above
all communicate. The system is built on trust and a cooperative dynamic.
The enterprise functions through a managerial control system, but also
through social cooperation mechanisms built around teamwork and trust.
However, even Toyota might be bested in this respect by the even more
loosely coupled networks of innovation and supply represented by
Taiwanese original-design manufacturers.
But let us also consider the system in question that has made this work
possible, the Internet, and compare it to the design principles of the
AT&T network in its heyday. Unlike the Internet, AT&T’s network was
fully managed. Mid-century, the company even retained ownership of the
phones at the endpoints, arguing that it needed to prohibit customers
from connecting unlicensed phones to the system (ostensibly to ensure
proper functioning of the networking and monitoring of customer
behavior, although it didn’t hurt either that this policy effectively
excluded competitors). This generated profit, but any substantial
technical innovations required the approval of management and a
re-engineering of the entire network. The Internet, on the other hand,
was designed to be as general as possible. The network hardware merely
delivers packets of data using standardized addressing information. The
hard processing work−manipulating a humanly-meaningful communication (a
letter or a song, a video or a software package) and breaking it up into
a stream of packets−was to be done by its edge devices, in this case
computers owned by users. This system allowed the breathtaking rate of
innovation that we have seen, while also creating certain
vulnerabilities in online security.
These vulnerabilities have led some to argue that a new system to manage
the Internet is needed. We see first of all that doubts about trust and
security on the Internet arise precisely because the network was
originally designed for people who could more-or-less trust each other,
and offloaded security from the network to the edges. As the network
grew and users diversified, trust (the practical belief that other human
agents in the system were competent and benign, or at least sincere)
declined. This decline was met with arguments in favor of building
security into the technical system, both at its core, in the network
elements themselves, and at its periphery, through “trusted computing.”
A “trusted computer” will, for example, not run a program or document
that its owner wants to run, unless it has received authorization from
some other locus: be it the copyright owner, the virus protection
company, or the employer. This is thought to be the most completely
effective means of preventing copyright infringement or system failure,
and preserving corporate security (these are the main reasons offered
for implementing such systems). Trusted computing in this form is the
ultimate reversal of the human-centric, loosely-coupled design approach
of the Internet. Instead of locating authority and capacity to act at
the endpoints, where human beings are located and can make decisions
about what is worthwhile, it implements the belief that
machines−technical systems−are trustworthy, while their human users are
malevolent, incompetent, or both.
Reintroducing the Human
Taylorism, the Bell system and trusted computing are all efforts to
remove human agency from action and replace it with well-designed,
tightly-bound systems. That is, the specifications and regularities of
the system are such that they control or direct action and learning over
time. Human agency, learning, communication and adaptation are minimized
in managed systems, if not eliminated, and the knowledge in the system
comes from the outside, from the designer, in the initial design over
time, and through observation of the system’s performance by someone
standing outside its constraints−a manager or systems designer. By
contrast, loosely-coupled systems affirmatively eschew this level of
control, and build in room for human agency, experimentation, failure,
communication, learning and adaptation. Loose-coupling is central to the
new systems. It is a feature of system design that leaves room for human
agency over time, only imperfectly constraining and enabling any given
action by the system itself. By creating such domains of human agency,
system designers are accepting the limitations of design and foresight,
and building in the possibilities of learning over time through action
in the system, by agents acting within
To deal with the new complexity of contemporary life we need to
re-introduce the human into the design of systems. We must put the soul
back into the system. If years of work on artificial intelligence have
taught us anything, it is that what makes for human insight is extremely
difficult to replicate or systematize. At the center of these new
systems, then, sits a human being who has a capacity to make judgments,
experiment, learn and adapt. But enabling human agency also provides
scope of action for human frailty. Although this idea is most alien to
the mainstream of system design in the twentieth century, we must now
turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality−our
ability to think of others and their needs, and to choose for ourselves
goals consistent with a broader social concern than merely our own
self-interest. The challenge of the near future is to build systems that
will allow us to be largely free to inquire, experiment, learn and
communicate, that will encourage us to cooperate, and that will avoid
the worst of what human beings are capable of, and elicit what is best.
Free software, Wikipedia, Creative Commons and the thousands of emerging
human practices of productive social cooperation in the networked
information economy give us real existence proofs that human-centric
systems can not merely exist, but thrive, as can the human beings and
social relations that make them. | Identifying opportunities and challenges to action and acting upon them. | of unsafe sex minus its | Loosely-coupled systems. | The ambition to measure and specify all human and material elements of the production system. | 3 |
99920_U7PIXLPN_6 | Why did AT&T originally retain ownership of the phones at the endpoints? | COMPLEXITY AND HUMANITY
We have all seen the images. Volunteers pitching in. People working day
and night; coming up with the most ingenious, improvised solutions to
everything from food and shelter to communications and security. Working
together; patching up the fabric that is rent. Disaster, natural or
otherwise, is a breakdown of systems. For a time, chaos reigns. For a
time, what will happen in the next five minutes, five hours, and five
days is unknown. All we have to rely on are our wits, fortitude, and
common humanity
Contemporary life is not chaotic, in the colloquial sense we apply to
disaster zones. It is, however, complex and rapidly changing; much more
so than life was in the past; even the very near past. Life, of course,
was never simple. But the fact that day-to-day behaviors in Shenzhen and
Bangalore have direct and immediate effects on people from Wichita to
Strasbourg, from Rio de Janeiro to Sydney, or that unscrupulous lenders
and careless borrowers in the United States can upend economic
expectations everywhere else in the world, no matter how carefully
others have planned, means that there are many more moving parts that
affect each other. And from this scale of practical effects, complexity
emerges. New things too were ever under the sun; but the systematic
application of knowledge to the creation of new knowledge, innovation to
innovation, and information to making more information has become
pervasive; and with it the knowledge that next year will be very
different than this. The Web, after all, is less than a generation old.
These two features−the global scale of interdependence of human action,
and the systematic acceleration of innovation, make contemporary life a
bit like a slow motion disaster, in one important respect. Its very
unpredictability makes it unwise to build systems that take too much
away from what human beings do best: look, think, innovate, adapt,
discuss, learn, and repeat. That is why we have seen many more systems
take on a loose, human centric model in the last decade and a half: from
the radical divergence of Toyota’s production system from the highly
structured model put in place by Henry Ford, to the Internet’s radical
departure from the AT&T system that preceded it, and on to the way
Wikipedia constructs human knowledge on the fly, incrementally, in ways
that would have been seen, until recently, as too chaotic ever to work
(and are still seen so be many). But it is time we acknowledge that
systems work best by making work human.
Modern Times
Modern times were hard enough. Trains and planes, telegraph and
telephone, all brought many people into the same causal space. The
solution to this increased complexity in the late 19th, early 20th
century was to increase the role of structure and improve its design.
During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, this type of
rationalization took the form of ever-more complex managed systems, with
crisp specification of roles, lines of authority, communication and
control.
In business, this rationalization was typified by Fredrick Taylor’s
Scientific Management, later embodied in Henry Ford’s assembly line. The
ambition of these approaches was to specify everything that needed doing
in minute detail, to enforce it through monitoring and rewards, and
later to build it into the very technology of work−the assembly line.
The idea was to eliminate human error and variability in the face of
change by removing thinking to the system, and thus neutralizing the
variability of the human beings who worked it. Few images captured that
time, and what it did to humanity, more vividly than Charlie Chaplin’s
assembly line worker in Modern Times.
At the same time, government experienced the rise of bureaucratization
and the administrative state. Nowhere was this done more brutally than
in the totalitarian states of mid-century. But the impulse to build
fully-specified systems, designed by experts, monitored and controlled
so as to limit human greed and error and to manage uncertainty, was
basic and widespread. It underlay the development of the enormously
successful state bureaucracies that responded to the Great Depression
with the New Deal. It took shape in the Marshall Plan to pull Europe out
of the material abyss into which it had been plunged by World War II,
and shepherded Japan’s industrial regeneration from it. In technical
systems too, we saw in mid-century marvels like the AT&T telephone
system and the IBM mainframe. For a moment in history, these large scale
managed systems were achieving efficiencies that seemed to overwhelm
competing models: from the Tennessee Valley Authority to Sputnik, from
Watson’s IBM to General Motors. Yet, to list these paragons from today’s
perspective is already to presage the demise of the belief in their
inevitable victory.
The increasing recognition of the limits of command-and-control systems
led to a new approach; but it turned out to be a retrenchment, not an
abandonment, of the goal of perfect rationalization of systems design,
which assumed much of the human away. What replaced planning and control
in these systems was the myth of perfect markets. This was achieved
through a hyper-simplification of human nature, wedded to mathematical
modeling of what hyper-simplified selfish rational actors, looking only
to their own interests, would do under diverse conditions. This approach
was widespread and influential; it still is. And yet it led to such
unforgettable gems as trying to understand why people do, or do not, use
condoms by writing sentences like: “The expected utility (EU) of unsafe
sex for m and for f is equal to the benefits (B) of unsafe sex minus its
expected costs, and is given by EUm = B - C(1-Pm)(Pf) and EUf = B -
C(1-Pf)(Pm),” and believing that you will learn anything useful about
lust and desire, recklessness and helplessness, or how to slow down the
transmission of AIDS. Only by concocting such a thin model of
humanity−no more than the economists’ utility curve−and neglecting any
complexities of social interactions that could not be conveyed through
prices, could the appearance of rationalization be maintained. Like
bureaucratic rationalization, perfect-market rationalization also had
successes. But, like its predecessor, its limits as an approach to human
systems design are becoming cleare
Work, Trust and Play
Pricing perfectly requires perfect information. And perfect information,
while always an illusion, has become an ever receding dream in a world
of constant, rapid change and complex global interactions. What we are
seeing instead is the rise of human systems that increasingly shy away
from either control or perfect pricing. Not that there isn’t control.
Not that there aren’t markets. And not that either of these approaches
to coordinating human action will disappear. But these managed systems
are becoming increasingly interlaced with looser structures, which
invite and enable more engaged human action by drawing on intrinsic
motivations and social relations. Dress codes and a culture of play in
the workplace in Silicon Valley, like the one day per week that Google
employees can use to play at whatever ideas they like, do not exist to
make the most innovative region in the United States a Ludic paradise,
gratifying employees at the expense of productivity, but rather to
engage the human and social in the pursuit of what is, in the long term,
the only core business competency−innovation. Wikipedia has eclipsed all
the commercial encyclopedias except Britannica not by issuing a large
IPO and hiring the smartest guys in the room, but by building an open
and inviting system that lets people learn together and pursue their
passion for knowledge, and each other’s company.
The set of human systems necessary for action in this complex,
unpredictable set of conditions, combining rationalization with human
agency, learning and adaptation, is as different from managed systems
and perfect markets as the new Toyota is from the old General Motors, or
as the Internet now is from AT&T then. The hallmarks of these newer
systems are: (a) location of authority and practical capacity to act at
the edges of the system, where potentialities for sensing the
environment, identifying opportunities and challenges to action and
acting upon them, are located; (b) an emphasis on the human: on trust,
cooperation, judgment and insight; (c) communication over the lifetime
of the interaction; and (d) loosely-coupled systems: systems in which
the regularities and dependencies among objects and processes are less
strictly associated with each other; where actions and interactions can
occur through multiple systems simultaneously, have room to fail,
maneuver, and be reoriented to fit changing conditions and new learning,
or shift from one system to another to achieve a solution.
Consider first of all the triumph of Toyota over the programs of Taylor
and Ford. Taylorism was typified by the ambition to measure and specify
all human and material elements of the production system. The ambition
of scientific management was to offer a single, integrated system where
all human variance (the source of slothful shirking and inept error)
could be isolated and controlled. Fordism took that ambition and
embedded the managerial knowledge in the technological platform of the
assembly line, guided by a multitude of rigid task specifications and
routines. Toyota Production System, by comparison, has a substantially
smaller number of roles that are also more loosely defined, with a
reliance on small teams where each team member can perform all tasks,
and who are encouraged to experiment, improve, fail, adapt, but above
all communicate. The system is built on trust and a cooperative dynamic.
The enterprise functions through a managerial control system, but also
through social cooperation mechanisms built around teamwork and trust.
However, even Toyota might be bested in this respect by the even more
loosely coupled networks of innovation and supply represented by
Taiwanese original-design manufacturers.
But let us also consider the system in question that has made this work
possible, the Internet, and compare it to the design principles of the
AT&T network in its heyday. Unlike the Internet, AT&T’s network was
fully managed. Mid-century, the company even retained ownership of the
phones at the endpoints, arguing that it needed to prohibit customers
from connecting unlicensed phones to the system (ostensibly to ensure
proper functioning of the networking and monitoring of customer
behavior, although it didn’t hurt either that this policy effectively
excluded competitors). This generated profit, but any substantial
technical innovations required the approval of management and a
re-engineering of the entire network. The Internet, on the other hand,
was designed to be as general as possible. The network hardware merely
delivers packets of data using standardized addressing information. The
hard processing work−manipulating a humanly-meaningful communication (a
letter or a song, a video or a software package) and breaking it up into
a stream of packets−was to be done by its edge devices, in this case
computers owned by users. This system allowed the breathtaking rate of
innovation that we have seen, while also creating certain
vulnerabilities in online security.
These vulnerabilities have led some to argue that a new system to manage
the Internet is needed. We see first of all that doubts about trust and
security on the Internet arise precisely because the network was
originally designed for people who could more-or-less trust each other,
and offloaded security from the network to the edges. As the network
grew and users diversified, trust (the practical belief that other human
agents in the system were competent and benign, or at least sincere)
declined. This decline was met with arguments in favor of building
security into the technical system, both at its core, in the network
elements themselves, and at its periphery, through “trusted computing.”
A “trusted computer” will, for example, not run a program or document
that its owner wants to run, unless it has received authorization from
some other locus: be it the copyright owner, the virus protection
company, or the employer. This is thought to be the most completely
effective means of preventing copyright infringement or system failure,
and preserving corporate security (these are the main reasons offered
for implementing such systems). Trusted computing in this form is the
ultimate reversal of the human-centric, loosely-coupled design approach
of the Internet. Instead of locating authority and capacity to act at
the endpoints, where human beings are located and can make decisions
about what is worthwhile, it implements the belief that
machines−technical systems−are trustworthy, while their human users are
malevolent, incompetent, or both.
Reintroducing the Human
Taylorism, the Bell system and trusted computing are all efforts to
remove human agency from action and replace it with well-designed,
tightly-bound systems. That is, the specifications and regularities of
the system are such that they control or direct action and learning over
time. Human agency, learning, communication and adaptation are minimized
in managed systems, if not eliminated, and the knowledge in the system
comes from the outside, from the designer, in the initial design over
time, and through observation of the system’s performance by someone
standing outside its constraints−a manager or systems designer. By
contrast, loosely-coupled systems affirmatively eschew this level of
control, and build in room for human agency, experimentation, failure,
communication, learning and adaptation. Loose-coupling is central to the
new systems. It is a feature of system design that leaves room for human
agency over time, only imperfectly constraining and enabling any given
action by the system itself. By creating such domains of human agency,
system designers are accepting the limitations of design and foresight,
and building in the possibilities of learning over time through action
in the system, by agents acting within
To deal with the new complexity of contemporary life we need to
re-introduce the human into the design of systems. We must put the soul
back into the system. If years of work on artificial intelligence have
taught us anything, it is that what makes for human insight is extremely
difficult to replicate or systematize. At the center of these new
systems, then, sits a human being who has a capacity to make judgments,
experiment, learn and adapt. But enabling human agency also provides
scope of action for human frailty. Although this idea is most alien to
the mainstream of system design in the twentieth century, we must now
turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality−our
ability to think of others and their needs, and to choose for ourselves
goals consistent with a broader social concern than merely our own
self-interest. The challenge of the near future is to build systems that
will allow us to be largely free to inquire, experiment, learn and
communicate, that will encourage us to cooperate, and that will avoid
the worst of what human beings are capable of, and elicit what is best.
Free software, Wikipedia, Creative Commons and the thousands of emerging
human practices of productive social cooperation in the networked
information economy give us real existence proofs that human-centric
systems can not merely exist, but thrive, as can the human beings and
social relations that make them. | To prohibit customers from connecting unlicensed phones at the endpoints. | of unsafe sex minus its | To ensure the proper functioning of the networking and monitoring of customer behavior. | To make the most profit. | 2 |
99920_U7PIXLPN_7 | How did the Internet allow for a breathtaking rate of innovation? | COMPLEXITY AND HUMANITY
We have all seen the images. Volunteers pitching in. People working day
and night; coming up with the most ingenious, improvised solutions to
everything from food and shelter to communications and security. Working
together; patching up the fabric that is rent. Disaster, natural or
otherwise, is a breakdown of systems. For a time, chaos reigns. For a
time, what will happen in the next five minutes, five hours, and five
days is unknown. All we have to rely on are our wits, fortitude, and
common humanity
Contemporary life is not chaotic, in the colloquial sense we apply to
disaster zones. It is, however, complex and rapidly changing; much more
so than life was in the past; even the very near past. Life, of course,
was never simple. But the fact that day-to-day behaviors in Shenzhen and
Bangalore have direct and immediate effects on people from Wichita to
Strasbourg, from Rio de Janeiro to Sydney, or that unscrupulous lenders
and careless borrowers in the United States can upend economic
expectations everywhere else in the world, no matter how carefully
others have planned, means that there are many more moving parts that
affect each other. And from this scale of practical effects, complexity
emerges. New things too were ever under the sun; but the systematic
application of knowledge to the creation of new knowledge, innovation to
innovation, and information to making more information has become
pervasive; and with it the knowledge that next year will be very
different than this. The Web, after all, is less than a generation old.
These two features−the global scale of interdependence of human action,
and the systematic acceleration of innovation, make contemporary life a
bit like a slow motion disaster, in one important respect. Its very
unpredictability makes it unwise to build systems that take too much
away from what human beings do best: look, think, innovate, adapt,
discuss, learn, and repeat. That is why we have seen many more systems
take on a loose, human centric model in the last decade and a half: from
the radical divergence of Toyota’s production system from the highly
structured model put in place by Henry Ford, to the Internet’s radical
departure from the AT&T system that preceded it, and on to the way
Wikipedia constructs human knowledge on the fly, incrementally, in ways
that would have been seen, until recently, as too chaotic ever to work
(and are still seen so be many). But it is time we acknowledge that
systems work best by making work human.
Modern Times
Modern times were hard enough. Trains and planes, telegraph and
telephone, all brought many people into the same causal space. The
solution to this increased complexity in the late 19th, early 20th
century was to increase the role of structure and improve its design.
During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, this type of
rationalization took the form of ever-more complex managed systems, with
crisp specification of roles, lines of authority, communication and
control.
In business, this rationalization was typified by Fredrick Taylor’s
Scientific Management, later embodied in Henry Ford’s assembly line. The
ambition of these approaches was to specify everything that needed doing
in minute detail, to enforce it through monitoring and rewards, and
later to build it into the very technology of work−the assembly line.
The idea was to eliminate human error and variability in the face of
change by removing thinking to the system, and thus neutralizing the
variability of the human beings who worked it. Few images captured that
time, and what it did to humanity, more vividly than Charlie Chaplin’s
assembly line worker in Modern Times.
At the same time, government experienced the rise of bureaucratization
and the administrative state. Nowhere was this done more brutally than
in the totalitarian states of mid-century. But the impulse to build
fully-specified systems, designed by experts, monitored and controlled
so as to limit human greed and error and to manage uncertainty, was
basic and widespread. It underlay the development of the enormously
successful state bureaucracies that responded to the Great Depression
with the New Deal. It took shape in the Marshall Plan to pull Europe out
of the material abyss into which it had been plunged by World War II,
and shepherded Japan’s industrial regeneration from it. In technical
systems too, we saw in mid-century marvels like the AT&T telephone
system and the IBM mainframe. For a moment in history, these large scale
managed systems were achieving efficiencies that seemed to overwhelm
competing models: from the Tennessee Valley Authority to Sputnik, from
Watson’s IBM to General Motors. Yet, to list these paragons from today’s
perspective is already to presage the demise of the belief in their
inevitable victory.
The increasing recognition of the limits of command-and-control systems
led to a new approach; but it turned out to be a retrenchment, not an
abandonment, of the goal of perfect rationalization of systems design,
which assumed much of the human away. What replaced planning and control
in these systems was the myth of perfect markets. This was achieved
through a hyper-simplification of human nature, wedded to mathematical
modeling of what hyper-simplified selfish rational actors, looking only
to their own interests, would do under diverse conditions. This approach
was widespread and influential; it still is. And yet it led to such
unforgettable gems as trying to understand why people do, or do not, use
condoms by writing sentences like: “The expected utility (EU) of unsafe
sex for m and for f is equal to the benefits (B) of unsafe sex minus its
expected costs, and is given by EUm = B - C(1-Pm)(Pf) and EUf = B -
C(1-Pf)(Pm),” and believing that you will learn anything useful about
lust and desire, recklessness and helplessness, or how to slow down the
transmission of AIDS. Only by concocting such a thin model of
humanity−no more than the economists’ utility curve−and neglecting any
complexities of social interactions that could not be conveyed through
prices, could the appearance of rationalization be maintained. Like
bureaucratic rationalization, perfect-market rationalization also had
successes. But, like its predecessor, its limits as an approach to human
systems design are becoming cleare
Work, Trust and Play
Pricing perfectly requires perfect information. And perfect information,
while always an illusion, has become an ever receding dream in a world
of constant, rapid change and complex global interactions. What we are
seeing instead is the rise of human systems that increasingly shy away
from either control or perfect pricing. Not that there isn’t control.
Not that there aren’t markets. And not that either of these approaches
to coordinating human action will disappear. But these managed systems
are becoming increasingly interlaced with looser structures, which
invite and enable more engaged human action by drawing on intrinsic
motivations and social relations. Dress codes and a culture of play in
the workplace in Silicon Valley, like the one day per week that Google
employees can use to play at whatever ideas they like, do not exist to
make the most innovative region in the United States a Ludic paradise,
gratifying employees at the expense of productivity, but rather to
engage the human and social in the pursuit of what is, in the long term,
the only core business competency−innovation. Wikipedia has eclipsed all
the commercial encyclopedias except Britannica not by issuing a large
IPO and hiring the smartest guys in the room, but by building an open
and inviting system that lets people learn together and pursue their
passion for knowledge, and each other’s company.
The set of human systems necessary for action in this complex,
unpredictable set of conditions, combining rationalization with human
agency, learning and adaptation, is as different from managed systems
and perfect markets as the new Toyota is from the old General Motors, or
as the Internet now is from AT&T then. The hallmarks of these newer
systems are: (a) location of authority and practical capacity to act at
the edges of the system, where potentialities for sensing the
environment, identifying opportunities and challenges to action and
acting upon them, are located; (b) an emphasis on the human: on trust,
cooperation, judgment and insight; (c) communication over the lifetime
of the interaction; and (d) loosely-coupled systems: systems in which
the regularities and dependencies among objects and processes are less
strictly associated with each other; where actions and interactions can
occur through multiple systems simultaneously, have room to fail,
maneuver, and be reoriented to fit changing conditions and new learning,
or shift from one system to another to achieve a solution.
Consider first of all the triumph of Toyota over the programs of Taylor
and Ford. Taylorism was typified by the ambition to measure and specify
all human and material elements of the production system. The ambition
of scientific management was to offer a single, integrated system where
all human variance (the source of slothful shirking and inept error)
could be isolated and controlled. Fordism took that ambition and
embedded the managerial knowledge in the technological platform of the
assembly line, guided by a multitude of rigid task specifications and
routines. Toyota Production System, by comparison, has a substantially
smaller number of roles that are also more loosely defined, with a
reliance on small teams where each team member can perform all tasks,
and who are encouraged to experiment, improve, fail, adapt, but above
all communicate. The system is built on trust and a cooperative dynamic.
The enterprise functions through a managerial control system, but also
through social cooperation mechanisms built around teamwork and trust.
However, even Toyota might be bested in this respect by the even more
loosely coupled networks of innovation and supply represented by
Taiwanese original-design manufacturers.
But let us also consider the system in question that has made this work
possible, the Internet, and compare it to the design principles of the
AT&T network in its heyday. Unlike the Internet, AT&T’s network was
fully managed. Mid-century, the company even retained ownership of the
phones at the endpoints, arguing that it needed to prohibit customers
from connecting unlicensed phones to the system (ostensibly to ensure
proper functioning of the networking and monitoring of customer
behavior, although it didn’t hurt either that this policy effectively
excluded competitors). This generated profit, but any substantial
technical innovations required the approval of management and a
re-engineering of the entire network. The Internet, on the other hand,
was designed to be as general as possible. The network hardware merely
delivers packets of data using standardized addressing information. The
hard processing work−manipulating a humanly-meaningful communication (a
letter or a song, a video or a software package) and breaking it up into
a stream of packets−was to be done by its edge devices, in this case
computers owned by users. This system allowed the breathtaking rate of
innovation that we have seen, while also creating certain
vulnerabilities in online security.
These vulnerabilities have led some to argue that a new system to manage
the Internet is needed. We see first of all that doubts about trust and
security on the Internet arise precisely because the network was
originally designed for people who could more-or-less trust each other,
and offloaded security from the network to the edges. As the network
grew and users diversified, trust (the practical belief that other human
agents in the system were competent and benign, or at least sincere)
declined. This decline was met with arguments in favor of building
security into the technical system, both at its core, in the network
elements themselves, and at its periphery, through “trusted computing.”
A “trusted computer” will, for example, not run a program or document
that its owner wants to run, unless it has received authorization from
some other locus: be it the copyright owner, the virus protection
company, or the employer. This is thought to be the most completely
effective means of preventing copyright infringement or system failure,
and preserving corporate security (these are the main reasons offered
for implementing such systems). Trusted computing in this form is the
ultimate reversal of the human-centric, loosely-coupled design approach
of the Internet. Instead of locating authority and capacity to act at
the endpoints, where human beings are located and can make decisions
about what is worthwhile, it implements the belief that
machines−technical systems−are trustworthy, while their human users are
malevolent, incompetent, or both.
Reintroducing the Human
Taylorism, the Bell system and trusted computing are all efforts to
remove human agency from action and replace it with well-designed,
tightly-bound systems. That is, the specifications and regularities of
the system are such that they control or direct action and learning over
time. Human agency, learning, communication and adaptation are minimized
in managed systems, if not eliminated, and the knowledge in the system
comes from the outside, from the designer, in the initial design over
time, and through observation of the system’s performance by someone
standing outside its constraints−a manager or systems designer. By
contrast, loosely-coupled systems affirmatively eschew this level of
control, and build in room for human agency, experimentation, failure,
communication, learning and adaptation. Loose-coupling is central to the
new systems. It is a feature of system design that leaves room for human
agency over time, only imperfectly constraining and enabling any given
action by the system itself. By creating such domains of human agency,
system designers are accepting the limitations of design and foresight,
and building in the possibilities of learning over time through action
in the system, by agents acting within
To deal with the new complexity of contemporary life we need to
re-introduce the human into the design of systems. We must put the soul
back into the system. If years of work on artificial intelligence have
taught us anything, it is that what makes for human insight is extremely
difficult to replicate or systematize. At the center of these new
systems, then, sits a human being who has a capacity to make judgments,
experiment, learn and adapt. But enabling human agency also provides
scope of action for human frailty. Although this idea is most alien to
the mainstream of system design in the twentieth century, we must now
turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality−our
ability to think of others and their needs, and to choose for ourselves
goals consistent with a broader social concern than merely our own
self-interest. The challenge of the near future is to build systems that
will allow us to be largely free to inquire, experiment, learn and
communicate, that will encourage us to cooperate, and that will avoid
the worst of what human beings are capable of, and elicit what is best.
Free software, Wikipedia, Creative Commons and the thousands of emerging
human practices of productive social cooperation in the networked
information economy give us real existence proofs that human-centric
systems can not merely exist, but thrive, as can the human beings and
social relations that make them. | By re-engineering the entire network. | of unsafe sex minus its | By being a fully managed system. | It was designed to be as general as possible. | 3 |
99920_U7PIXLPN_8 | What is a "trusted computer"? | COMPLEXITY AND HUMANITY
We have all seen the images. Volunteers pitching in. People working day
and night; coming up with the most ingenious, improvised solutions to
everything from food and shelter to communications and security. Working
together; patching up the fabric that is rent. Disaster, natural or
otherwise, is a breakdown of systems. For a time, chaos reigns. For a
time, what will happen in the next five minutes, five hours, and five
days is unknown. All we have to rely on are our wits, fortitude, and
common humanity
Contemporary life is not chaotic, in the colloquial sense we apply to
disaster zones. It is, however, complex and rapidly changing; much more
so than life was in the past; even the very near past. Life, of course,
was never simple. But the fact that day-to-day behaviors in Shenzhen and
Bangalore have direct and immediate effects on people from Wichita to
Strasbourg, from Rio de Janeiro to Sydney, or that unscrupulous lenders
and careless borrowers in the United States can upend economic
expectations everywhere else in the world, no matter how carefully
others have planned, means that there are many more moving parts that
affect each other. And from this scale of practical effects, complexity
emerges. New things too were ever under the sun; but the systematic
application of knowledge to the creation of new knowledge, innovation to
innovation, and information to making more information has become
pervasive; and with it the knowledge that next year will be very
different than this. The Web, after all, is less than a generation old.
These two features−the global scale of interdependence of human action,
and the systematic acceleration of innovation, make contemporary life a
bit like a slow motion disaster, in one important respect. Its very
unpredictability makes it unwise to build systems that take too much
away from what human beings do best: look, think, innovate, adapt,
discuss, learn, and repeat. That is why we have seen many more systems
take on a loose, human centric model in the last decade and a half: from
the radical divergence of Toyota’s production system from the highly
structured model put in place by Henry Ford, to the Internet’s radical
departure from the AT&T system that preceded it, and on to the way
Wikipedia constructs human knowledge on the fly, incrementally, in ways
that would have been seen, until recently, as too chaotic ever to work
(and are still seen so be many). But it is time we acknowledge that
systems work best by making work human.
Modern Times
Modern times were hard enough. Trains and planes, telegraph and
telephone, all brought many people into the same causal space. The
solution to this increased complexity in the late 19th, early 20th
century was to increase the role of structure and improve its design.
During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, this type of
rationalization took the form of ever-more complex managed systems, with
crisp specification of roles, lines of authority, communication and
control.
In business, this rationalization was typified by Fredrick Taylor’s
Scientific Management, later embodied in Henry Ford’s assembly line. The
ambition of these approaches was to specify everything that needed doing
in minute detail, to enforce it through monitoring and rewards, and
later to build it into the very technology of work−the assembly line.
The idea was to eliminate human error and variability in the face of
change by removing thinking to the system, and thus neutralizing the
variability of the human beings who worked it. Few images captured that
time, and what it did to humanity, more vividly than Charlie Chaplin’s
assembly line worker in Modern Times.
At the same time, government experienced the rise of bureaucratization
and the administrative state. Nowhere was this done more brutally than
in the totalitarian states of mid-century. But the impulse to build
fully-specified systems, designed by experts, monitored and controlled
so as to limit human greed and error and to manage uncertainty, was
basic and widespread. It underlay the development of the enormously
successful state bureaucracies that responded to the Great Depression
with the New Deal. It took shape in the Marshall Plan to pull Europe out
of the material abyss into which it had been plunged by World War II,
and shepherded Japan’s industrial regeneration from it. In technical
systems too, we saw in mid-century marvels like the AT&T telephone
system and the IBM mainframe. For a moment in history, these large scale
managed systems were achieving efficiencies that seemed to overwhelm
competing models: from the Tennessee Valley Authority to Sputnik, from
Watson’s IBM to General Motors. Yet, to list these paragons from today’s
perspective is already to presage the demise of the belief in their
inevitable victory.
The increasing recognition of the limits of command-and-control systems
led to a new approach; but it turned out to be a retrenchment, not an
abandonment, of the goal of perfect rationalization of systems design,
which assumed much of the human away. What replaced planning and control
in these systems was the myth of perfect markets. This was achieved
through a hyper-simplification of human nature, wedded to mathematical
modeling of what hyper-simplified selfish rational actors, looking only
to their own interests, would do under diverse conditions. This approach
was widespread and influential; it still is. And yet it led to such
unforgettable gems as trying to understand why people do, or do not, use
condoms by writing sentences like: “The expected utility (EU) of unsafe
sex for m and for f is equal to the benefits (B) of unsafe sex minus its
expected costs, and is given by EUm = B - C(1-Pm)(Pf) and EUf = B -
C(1-Pf)(Pm),” and believing that you will learn anything useful about
lust and desire, recklessness and helplessness, or how to slow down the
transmission of AIDS. Only by concocting such a thin model of
humanity−no more than the economists’ utility curve−and neglecting any
complexities of social interactions that could not be conveyed through
prices, could the appearance of rationalization be maintained. Like
bureaucratic rationalization, perfect-market rationalization also had
successes. But, like its predecessor, its limits as an approach to human
systems design are becoming cleare
Work, Trust and Play
Pricing perfectly requires perfect information. And perfect information,
while always an illusion, has become an ever receding dream in a world
of constant, rapid change and complex global interactions. What we are
seeing instead is the rise of human systems that increasingly shy away
from either control or perfect pricing. Not that there isn’t control.
Not that there aren’t markets. And not that either of these approaches
to coordinating human action will disappear. But these managed systems
are becoming increasingly interlaced with looser structures, which
invite and enable more engaged human action by drawing on intrinsic
motivations and social relations. Dress codes and a culture of play in
the workplace in Silicon Valley, like the one day per week that Google
employees can use to play at whatever ideas they like, do not exist to
make the most innovative region in the United States a Ludic paradise,
gratifying employees at the expense of productivity, but rather to
engage the human and social in the pursuit of what is, in the long term,
the only core business competency−innovation. Wikipedia has eclipsed all
the commercial encyclopedias except Britannica not by issuing a large
IPO and hiring the smartest guys in the room, but by building an open
and inviting system that lets people learn together and pursue their
passion for knowledge, and each other’s company.
The set of human systems necessary for action in this complex,
unpredictable set of conditions, combining rationalization with human
agency, learning and adaptation, is as different from managed systems
and perfect markets as the new Toyota is from the old General Motors, or
as the Internet now is from AT&T then. The hallmarks of these newer
systems are: (a) location of authority and practical capacity to act at
the edges of the system, where potentialities for sensing the
environment, identifying opportunities and challenges to action and
acting upon them, are located; (b) an emphasis on the human: on trust,
cooperation, judgment and insight; (c) communication over the lifetime
of the interaction; and (d) loosely-coupled systems: systems in which
the regularities and dependencies among objects and processes are less
strictly associated with each other; where actions and interactions can
occur through multiple systems simultaneously, have room to fail,
maneuver, and be reoriented to fit changing conditions and new learning,
or shift from one system to another to achieve a solution.
Consider first of all the triumph of Toyota over the programs of Taylor
and Ford. Taylorism was typified by the ambition to measure and specify
all human and material elements of the production system. The ambition
of scientific management was to offer a single, integrated system where
all human variance (the source of slothful shirking and inept error)
could be isolated and controlled. Fordism took that ambition and
embedded the managerial knowledge in the technological platform of the
assembly line, guided by a multitude of rigid task specifications and
routines. Toyota Production System, by comparison, has a substantially
smaller number of roles that are also more loosely defined, with a
reliance on small teams where each team member can perform all tasks,
and who are encouraged to experiment, improve, fail, adapt, but above
all communicate. The system is built on trust and a cooperative dynamic.
The enterprise functions through a managerial control system, but also
through social cooperation mechanisms built around teamwork and trust.
However, even Toyota might be bested in this respect by the even more
loosely coupled networks of innovation and supply represented by
Taiwanese original-design manufacturers.
But let us also consider the system in question that has made this work
possible, the Internet, and compare it to the design principles of the
AT&T network in its heyday. Unlike the Internet, AT&T’s network was
fully managed. Mid-century, the company even retained ownership of the
phones at the endpoints, arguing that it needed to prohibit customers
from connecting unlicensed phones to the system (ostensibly to ensure
proper functioning of the networking and monitoring of customer
behavior, although it didn’t hurt either that this policy effectively
excluded competitors). This generated profit, but any substantial
technical innovations required the approval of management and a
re-engineering of the entire network. The Internet, on the other hand,
was designed to be as general as possible. The network hardware merely
delivers packets of data using standardized addressing information. The
hard processing work−manipulating a humanly-meaningful communication (a
letter or a song, a video or a software package) and breaking it up into
a stream of packets−was to be done by its edge devices, in this case
computers owned by users. This system allowed the breathtaking rate of
innovation that we have seen, while also creating certain
vulnerabilities in online security.
These vulnerabilities have led some to argue that a new system to manage
the Internet is needed. We see first of all that doubts about trust and
security on the Internet arise precisely because the network was
originally designed for people who could more-or-less trust each other,
and offloaded security from the network to the edges. As the network
grew and users diversified, trust (the practical belief that other human
agents in the system were competent and benign, or at least sincere)
declined. This decline was met with arguments in favor of building
security into the technical system, both at its core, in the network
elements themselves, and at its periphery, through “trusted computing.”
A “trusted computer” will, for example, not run a program or document
that its owner wants to run, unless it has received authorization from
some other locus: be it the copyright owner, the virus protection
company, or the employer. This is thought to be the most completely
effective means of preventing copyright infringement or system failure,
and preserving corporate security (these are the main reasons offered
for implementing such systems). Trusted computing in this form is the
ultimate reversal of the human-centric, loosely-coupled design approach
of the Internet. Instead of locating authority and capacity to act at
the endpoints, where human beings are located and can make decisions
about what is worthwhile, it implements the belief that
machines−technical systems−are trustworthy, while their human users are
malevolent, incompetent, or both.
Reintroducing the Human
Taylorism, the Bell system and trusted computing are all efforts to
remove human agency from action and replace it with well-designed,
tightly-bound systems. That is, the specifications and regularities of
the system are such that they control or direct action and learning over
time. Human agency, learning, communication and adaptation are minimized
in managed systems, if not eliminated, and the knowledge in the system
comes from the outside, from the designer, in the initial design over
time, and through observation of the system’s performance by someone
standing outside its constraints−a manager or systems designer. By
contrast, loosely-coupled systems affirmatively eschew this level of
control, and build in room for human agency, experimentation, failure,
communication, learning and adaptation. Loose-coupling is central to the
new systems. It is a feature of system design that leaves room for human
agency over time, only imperfectly constraining and enabling any given
action by the system itself. By creating such domains of human agency,
system designers are accepting the limitations of design and foresight,
and building in the possibilities of learning over time through action
in the system, by agents acting within
To deal with the new complexity of contemporary life we need to
re-introduce the human into the design of systems. We must put the soul
back into the system. If years of work on artificial intelligence have
taught us anything, it is that what makes for human insight is extremely
difficult to replicate or systematize. At the center of these new
systems, then, sits a human being who has a capacity to make judgments,
experiment, learn and adapt. But enabling human agency also provides
scope of action for human frailty. Although this idea is most alien to
the mainstream of system design in the twentieth century, we must now
turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality−our
ability to think of others and their needs, and to choose for ourselves
goals consistent with a broader social concern than merely our own
self-interest. The challenge of the near future is to build systems that
will allow us to be largely free to inquire, experiment, learn and
communicate, that will encourage us to cooperate, and that will avoid
the worst of what human beings are capable of, and elicit what is best.
Free software, Wikipedia, Creative Commons and the thousands of emerging
human practices of productive social cooperation in the networked
information economy give us real existence proofs that human-centric
systems can not merely exist, but thrive, as can the human beings and
social relations that make them. | A computer system that implements the belief that machines are trustworthy, while human users are malevolent and or incompetent. | of unsafe sex minus its | A computer that will not run a program without authorization from some other locus, such as a copyright owner. | A computer system where human beings are located and can make decisions about what is worthwhile. | 2 |
99920_U7PIXLPN_9 | What is something that gives us real proof that human-centric systems can thrive? | COMPLEXITY AND HUMANITY
We have all seen the images. Volunteers pitching in. People working day
and night; coming up with the most ingenious, improvised solutions to
everything from food and shelter to communications and security. Working
together; patching up the fabric that is rent. Disaster, natural or
otherwise, is a breakdown of systems. For a time, chaos reigns. For a
time, what will happen in the next five minutes, five hours, and five
days is unknown. All we have to rely on are our wits, fortitude, and
common humanity
Contemporary life is not chaotic, in the colloquial sense we apply to
disaster zones. It is, however, complex and rapidly changing; much more
so than life was in the past; even the very near past. Life, of course,
was never simple. But the fact that day-to-day behaviors in Shenzhen and
Bangalore have direct and immediate effects on people from Wichita to
Strasbourg, from Rio de Janeiro to Sydney, or that unscrupulous lenders
and careless borrowers in the United States can upend economic
expectations everywhere else in the world, no matter how carefully
others have planned, means that there are many more moving parts that
affect each other. And from this scale of practical effects, complexity
emerges. New things too were ever under the sun; but the systematic
application of knowledge to the creation of new knowledge, innovation to
innovation, and information to making more information has become
pervasive; and with it the knowledge that next year will be very
different than this. The Web, after all, is less than a generation old.
These two features−the global scale of interdependence of human action,
and the systematic acceleration of innovation, make contemporary life a
bit like a slow motion disaster, in one important respect. Its very
unpredictability makes it unwise to build systems that take too much
away from what human beings do best: look, think, innovate, adapt,
discuss, learn, and repeat. That is why we have seen many more systems
take on a loose, human centric model in the last decade and a half: from
the radical divergence of Toyota’s production system from the highly
structured model put in place by Henry Ford, to the Internet’s radical
departure from the AT&T system that preceded it, and on to the way
Wikipedia constructs human knowledge on the fly, incrementally, in ways
that would have been seen, until recently, as too chaotic ever to work
(and are still seen so be many). But it is time we acknowledge that
systems work best by making work human.
Modern Times
Modern times were hard enough. Trains and planes, telegraph and
telephone, all brought many people into the same causal space. The
solution to this increased complexity in the late 19th, early 20th
century was to increase the role of structure and improve its design.
During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, this type of
rationalization took the form of ever-more complex managed systems, with
crisp specification of roles, lines of authority, communication and
control.
In business, this rationalization was typified by Fredrick Taylor’s
Scientific Management, later embodied in Henry Ford’s assembly line. The
ambition of these approaches was to specify everything that needed doing
in minute detail, to enforce it through monitoring and rewards, and
later to build it into the very technology of work−the assembly line.
The idea was to eliminate human error and variability in the face of
change by removing thinking to the system, and thus neutralizing the
variability of the human beings who worked it. Few images captured that
time, and what it did to humanity, more vividly than Charlie Chaplin’s
assembly line worker in Modern Times.
At the same time, government experienced the rise of bureaucratization
and the administrative state. Nowhere was this done more brutally than
in the totalitarian states of mid-century. But the impulse to build
fully-specified systems, designed by experts, monitored and controlled
so as to limit human greed and error and to manage uncertainty, was
basic and widespread. It underlay the development of the enormously
successful state bureaucracies that responded to the Great Depression
with the New Deal. It took shape in the Marshall Plan to pull Europe out
of the material abyss into which it had been plunged by World War II,
and shepherded Japan’s industrial regeneration from it. In technical
systems too, we saw in mid-century marvels like the AT&T telephone
system and the IBM mainframe. For a moment in history, these large scale
managed systems were achieving efficiencies that seemed to overwhelm
competing models: from the Tennessee Valley Authority to Sputnik, from
Watson’s IBM to General Motors. Yet, to list these paragons from today’s
perspective is already to presage the demise of the belief in their
inevitable victory.
The increasing recognition of the limits of command-and-control systems
led to a new approach; but it turned out to be a retrenchment, not an
abandonment, of the goal of perfect rationalization of systems design,
which assumed much of the human away. What replaced planning and control
in these systems was the myth of perfect markets. This was achieved
through a hyper-simplification of human nature, wedded to mathematical
modeling of what hyper-simplified selfish rational actors, looking only
to their own interests, would do under diverse conditions. This approach
was widespread and influential; it still is. And yet it led to such
unforgettable gems as trying to understand why people do, or do not, use
condoms by writing sentences like: “The expected utility (EU) of unsafe
sex for m and for f is equal to the benefits (B) of unsafe sex minus its
expected costs, and is given by EUm = B - C(1-Pm)(Pf) and EUf = B -
C(1-Pf)(Pm),” and believing that you will learn anything useful about
lust and desire, recklessness and helplessness, or how to slow down the
transmission of AIDS. Only by concocting such a thin model of
humanity−no more than the economists’ utility curve−and neglecting any
complexities of social interactions that could not be conveyed through
prices, could the appearance of rationalization be maintained. Like
bureaucratic rationalization, perfect-market rationalization also had
successes. But, like its predecessor, its limits as an approach to human
systems design are becoming cleare
Work, Trust and Play
Pricing perfectly requires perfect information. And perfect information,
while always an illusion, has become an ever receding dream in a world
of constant, rapid change and complex global interactions. What we are
seeing instead is the rise of human systems that increasingly shy away
from either control or perfect pricing. Not that there isn’t control.
Not that there aren’t markets. And not that either of these approaches
to coordinating human action will disappear. But these managed systems
are becoming increasingly interlaced with looser structures, which
invite and enable more engaged human action by drawing on intrinsic
motivations and social relations. Dress codes and a culture of play in
the workplace in Silicon Valley, like the one day per week that Google
employees can use to play at whatever ideas they like, do not exist to
make the most innovative region in the United States a Ludic paradise,
gratifying employees at the expense of productivity, but rather to
engage the human and social in the pursuit of what is, in the long term,
the only core business competency−innovation. Wikipedia has eclipsed all
the commercial encyclopedias except Britannica not by issuing a large
IPO and hiring the smartest guys in the room, but by building an open
and inviting system that lets people learn together and pursue their
passion for knowledge, and each other’s company.
The set of human systems necessary for action in this complex,
unpredictable set of conditions, combining rationalization with human
agency, learning and adaptation, is as different from managed systems
and perfect markets as the new Toyota is from the old General Motors, or
as the Internet now is from AT&T then. The hallmarks of these newer
systems are: (a) location of authority and practical capacity to act at
the edges of the system, where potentialities for sensing the
environment, identifying opportunities and challenges to action and
acting upon them, are located; (b) an emphasis on the human: on trust,
cooperation, judgment and insight; (c) communication over the lifetime
of the interaction; and (d) loosely-coupled systems: systems in which
the regularities and dependencies among objects and processes are less
strictly associated with each other; where actions and interactions can
occur through multiple systems simultaneously, have room to fail,
maneuver, and be reoriented to fit changing conditions and new learning,
or shift from one system to another to achieve a solution.
Consider first of all the triumph of Toyota over the programs of Taylor
and Ford. Taylorism was typified by the ambition to measure and specify
all human and material elements of the production system. The ambition
of scientific management was to offer a single, integrated system where
all human variance (the source of slothful shirking and inept error)
could be isolated and controlled. Fordism took that ambition and
embedded the managerial knowledge in the technological platform of the
assembly line, guided by a multitude of rigid task specifications and
routines. Toyota Production System, by comparison, has a substantially
smaller number of roles that are also more loosely defined, with a
reliance on small teams where each team member can perform all tasks,
and who are encouraged to experiment, improve, fail, adapt, but above
all communicate. The system is built on trust and a cooperative dynamic.
The enterprise functions through a managerial control system, but also
through social cooperation mechanisms built around teamwork and trust.
However, even Toyota might be bested in this respect by the even more
loosely coupled networks of innovation and supply represented by
Taiwanese original-design manufacturers.
But let us also consider the system in question that has made this work
possible, the Internet, and compare it to the design principles of the
AT&T network in its heyday. Unlike the Internet, AT&T’s network was
fully managed. Mid-century, the company even retained ownership of the
phones at the endpoints, arguing that it needed to prohibit customers
from connecting unlicensed phones to the system (ostensibly to ensure
proper functioning of the networking and monitoring of customer
behavior, although it didn’t hurt either that this policy effectively
excluded competitors). This generated profit, but any substantial
technical innovations required the approval of management and a
re-engineering of the entire network. The Internet, on the other hand,
was designed to be as general as possible. The network hardware merely
delivers packets of data using standardized addressing information. The
hard processing work−manipulating a humanly-meaningful communication (a
letter or a song, a video or a software package) and breaking it up into
a stream of packets−was to be done by its edge devices, in this case
computers owned by users. This system allowed the breathtaking rate of
innovation that we have seen, while also creating certain
vulnerabilities in online security.
These vulnerabilities have led some to argue that a new system to manage
the Internet is needed. We see first of all that doubts about trust and
security on the Internet arise precisely because the network was
originally designed for people who could more-or-less trust each other,
and offloaded security from the network to the edges. As the network
grew and users diversified, trust (the practical belief that other human
agents in the system were competent and benign, or at least sincere)
declined. This decline was met with arguments in favor of building
security into the technical system, both at its core, in the network
elements themselves, and at its periphery, through “trusted computing.”
A “trusted computer” will, for example, not run a program or document
that its owner wants to run, unless it has received authorization from
some other locus: be it the copyright owner, the virus protection
company, or the employer. This is thought to be the most completely
effective means of preventing copyright infringement or system failure,
and preserving corporate security (these are the main reasons offered
for implementing such systems). Trusted computing in this form is the
ultimate reversal of the human-centric, loosely-coupled design approach
of the Internet. Instead of locating authority and capacity to act at
the endpoints, where human beings are located and can make decisions
about what is worthwhile, it implements the belief that
machines−technical systems−are trustworthy, while their human users are
malevolent, incompetent, or both.
Reintroducing the Human
Taylorism, the Bell system and trusted computing are all efforts to
remove human agency from action and replace it with well-designed,
tightly-bound systems. That is, the specifications and regularities of
the system are such that they control or direct action and learning over
time. Human agency, learning, communication and adaptation are minimized
in managed systems, if not eliminated, and the knowledge in the system
comes from the outside, from the designer, in the initial design over
time, and through observation of the system’s performance by someone
standing outside its constraints−a manager or systems designer. By
contrast, loosely-coupled systems affirmatively eschew this level of
control, and build in room for human agency, experimentation, failure,
communication, learning and adaptation. Loose-coupling is central to the
new systems. It is a feature of system design that leaves room for human
agency over time, only imperfectly constraining and enabling any given
action by the system itself. By creating such domains of human agency,
system designers are accepting the limitations of design and foresight,
and building in the possibilities of learning over time through action
in the system, by agents acting within
To deal with the new complexity of contemporary life we need to
re-introduce the human into the design of systems. We must put the soul
back into the system. If years of work on artificial intelligence have
taught us anything, it is that what makes for human insight is extremely
difficult to replicate or systematize. At the center of these new
systems, then, sits a human being who has a capacity to make judgments,
experiment, learn and adapt. But enabling human agency also provides
scope of action for human frailty. Although this idea is most alien to
the mainstream of system design in the twentieth century, we must now
turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality−our
ability to think of others and their needs, and to choose for ourselves
goals consistent with a broader social concern than merely our own
self-interest. The challenge of the near future is to build systems that
will allow us to be largely free to inquire, experiment, learn and
communicate, that will encourage us to cooperate, and that will avoid
the worst of what human beings are capable of, and elicit what is best.
Free software, Wikipedia, Creative Commons and the thousands of emerging
human practices of productive social cooperation in the networked
information economy give us real existence proofs that human-centric
systems can not merely exist, but thrive, as can the human beings and
social relations that make them. | Taylorism | of unsafe sex minus its | Wikipedia | The New Deal | 2 |
99924_YN01YWI7_1 | What is the access revolution? | What Is Open Access?
Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. About thirty years ago this kind of free global sharing became something new under the sun. Before that, it would have sounded like a quixotic dream.
Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. Let’s call this one the access revolution.
Why don’t more authors take advantage of the access revolution to reach more readers? The answer is pretty clear. Authors who share their works in this way aren’t selling them, and even authors with purposes higher than money depend on sales to make a living. Or at least they appreciate sales.
Let’s sharpen the question, then, by putting to one side authors who want to sell their work. We can even acknowledge that we’re putting aside the vast majority of authors.
Imagine a tribe of authors who write serious and useful work, and who follow a centuries-old custom of giving it away without charge. I don’t mean a group of rich authors who don’t need money. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. In fact, very few are wealthy. For now, it doesn’t matter who these authors are, how rare they are, what they write, or why they follow this peculiar custom. It’s enough to know that their employers pay them salaries, freeing them to give away their work, that they write for impact rather than money, and that they score career points when they make the kind of impact they hoped to make. Suppose that selling their work would actually harm their interests by shrinking their audience, reducing their impact, and distorting their professional goals by steering them toward popular topics and away from the specialized questions on which they are experts.
If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. The dream of global free access can be a reality for them, even if most other authors hope to earn royalties and feel obliged to sit out this particular revolution.
These lucky authors are scholars, and the works they customarily write and publish without payment are peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals.
Open access
is the name of the revolutionary kind of access these authors, unencumbered by a motive of financial gain, are free to provide to their readers.
Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes.
A price tag
is a significant access barrier. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. But when a scholar needs to read or consult hundreds of works for one research project, or when a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics, and when the volume of new work grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers.
Copyright
can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. That makes sense when the author wants to sell the work and when the use you have in mind could undermine sales. But for research articles we’re generally talking about authors from the special tribe who want to share their work as widely as possible. Even these authors, however, tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries—publishers—who want to sell their work. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. OA removes these permission barriers.
Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it.
Terminology
When we need to, we can be more specific about access vehicles and access barriers. In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called
gold OA
, and OA delivered by repositories is called
green OA
. Work that is not open access, or that is available only for a price, is called
toll access
(TA). Over the years I’ve asked publishers for a neutral, nonpejorative and nonhonorific term for toll-access publishers, and
conventional publishers
is the suggestion I hear most often. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide
gratis OA
, and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide
libre OA
. (Also see section 3.1 on green/gold and section 3.3 on gratis/libre.)
OA was defined in three influential public statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003).
I sometimes refer to their overlap or common ground as the BBB definition of OA. My definition here is the BBB definition reduced to its essential elements and refined with some post-BBB terminology (green, gold, gratis, libre) for speaking precisely about subspecies of OA. Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA:
There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Here’s how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.”
Note that all three legs of the BBB definition go beyond removing price barriers to removing permission barriers, or beyond gratis OA to libre OA. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. The purpose of OA is to remove barriers to all legitimate scholarly uses for scholarly literature, but there’s no legitimate scholarly purpose in suppressing attribution to the texts we use. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.)
The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. If there are complexities, they lie in the transition from where we are now to a world in which OA is the default for new research. This is complicated because the major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural. (More in
chapter 9
on the future.)
In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. Moreover, any kind of content can be digital: texts, data, images, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software—and to different degrees we already do. But the term “open access” was coined by researchers trying to remove access barriers to research. The next section explains why.
1.1 What Makes OA Possible?
OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. But why would a copyright holder consent to OA?
Two background facts suggest the answer. First, authors are the copyright holders for their work until or unless they transfer rights to someone else, such as a publisher.
Second, scholarly journals generally don’t pay authors for their research articles, which frees this special tribe of authors to consent to OA without losing revenue. This fact distinguishes scholars decisively from musicians and moviemakers, and even from most other kinds of authors. This is why controversies about OA to music and movies don’t carry over to OA for research articles.
Both facts are critical, but the second is nearly unknown outside the academic world. It’s not a new fact of academic life, arising from a recent economic downturn in the publishing industry. Nor is it a case of corporate exploitation of unworldly academics. Scholarly journals haven’t paid authors for their articles since the first scholarly journals, the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society of London and the
Journal des sçavans
, launched in London and Paris in 1665.
The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. Or it may be a wise adaptation that would eventually evolve in any culture with a serious research subculture. (The optimist in me wants to believe the latter, but the evolution of copyright law taunts that optimism.) This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It also supports academic freedom and the kinds of serious inquiry that advance knowledge. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. At the same time it frees them to microspecialize and defend ideas of immediate interest to just a handful people in the world, which are essential to pushing the frontiers of knowledge.
This custom doesn’t guarantee that truth-seeking won’t be derailed by profit-seeking, and it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eventually fill the smallest gaps in our collaborative understanding of the world. It doesn’t even guarantee that scholars won’t sometimes play for the crowd and detour into fad thinking. But it removes a major distraction by allowing them, if they wish, to focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell. It’s a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to research, and it’s the key to the legal and economic lock that would otherwise shackle steps toward OA.
Creative people who live by royalties, such as novelists, musicians, and moviemakers, may consider this scholarly tradition a burden and sacrifice for scholars. We might even agree, provided we don’t overlook a few facts. First, it’s a sacrifice that scholars have been making for nearly 350 years. OA to research articles doesn’t depend on asking royalty-earning authors to give up their royalties. Second, academics have salaries from universities, freeing them to dive deeply into their research topics and publish specialized articles without market appeal. Many musicians and moviemakers might envy that freedom to disregard sales and popular taste. Third, academics receive other, less tangible rewards from their institutions—like promotion and tenure—when their research is recognized by others, accepted, cited, applied, and built upon.
It’s no accident that faculty who advance knowledge in their fields also advance their careers. Academics are passionate about certain topics, ideas, questions, inquiries, or disciplines. They feel lucky to have jobs in which they may pursue these passions and even luckier to be rewarded for pursuing them. Some focus single-mindedly on carrying an honest pebble to the pile of knowledge (as John Lange put it), having an impact on their field, or scooping others working on the same questions. Others focus strategically on building the case for promotion and tenure. But the two paths converge, which is not a fortuitous fact of nature but an engineered fact of life in the academy. As incentives for productivity, these intangible career benefits may be stronger for the average researcher than royalties are for the average novelist or musician. (In both domains, bountiful royalties for superstars tell us nothing about effective payment models for the long tail of less stellar professionals.)
There’s no sense in which research would be more free, efficient, or effective if academics took a more “businesslike” position, behaved more like musicians and moviemakers, abandoned their insulation from the market, and tied their income to the popularity of their ideas. Nonacademics who urge academics to come to their senses and demand royalties even for journal articles may be more naive about nonprofit research than academics are about for-profit business.
We can take this a step further. Scholars can afford to ignore sales because they have salaries and research grants to take the place of royalties. But why do universities pay salaries and why do funding agencies award grants? They do it to advance research and the range of public interests served by research. They don’t do it to earn profits from the results. They are all nonprofit. They certainly don’t do it to make scholarly writings into gifts to enrich publishers, especially when conventional publishers erect access barriers at the expense of research. Universities and funding agencies pay researchers to make their research into gifts to the public in the widest sense.
Public and private funding agencies are essentially public and private charities, funding research they regard as useful or beneficial. Universities have a public purpose as well, even when they are private institutions. We support the public institutions with public funds, and we support the private ones with tax exemptions for their property and tax deductions for their donors.
We’d have less knowledge, less academic freedom, and less OA if researchers worked for royalties and made their research articles into commodities rather than gifts. It should be no surprise, then, that more and more funding agencies and universities are adopting strong OA policies. Their mission to advance research leads them directly to logic of OA: With a few exceptions, such as classified research, research that is worth funding or facilitating is worth sharing with everyone who can make use of it. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
Newcomers to OA often assume that OA helps readers and hurts authors, and that the reader side of the scholarly soul must beg the author side to make the necessary sacrifice. But OA benefits authors as well as readers. Authors want access to readers at least as much as readers want access to authors. All authors want to cultivate a larger audience and greater impact. Authors who work for royalties have reason to compromise and settle for the smaller audience of paying customers. But authors who aren’t paid for their writing have no reason to compromise.
It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to recognize that scholarly publication is accompanied by a strong interest in impact and career building. The result is a mix of interested and disinterested motives. The reasons to make work OA are essentially the same as the reasons to publish. Authors who make their work OA are always serving others but not always acting from altruism. In fact, the idea that OA depends on author altruism slows down OA progress by hiding the role of author self-interest.
Another aspect of author self-interest emerges from the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles, even when they are published in the same issue of the same journal. There’s growing evidence that OA articles are downloaded more often as well, and that journals converting to OA see a rise in their submissions and citation impact.
There are many hypotheses to explain the correlation between OA and increased citations, but it’s likely that ongoing studies will show that much of the correlation is simply due to the larger audience and heightened visibility provided by OA itself. When you enlarge the audience for an article, you also enlarge the subset of the audience that will later cite it, including professionals in the same field at institutions unable to afford subscription access. OA enlarges the potential audience, including the potential professional audience, far beyond that for even the most prestigious and popular subscription journals.
In any case, these studies bring a welcome note of author self-interest to the case for OA. OA is not a sacrifice for authors who write for impact rather than money. It increases a work’s visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming. But as we’ll see, it’s not costly, not difficult, and not time-consuming.
My colleague Stevan Harnad frequently compares research articles to advertisements. They advertise the author’s research. Try telling advertisers that they’re making a needless sacrifice by allowing people to read their ads without having to pay for the privilege. Advertisers give away their ads and even pay to place them where they might be seen. They do this to benefit themselves, and scholars have the same interest in sharing their message as widely as possible.
Because any content can be digital, and any digital content can be OA, OA needn’t be limited to royalty-free literature like research articles. Research articles are just ripe examples of low-hanging fruit. OA could extend to royalty-producing work like monographs, textbooks, novels, news, music, and movies. But as soon as we cross the line into OA for royalty-producing work, authors will either lose revenue or fear that they will lose revenue. Either way, they’ll be harder to persuade. But instead of concluding that royalty-producing work is off limits to OA, we should merely conclude that it’s higher-hanging fruit. In many cases we can still persuade royalty-earning authors to consent to OA. (See section 5.3 on OA for books.)
Authors of scholarly research articles aren’t the only players who work without pay in the production of research literature. In general, scholarly journals don’t pay editors or referees either. In general, editors and referees are paid salaries by universities to free them, like authors, to donate their time and labor to ensure the quality of new work appearing in scholarly journals. An important consequence follows. All the key players in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA needn’t dispense with peer review or favor unrefereed manuscripts over refereed articles. We can aim for the prize of OA to peer-reviewed scholarship. (See section 5.1 on peer review.)
Of course, conventional publishers are not as free as authors, editors, and referees to forgo revenue. This is a central fact in the transition to OA, and it explains why the interests of scholars and conventional publishers diverge more in the digital age than they diverged earlier. But not all publishers are conventional, and not all conventional publishers will carry print-era business models into the digital age.
Academic publishers are not monolithic. Some new ones were born OA and some older ones have completely converted to OA. Many provide OA to some of their work but not all of it. Some are experimenting with OA, and some are watching the experiments of others. Most allow green OA (through repositories) and a growing number offer at least some kind of gold OA (through journals). Some are supportive, some undecided, some opposed. Among the opposed, some have merely decided not to provide OA themselves, while others lobby actively against policies to encourage or require OA. Some oppose gold but not green OA, while others oppose green but not gold OA.
OA gains nothing and loses potential allies by blurring these distinctions. This variety reminds us (to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly) that OA doesn’t threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt.
A growing number of journal publishers have chosen business models allowing them to dispense with subscription revenue and offer OA. They have expenses but they also have revenue to cover their expenses. In fact, some OA publishers are for-profit and profitable. (See chapter 7 on economics.)
Moreover, peer review is done by dedicated volunteers who don’t care how a journal pays its bills, or even whether the journal is in the red or the black. If all peer-reviewed journals converted to OA overnight, the authors, editors, and referees would have the same incentives to participate in peer review that they had the day before. They needn’t stop offering their services, needn’t lower their standards, and needn’t make sacrifices they weren’t already making. They volunteer their time not because of a journal’s choice of business model but because of its contribution to research. They could carry on with solvent or insolvent subscription publishers, with solvent or insolvent OA publishers, or even without publishers.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative said in February 2002: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment. . . . The new technology is the internet.”
To see what this willingness looks like without the medium to give it effect, look at scholarship in the age of print. Author gifts turned into publisher commodities, and access gaps for readers were harmfully large and widespread. (Access gaps are still harmfully large and widespread, but only because OA is not yet the default for new research.) To see what the medium looks like without the willingness, look at music and movies in the age of the internet. The need for royalties keeps creators from reaching everyone who would enjoy their work.
A beautiful opportunity exists where the willingness and the medium overlap. A scholarly custom that evolved in the seventeenth century frees scholars to take advantage of the access revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first. Because scholars are nearly unique in following this custom, they are nearly unique in their freedom to take advantage of this revolution without financial risk. In this sense, the planets have aligned for scholars. Most other authors are constrained to fear rather than seize the opportunities created by the internet.
1.2 What OA Is Not
We can dispel a cloud of objections and misunderstandings simply by pointing out a few things that OA is not. (Many of these points will be elaborated in later chapters.)
OA isn’t an attempt to bypass peer review. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most conservative to the most innovative, and all the major public statements on OA insist on its importance. Because scholarly journals generally don’t pay peer-reviewing editors and referees, just as they don’t pay authors, all the participants in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. While OA to unrefereed preprints is useful and widespread, the OA movement isn’t limited to unrefereed preprints and, if anything, focuses on OA to peer-reviewed articles. (More in section 5.1 on peer review.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reform, violate, or abolish copyright. It’s compatible with copyright law as it is. OA would benefit from the right kinds of copyright reforms, and many dedicated people are working on them. But it needn’t wait for reforms and hasn’t waited. OA literature avoids copyright problems in exactly the same way that conventional toll-access literature does. For older works, it takes advantage of the public domain, and for newer works, it rests on copyright-holder consent. (More in chapter 4 on policies and chapter 6 on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deprive royalty-earning authors of income. The OA movement focuses on research articles precisely because they don’t pay royalties. In any case, inside and outside that focus, OA for copyrighted work depends on copyright-holder consent. Hence, royalty-earning authors have nothing to fear but persuasion that the benefits of OA might outweigh the risks to royalties. (More in section 5.3 on OA for books.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deny the reality of costs. No serious OA advocate has ever argued that OA literature is costless to produce, although many argue that it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature, even less expensive than born-digital toll-access literature. The question is not whether research literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than charging readers and creating access barriers. (More in chapter 7 on economics.)
Terminology
We could talk about vigilante OA, infringing OA, piratical OA, or OA without consent. That sort of OA could violate copyrights and deprive royalty-earning authors of royalties against their will. But we could also talk about vigilante publishing, infringing publishing, piratical publishing, or publishing without consent. Both happen. However, we generally reserve the term “publishing” for lawful publishing, and tack on special adjectives to describe unlawful variations on the theme. Likewise, I’ll reserve the term “open access” for lawful OA that carries the consent of the relevant rightsholder.
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce authors’ rights over their work. On the contrary, OA depends on author decisions and requires authors to exercise more rights or control over their work than they are allowed to exercise under traditional publishing contracts. One OA strategy is for authors to retain some of the rights they formerly gave publishers, including the right to authorize OA. Another OA strategy is for publishers to permit more uses than they formerly permitted, including permission for authors to make OA copies of their work. By contrast, traditional journal-publishing contracts demand that authors transfer all rights to publishers, and author rights or control cannot sink lower than that. (See chapters
4
on policies and
6
on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce academic freedom. Academic authors remain free to submit their work to the journals or publishers of their choice. Policies requiring OA do so conditionally, for example, for researchers who choose to apply for a certain kind of grant. In addition, these policies generally build in exceptions, waiver options, or both. Since 2008 most university OA policies have been adopted by faculty deeply concerned to preserve and even enhance their prerogatives. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
OA isn’t an attempt to relax rules against plagiarism. All the public definitions of OA support author attribution, even construed as a “restriction” on users. All the major open licenses require author attribution. Moreover, plagiarism is typically punished by the plagiarist’s institution rather than by courts, that is, by social norms rather than by law. Hence, even when attribution is not legally required, plagiarism is still a punishable offense and no OA policy anywhere interferes with those punishments. In any case, if making literature digital and online makes plagiarism easier to commit, then OA makes plagiarism easier to detect. Not all plagiarists are smart, but the smart ones will not steal from OA sources indexed in every search engine. In this sense, OA deters plagiarism.
OA isn’t an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers. OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers, and research institutions. The goal is constructive, not destructive. If OA does eventually harm toll-access publishers, it will be in the way that personal computers harmed typewriter manufacturers. The harm was not the goal, but a side effect of developing something better. Moreover, OA doesn’t challenge publishers or publishing per se, just one business model for publishing, and it’s far easier for conventional publishers to adapt to OA than for typewriter manufacturers to adapt to computers. In fact, most toll-access publishers are already adapting, by allowing author-initiated OA, providing some OA themselves, or experimenting with OA. (See section 3.1 on green OA and chapter 8 on casualties.)
OA doesn’t require boycotting any kind of literature or publisher. It doesn’t require boycotting toll-access research any more than free online journalism requires boycotting priced online journalism. OA doesn’t require us to strike toll-access literature from our personal reading lists, course syllabi, or libraries. Some scholars who support OA decide to submit new work only to OA journals, or to donate their time as editors or referees only to OA journals, in effect boycotting toll-access journals as authors, editors, and referees. But this choice is not forced by the definition of OA, by a commitment to OA, or by any OA policy, and most scholars who support OA continue to work with toll-access journals. In any case, even those scholars who do boycott toll-access journals as authors, editors, or referees don’t boycott them as readers. (Here we needn’t get into the complexity that some toll-access journals effectively create involuntary reader boycotts by pricing their journals out of reach of readers who want access.)
OA isn’t primarily about bringing access to lay readers. If anything, the OA movement focuses on bringing access to professional researchers whose careers depend on access. But there’s no need to decide which users are primary and which are secondary. The publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. OA is about bringing access to everyone with an internet connection who wants access, regardless of their professions or purposes. There’s no doubt that if we put “professional researchers” and “everyone else” into separate categories, a higher percentage of researchers will want access to research literature, even after taking into account that many already have paid access through their institutions. But it’s far from clear why that would matter, especially when providing OA to all internet users is cheaper and simpler than providing OA to just a subset of worthy internet users.
If party-goers in New York and New Jersey can both enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks in New York Harbor, then the sponsors needn’t decide that one group is primary, even if a simple study could show which group is more numerous. If this analogy breaks down, it’s because New Jersey residents who can’t see the fireworks gain nothing from New Yorkers who can. But research does offer this double or indirect benefit. When OA research directly benefits many lay readers, so much the better. But when it doesn’t, it still benefits everyone indirectly by benefiting researchers directly. (Also see section 5.5.1 on access for lay readers.)
Finally, OA isn’t universal access. Even when we succeed at removing price and permission barriers, four other kinds of access barrier might remain in place:
Filtering and censorship barriers
Many schools, employers, ISPs, and governments want to limit what users can see.
Language barriers
Most online literature is in English, or another single language, and machine translation is still very weak.
Handicap access barriers
Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be.
Connectivity barriers
The digital divide keeps billions of people offline, including millions of scholars, and impedes millions of others with slow, flaky, or low-bandwidth internet connections.
Most us want to remove all four of these barriers. But there’s no reason to save the term
open access
until we succeed. In the long climb to universal access, removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name. | Globally more homes than ever before have access to the internet. | Free global sharing. | Authors are giving away their work for free. | Authors can share their work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. | 3 |
99924_YN01YWI7_2 | How could selling their work actually harm some authors' interests? | What Is Open Access?
Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. About thirty years ago this kind of free global sharing became something new under the sun. Before that, it would have sounded like a quixotic dream.
Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. Let’s call this one the access revolution.
Why don’t more authors take advantage of the access revolution to reach more readers? The answer is pretty clear. Authors who share their works in this way aren’t selling them, and even authors with purposes higher than money depend on sales to make a living. Or at least they appreciate sales.
Let’s sharpen the question, then, by putting to one side authors who want to sell their work. We can even acknowledge that we’re putting aside the vast majority of authors.
Imagine a tribe of authors who write serious and useful work, and who follow a centuries-old custom of giving it away without charge. I don’t mean a group of rich authors who don’t need money. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. In fact, very few are wealthy. For now, it doesn’t matter who these authors are, how rare they are, what they write, or why they follow this peculiar custom. It’s enough to know that their employers pay them salaries, freeing them to give away their work, that they write for impact rather than money, and that they score career points when they make the kind of impact they hoped to make. Suppose that selling their work would actually harm their interests by shrinking their audience, reducing their impact, and distorting their professional goals by steering them toward popular topics and away from the specialized questions on which they are experts.
If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. The dream of global free access can be a reality for them, even if most other authors hope to earn royalties and feel obliged to sit out this particular revolution.
These lucky authors are scholars, and the works they customarily write and publish without payment are peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals.
Open access
is the name of the revolutionary kind of access these authors, unencumbered by a motive of financial gain, are free to provide to their readers.
Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes.
A price tag
is a significant access barrier. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. But when a scholar needs to read or consult hundreds of works for one research project, or when a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics, and when the volume of new work grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers.
Copyright
can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. That makes sense when the author wants to sell the work and when the use you have in mind could undermine sales. But for research articles we’re generally talking about authors from the special tribe who want to share their work as widely as possible. Even these authors, however, tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries—publishers—who want to sell their work. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. OA removes these permission barriers.
Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it.
Terminology
When we need to, we can be more specific about access vehicles and access barriers. In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called
gold OA
, and OA delivered by repositories is called
green OA
. Work that is not open access, or that is available only for a price, is called
toll access
(TA). Over the years I’ve asked publishers for a neutral, nonpejorative and nonhonorific term for toll-access publishers, and
conventional publishers
is the suggestion I hear most often. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide
gratis OA
, and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide
libre OA
. (Also see section 3.1 on green/gold and section 3.3 on gratis/libre.)
OA was defined in three influential public statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003).
I sometimes refer to their overlap or common ground as the BBB definition of OA. My definition here is the BBB definition reduced to its essential elements and refined with some post-BBB terminology (green, gold, gratis, libre) for speaking precisely about subspecies of OA. Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA:
There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Here’s how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.”
Note that all three legs of the BBB definition go beyond removing price barriers to removing permission barriers, or beyond gratis OA to libre OA. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. The purpose of OA is to remove barriers to all legitimate scholarly uses for scholarly literature, but there’s no legitimate scholarly purpose in suppressing attribution to the texts we use. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.)
The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. If there are complexities, they lie in the transition from where we are now to a world in which OA is the default for new research. This is complicated because the major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural. (More in
chapter 9
on the future.)
In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. Moreover, any kind of content can be digital: texts, data, images, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software—and to different degrees we already do. But the term “open access” was coined by researchers trying to remove access barriers to research. The next section explains why.
1.1 What Makes OA Possible?
OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. But why would a copyright holder consent to OA?
Two background facts suggest the answer. First, authors are the copyright holders for their work until or unless they transfer rights to someone else, such as a publisher.
Second, scholarly journals generally don’t pay authors for their research articles, which frees this special tribe of authors to consent to OA without losing revenue. This fact distinguishes scholars decisively from musicians and moviemakers, and even from most other kinds of authors. This is why controversies about OA to music and movies don’t carry over to OA for research articles.
Both facts are critical, but the second is nearly unknown outside the academic world. It’s not a new fact of academic life, arising from a recent economic downturn in the publishing industry. Nor is it a case of corporate exploitation of unworldly academics. Scholarly journals haven’t paid authors for their articles since the first scholarly journals, the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society of London and the
Journal des sçavans
, launched in London and Paris in 1665.
The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. Or it may be a wise adaptation that would eventually evolve in any culture with a serious research subculture. (The optimist in me wants to believe the latter, but the evolution of copyright law taunts that optimism.) This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It also supports academic freedom and the kinds of serious inquiry that advance knowledge. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. At the same time it frees them to microspecialize and defend ideas of immediate interest to just a handful people in the world, which are essential to pushing the frontiers of knowledge.
This custom doesn’t guarantee that truth-seeking won’t be derailed by profit-seeking, and it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eventually fill the smallest gaps in our collaborative understanding of the world. It doesn’t even guarantee that scholars won’t sometimes play for the crowd and detour into fad thinking. But it removes a major distraction by allowing them, if they wish, to focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell. It’s a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to research, and it’s the key to the legal and economic lock that would otherwise shackle steps toward OA.
Creative people who live by royalties, such as novelists, musicians, and moviemakers, may consider this scholarly tradition a burden and sacrifice for scholars. We might even agree, provided we don’t overlook a few facts. First, it’s a sacrifice that scholars have been making for nearly 350 years. OA to research articles doesn’t depend on asking royalty-earning authors to give up their royalties. Second, academics have salaries from universities, freeing them to dive deeply into their research topics and publish specialized articles without market appeal. Many musicians and moviemakers might envy that freedom to disregard sales and popular taste. Third, academics receive other, less tangible rewards from their institutions—like promotion and tenure—when their research is recognized by others, accepted, cited, applied, and built upon.
It’s no accident that faculty who advance knowledge in their fields also advance their careers. Academics are passionate about certain topics, ideas, questions, inquiries, or disciplines. They feel lucky to have jobs in which they may pursue these passions and even luckier to be rewarded for pursuing them. Some focus single-mindedly on carrying an honest pebble to the pile of knowledge (as John Lange put it), having an impact on their field, or scooping others working on the same questions. Others focus strategically on building the case for promotion and tenure. But the two paths converge, which is not a fortuitous fact of nature but an engineered fact of life in the academy. As incentives for productivity, these intangible career benefits may be stronger for the average researcher than royalties are for the average novelist or musician. (In both domains, bountiful royalties for superstars tell us nothing about effective payment models for the long tail of less stellar professionals.)
There’s no sense in which research would be more free, efficient, or effective if academics took a more “businesslike” position, behaved more like musicians and moviemakers, abandoned their insulation from the market, and tied their income to the popularity of their ideas. Nonacademics who urge academics to come to their senses and demand royalties even for journal articles may be more naive about nonprofit research than academics are about for-profit business.
We can take this a step further. Scholars can afford to ignore sales because they have salaries and research grants to take the place of royalties. But why do universities pay salaries and why do funding agencies award grants? They do it to advance research and the range of public interests served by research. They don’t do it to earn profits from the results. They are all nonprofit. They certainly don’t do it to make scholarly writings into gifts to enrich publishers, especially when conventional publishers erect access barriers at the expense of research. Universities and funding agencies pay researchers to make their research into gifts to the public in the widest sense.
Public and private funding agencies are essentially public and private charities, funding research they regard as useful or beneficial. Universities have a public purpose as well, even when they are private institutions. We support the public institutions with public funds, and we support the private ones with tax exemptions for their property and tax deductions for their donors.
We’d have less knowledge, less academic freedom, and less OA if researchers worked for royalties and made their research articles into commodities rather than gifts. It should be no surprise, then, that more and more funding agencies and universities are adopting strong OA policies. Their mission to advance research leads them directly to logic of OA: With a few exceptions, such as classified research, research that is worth funding or facilitating is worth sharing with everyone who can make use of it. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
Newcomers to OA often assume that OA helps readers and hurts authors, and that the reader side of the scholarly soul must beg the author side to make the necessary sacrifice. But OA benefits authors as well as readers. Authors want access to readers at least as much as readers want access to authors. All authors want to cultivate a larger audience and greater impact. Authors who work for royalties have reason to compromise and settle for the smaller audience of paying customers. But authors who aren’t paid for their writing have no reason to compromise.
It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to recognize that scholarly publication is accompanied by a strong interest in impact and career building. The result is a mix of interested and disinterested motives. The reasons to make work OA are essentially the same as the reasons to publish. Authors who make their work OA are always serving others but not always acting from altruism. In fact, the idea that OA depends on author altruism slows down OA progress by hiding the role of author self-interest.
Another aspect of author self-interest emerges from the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles, even when they are published in the same issue of the same journal. There’s growing evidence that OA articles are downloaded more often as well, and that journals converting to OA see a rise in their submissions and citation impact.
There are many hypotheses to explain the correlation between OA and increased citations, but it’s likely that ongoing studies will show that much of the correlation is simply due to the larger audience and heightened visibility provided by OA itself. When you enlarge the audience for an article, you also enlarge the subset of the audience that will later cite it, including professionals in the same field at institutions unable to afford subscription access. OA enlarges the potential audience, including the potential professional audience, far beyond that for even the most prestigious and popular subscription journals.
In any case, these studies bring a welcome note of author self-interest to the case for OA. OA is not a sacrifice for authors who write for impact rather than money. It increases a work’s visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming. But as we’ll see, it’s not costly, not difficult, and not time-consuming.
My colleague Stevan Harnad frequently compares research articles to advertisements. They advertise the author’s research. Try telling advertisers that they’re making a needless sacrifice by allowing people to read their ads without having to pay for the privilege. Advertisers give away their ads and even pay to place them where they might be seen. They do this to benefit themselves, and scholars have the same interest in sharing their message as widely as possible.
Because any content can be digital, and any digital content can be OA, OA needn’t be limited to royalty-free literature like research articles. Research articles are just ripe examples of low-hanging fruit. OA could extend to royalty-producing work like monographs, textbooks, novels, news, music, and movies. But as soon as we cross the line into OA for royalty-producing work, authors will either lose revenue or fear that they will lose revenue. Either way, they’ll be harder to persuade. But instead of concluding that royalty-producing work is off limits to OA, we should merely conclude that it’s higher-hanging fruit. In many cases we can still persuade royalty-earning authors to consent to OA. (See section 5.3 on OA for books.)
Authors of scholarly research articles aren’t the only players who work without pay in the production of research literature. In general, scholarly journals don’t pay editors or referees either. In general, editors and referees are paid salaries by universities to free them, like authors, to donate their time and labor to ensure the quality of new work appearing in scholarly journals. An important consequence follows. All the key players in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA needn’t dispense with peer review or favor unrefereed manuscripts over refereed articles. We can aim for the prize of OA to peer-reviewed scholarship. (See section 5.1 on peer review.)
Of course, conventional publishers are not as free as authors, editors, and referees to forgo revenue. This is a central fact in the transition to OA, and it explains why the interests of scholars and conventional publishers diverge more in the digital age than they diverged earlier. But not all publishers are conventional, and not all conventional publishers will carry print-era business models into the digital age.
Academic publishers are not monolithic. Some new ones were born OA and some older ones have completely converted to OA. Many provide OA to some of their work but not all of it. Some are experimenting with OA, and some are watching the experiments of others. Most allow green OA (through repositories) and a growing number offer at least some kind of gold OA (through journals). Some are supportive, some undecided, some opposed. Among the opposed, some have merely decided not to provide OA themselves, while others lobby actively against policies to encourage or require OA. Some oppose gold but not green OA, while others oppose green but not gold OA.
OA gains nothing and loses potential allies by blurring these distinctions. This variety reminds us (to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly) that OA doesn’t threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt.
A growing number of journal publishers have chosen business models allowing them to dispense with subscription revenue and offer OA. They have expenses but they also have revenue to cover their expenses. In fact, some OA publishers are for-profit and profitable. (See chapter 7 on economics.)
Moreover, peer review is done by dedicated volunteers who don’t care how a journal pays its bills, or even whether the journal is in the red or the black. If all peer-reviewed journals converted to OA overnight, the authors, editors, and referees would have the same incentives to participate in peer review that they had the day before. They needn’t stop offering their services, needn’t lower their standards, and needn’t make sacrifices they weren’t already making. They volunteer their time not because of a journal’s choice of business model but because of its contribution to research. They could carry on with solvent or insolvent subscription publishers, with solvent or insolvent OA publishers, or even without publishers.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative said in February 2002: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment. . . . The new technology is the internet.”
To see what this willingness looks like without the medium to give it effect, look at scholarship in the age of print. Author gifts turned into publisher commodities, and access gaps for readers were harmfully large and widespread. (Access gaps are still harmfully large and widespread, but only because OA is not yet the default for new research.) To see what the medium looks like without the willingness, look at music and movies in the age of the internet. The need for royalties keeps creators from reaching everyone who would enjoy their work.
A beautiful opportunity exists where the willingness and the medium overlap. A scholarly custom that evolved in the seventeenth century frees scholars to take advantage of the access revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first. Because scholars are nearly unique in following this custom, they are nearly unique in their freedom to take advantage of this revolution without financial risk. In this sense, the planets have aligned for scholars. Most other authors are constrained to fear rather than seize the opportunities created by the internet.
1.2 What OA Is Not
We can dispel a cloud of objections and misunderstandings simply by pointing out a few things that OA is not. (Many of these points will be elaborated in later chapters.)
OA isn’t an attempt to bypass peer review. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most conservative to the most innovative, and all the major public statements on OA insist on its importance. Because scholarly journals generally don’t pay peer-reviewing editors and referees, just as they don’t pay authors, all the participants in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. While OA to unrefereed preprints is useful and widespread, the OA movement isn’t limited to unrefereed preprints and, if anything, focuses on OA to peer-reviewed articles. (More in section 5.1 on peer review.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reform, violate, or abolish copyright. It’s compatible with copyright law as it is. OA would benefit from the right kinds of copyright reforms, and many dedicated people are working on them. But it needn’t wait for reforms and hasn’t waited. OA literature avoids copyright problems in exactly the same way that conventional toll-access literature does. For older works, it takes advantage of the public domain, and for newer works, it rests on copyright-holder consent. (More in chapter 4 on policies and chapter 6 on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deprive royalty-earning authors of income. The OA movement focuses on research articles precisely because they don’t pay royalties. In any case, inside and outside that focus, OA for copyrighted work depends on copyright-holder consent. Hence, royalty-earning authors have nothing to fear but persuasion that the benefits of OA might outweigh the risks to royalties. (More in section 5.3 on OA for books.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deny the reality of costs. No serious OA advocate has ever argued that OA literature is costless to produce, although many argue that it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature, even less expensive than born-digital toll-access literature. The question is not whether research literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than charging readers and creating access barriers. (More in chapter 7 on economics.)
Terminology
We could talk about vigilante OA, infringing OA, piratical OA, or OA without consent. That sort of OA could violate copyrights and deprive royalty-earning authors of royalties against their will. But we could also talk about vigilante publishing, infringing publishing, piratical publishing, or publishing without consent. Both happen. However, we generally reserve the term “publishing” for lawful publishing, and tack on special adjectives to describe unlawful variations on the theme. Likewise, I’ll reserve the term “open access” for lawful OA that carries the consent of the relevant rightsholder.
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce authors’ rights over their work. On the contrary, OA depends on author decisions and requires authors to exercise more rights or control over their work than they are allowed to exercise under traditional publishing contracts. One OA strategy is for authors to retain some of the rights they formerly gave publishers, including the right to authorize OA. Another OA strategy is for publishers to permit more uses than they formerly permitted, including permission for authors to make OA copies of their work. By contrast, traditional journal-publishing contracts demand that authors transfer all rights to publishers, and author rights or control cannot sink lower than that. (See chapters
4
on policies and
6
on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce academic freedom. Academic authors remain free to submit their work to the journals or publishers of their choice. Policies requiring OA do so conditionally, for example, for researchers who choose to apply for a certain kind of grant. In addition, these policies generally build in exceptions, waiver options, or both. Since 2008 most university OA policies have been adopted by faculty deeply concerned to preserve and even enhance their prerogatives. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
OA isn’t an attempt to relax rules against plagiarism. All the public definitions of OA support author attribution, even construed as a “restriction” on users. All the major open licenses require author attribution. Moreover, plagiarism is typically punished by the plagiarist’s institution rather than by courts, that is, by social norms rather than by law. Hence, even when attribution is not legally required, plagiarism is still a punishable offense and no OA policy anywhere interferes with those punishments. In any case, if making literature digital and online makes plagiarism easier to commit, then OA makes plagiarism easier to detect. Not all plagiarists are smart, but the smart ones will not steal from OA sources indexed in every search engine. In this sense, OA deters plagiarism.
OA isn’t an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers. OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers, and research institutions. The goal is constructive, not destructive. If OA does eventually harm toll-access publishers, it will be in the way that personal computers harmed typewriter manufacturers. The harm was not the goal, but a side effect of developing something better. Moreover, OA doesn’t challenge publishers or publishing per se, just one business model for publishing, and it’s far easier for conventional publishers to adapt to OA than for typewriter manufacturers to adapt to computers. In fact, most toll-access publishers are already adapting, by allowing author-initiated OA, providing some OA themselves, or experimenting with OA. (See section 3.1 on green OA and chapter 8 on casualties.)
OA doesn’t require boycotting any kind of literature or publisher. It doesn’t require boycotting toll-access research any more than free online journalism requires boycotting priced online journalism. OA doesn’t require us to strike toll-access literature from our personal reading lists, course syllabi, or libraries. Some scholars who support OA decide to submit new work only to OA journals, or to donate their time as editors or referees only to OA journals, in effect boycotting toll-access journals as authors, editors, and referees. But this choice is not forced by the definition of OA, by a commitment to OA, or by any OA policy, and most scholars who support OA continue to work with toll-access journals. In any case, even those scholars who do boycott toll-access journals as authors, editors, or referees don’t boycott them as readers. (Here we needn’t get into the complexity that some toll-access journals effectively create involuntary reader boycotts by pricing their journals out of reach of readers who want access.)
OA isn’t primarily about bringing access to lay readers. If anything, the OA movement focuses on bringing access to professional researchers whose careers depend on access. But there’s no need to decide which users are primary and which are secondary. The publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. OA is about bringing access to everyone with an internet connection who wants access, regardless of their professions or purposes. There’s no doubt that if we put “professional researchers” and “everyone else” into separate categories, a higher percentage of researchers will want access to research literature, even after taking into account that many already have paid access through their institutions. But it’s far from clear why that would matter, especially when providing OA to all internet users is cheaper and simpler than providing OA to just a subset of worthy internet users.
If party-goers in New York and New Jersey can both enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks in New York Harbor, then the sponsors needn’t decide that one group is primary, even if a simple study could show which group is more numerous. If this analogy breaks down, it’s because New Jersey residents who can’t see the fireworks gain nothing from New Yorkers who can. But research does offer this double or indirect benefit. When OA research directly benefits many lay readers, so much the better. But when it doesn’t, it still benefits everyone indirectly by benefiting researchers directly. (Also see section 5.5.1 on access for lay readers.)
Finally, OA isn’t universal access. Even when we succeed at removing price and permission barriers, four other kinds of access barrier might remain in place:
Filtering and censorship barriers
Many schools, employers, ISPs, and governments want to limit what users can see.
Language barriers
Most online literature is in English, or another single language, and machine translation is still very weak.
Handicap access barriers
Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be.
Connectivity barriers
The digital divide keeps billions of people offline, including millions of scholars, and impedes millions of others with slow, flaky, or low-bandwidth internet connections.
Most us want to remove all four of these barriers. But there’s no reason to save the term
open access
until we succeed. In the long climb to universal access, removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name. | It could steer them toward writing about popular topics rather than writing about their expertise. | Libraries may decide not to purchase the work because of the cost involved for multiple copies. | They may never reach a global audience. | The cost to read the work could result in a smaller audience. | 3 |
99924_YN01YWI7_3 | What does removing price barriers mean for readers? | What Is Open Access?
Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. About thirty years ago this kind of free global sharing became something new under the sun. Before that, it would have sounded like a quixotic dream.
Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. Let’s call this one the access revolution.
Why don’t more authors take advantage of the access revolution to reach more readers? The answer is pretty clear. Authors who share their works in this way aren’t selling them, and even authors with purposes higher than money depend on sales to make a living. Or at least they appreciate sales.
Let’s sharpen the question, then, by putting to one side authors who want to sell their work. We can even acknowledge that we’re putting aside the vast majority of authors.
Imagine a tribe of authors who write serious and useful work, and who follow a centuries-old custom of giving it away without charge. I don’t mean a group of rich authors who don’t need money. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. In fact, very few are wealthy. For now, it doesn’t matter who these authors are, how rare they are, what they write, or why they follow this peculiar custom. It’s enough to know that their employers pay them salaries, freeing them to give away their work, that they write for impact rather than money, and that they score career points when they make the kind of impact they hoped to make. Suppose that selling their work would actually harm their interests by shrinking their audience, reducing their impact, and distorting their professional goals by steering them toward popular topics and away from the specialized questions on which they are experts.
If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. The dream of global free access can be a reality for them, even if most other authors hope to earn royalties and feel obliged to sit out this particular revolution.
These lucky authors are scholars, and the works they customarily write and publish without payment are peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals.
Open access
is the name of the revolutionary kind of access these authors, unencumbered by a motive of financial gain, are free to provide to their readers.
Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes.
A price tag
is a significant access barrier. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. But when a scholar needs to read or consult hundreds of works for one research project, or when a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics, and when the volume of new work grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers.
Copyright
can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. That makes sense when the author wants to sell the work and when the use you have in mind could undermine sales. But for research articles we’re generally talking about authors from the special tribe who want to share their work as widely as possible. Even these authors, however, tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries—publishers—who want to sell their work. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. OA removes these permission barriers.
Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it.
Terminology
When we need to, we can be more specific about access vehicles and access barriers. In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called
gold OA
, and OA delivered by repositories is called
green OA
. Work that is not open access, or that is available only for a price, is called
toll access
(TA). Over the years I’ve asked publishers for a neutral, nonpejorative and nonhonorific term for toll-access publishers, and
conventional publishers
is the suggestion I hear most often. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide
gratis OA
, and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide
libre OA
. (Also see section 3.1 on green/gold and section 3.3 on gratis/libre.)
OA was defined in three influential public statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003).
I sometimes refer to their overlap or common ground as the BBB definition of OA. My definition here is the BBB definition reduced to its essential elements and refined with some post-BBB terminology (green, gold, gratis, libre) for speaking precisely about subspecies of OA. Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA:
There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Here’s how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.”
Note that all three legs of the BBB definition go beyond removing price barriers to removing permission barriers, or beyond gratis OA to libre OA. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. The purpose of OA is to remove barriers to all legitimate scholarly uses for scholarly literature, but there’s no legitimate scholarly purpose in suppressing attribution to the texts we use. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.)
The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. If there are complexities, they lie in the transition from where we are now to a world in which OA is the default for new research. This is complicated because the major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural. (More in
chapter 9
on the future.)
In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. Moreover, any kind of content can be digital: texts, data, images, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software—and to different degrees we already do. But the term “open access” was coined by researchers trying to remove access barriers to research. The next section explains why.
1.1 What Makes OA Possible?
OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. But why would a copyright holder consent to OA?
Two background facts suggest the answer. First, authors are the copyright holders for their work until or unless they transfer rights to someone else, such as a publisher.
Second, scholarly journals generally don’t pay authors for their research articles, which frees this special tribe of authors to consent to OA without losing revenue. This fact distinguishes scholars decisively from musicians and moviemakers, and even from most other kinds of authors. This is why controversies about OA to music and movies don’t carry over to OA for research articles.
Both facts are critical, but the second is nearly unknown outside the academic world. It’s not a new fact of academic life, arising from a recent economic downturn in the publishing industry. Nor is it a case of corporate exploitation of unworldly academics. Scholarly journals haven’t paid authors for their articles since the first scholarly journals, the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society of London and the
Journal des sçavans
, launched in London and Paris in 1665.
The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. Or it may be a wise adaptation that would eventually evolve in any culture with a serious research subculture. (The optimist in me wants to believe the latter, but the evolution of copyright law taunts that optimism.) This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It also supports academic freedom and the kinds of serious inquiry that advance knowledge. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. At the same time it frees them to microspecialize and defend ideas of immediate interest to just a handful people in the world, which are essential to pushing the frontiers of knowledge.
This custom doesn’t guarantee that truth-seeking won’t be derailed by profit-seeking, and it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eventually fill the smallest gaps in our collaborative understanding of the world. It doesn’t even guarantee that scholars won’t sometimes play for the crowd and detour into fad thinking. But it removes a major distraction by allowing them, if they wish, to focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell. It’s a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to research, and it’s the key to the legal and economic lock that would otherwise shackle steps toward OA.
Creative people who live by royalties, such as novelists, musicians, and moviemakers, may consider this scholarly tradition a burden and sacrifice for scholars. We might even agree, provided we don’t overlook a few facts. First, it’s a sacrifice that scholars have been making for nearly 350 years. OA to research articles doesn’t depend on asking royalty-earning authors to give up their royalties. Second, academics have salaries from universities, freeing them to dive deeply into their research topics and publish specialized articles without market appeal. Many musicians and moviemakers might envy that freedom to disregard sales and popular taste. Third, academics receive other, less tangible rewards from their institutions—like promotion and tenure—when their research is recognized by others, accepted, cited, applied, and built upon.
It’s no accident that faculty who advance knowledge in their fields also advance their careers. Academics are passionate about certain topics, ideas, questions, inquiries, or disciplines. They feel lucky to have jobs in which they may pursue these passions and even luckier to be rewarded for pursuing them. Some focus single-mindedly on carrying an honest pebble to the pile of knowledge (as John Lange put it), having an impact on their field, or scooping others working on the same questions. Others focus strategically on building the case for promotion and tenure. But the two paths converge, which is not a fortuitous fact of nature but an engineered fact of life in the academy. As incentives for productivity, these intangible career benefits may be stronger for the average researcher than royalties are for the average novelist or musician. (In both domains, bountiful royalties for superstars tell us nothing about effective payment models for the long tail of less stellar professionals.)
There’s no sense in which research would be more free, efficient, or effective if academics took a more “businesslike” position, behaved more like musicians and moviemakers, abandoned their insulation from the market, and tied their income to the popularity of their ideas. Nonacademics who urge academics to come to their senses and demand royalties even for journal articles may be more naive about nonprofit research than academics are about for-profit business.
We can take this a step further. Scholars can afford to ignore sales because they have salaries and research grants to take the place of royalties. But why do universities pay salaries and why do funding agencies award grants? They do it to advance research and the range of public interests served by research. They don’t do it to earn profits from the results. They are all nonprofit. They certainly don’t do it to make scholarly writings into gifts to enrich publishers, especially when conventional publishers erect access barriers at the expense of research. Universities and funding agencies pay researchers to make their research into gifts to the public in the widest sense.
Public and private funding agencies are essentially public and private charities, funding research they regard as useful or beneficial. Universities have a public purpose as well, even when they are private institutions. We support the public institutions with public funds, and we support the private ones with tax exemptions for their property and tax deductions for their donors.
We’d have less knowledge, less academic freedom, and less OA if researchers worked for royalties and made their research articles into commodities rather than gifts. It should be no surprise, then, that more and more funding agencies and universities are adopting strong OA policies. Their mission to advance research leads them directly to logic of OA: With a few exceptions, such as classified research, research that is worth funding or facilitating is worth sharing with everyone who can make use of it. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
Newcomers to OA often assume that OA helps readers and hurts authors, and that the reader side of the scholarly soul must beg the author side to make the necessary sacrifice. But OA benefits authors as well as readers. Authors want access to readers at least as much as readers want access to authors. All authors want to cultivate a larger audience and greater impact. Authors who work for royalties have reason to compromise and settle for the smaller audience of paying customers. But authors who aren’t paid for their writing have no reason to compromise.
It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to recognize that scholarly publication is accompanied by a strong interest in impact and career building. The result is a mix of interested and disinterested motives. The reasons to make work OA are essentially the same as the reasons to publish. Authors who make their work OA are always serving others but not always acting from altruism. In fact, the idea that OA depends on author altruism slows down OA progress by hiding the role of author self-interest.
Another aspect of author self-interest emerges from the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles, even when they are published in the same issue of the same journal. There’s growing evidence that OA articles are downloaded more often as well, and that journals converting to OA see a rise in their submissions and citation impact.
There are many hypotheses to explain the correlation between OA and increased citations, but it’s likely that ongoing studies will show that much of the correlation is simply due to the larger audience and heightened visibility provided by OA itself. When you enlarge the audience for an article, you also enlarge the subset of the audience that will later cite it, including professionals in the same field at institutions unable to afford subscription access. OA enlarges the potential audience, including the potential professional audience, far beyond that for even the most prestigious and popular subscription journals.
In any case, these studies bring a welcome note of author self-interest to the case for OA. OA is not a sacrifice for authors who write for impact rather than money. It increases a work’s visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming. But as we’ll see, it’s not costly, not difficult, and not time-consuming.
My colleague Stevan Harnad frequently compares research articles to advertisements. They advertise the author’s research. Try telling advertisers that they’re making a needless sacrifice by allowing people to read their ads without having to pay for the privilege. Advertisers give away their ads and even pay to place them where they might be seen. They do this to benefit themselves, and scholars have the same interest in sharing their message as widely as possible.
Because any content can be digital, and any digital content can be OA, OA needn’t be limited to royalty-free literature like research articles. Research articles are just ripe examples of low-hanging fruit. OA could extend to royalty-producing work like monographs, textbooks, novels, news, music, and movies. But as soon as we cross the line into OA for royalty-producing work, authors will either lose revenue or fear that they will lose revenue. Either way, they’ll be harder to persuade. But instead of concluding that royalty-producing work is off limits to OA, we should merely conclude that it’s higher-hanging fruit. In many cases we can still persuade royalty-earning authors to consent to OA. (See section 5.3 on OA for books.)
Authors of scholarly research articles aren’t the only players who work without pay in the production of research literature. In general, scholarly journals don’t pay editors or referees either. In general, editors and referees are paid salaries by universities to free them, like authors, to donate their time and labor to ensure the quality of new work appearing in scholarly journals. An important consequence follows. All the key players in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA needn’t dispense with peer review or favor unrefereed manuscripts over refereed articles. We can aim for the prize of OA to peer-reviewed scholarship. (See section 5.1 on peer review.)
Of course, conventional publishers are not as free as authors, editors, and referees to forgo revenue. This is a central fact in the transition to OA, and it explains why the interests of scholars and conventional publishers diverge more in the digital age than they diverged earlier. But not all publishers are conventional, and not all conventional publishers will carry print-era business models into the digital age.
Academic publishers are not monolithic. Some new ones were born OA and some older ones have completely converted to OA. Many provide OA to some of their work but not all of it. Some are experimenting with OA, and some are watching the experiments of others. Most allow green OA (through repositories) and a growing number offer at least some kind of gold OA (through journals). Some are supportive, some undecided, some opposed. Among the opposed, some have merely decided not to provide OA themselves, while others lobby actively against policies to encourage or require OA. Some oppose gold but not green OA, while others oppose green but not gold OA.
OA gains nothing and loses potential allies by blurring these distinctions. This variety reminds us (to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly) that OA doesn’t threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt.
A growing number of journal publishers have chosen business models allowing them to dispense with subscription revenue and offer OA. They have expenses but they also have revenue to cover their expenses. In fact, some OA publishers are for-profit and profitable. (See chapter 7 on economics.)
Moreover, peer review is done by dedicated volunteers who don’t care how a journal pays its bills, or even whether the journal is in the red or the black. If all peer-reviewed journals converted to OA overnight, the authors, editors, and referees would have the same incentives to participate in peer review that they had the day before. They needn’t stop offering their services, needn’t lower their standards, and needn’t make sacrifices they weren’t already making. They volunteer their time not because of a journal’s choice of business model but because of its contribution to research. They could carry on with solvent or insolvent subscription publishers, with solvent or insolvent OA publishers, or even without publishers.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative said in February 2002: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment. . . . The new technology is the internet.”
To see what this willingness looks like without the medium to give it effect, look at scholarship in the age of print. Author gifts turned into publisher commodities, and access gaps for readers were harmfully large and widespread. (Access gaps are still harmfully large and widespread, but only because OA is not yet the default for new research.) To see what the medium looks like without the willingness, look at music and movies in the age of the internet. The need for royalties keeps creators from reaching everyone who would enjoy their work.
A beautiful opportunity exists where the willingness and the medium overlap. A scholarly custom that evolved in the seventeenth century frees scholars to take advantage of the access revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first. Because scholars are nearly unique in following this custom, they are nearly unique in their freedom to take advantage of this revolution without financial risk. In this sense, the planets have aligned for scholars. Most other authors are constrained to fear rather than seize the opportunities created by the internet.
1.2 What OA Is Not
We can dispel a cloud of objections and misunderstandings simply by pointing out a few things that OA is not. (Many of these points will be elaborated in later chapters.)
OA isn’t an attempt to bypass peer review. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most conservative to the most innovative, and all the major public statements on OA insist on its importance. Because scholarly journals generally don’t pay peer-reviewing editors and referees, just as they don’t pay authors, all the participants in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. While OA to unrefereed preprints is useful and widespread, the OA movement isn’t limited to unrefereed preprints and, if anything, focuses on OA to peer-reviewed articles. (More in section 5.1 on peer review.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reform, violate, or abolish copyright. It’s compatible with copyright law as it is. OA would benefit from the right kinds of copyright reforms, and many dedicated people are working on them. But it needn’t wait for reforms and hasn’t waited. OA literature avoids copyright problems in exactly the same way that conventional toll-access literature does. For older works, it takes advantage of the public domain, and for newer works, it rests on copyright-holder consent. (More in chapter 4 on policies and chapter 6 on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deprive royalty-earning authors of income. The OA movement focuses on research articles precisely because they don’t pay royalties. In any case, inside and outside that focus, OA for copyrighted work depends on copyright-holder consent. Hence, royalty-earning authors have nothing to fear but persuasion that the benefits of OA might outweigh the risks to royalties. (More in section 5.3 on OA for books.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deny the reality of costs. No serious OA advocate has ever argued that OA literature is costless to produce, although many argue that it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature, even less expensive than born-digital toll-access literature. The question is not whether research literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than charging readers and creating access barriers. (More in chapter 7 on economics.)
Terminology
We could talk about vigilante OA, infringing OA, piratical OA, or OA without consent. That sort of OA could violate copyrights and deprive royalty-earning authors of royalties against their will. But we could also talk about vigilante publishing, infringing publishing, piratical publishing, or publishing without consent. Both happen. However, we generally reserve the term “publishing” for lawful publishing, and tack on special adjectives to describe unlawful variations on the theme. Likewise, I’ll reserve the term “open access” for lawful OA that carries the consent of the relevant rightsholder.
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce authors’ rights over their work. On the contrary, OA depends on author decisions and requires authors to exercise more rights or control over their work than they are allowed to exercise under traditional publishing contracts. One OA strategy is for authors to retain some of the rights they formerly gave publishers, including the right to authorize OA. Another OA strategy is for publishers to permit more uses than they formerly permitted, including permission for authors to make OA copies of their work. By contrast, traditional journal-publishing contracts demand that authors transfer all rights to publishers, and author rights or control cannot sink lower than that. (See chapters
4
on policies and
6
on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce academic freedom. Academic authors remain free to submit their work to the journals or publishers of their choice. Policies requiring OA do so conditionally, for example, for researchers who choose to apply for a certain kind of grant. In addition, these policies generally build in exceptions, waiver options, or both. Since 2008 most university OA policies have been adopted by faculty deeply concerned to preserve and even enhance their prerogatives. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
OA isn’t an attempt to relax rules against plagiarism. All the public definitions of OA support author attribution, even construed as a “restriction” on users. All the major open licenses require author attribution. Moreover, plagiarism is typically punished by the plagiarist’s institution rather than by courts, that is, by social norms rather than by law. Hence, even when attribution is not legally required, plagiarism is still a punishable offense and no OA policy anywhere interferes with those punishments. In any case, if making literature digital and online makes plagiarism easier to commit, then OA makes plagiarism easier to detect. Not all plagiarists are smart, but the smart ones will not steal from OA sources indexed in every search engine. In this sense, OA deters plagiarism.
OA isn’t an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers. OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers, and research institutions. The goal is constructive, not destructive. If OA does eventually harm toll-access publishers, it will be in the way that personal computers harmed typewriter manufacturers. The harm was not the goal, but a side effect of developing something better. Moreover, OA doesn’t challenge publishers or publishing per se, just one business model for publishing, and it’s far easier for conventional publishers to adapt to OA than for typewriter manufacturers to adapt to computers. In fact, most toll-access publishers are already adapting, by allowing author-initiated OA, providing some OA themselves, or experimenting with OA. (See section 3.1 on green OA and chapter 8 on casualties.)
OA doesn’t require boycotting any kind of literature or publisher. It doesn’t require boycotting toll-access research any more than free online journalism requires boycotting priced online journalism. OA doesn’t require us to strike toll-access literature from our personal reading lists, course syllabi, or libraries. Some scholars who support OA decide to submit new work only to OA journals, or to donate their time as editors or referees only to OA journals, in effect boycotting toll-access journals as authors, editors, and referees. But this choice is not forced by the definition of OA, by a commitment to OA, or by any OA policy, and most scholars who support OA continue to work with toll-access journals. In any case, even those scholars who do boycott toll-access journals as authors, editors, or referees don’t boycott them as readers. (Here we needn’t get into the complexity that some toll-access journals effectively create involuntary reader boycotts by pricing their journals out of reach of readers who want access.)
OA isn’t primarily about bringing access to lay readers. If anything, the OA movement focuses on bringing access to professional researchers whose careers depend on access. But there’s no need to decide which users are primary and which are secondary. The publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. OA is about bringing access to everyone with an internet connection who wants access, regardless of their professions or purposes. There’s no doubt that if we put “professional researchers” and “everyone else” into separate categories, a higher percentage of researchers will want access to research literature, even after taking into account that many already have paid access through their institutions. But it’s far from clear why that would matter, especially when providing OA to all internet users is cheaper and simpler than providing OA to just a subset of worthy internet users.
If party-goers in New York and New Jersey can both enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks in New York Harbor, then the sponsors needn’t decide that one group is primary, even if a simple study could show which group is more numerous. If this analogy breaks down, it’s because New Jersey residents who can’t see the fireworks gain nothing from New Yorkers who can. But research does offer this double or indirect benefit. When OA research directly benefits many lay readers, so much the better. But when it doesn’t, it still benefits everyone indirectly by benefiting researchers directly. (Also see section 5.5.1 on access for lay readers.)
Finally, OA isn’t universal access. Even when we succeed at removing price and permission barriers, four other kinds of access barrier might remain in place:
Filtering and censorship barriers
Many schools, employers, ISPs, and governments want to limit what users can see.
Language barriers
Most online literature is in English, or another single language, and machine translation is still very weak.
Handicap access barriers
Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be.
Connectivity barriers
The digital divide keeps billions of people offline, including millions of scholars, and impedes millions of others with slow, flaky, or low-bandwidth internet connections.
Most us want to remove all four of these barriers. But there’s no reason to save the term
open access
until we succeed. In the long climb to universal access, removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name. | Readers are not limited by the budgets of libraries. | Readers can translate and redistribute work. | Readers can reuse literature for scholarly purposes. | Readers are not limited by their own ability to pay. | 3 |
99924_YN01YWI7_4 | What does removing permission barriers mean for readers? | What Is Open Access?
Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. About thirty years ago this kind of free global sharing became something new under the sun. Before that, it would have sounded like a quixotic dream.
Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. Let’s call this one the access revolution.
Why don’t more authors take advantage of the access revolution to reach more readers? The answer is pretty clear. Authors who share their works in this way aren’t selling them, and even authors with purposes higher than money depend on sales to make a living. Or at least they appreciate sales.
Let’s sharpen the question, then, by putting to one side authors who want to sell their work. We can even acknowledge that we’re putting aside the vast majority of authors.
Imagine a tribe of authors who write serious and useful work, and who follow a centuries-old custom of giving it away without charge. I don’t mean a group of rich authors who don’t need money. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. In fact, very few are wealthy. For now, it doesn’t matter who these authors are, how rare they are, what they write, or why they follow this peculiar custom. It’s enough to know that their employers pay them salaries, freeing them to give away their work, that they write for impact rather than money, and that they score career points when they make the kind of impact they hoped to make. Suppose that selling their work would actually harm their interests by shrinking their audience, reducing their impact, and distorting their professional goals by steering them toward popular topics and away from the specialized questions on which they are experts.
If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. The dream of global free access can be a reality for them, even if most other authors hope to earn royalties and feel obliged to sit out this particular revolution.
These lucky authors are scholars, and the works they customarily write and publish without payment are peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals.
Open access
is the name of the revolutionary kind of access these authors, unencumbered by a motive of financial gain, are free to provide to their readers.
Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes.
A price tag
is a significant access barrier. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. But when a scholar needs to read or consult hundreds of works for one research project, or when a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics, and when the volume of new work grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers.
Copyright
can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. That makes sense when the author wants to sell the work and when the use you have in mind could undermine sales. But for research articles we’re generally talking about authors from the special tribe who want to share their work as widely as possible. Even these authors, however, tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries—publishers—who want to sell their work. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. OA removes these permission barriers.
Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it.
Terminology
When we need to, we can be more specific about access vehicles and access barriers. In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called
gold OA
, and OA delivered by repositories is called
green OA
. Work that is not open access, or that is available only for a price, is called
toll access
(TA). Over the years I’ve asked publishers for a neutral, nonpejorative and nonhonorific term for toll-access publishers, and
conventional publishers
is the suggestion I hear most often. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide
gratis OA
, and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide
libre OA
. (Also see section 3.1 on green/gold and section 3.3 on gratis/libre.)
OA was defined in three influential public statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003).
I sometimes refer to their overlap or common ground as the BBB definition of OA. My definition here is the BBB definition reduced to its essential elements and refined with some post-BBB terminology (green, gold, gratis, libre) for speaking precisely about subspecies of OA. Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA:
There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Here’s how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.”
Note that all three legs of the BBB definition go beyond removing price barriers to removing permission barriers, or beyond gratis OA to libre OA. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. The purpose of OA is to remove barriers to all legitimate scholarly uses for scholarly literature, but there’s no legitimate scholarly purpose in suppressing attribution to the texts we use. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.)
The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. If there are complexities, they lie in the transition from where we are now to a world in which OA is the default for new research. This is complicated because the major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural. (More in
chapter 9
on the future.)
In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. Moreover, any kind of content can be digital: texts, data, images, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software—and to different degrees we already do. But the term “open access” was coined by researchers trying to remove access barriers to research. The next section explains why.
1.1 What Makes OA Possible?
OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. But why would a copyright holder consent to OA?
Two background facts suggest the answer. First, authors are the copyright holders for their work until or unless they transfer rights to someone else, such as a publisher.
Second, scholarly journals generally don’t pay authors for their research articles, which frees this special tribe of authors to consent to OA without losing revenue. This fact distinguishes scholars decisively from musicians and moviemakers, and even from most other kinds of authors. This is why controversies about OA to music and movies don’t carry over to OA for research articles.
Both facts are critical, but the second is nearly unknown outside the academic world. It’s not a new fact of academic life, arising from a recent economic downturn in the publishing industry. Nor is it a case of corporate exploitation of unworldly academics. Scholarly journals haven’t paid authors for their articles since the first scholarly journals, the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society of London and the
Journal des sçavans
, launched in London and Paris in 1665.
The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. Or it may be a wise adaptation that would eventually evolve in any culture with a serious research subculture. (The optimist in me wants to believe the latter, but the evolution of copyright law taunts that optimism.) This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It also supports academic freedom and the kinds of serious inquiry that advance knowledge. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. At the same time it frees them to microspecialize and defend ideas of immediate interest to just a handful people in the world, which are essential to pushing the frontiers of knowledge.
This custom doesn’t guarantee that truth-seeking won’t be derailed by profit-seeking, and it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eventually fill the smallest gaps in our collaborative understanding of the world. It doesn’t even guarantee that scholars won’t sometimes play for the crowd and detour into fad thinking. But it removes a major distraction by allowing them, if they wish, to focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell. It’s a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to research, and it’s the key to the legal and economic lock that would otherwise shackle steps toward OA.
Creative people who live by royalties, such as novelists, musicians, and moviemakers, may consider this scholarly tradition a burden and sacrifice for scholars. We might even agree, provided we don’t overlook a few facts. First, it’s a sacrifice that scholars have been making for nearly 350 years. OA to research articles doesn’t depend on asking royalty-earning authors to give up their royalties. Second, academics have salaries from universities, freeing them to dive deeply into their research topics and publish specialized articles without market appeal. Many musicians and moviemakers might envy that freedom to disregard sales and popular taste. Third, academics receive other, less tangible rewards from their institutions—like promotion and tenure—when their research is recognized by others, accepted, cited, applied, and built upon.
It’s no accident that faculty who advance knowledge in their fields also advance their careers. Academics are passionate about certain topics, ideas, questions, inquiries, or disciplines. They feel lucky to have jobs in which they may pursue these passions and even luckier to be rewarded for pursuing them. Some focus single-mindedly on carrying an honest pebble to the pile of knowledge (as John Lange put it), having an impact on their field, or scooping others working on the same questions. Others focus strategically on building the case for promotion and tenure. But the two paths converge, which is not a fortuitous fact of nature but an engineered fact of life in the academy. As incentives for productivity, these intangible career benefits may be stronger for the average researcher than royalties are for the average novelist or musician. (In both domains, bountiful royalties for superstars tell us nothing about effective payment models for the long tail of less stellar professionals.)
There’s no sense in which research would be more free, efficient, or effective if academics took a more “businesslike” position, behaved more like musicians and moviemakers, abandoned their insulation from the market, and tied their income to the popularity of their ideas. Nonacademics who urge academics to come to their senses and demand royalties even for journal articles may be more naive about nonprofit research than academics are about for-profit business.
We can take this a step further. Scholars can afford to ignore sales because they have salaries and research grants to take the place of royalties. But why do universities pay salaries and why do funding agencies award grants? They do it to advance research and the range of public interests served by research. They don’t do it to earn profits from the results. They are all nonprofit. They certainly don’t do it to make scholarly writings into gifts to enrich publishers, especially when conventional publishers erect access barriers at the expense of research. Universities and funding agencies pay researchers to make their research into gifts to the public in the widest sense.
Public and private funding agencies are essentially public and private charities, funding research they regard as useful or beneficial. Universities have a public purpose as well, even when they are private institutions. We support the public institutions with public funds, and we support the private ones with tax exemptions for their property and tax deductions for their donors.
We’d have less knowledge, less academic freedom, and less OA if researchers worked for royalties and made their research articles into commodities rather than gifts. It should be no surprise, then, that more and more funding agencies and universities are adopting strong OA policies. Their mission to advance research leads them directly to logic of OA: With a few exceptions, such as classified research, research that is worth funding or facilitating is worth sharing with everyone who can make use of it. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
Newcomers to OA often assume that OA helps readers and hurts authors, and that the reader side of the scholarly soul must beg the author side to make the necessary sacrifice. But OA benefits authors as well as readers. Authors want access to readers at least as much as readers want access to authors. All authors want to cultivate a larger audience and greater impact. Authors who work for royalties have reason to compromise and settle for the smaller audience of paying customers. But authors who aren’t paid for their writing have no reason to compromise.
It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to recognize that scholarly publication is accompanied by a strong interest in impact and career building. The result is a mix of interested and disinterested motives. The reasons to make work OA are essentially the same as the reasons to publish. Authors who make their work OA are always serving others but not always acting from altruism. In fact, the idea that OA depends on author altruism slows down OA progress by hiding the role of author self-interest.
Another aspect of author self-interest emerges from the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles, even when they are published in the same issue of the same journal. There’s growing evidence that OA articles are downloaded more often as well, and that journals converting to OA see a rise in their submissions and citation impact.
There are many hypotheses to explain the correlation between OA and increased citations, but it’s likely that ongoing studies will show that much of the correlation is simply due to the larger audience and heightened visibility provided by OA itself. When you enlarge the audience for an article, you also enlarge the subset of the audience that will later cite it, including professionals in the same field at institutions unable to afford subscription access. OA enlarges the potential audience, including the potential professional audience, far beyond that for even the most prestigious and popular subscription journals.
In any case, these studies bring a welcome note of author self-interest to the case for OA. OA is not a sacrifice for authors who write for impact rather than money. It increases a work’s visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming. But as we’ll see, it’s not costly, not difficult, and not time-consuming.
My colleague Stevan Harnad frequently compares research articles to advertisements. They advertise the author’s research. Try telling advertisers that they’re making a needless sacrifice by allowing people to read their ads without having to pay for the privilege. Advertisers give away their ads and even pay to place them where they might be seen. They do this to benefit themselves, and scholars have the same interest in sharing their message as widely as possible.
Because any content can be digital, and any digital content can be OA, OA needn’t be limited to royalty-free literature like research articles. Research articles are just ripe examples of low-hanging fruit. OA could extend to royalty-producing work like monographs, textbooks, novels, news, music, and movies. But as soon as we cross the line into OA for royalty-producing work, authors will either lose revenue or fear that they will lose revenue. Either way, they’ll be harder to persuade. But instead of concluding that royalty-producing work is off limits to OA, we should merely conclude that it’s higher-hanging fruit. In many cases we can still persuade royalty-earning authors to consent to OA. (See section 5.3 on OA for books.)
Authors of scholarly research articles aren’t the only players who work without pay in the production of research literature. In general, scholarly journals don’t pay editors or referees either. In general, editors and referees are paid salaries by universities to free them, like authors, to donate their time and labor to ensure the quality of new work appearing in scholarly journals. An important consequence follows. All the key players in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA needn’t dispense with peer review or favor unrefereed manuscripts over refereed articles. We can aim for the prize of OA to peer-reviewed scholarship. (See section 5.1 on peer review.)
Of course, conventional publishers are not as free as authors, editors, and referees to forgo revenue. This is a central fact in the transition to OA, and it explains why the interests of scholars and conventional publishers diverge more in the digital age than they diverged earlier. But not all publishers are conventional, and not all conventional publishers will carry print-era business models into the digital age.
Academic publishers are not monolithic. Some new ones were born OA and some older ones have completely converted to OA. Many provide OA to some of their work but not all of it. Some are experimenting with OA, and some are watching the experiments of others. Most allow green OA (through repositories) and a growing number offer at least some kind of gold OA (through journals). Some are supportive, some undecided, some opposed. Among the opposed, some have merely decided not to provide OA themselves, while others lobby actively against policies to encourage or require OA. Some oppose gold but not green OA, while others oppose green but not gold OA.
OA gains nothing and loses potential allies by blurring these distinctions. This variety reminds us (to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly) that OA doesn’t threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt.
A growing number of journal publishers have chosen business models allowing them to dispense with subscription revenue and offer OA. They have expenses but they also have revenue to cover their expenses. In fact, some OA publishers are for-profit and profitable. (See chapter 7 on economics.)
Moreover, peer review is done by dedicated volunteers who don’t care how a journal pays its bills, or even whether the journal is in the red or the black. If all peer-reviewed journals converted to OA overnight, the authors, editors, and referees would have the same incentives to participate in peer review that they had the day before. They needn’t stop offering their services, needn’t lower their standards, and needn’t make sacrifices they weren’t already making. They volunteer their time not because of a journal’s choice of business model but because of its contribution to research. They could carry on with solvent or insolvent subscription publishers, with solvent or insolvent OA publishers, or even without publishers.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative said in February 2002: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment. . . . The new technology is the internet.”
To see what this willingness looks like without the medium to give it effect, look at scholarship in the age of print. Author gifts turned into publisher commodities, and access gaps for readers were harmfully large and widespread. (Access gaps are still harmfully large and widespread, but only because OA is not yet the default for new research.) To see what the medium looks like without the willingness, look at music and movies in the age of the internet. The need for royalties keeps creators from reaching everyone who would enjoy their work.
A beautiful opportunity exists where the willingness and the medium overlap. A scholarly custom that evolved in the seventeenth century frees scholars to take advantage of the access revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first. Because scholars are nearly unique in following this custom, they are nearly unique in their freedom to take advantage of this revolution without financial risk. In this sense, the planets have aligned for scholars. Most other authors are constrained to fear rather than seize the opportunities created by the internet.
1.2 What OA Is Not
We can dispel a cloud of objections and misunderstandings simply by pointing out a few things that OA is not. (Many of these points will be elaborated in later chapters.)
OA isn’t an attempt to bypass peer review. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most conservative to the most innovative, and all the major public statements on OA insist on its importance. Because scholarly journals generally don’t pay peer-reviewing editors and referees, just as they don’t pay authors, all the participants in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. While OA to unrefereed preprints is useful and widespread, the OA movement isn’t limited to unrefereed preprints and, if anything, focuses on OA to peer-reviewed articles. (More in section 5.1 on peer review.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reform, violate, or abolish copyright. It’s compatible with copyright law as it is. OA would benefit from the right kinds of copyright reforms, and many dedicated people are working on them. But it needn’t wait for reforms and hasn’t waited. OA literature avoids copyright problems in exactly the same way that conventional toll-access literature does. For older works, it takes advantage of the public domain, and for newer works, it rests on copyright-holder consent. (More in chapter 4 on policies and chapter 6 on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deprive royalty-earning authors of income. The OA movement focuses on research articles precisely because they don’t pay royalties. In any case, inside and outside that focus, OA for copyrighted work depends on copyright-holder consent. Hence, royalty-earning authors have nothing to fear but persuasion that the benefits of OA might outweigh the risks to royalties. (More in section 5.3 on OA for books.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deny the reality of costs. No serious OA advocate has ever argued that OA literature is costless to produce, although many argue that it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature, even less expensive than born-digital toll-access literature. The question is not whether research literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than charging readers and creating access barriers. (More in chapter 7 on economics.)
Terminology
We could talk about vigilante OA, infringing OA, piratical OA, or OA without consent. That sort of OA could violate copyrights and deprive royalty-earning authors of royalties against their will. But we could also talk about vigilante publishing, infringing publishing, piratical publishing, or publishing without consent. Both happen. However, we generally reserve the term “publishing” for lawful publishing, and tack on special adjectives to describe unlawful variations on the theme. Likewise, I’ll reserve the term “open access” for lawful OA that carries the consent of the relevant rightsholder.
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce authors’ rights over their work. On the contrary, OA depends on author decisions and requires authors to exercise more rights or control over their work than they are allowed to exercise under traditional publishing contracts. One OA strategy is for authors to retain some of the rights they formerly gave publishers, including the right to authorize OA. Another OA strategy is for publishers to permit more uses than they formerly permitted, including permission for authors to make OA copies of their work. By contrast, traditional journal-publishing contracts demand that authors transfer all rights to publishers, and author rights or control cannot sink lower than that. (See chapters
4
on policies and
6
on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce academic freedom. Academic authors remain free to submit their work to the journals or publishers of their choice. Policies requiring OA do so conditionally, for example, for researchers who choose to apply for a certain kind of grant. In addition, these policies generally build in exceptions, waiver options, or both. Since 2008 most university OA policies have been adopted by faculty deeply concerned to preserve and even enhance their prerogatives. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
OA isn’t an attempt to relax rules against plagiarism. All the public definitions of OA support author attribution, even construed as a “restriction” on users. All the major open licenses require author attribution. Moreover, plagiarism is typically punished by the plagiarist’s institution rather than by courts, that is, by social norms rather than by law. Hence, even when attribution is not legally required, plagiarism is still a punishable offense and no OA policy anywhere interferes with those punishments. In any case, if making literature digital and online makes plagiarism easier to commit, then OA makes plagiarism easier to detect. Not all plagiarists are smart, but the smart ones will not steal from OA sources indexed in every search engine. In this sense, OA deters plagiarism.
OA isn’t an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers. OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers, and research institutions. The goal is constructive, not destructive. If OA does eventually harm toll-access publishers, it will be in the way that personal computers harmed typewriter manufacturers. The harm was not the goal, but a side effect of developing something better. Moreover, OA doesn’t challenge publishers or publishing per se, just one business model for publishing, and it’s far easier for conventional publishers to adapt to OA than for typewriter manufacturers to adapt to computers. In fact, most toll-access publishers are already adapting, by allowing author-initiated OA, providing some OA themselves, or experimenting with OA. (See section 3.1 on green OA and chapter 8 on casualties.)
OA doesn’t require boycotting any kind of literature or publisher. It doesn’t require boycotting toll-access research any more than free online journalism requires boycotting priced online journalism. OA doesn’t require us to strike toll-access literature from our personal reading lists, course syllabi, or libraries. Some scholars who support OA decide to submit new work only to OA journals, or to donate their time as editors or referees only to OA journals, in effect boycotting toll-access journals as authors, editors, and referees. But this choice is not forced by the definition of OA, by a commitment to OA, or by any OA policy, and most scholars who support OA continue to work with toll-access journals. In any case, even those scholars who do boycott toll-access journals as authors, editors, or referees don’t boycott them as readers. (Here we needn’t get into the complexity that some toll-access journals effectively create involuntary reader boycotts by pricing their journals out of reach of readers who want access.)
OA isn’t primarily about bringing access to lay readers. If anything, the OA movement focuses on bringing access to professional researchers whose careers depend on access. But there’s no need to decide which users are primary and which are secondary. The publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. OA is about bringing access to everyone with an internet connection who wants access, regardless of their professions or purposes. There’s no doubt that if we put “professional researchers” and “everyone else” into separate categories, a higher percentage of researchers will want access to research literature, even after taking into account that many already have paid access through their institutions. But it’s far from clear why that would matter, especially when providing OA to all internet users is cheaper and simpler than providing OA to just a subset of worthy internet users.
If party-goers in New York and New Jersey can both enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks in New York Harbor, then the sponsors needn’t decide that one group is primary, even if a simple study could show which group is more numerous. If this analogy breaks down, it’s because New Jersey residents who can’t see the fireworks gain nothing from New Yorkers who can. But research does offer this double or indirect benefit. When OA research directly benefits many lay readers, so much the better. But when it doesn’t, it still benefits everyone indirectly by benefiting researchers directly. (Also see section 5.5.1 on access for lay readers.)
Finally, OA isn’t universal access. Even when we succeed at removing price and permission barriers, four other kinds of access barrier might remain in place:
Filtering and censorship barriers
Many schools, employers, ISPs, and governments want to limit what users can see.
Language barriers
Most online literature is in English, or another single language, and machine translation is still very weak.
Handicap access barriers
Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be.
Connectivity barriers
The digital divide keeps billions of people offline, including millions of scholars, and impedes millions of others with slow, flaky, or low-bandwidth internet connections.
Most us want to remove all four of these barriers. But there’s no reason to save the term
open access
until we succeed. In the long climb to universal access, removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name. | Readers can reuse literature for scholarly purposes. | Readers can translate and redistribute work. | Readers are not limited by their own ability to pay. | Readers are not limited by the budgets of libraries. | 0 |
99924_YN01YWI7_5 | What is the open-access delivered by repositories called? | What Is Open Access?
Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. About thirty years ago this kind of free global sharing became something new under the sun. Before that, it would have sounded like a quixotic dream.
Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. Let’s call this one the access revolution.
Why don’t more authors take advantage of the access revolution to reach more readers? The answer is pretty clear. Authors who share their works in this way aren’t selling them, and even authors with purposes higher than money depend on sales to make a living. Or at least they appreciate sales.
Let’s sharpen the question, then, by putting to one side authors who want to sell their work. We can even acknowledge that we’re putting aside the vast majority of authors.
Imagine a tribe of authors who write serious and useful work, and who follow a centuries-old custom of giving it away without charge. I don’t mean a group of rich authors who don’t need money. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. In fact, very few are wealthy. For now, it doesn’t matter who these authors are, how rare they are, what they write, or why they follow this peculiar custom. It’s enough to know that their employers pay them salaries, freeing them to give away their work, that they write for impact rather than money, and that they score career points when they make the kind of impact they hoped to make. Suppose that selling their work would actually harm their interests by shrinking their audience, reducing their impact, and distorting their professional goals by steering them toward popular topics and away from the specialized questions on which they are experts.
If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. The dream of global free access can be a reality for them, even if most other authors hope to earn royalties and feel obliged to sit out this particular revolution.
These lucky authors are scholars, and the works they customarily write and publish without payment are peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals.
Open access
is the name of the revolutionary kind of access these authors, unencumbered by a motive of financial gain, are free to provide to their readers.
Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes.
A price tag
is a significant access barrier. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. But when a scholar needs to read or consult hundreds of works for one research project, or when a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics, and when the volume of new work grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers.
Copyright
can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. That makes sense when the author wants to sell the work and when the use you have in mind could undermine sales. But for research articles we’re generally talking about authors from the special tribe who want to share their work as widely as possible. Even these authors, however, tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries—publishers—who want to sell their work. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. OA removes these permission barriers.
Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it.
Terminology
When we need to, we can be more specific about access vehicles and access barriers. In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called
gold OA
, and OA delivered by repositories is called
green OA
. Work that is not open access, or that is available only for a price, is called
toll access
(TA). Over the years I’ve asked publishers for a neutral, nonpejorative and nonhonorific term for toll-access publishers, and
conventional publishers
is the suggestion I hear most often. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide
gratis OA
, and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide
libre OA
. (Also see section 3.1 on green/gold and section 3.3 on gratis/libre.)
OA was defined in three influential public statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003).
I sometimes refer to their overlap or common ground as the BBB definition of OA. My definition here is the BBB definition reduced to its essential elements and refined with some post-BBB terminology (green, gold, gratis, libre) for speaking precisely about subspecies of OA. Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA:
There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Here’s how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.”
Note that all three legs of the BBB definition go beyond removing price barriers to removing permission barriers, or beyond gratis OA to libre OA. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. The purpose of OA is to remove barriers to all legitimate scholarly uses for scholarly literature, but there’s no legitimate scholarly purpose in suppressing attribution to the texts we use. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.)
The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. If there are complexities, they lie in the transition from where we are now to a world in which OA is the default for new research. This is complicated because the major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural. (More in
chapter 9
on the future.)
In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. Moreover, any kind of content can be digital: texts, data, images, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software—and to different degrees we already do. But the term “open access” was coined by researchers trying to remove access barriers to research. The next section explains why.
1.1 What Makes OA Possible?
OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. But why would a copyright holder consent to OA?
Two background facts suggest the answer. First, authors are the copyright holders for their work until or unless they transfer rights to someone else, such as a publisher.
Second, scholarly journals generally don’t pay authors for their research articles, which frees this special tribe of authors to consent to OA without losing revenue. This fact distinguishes scholars decisively from musicians and moviemakers, and even from most other kinds of authors. This is why controversies about OA to music and movies don’t carry over to OA for research articles.
Both facts are critical, but the second is nearly unknown outside the academic world. It’s not a new fact of academic life, arising from a recent economic downturn in the publishing industry. Nor is it a case of corporate exploitation of unworldly academics. Scholarly journals haven’t paid authors for their articles since the first scholarly journals, the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society of London and the
Journal des sçavans
, launched in London and Paris in 1665.
The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. Or it may be a wise adaptation that would eventually evolve in any culture with a serious research subculture. (The optimist in me wants to believe the latter, but the evolution of copyright law taunts that optimism.) This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It also supports academic freedom and the kinds of serious inquiry that advance knowledge. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. At the same time it frees them to microspecialize and defend ideas of immediate interest to just a handful people in the world, which are essential to pushing the frontiers of knowledge.
This custom doesn’t guarantee that truth-seeking won’t be derailed by profit-seeking, and it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eventually fill the smallest gaps in our collaborative understanding of the world. It doesn’t even guarantee that scholars won’t sometimes play for the crowd and detour into fad thinking. But it removes a major distraction by allowing them, if they wish, to focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell. It’s a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to research, and it’s the key to the legal and economic lock that would otherwise shackle steps toward OA.
Creative people who live by royalties, such as novelists, musicians, and moviemakers, may consider this scholarly tradition a burden and sacrifice for scholars. We might even agree, provided we don’t overlook a few facts. First, it’s a sacrifice that scholars have been making for nearly 350 years. OA to research articles doesn’t depend on asking royalty-earning authors to give up their royalties. Second, academics have salaries from universities, freeing them to dive deeply into their research topics and publish specialized articles without market appeal. Many musicians and moviemakers might envy that freedom to disregard sales and popular taste. Third, academics receive other, less tangible rewards from their institutions—like promotion and tenure—when their research is recognized by others, accepted, cited, applied, and built upon.
It’s no accident that faculty who advance knowledge in their fields also advance their careers. Academics are passionate about certain topics, ideas, questions, inquiries, or disciplines. They feel lucky to have jobs in which they may pursue these passions and even luckier to be rewarded for pursuing them. Some focus single-mindedly on carrying an honest pebble to the pile of knowledge (as John Lange put it), having an impact on their field, or scooping others working on the same questions. Others focus strategically on building the case for promotion and tenure. But the two paths converge, which is not a fortuitous fact of nature but an engineered fact of life in the academy. As incentives for productivity, these intangible career benefits may be stronger for the average researcher than royalties are for the average novelist or musician. (In both domains, bountiful royalties for superstars tell us nothing about effective payment models for the long tail of less stellar professionals.)
There’s no sense in which research would be more free, efficient, or effective if academics took a more “businesslike” position, behaved more like musicians and moviemakers, abandoned their insulation from the market, and tied their income to the popularity of their ideas. Nonacademics who urge academics to come to their senses and demand royalties even for journal articles may be more naive about nonprofit research than academics are about for-profit business.
We can take this a step further. Scholars can afford to ignore sales because they have salaries and research grants to take the place of royalties. But why do universities pay salaries and why do funding agencies award grants? They do it to advance research and the range of public interests served by research. They don’t do it to earn profits from the results. They are all nonprofit. They certainly don’t do it to make scholarly writings into gifts to enrich publishers, especially when conventional publishers erect access barriers at the expense of research. Universities and funding agencies pay researchers to make their research into gifts to the public in the widest sense.
Public and private funding agencies are essentially public and private charities, funding research they regard as useful or beneficial. Universities have a public purpose as well, even when they are private institutions. We support the public institutions with public funds, and we support the private ones with tax exemptions for their property and tax deductions for their donors.
We’d have less knowledge, less academic freedom, and less OA if researchers worked for royalties and made their research articles into commodities rather than gifts. It should be no surprise, then, that more and more funding agencies and universities are adopting strong OA policies. Their mission to advance research leads them directly to logic of OA: With a few exceptions, such as classified research, research that is worth funding or facilitating is worth sharing with everyone who can make use of it. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
Newcomers to OA often assume that OA helps readers and hurts authors, and that the reader side of the scholarly soul must beg the author side to make the necessary sacrifice. But OA benefits authors as well as readers. Authors want access to readers at least as much as readers want access to authors. All authors want to cultivate a larger audience and greater impact. Authors who work for royalties have reason to compromise and settle for the smaller audience of paying customers. But authors who aren’t paid for their writing have no reason to compromise.
It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to recognize that scholarly publication is accompanied by a strong interest in impact and career building. The result is a mix of interested and disinterested motives. The reasons to make work OA are essentially the same as the reasons to publish. Authors who make their work OA are always serving others but not always acting from altruism. In fact, the idea that OA depends on author altruism slows down OA progress by hiding the role of author self-interest.
Another aspect of author self-interest emerges from the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles, even when they are published in the same issue of the same journal. There’s growing evidence that OA articles are downloaded more often as well, and that journals converting to OA see a rise in their submissions and citation impact.
There are many hypotheses to explain the correlation between OA and increased citations, but it’s likely that ongoing studies will show that much of the correlation is simply due to the larger audience and heightened visibility provided by OA itself. When you enlarge the audience for an article, you also enlarge the subset of the audience that will later cite it, including professionals in the same field at institutions unable to afford subscription access. OA enlarges the potential audience, including the potential professional audience, far beyond that for even the most prestigious and popular subscription journals.
In any case, these studies bring a welcome note of author self-interest to the case for OA. OA is not a sacrifice for authors who write for impact rather than money. It increases a work’s visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming. But as we’ll see, it’s not costly, not difficult, and not time-consuming.
My colleague Stevan Harnad frequently compares research articles to advertisements. They advertise the author’s research. Try telling advertisers that they’re making a needless sacrifice by allowing people to read their ads without having to pay for the privilege. Advertisers give away their ads and even pay to place them where they might be seen. They do this to benefit themselves, and scholars have the same interest in sharing their message as widely as possible.
Because any content can be digital, and any digital content can be OA, OA needn’t be limited to royalty-free literature like research articles. Research articles are just ripe examples of low-hanging fruit. OA could extend to royalty-producing work like monographs, textbooks, novels, news, music, and movies. But as soon as we cross the line into OA for royalty-producing work, authors will either lose revenue or fear that they will lose revenue. Either way, they’ll be harder to persuade. But instead of concluding that royalty-producing work is off limits to OA, we should merely conclude that it’s higher-hanging fruit. In many cases we can still persuade royalty-earning authors to consent to OA. (See section 5.3 on OA for books.)
Authors of scholarly research articles aren’t the only players who work without pay in the production of research literature. In general, scholarly journals don’t pay editors or referees either. In general, editors and referees are paid salaries by universities to free them, like authors, to donate their time and labor to ensure the quality of new work appearing in scholarly journals. An important consequence follows. All the key players in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA needn’t dispense with peer review or favor unrefereed manuscripts over refereed articles. We can aim for the prize of OA to peer-reviewed scholarship. (See section 5.1 on peer review.)
Of course, conventional publishers are not as free as authors, editors, and referees to forgo revenue. This is a central fact in the transition to OA, and it explains why the interests of scholars and conventional publishers diverge more in the digital age than they diverged earlier. But not all publishers are conventional, and not all conventional publishers will carry print-era business models into the digital age.
Academic publishers are not monolithic. Some new ones were born OA and some older ones have completely converted to OA. Many provide OA to some of their work but not all of it. Some are experimenting with OA, and some are watching the experiments of others. Most allow green OA (through repositories) and a growing number offer at least some kind of gold OA (through journals). Some are supportive, some undecided, some opposed. Among the opposed, some have merely decided not to provide OA themselves, while others lobby actively against policies to encourage or require OA. Some oppose gold but not green OA, while others oppose green but not gold OA.
OA gains nothing and loses potential allies by blurring these distinctions. This variety reminds us (to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly) that OA doesn’t threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt.
A growing number of journal publishers have chosen business models allowing them to dispense with subscription revenue and offer OA. They have expenses but they also have revenue to cover their expenses. In fact, some OA publishers are for-profit and profitable. (See chapter 7 on economics.)
Moreover, peer review is done by dedicated volunteers who don’t care how a journal pays its bills, or even whether the journal is in the red or the black. If all peer-reviewed journals converted to OA overnight, the authors, editors, and referees would have the same incentives to participate in peer review that they had the day before. They needn’t stop offering their services, needn’t lower their standards, and needn’t make sacrifices they weren’t already making. They volunteer their time not because of a journal’s choice of business model but because of its contribution to research. They could carry on with solvent or insolvent subscription publishers, with solvent or insolvent OA publishers, or even without publishers.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative said in February 2002: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment. . . . The new technology is the internet.”
To see what this willingness looks like without the medium to give it effect, look at scholarship in the age of print. Author gifts turned into publisher commodities, and access gaps for readers were harmfully large and widespread. (Access gaps are still harmfully large and widespread, but only because OA is not yet the default for new research.) To see what the medium looks like without the willingness, look at music and movies in the age of the internet. The need for royalties keeps creators from reaching everyone who would enjoy their work.
A beautiful opportunity exists where the willingness and the medium overlap. A scholarly custom that evolved in the seventeenth century frees scholars to take advantage of the access revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first. Because scholars are nearly unique in following this custom, they are nearly unique in their freedom to take advantage of this revolution without financial risk. In this sense, the planets have aligned for scholars. Most other authors are constrained to fear rather than seize the opportunities created by the internet.
1.2 What OA Is Not
We can dispel a cloud of objections and misunderstandings simply by pointing out a few things that OA is not. (Many of these points will be elaborated in later chapters.)
OA isn’t an attempt to bypass peer review. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most conservative to the most innovative, and all the major public statements on OA insist on its importance. Because scholarly journals generally don’t pay peer-reviewing editors and referees, just as they don’t pay authors, all the participants in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. While OA to unrefereed preprints is useful and widespread, the OA movement isn’t limited to unrefereed preprints and, if anything, focuses on OA to peer-reviewed articles. (More in section 5.1 on peer review.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reform, violate, or abolish copyright. It’s compatible with copyright law as it is. OA would benefit from the right kinds of copyright reforms, and many dedicated people are working on them. But it needn’t wait for reforms and hasn’t waited. OA literature avoids copyright problems in exactly the same way that conventional toll-access literature does. For older works, it takes advantage of the public domain, and for newer works, it rests on copyright-holder consent. (More in chapter 4 on policies and chapter 6 on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deprive royalty-earning authors of income. The OA movement focuses on research articles precisely because they don’t pay royalties. In any case, inside and outside that focus, OA for copyrighted work depends on copyright-holder consent. Hence, royalty-earning authors have nothing to fear but persuasion that the benefits of OA might outweigh the risks to royalties. (More in section 5.3 on OA for books.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deny the reality of costs. No serious OA advocate has ever argued that OA literature is costless to produce, although many argue that it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature, even less expensive than born-digital toll-access literature. The question is not whether research literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than charging readers and creating access barriers. (More in chapter 7 on economics.)
Terminology
We could talk about vigilante OA, infringing OA, piratical OA, or OA without consent. That sort of OA could violate copyrights and deprive royalty-earning authors of royalties against their will. But we could also talk about vigilante publishing, infringing publishing, piratical publishing, or publishing without consent. Both happen. However, we generally reserve the term “publishing” for lawful publishing, and tack on special adjectives to describe unlawful variations on the theme. Likewise, I’ll reserve the term “open access” for lawful OA that carries the consent of the relevant rightsholder.
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce authors’ rights over their work. On the contrary, OA depends on author decisions and requires authors to exercise more rights or control over their work than they are allowed to exercise under traditional publishing contracts. One OA strategy is for authors to retain some of the rights they formerly gave publishers, including the right to authorize OA. Another OA strategy is for publishers to permit more uses than they formerly permitted, including permission for authors to make OA copies of their work. By contrast, traditional journal-publishing contracts demand that authors transfer all rights to publishers, and author rights or control cannot sink lower than that. (See chapters
4
on policies and
6
on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce academic freedom. Academic authors remain free to submit their work to the journals or publishers of their choice. Policies requiring OA do so conditionally, for example, for researchers who choose to apply for a certain kind of grant. In addition, these policies generally build in exceptions, waiver options, or both. Since 2008 most university OA policies have been adopted by faculty deeply concerned to preserve and even enhance their prerogatives. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
OA isn’t an attempt to relax rules against plagiarism. All the public definitions of OA support author attribution, even construed as a “restriction” on users. All the major open licenses require author attribution. Moreover, plagiarism is typically punished by the plagiarist’s institution rather than by courts, that is, by social norms rather than by law. Hence, even when attribution is not legally required, plagiarism is still a punishable offense and no OA policy anywhere interferes with those punishments. In any case, if making literature digital and online makes plagiarism easier to commit, then OA makes plagiarism easier to detect. Not all plagiarists are smart, but the smart ones will not steal from OA sources indexed in every search engine. In this sense, OA deters plagiarism.
OA isn’t an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers. OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers, and research institutions. The goal is constructive, not destructive. If OA does eventually harm toll-access publishers, it will be in the way that personal computers harmed typewriter manufacturers. The harm was not the goal, but a side effect of developing something better. Moreover, OA doesn’t challenge publishers or publishing per se, just one business model for publishing, and it’s far easier for conventional publishers to adapt to OA than for typewriter manufacturers to adapt to computers. In fact, most toll-access publishers are already adapting, by allowing author-initiated OA, providing some OA themselves, or experimenting with OA. (See section 3.1 on green OA and chapter 8 on casualties.)
OA doesn’t require boycotting any kind of literature or publisher. It doesn’t require boycotting toll-access research any more than free online journalism requires boycotting priced online journalism. OA doesn’t require us to strike toll-access literature from our personal reading lists, course syllabi, or libraries. Some scholars who support OA decide to submit new work only to OA journals, or to donate their time as editors or referees only to OA journals, in effect boycotting toll-access journals as authors, editors, and referees. But this choice is not forced by the definition of OA, by a commitment to OA, or by any OA policy, and most scholars who support OA continue to work with toll-access journals. In any case, even those scholars who do boycott toll-access journals as authors, editors, or referees don’t boycott them as readers. (Here we needn’t get into the complexity that some toll-access journals effectively create involuntary reader boycotts by pricing their journals out of reach of readers who want access.)
OA isn’t primarily about bringing access to lay readers. If anything, the OA movement focuses on bringing access to professional researchers whose careers depend on access. But there’s no need to decide which users are primary and which are secondary. The publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. OA is about bringing access to everyone with an internet connection who wants access, regardless of their professions or purposes. There’s no doubt that if we put “professional researchers” and “everyone else” into separate categories, a higher percentage of researchers will want access to research literature, even after taking into account that many already have paid access through their institutions. But it’s far from clear why that would matter, especially when providing OA to all internet users is cheaper and simpler than providing OA to just a subset of worthy internet users.
If party-goers in New York and New Jersey can both enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks in New York Harbor, then the sponsors needn’t decide that one group is primary, even if a simple study could show which group is more numerous. If this analogy breaks down, it’s because New Jersey residents who can’t see the fireworks gain nothing from New Yorkers who can. But research does offer this double or indirect benefit. When OA research directly benefits many lay readers, so much the better. But when it doesn’t, it still benefits everyone indirectly by benefiting researchers directly. (Also see section 5.5.1 on access for lay readers.)
Finally, OA isn’t universal access. Even when we succeed at removing price and permission barriers, four other kinds of access barrier might remain in place:
Filtering and censorship barriers
Many schools, employers, ISPs, and governments want to limit what users can see.
Language barriers
Most online literature is in English, or another single language, and machine translation is still very weak.
Handicap access barriers
Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be.
Connectivity barriers
The digital divide keeps billions of people offline, including millions of scholars, and impedes millions of others with slow, flaky, or low-bandwidth internet connections.
Most us want to remove all four of these barriers. But there’s no reason to save the term
open access
until we succeed. In the long climb to universal access, removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name. | Green OA | Libre OA | Gold OA | Gratis OA | 0 |
99924_YN01YWI7_6 | What is one limit all kinds of OA put on user freedom? | What Is Open Access?
Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. About thirty years ago this kind of free global sharing became something new under the sun. Before that, it would have sounded like a quixotic dream.
Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. Let’s call this one the access revolution.
Why don’t more authors take advantage of the access revolution to reach more readers? The answer is pretty clear. Authors who share their works in this way aren’t selling them, and even authors with purposes higher than money depend on sales to make a living. Or at least they appreciate sales.
Let’s sharpen the question, then, by putting to one side authors who want to sell their work. We can even acknowledge that we’re putting aside the vast majority of authors.
Imagine a tribe of authors who write serious and useful work, and who follow a centuries-old custom of giving it away without charge. I don’t mean a group of rich authors who don’t need money. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. In fact, very few are wealthy. For now, it doesn’t matter who these authors are, how rare they are, what they write, or why they follow this peculiar custom. It’s enough to know that their employers pay them salaries, freeing them to give away their work, that they write for impact rather than money, and that they score career points when they make the kind of impact they hoped to make. Suppose that selling their work would actually harm their interests by shrinking their audience, reducing their impact, and distorting their professional goals by steering them toward popular topics and away from the specialized questions on which they are experts.
If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. The dream of global free access can be a reality for them, even if most other authors hope to earn royalties and feel obliged to sit out this particular revolution.
These lucky authors are scholars, and the works they customarily write and publish without payment are peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals.
Open access
is the name of the revolutionary kind of access these authors, unencumbered by a motive of financial gain, are free to provide to their readers.
Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes.
A price tag
is a significant access barrier. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. But when a scholar needs to read or consult hundreds of works for one research project, or when a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics, and when the volume of new work grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers.
Copyright
can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. That makes sense when the author wants to sell the work and when the use you have in mind could undermine sales. But for research articles we’re generally talking about authors from the special tribe who want to share their work as widely as possible. Even these authors, however, tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries—publishers—who want to sell their work. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. OA removes these permission barriers.
Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it.
Terminology
When we need to, we can be more specific about access vehicles and access barriers. In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called
gold OA
, and OA delivered by repositories is called
green OA
. Work that is not open access, or that is available only for a price, is called
toll access
(TA). Over the years I’ve asked publishers for a neutral, nonpejorative and nonhonorific term for toll-access publishers, and
conventional publishers
is the suggestion I hear most often. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide
gratis OA
, and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide
libre OA
. (Also see section 3.1 on green/gold and section 3.3 on gratis/libre.)
OA was defined in three influential public statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003).
I sometimes refer to their overlap or common ground as the BBB definition of OA. My definition here is the BBB definition reduced to its essential elements and refined with some post-BBB terminology (green, gold, gratis, libre) for speaking precisely about subspecies of OA. Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA:
There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Here’s how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.”
Note that all three legs of the BBB definition go beyond removing price barriers to removing permission barriers, or beyond gratis OA to libre OA. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. The purpose of OA is to remove barriers to all legitimate scholarly uses for scholarly literature, but there’s no legitimate scholarly purpose in suppressing attribution to the texts we use. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.)
The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. If there are complexities, they lie in the transition from where we are now to a world in which OA is the default for new research. This is complicated because the major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural. (More in
chapter 9
on the future.)
In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. Moreover, any kind of content can be digital: texts, data, images, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software—and to different degrees we already do. But the term “open access” was coined by researchers trying to remove access barriers to research. The next section explains why.
1.1 What Makes OA Possible?
OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. But why would a copyright holder consent to OA?
Two background facts suggest the answer. First, authors are the copyright holders for their work until or unless they transfer rights to someone else, such as a publisher.
Second, scholarly journals generally don’t pay authors for their research articles, which frees this special tribe of authors to consent to OA without losing revenue. This fact distinguishes scholars decisively from musicians and moviemakers, and even from most other kinds of authors. This is why controversies about OA to music and movies don’t carry over to OA for research articles.
Both facts are critical, but the second is nearly unknown outside the academic world. It’s not a new fact of academic life, arising from a recent economic downturn in the publishing industry. Nor is it a case of corporate exploitation of unworldly academics. Scholarly journals haven’t paid authors for their articles since the first scholarly journals, the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society of London and the
Journal des sçavans
, launched in London and Paris in 1665.
The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. Or it may be a wise adaptation that would eventually evolve in any culture with a serious research subculture. (The optimist in me wants to believe the latter, but the evolution of copyright law taunts that optimism.) This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It also supports academic freedom and the kinds of serious inquiry that advance knowledge. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. At the same time it frees them to microspecialize and defend ideas of immediate interest to just a handful people in the world, which are essential to pushing the frontiers of knowledge.
This custom doesn’t guarantee that truth-seeking won’t be derailed by profit-seeking, and it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eventually fill the smallest gaps in our collaborative understanding of the world. It doesn’t even guarantee that scholars won’t sometimes play for the crowd and detour into fad thinking. But it removes a major distraction by allowing them, if they wish, to focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell. It’s a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to research, and it’s the key to the legal and economic lock that would otherwise shackle steps toward OA.
Creative people who live by royalties, such as novelists, musicians, and moviemakers, may consider this scholarly tradition a burden and sacrifice for scholars. We might even agree, provided we don’t overlook a few facts. First, it’s a sacrifice that scholars have been making for nearly 350 years. OA to research articles doesn’t depend on asking royalty-earning authors to give up their royalties. Second, academics have salaries from universities, freeing them to dive deeply into their research topics and publish specialized articles without market appeal. Many musicians and moviemakers might envy that freedom to disregard sales and popular taste. Third, academics receive other, less tangible rewards from their institutions—like promotion and tenure—when their research is recognized by others, accepted, cited, applied, and built upon.
It’s no accident that faculty who advance knowledge in their fields also advance their careers. Academics are passionate about certain topics, ideas, questions, inquiries, or disciplines. They feel lucky to have jobs in which they may pursue these passions and even luckier to be rewarded for pursuing them. Some focus single-mindedly on carrying an honest pebble to the pile of knowledge (as John Lange put it), having an impact on their field, or scooping others working on the same questions. Others focus strategically on building the case for promotion and tenure. But the two paths converge, which is not a fortuitous fact of nature but an engineered fact of life in the academy. As incentives for productivity, these intangible career benefits may be stronger for the average researcher than royalties are for the average novelist or musician. (In both domains, bountiful royalties for superstars tell us nothing about effective payment models for the long tail of less stellar professionals.)
There’s no sense in which research would be more free, efficient, or effective if academics took a more “businesslike” position, behaved more like musicians and moviemakers, abandoned their insulation from the market, and tied their income to the popularity of their ideas. Nonacademics who urge academics to come to their senses and demand royalties even for journal articles may be more naive about nonprofit research than academics are about for-profit business.
We can take this a step further. Scholars can afford to ignore sales because they have salaries and research grants to take the place of royalties. But why do universities pay salaries and why do funding agencies award grants? They do it to advance research and the range of public interests served by research. They don’t do it to earn profits from the results. They are all nonprofit. They certainly don’t do it to make scholarly writings into gifts to enrich publishers, especially when conventional publishers erect access barriers at the expense of research. Universities and funding agencies pay researchers to make their research into gifts to the public in the widest sense.
Public and private funding agencies are essentially public and private charities, funding research they regard as useful or beneficial. Universities have a public purpose as well, even when they are private institutions. We support the public institutions with public funds, and we support the private ones with tax exemptions for their property and tax deductions for their donors.
We’d have less knowledge, less academic freedom, and less OA if researchers worked for royalties and made their research articles into commodities rather than gifts. It should be no surprise, then, that more and more funding agencies and universities are adopting strong OA policies. Their mission to advance research leads them directly to logic of OA: With a few exceptions, such as classified research, research that is worth funding or facilitating is worth sharing with everyone who can make use of it. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
Newcomers to OA often assume that OA helps readers and hurts authors, and that the reader side of the scholarly soul must beg the author side to make the necessary sacrifice. But OA benefits authors as well as readers. Authors want access to readers at least as much as readers want access to authors. All authors want to cultivate a larger audience and greater impact. Authors who work for royalties have reason to compromise and settle for the smaller audience of paying customers. But authors who aren’t paid for their writing have no reason to compromise.
It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to recognize that scholarly publication is accompanied by a strong interest in impact and career building. The result is a mix of interested and disinterested motives. The reasons to make work OA are essentially the same as the reasons to publish. Authors who make their work OA are always serving others but not always acting from altruism. In fact, the idea that OA depends on author altruism slows down OA progress by hiding the role of author self-interest.
Another aspect of author self-interest emerges from the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles, even when they are published in the same issue of the same journal. There’s growing evidence that OA articles are downloaded more often as well, and that journals converting to OA see a rise in their submissions and citation impact.
There are many hypotheses to explain the correlation between OA and increased citations, but it’s likely that ongoing studies will show that much of the correlation is simply due to the larger audience and heightened visibility provided by OA itself. When you enlarge the audience for an article, you also enlarge the subset of the audience that will later cite it, including professionals in the same field at institutions unable to afford subscription access. OA enlarges the potential audience, including the potential professional audience, far beyond that for even the most prestigious and popular subscription journals.
In any case, these studies bring a welcome note of author self-interest to the case for OA. OA is not a sacrifice for authors who write for impact rather than money. It increases a work’s visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming. But as we’ll see, it’s not costly, not difficult, and not time-consuming.
My colleague Stevan Harnad frequently compares research articles to advertisements. They advertise the author’s research. Try telling advertisers that they’re making a needless sacrifice by allowing people to read their ads without having to pay for the privilege. Advertisers give away their ads and even pay to place them where they might be seen. They do this to benefit themselves, and scholars have the same interest in sharing their message as widely as possible.
Because any content can be digital, and any digital content can be OA, OA needn’t be limited to royalty-free literature like research articles. Research articles are just ripe examples of low-hanging fruit. OA could extend to royalty-producing work like monographs, textbooks, novels, news, music, and movies. But as soon as we cross the line into OA for royalty-producing work, authors will either lose revenue or fear that they will lose revenue. Either way, they’ll be harder to persuade. But instead of concluding that royalty-producing work is off limits to OA, we should merely conclude that it’s higher-hanging fruit. In many cases we can still persuade royalty-earning authors to consent to OA. (See section 5.3 on OA for books.)
Authors of scholarly research articles aren’t the only players who work without pay in the production of research literature. In general, scholarly journals don’t pay editors or referees either. In general, editors and referees are paid salaries by universities to free them, like authors, to donate their time and labor to ensure the quality of new work appearing in scholarly journals. An important consequence follows. All the key players in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA needn’t dispense with peer review or favor unrefereed manuscripts over refereed articles. We can aim for the prize of OA to peer-reviewed scholarship. (See section 5.1 on peer review.)
Of course, conventional publishers are not as free as authors, editors, and referees to forgo revenue. This is a central fact in the transition to OA, and it explains why the interests of scholars and conventional publishers diverge more in the digital age than they diverged earlier. But not all publishers are conventional, and not all conventional publishers will carry print-era business models into the digital age.
Academic publishers are not monolithic. Some new ones were born OA and some older ones have completely converted to OA. Many provide OA to some of their work but not all of it. Some are experimenting with OA, and some are watching the experiments of others. Most allow green OA (through repositories) and a growing number offer at least some kind of gold OA (through journals). Some are supportive, some undecided, some opposed. Among the opposed, some have merely decided not to provide OA themselves, while others lobby actively against policies to encourage or require OA. Some oppose gold but not green OA, while others oppose green but not gold OA.
OA gains nothing and loses potential allies by blurring these distinctions. This variety reminds us (to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly) that OA doesn’t threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt.
A growing number of journal publishers have chosen business models allowing them to dispense with subscription revenue and offer OA. They have expenses but they also have revenue to cover their expenses. In fact, some OA publishers are for-profit and profitable. (See chapter 7 on economics.)
Moreover, peer review is done by dedicated volunteers who don’t care how a journal pays its bills, or even whether the journal is in the red or the black. If all peer-reviewed journals converted to OA overnight, the authors, editors, and referees would have the same incentives to participate in peer review that they had the day before. They needn’t stop offering their services, needn’t lower their standards, and needn’t make sacrifices they weren’t already making. They volunteer their time not because of a journal’s choice of business model but because of its contribution to research. They could carry on with solvent or insolvent subscription publishers, with solvent or insolvent OA publishers, or even without publishers.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative said in February 2002: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment. . . . The new technology is the internet.”
To see what this willingness looks like without the medium to give it effect, look at scholarship in the age of print. Author gifts turned into publisher commodities, and access gaps for readers were harmfully large and widespread. (Access gaps are still harmfully large and widespread, but only because OA is not yet the default for new research.) To see what the medium looks like without the willingness, look at music and movies in the age of the internet. The need for royalties keeps creators from reaching everyone who would enjoy their work.
A beautiful opportunity exists where the willingness and the medium overlap. A scholarly custom that evolved in the seventeenth century frees scholars to take advantage of the access revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first. Because scholars are nearly unique in following this custom, they are nearly unique in their freedom to take advantage of this revolution without financial risk. In this sense, the planets have aligned for scholars. Most other authors are constrained to fear rather than seize the opportunities created by the internet.
1.2 What OA Is Not
We can dispel a cloud of objections and misunderstandings simply by pointing out a few things that OA is not. (Many of these points will be elaborated in later chapters.)
OA isn’t an attempt to bypass peer review. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most conservative to the most innovative, and all the major public statements on OA insist on its importance. Because scholarly journals generally don’t pay peer-reviewing editors and referees, just as they don’t pay authors, all the participants in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. While OA to unrefereed preprints is useful and widespread, the OA movement isn’t limited to unrefereed preprints and, if anything, focuses on OA to peer-reviewed articles. (More in section 5.1 on peer review.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reform, violate, or abolish copyright. It’s compatible with copyright law as it is. OA would benefit from the right kinds of copyright reforms, and many dedicated people are working on them. But it needn’t wait for reforms and hasn’t waited. OA literature avoids copyright problems in exactly the same way that conventional toll-access literature does. For older works, it takes advantage of the public domain, and for newer works, it rests on copyright-holder consent. (More in chapter 4 on policies and chapter 6 on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deprive royalty-earning authors of income. The OA movement focuses on research articles precisely because they don’t pay royalties. In any case, inside and outside that focus, OA for copyrighted work depends on copyright-holder consent. Hence, royalty-earning authors have nothing to fear but persuasion that the benefits of OA might outweigh the risks to royalties. (More in section 5.3 on OA for books.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deny the reality of costs. No serious OA advocate has ever argued that OA literature is costless to produce, although many argue that it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature, even less expensive than born-digital toll-access literature. The question is not whether research literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than charging readers and creating access barriers. (More in chapter 7 on economics.)
Terminology
We could talk about vigilante OA, infringing OA, piratical OA, or OA without consent. That sort of OA could violate copyrights and deprive royalty-earning authors of royalties against their will. But we could also talk about vigilante publishing, infringing publishing, piratical publishing, or publishing without consent. Both happen. However, we generally reserve the term “publishing” for lawful publishing, and tack on special adjectives to describe unlawful variations on the theme. Likewise, I’ll reserve the term “open access” for lawful OA that carries the consent of the relevant rightsholder.
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce authors’ rights over their work. On the contrary, OA depends on author decisions and requires authors to exercise more rights or control over their work than they are allowed to exercise under traditional publishing contracts. One OA strategy is for authors to retain some of the rights they formerly gave publishers, including the right to authorize OA. Another OA strategy is for publishers to permit more uses than they formerly permitted, including permission for authors to make OA copies of their work. By contrast, traditional journal-publishing contracts demand that authors transfer all rights to publishers, and author rights or control cannot sink lower than that. (See chapters
4
on policies and
6
on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce academic freedom. Academic authors remain free to submit their work to the journals or publishers of their choice. Policies requiring OA do so conditionally, for example, for researchers who choose to apply for a certain kind of grant. In addition, these policies generally build in exceptions, waiver options, or both. Since 2008 most university OA policies have been adopted by faculty deeply concerned to preserve and even enhance their prerogatives. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
OA isn’t an attempt to relax rules against plagiarism. All the public definitions of OA support author attribution, even construed as a “restriction” on users. All the major open licenses require author attribution. Moreover, plagiarism is typically punished by the plagiarist’s institution rather than by courts, that is, by social norms rather than by law. Hence, even when attribution is not legally required, plagiarism is still a punishable offense and no OA policy anywhere interferes with those punishments. In any case, if making literature digital and online makes plagiarism easier to commit, then OA makes plagiarism easier to detect. Not all plagiarists are smart, but the smart ones will not steal from OA sources indexed in every search engine. In this sense, OA deters plagiarism.
OA isn’t an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers. OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers, and research institutions. The goal is constructive, not destructive. If OA does eventually harm toll-access publishers, it will be in the way that personal computers harmed typewriter manufacturers. The harm was not the goal, but a side effect of developing something better. Moreover, OA doesn’t challenge publishers or publishing per se, just one business model for publishing, and it’s far easier for conventional publishers to adapt to OA than for typewriter manufacturers to adapt to computers. In fact, most toll-access publishers are already adapting, by allowing author-initiated OA, providing some OA themselves, or experimenting with OA. (See section 3.1 on green OA and chapter 8 on casualties.)
OA doesn’t require boycotting any kind of literature or publisher. It doesn’t require boycotting toll-access research any more than free online journalism requires boycotting priced online journalism. OA doesn’t require us to strike toll-access literature from our personal reading lists, course syllabi, or libraries. Some scholars who support OA decide to submit new work only to OA journals, or to donate their time as editors or referees only to OA journals, in effect boycotting toll-access journals as authors, editors, and referees. But this choice is not forced by the definition of OA, by a commitment to OA, or by any OA policy, and most scholars who support OA continue to work with toll-access journals. In any case, even those scholars who do boycott toll-access journals as authors, editors, or referees don’t boycott them as readers. (Here we needn’t get into the complexity that some toll-access journals effectively create involuntary reader boycotts by pricing their journals out of reach of readers who want access.)
OA isn’t primarily about bringing access to lay readers. If anything, the OA movement focuses on bringing access to professional researchers whose careers depend on access. But there’s no need to decide which users are primary and which are secondary. The publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. OA is about bringing access to everyone with an internet connection who wants access, regardless of their professions or purposes. There’s no doubt that if we put “professional researchers” and “everyone else” into separate categories, a higher percentage of researchers will want access to research literature, even after taking into account that many already have paid access through their institutions. But it’s far from clear why that would matter, especially when providing OA to all internet users is cheaper and simpler than providing OA to just a subset of worthy internet users.
If party-goers in New York and New Jersey can both enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks in New York Harbor, then the sponsors needn’t decide that one group is primary, even if a simple study could show which group is more numerous. If this analogy breaks down, it’s because New Jersey residents who can’t see the fireworks gain nothing from New Yorkers who can. But research does offer this double or indirect benefit. When OA research directly benefits many lay readers, so much the better. But when it doesn’t, it still benefits everyone indirectly by benefiting researchers directly. (Also see section 5.5.1 on access for lay readers.)
Finally, OA isn’t universal access. Even when we succeed at removing price and permission barriers, four other kinds of access barrier might remain in place:
Filtering and censorship barriers
Many schools, employers, ISPs, and governments want to limit what users can see.
Language barriers
Most online literature is in English, or another single language, and machine translation is still very weak.
Handicap access barriers
Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be.
Connectivity barriers
The digital divide keeps billions of people offline, including millions of scholars, and impedes millions of others with slow, flaky, or low-bandwidth internet connections.
Most us want to remove all four of these barriers. But there’s no reason to save the term
open access
until we succeed. In the long climb to universal access, removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name. | A constraint on library privileges. | A limit on text mining. | A constraint on reproduction and distribution. | There is an obligation to credit the work to the author. | 3 |
99924_YN01YWI7_7 | What is the main premise of OA? | What Is Open Access?
Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. About thirty years ago this kind of free global sharing became something new under the sun. Before that, it would have sounded like a quixotic dream.
Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. Let’s call this one the access revolution.
Why don’t more authors take advantage of the access revolution to reach more readers? The answer is pretty clear. Authors who share their works in this way aren’t selling them, and even authors with purposes higher than money depend on sales to make a living. Or at least they appreciate sales.
Let’s sharpen the question, then, by putting to one side authors who want to sell their work. We can even acknowledge that we’re putting aside the vast majority of authors.
Imagine a tribe of authors who write serious and useful work, and who follow a centuries-old custom of giving it away without charge. I don’t mean a group of rich authors who don’t need money. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. In fact, very few are wealthy. For now, it doesn’t matter who these authors are, how rare they are, what they write, or why they follow this peculiar custom. It’s enough to know that their employers pay them salaries, freeing them to give away their work, that they write for impact rather than money, and that they score career points when they make the kind of impact they hoped to make. Suppose that selling their work would actually harm their interests by shrinking their audience, reducing their impact, and distorting their professional goals by steering them toward popular topics and away from the specialized questions on which they are experts.
If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. The dream of global free access can be a reality for them, even if most other authors hope to earn royalties and feel obliged to sit out this particular revolution.
These lucky authors are scholars, and the works they customarily write and publish without payment are peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals.
Open access
is the name of the revolutionary kind of access these authors, unencumbered by a motive of financial gain, are free to provide to their readers.
Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes.
A price tag
is a significant access barrier. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. But when a scholar needs to read or consult hundreds of works for one research project, or when a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics, and when the volume of new work grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers.
Copyright
can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. That makes sense when the author wants to sell the work and when the use you have in mind could undermine sales. But for research articles we’re generally talking about authors from the special tribe who want to share their work as widely as possible. Even these authors, however, tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries—publishers—who want to sell their work. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. OA removes these permission barriers.
Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it.
Terminology
When we need to, we can be more specific about access vehicles and access barriers. In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called
gold OA
, and OA delivered by repositories is called
green OA
. Work that is not open access, or that is available only for a price, is called
toll access
(TA). Over the years I’ve asked publishers for a neutral, nonpejorative and nonhonorific term for toll-access publishers, and
conventional publishers
is the suggestion I hear most often. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide
gratis OA
, and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide
libre OA
. (Also see section 3.1 on green/gold and section 3.3 on gratis/libre.)
OA was defined in three influential public statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003).
I sometimes refer to their overlap or common ground as the BBB definition of OA. My definition here is the BBB definition reduced to its essential elements and refined with some post-BBB terminology (green, gold, gratis, libre) for speaking precisely about subspecies of OA. Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA:
There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Here’s how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.”
Note that all three legs of the BBB definition go beyond removing price barriers to removing permission barriers, or beyond gratis OA to libre OA. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. The purpose of OA is to remove barriers to all legitimate scholarly uses for scholarly literature, but there’s no legitimate scholarly purpose in suppressing attribution to the texts we use. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.)
The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. If there are complexities, they lie in the transition from where we are now to a world in which OA is the default for new research. This is complicated because the major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural. (More in
chapter 9
on the future.)
In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. Moreover, any kind of content can be digital: texts, data, images, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software—and to different degrees we already do. But the term “open access” was coined by researchers trying to remove access barriers to research. The next section explains why.
1.1 What Makes OA Possible?
OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. But why would a copyright holder consent to OA?
Two background facts suggest the answer. First, authors are the copyright holders for their work until or unless they transfer rights to someone else, such as a publisher.
Second, scholarly journals generally don’t pay authors for their research articles, which frees this special tribe of authors to consent to OA without losing revenue. This fact distinguishes scholars decisively from musicians and moviemakers, and even from most other kinds of authors. This is why controversies about OA to music and movies don’t carry over to OA for research articles.
Both facts are critical, but the second is nearly unknown outside the academic world. It’s not a new fact of academic life, arising from a recent economic downturn in the publishing industry. Nor is it a case of corporate exploitation of unworldly academics. Scholarly journals haven’t paid authors for their articles since the first scholarly journals, the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society of London and the
Journal des sçavans
, launched in London and Paris in 1665.
The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. Or it may be a wise adaptation that would eventually evolve in any culture with a serious research subculture. (The optimist in me wants to believe the latter, but the evolution of copyright law taunts that optimism.) This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It also supports academic freedom and the kinds of serious inquiry that advance knowledge. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. At the same time it frees them to microspecialize and defend ideas of immediate interest to just a handful people in the world, which are essential to pushing the frontiers of knowledge.
This custom doesn’t guarantee that truth-seeking won’t be derailed by profit-seeking, and it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eventually fill the smallest gaps in our collaborative understanding of the world. It doesn’t even guarantee that scholars won’t sometimes play for the crowd and detour into fad thinking. But it removes a major distraction by allowing them, if they wish, to focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell. It’s a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to research, and it’s the key to the legal and economic lock that would otherwise shackle steps toward OA.
Creative people who live by royalties, such as novelists, musicians, and moviemakers, may consider this scholarly tradition a burden and sacrifice for scholars. We might even agree, provided we don’t overlook a few facts. First, it’s a sacrifice that scholars have been making for nearly 350 years. OA to research articles doesn’t depend on asking royalty-earning authors to give up their royalties. Second, academics have salaries from universities, freeing them to dive deeply into their research topics and publish specialized articles without market appeal. Many musicians and moviemakers might envy that freedom to disregard sales and popular taste. Third, academics receive other, less tangible rewards from their institutions—like promotion and tenure—when their research is recognized by others, accepted, cited, applied, and built upon.
It’s no accident that faculty who advance knowledge in their fields also advance their careers. Academics are passionate about certain topics, ideas, questions, inquiries, or disciplines. They feel lucky to have jobs in which they may pursue these passions and even luckier to be rewarded for pursuing them. Some focus single-mindedly on carrying an honest pebble to the pile of knowledge (as John Lange put it), having an impact on their field, or scooping others working on the same questions. Others focus strategically on building the case for promotion and tenure. But the two paths converge, which is not a fortuitous fact of nature but an engineered fact of life in the academy. As incentives for productivity, these intangible career benefits may be stronger for the average researcher than royalties are for the average novelist or musician. (In both domains, bountiful royalties for superstars tell us nothing about effective payment models for the long tail of less stellar professionals.)
There’s no sense in which research would be more free, efficient, or effective if academics took a more “businesslike” position, behaved more like musicians and moviemakers, abandoned their insulation from the market, and tied their income to the popularity of their ideas. Nonacademics who urge academics to come to their senses and demand royalties even for journal articles may be more naive about nonprofit research than academics are about for-profit business.
We can take this a step further. Scholars can afford to ignore sales because they have salaries and research grants to take the place of royalties. But why do universities pay salaries and why do funding agencies award grants? They do it to advance research and the range of public interests served by research. They don’t do it to earn profits from the results. They are all nonprofit. They certainly don’t do it to make scholarly writings into gifts to enrich publishers, especially when conventional publishers erect access barriers at the expense of research. Universities and funding agencies pay researchers to make their research into gifts to the public in the widest sense.
Public and private funding agencies are essentially public and private charities, funding research they regard as useful or beneficial. Universities have a public purpose as well, even when they are private institutions. We support the public institutions with public funds, and we support the private ones with tax exemptions for their property and tax deductions for their donors.
We’d have less knowledge, less academic freedom, and less OA if researchers worked for royalties and made their research articles into commodities rather than gifts. It should be no surprise, then, that more and more funding agencies and universities are adopting strong OA policies. Their mission to advance research leads them directly to logic of OA: With a few exceptions, such as classified research, research that is worth funding or facilitating is worth sharing with everyone who can make use of it. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
Newcomers to OA often assume that OA helps readers and hurts authors, and that the reader side of the scholarly soul must beg the author side to make the necessary sacrifice. But OA benefits authors as well as readers. Authors want access to readers at least as much as readers want access to authors. All authors want to cultivate a larger audience and greater impact. Authors who work for royalties have reason to compromise and settle for the smaller audience of paying customers. But authors who aren’t paid for their writing have no reason to compromise.
It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to recognize that scholarly publication is accompanied by a strong interest in impact and career building. The result is a mix of interested and disinterested motives. The reasons to make work OA are essentially the same as the reasons to publish. Authors who make their work OA are always serving others but not always acting from altruism. In fact, the idea that OA depends on author altruism slows down OA progress by hiding the role of author self-interest.
Another aspect of author self-interest emerges from the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles, even when they are published in the same issue of the same journal. There’s growing evidence that OA articles are downloaded more often as well, and that journals converting to OA see a rise in their submissions and citation impact.
There are many hypotheses to explain the correlation between OA and increased citations, but it’s likely that ongoing studies will show that much of the correlation is simply due to the larger audience and heightened visibility provided by OA itself. When you enlarge the audience for an article, you also enlarge the subset of the audience that will later cite it, including professionals in the same field at institutions unable to afford subscription access. OA enlarges the potential audience, including the potential professional audience, far beyond that for even the most prestigious and popular subscription journals.
In any case, these studies bring a welcome note of author self-interest to the case for OA. OA is not a sacrifice for authors who write for impact rather than money. It increases a work’s visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming. But as we’ll see, it’s not costly, not difficult, and not time-consuming.
My colleague Stevan Harnad frequently compares research articles to advertisements. They advertise the author’s research. Try telling advertisers that they’re making a needless sacrifice by allowing people to read their ads without having to pay for the privilege. Advertisers give away their ads and even pay to place them where they might be seen. They do this to benefit themselves, and scholars have the same interest in sharing their message as widely as possible.
Because any content can be digital, and any digital content can be OA, OA needn’t be limited to royalty-free literature like research articles. Research articles are just ripe examples of low-hanging fruit. OA could extend to royalty-producing work like monographs, textbooks, novels, news, music, and movies. But as soon as we cross the line into OA for royalty-producing work, authors will either lose revenue or fear that they will lose revenue. Either way, they’ll be harder to persuade. But instead of concluding that royalty-producing work is off limits to OA, we should merely conclude that it’s higher-hanging fruit. In many cases we can still persuade royalty-earning authors to consent to OA. (See section 5.3 on OA for books.)
Authors of scholarly research articles aren’t the only players who work without pay in the production of research literature. In general, scholarly journals don’t pay editors or referees either. In general, editors and referees are paid salaries by universities to free them, like authors, to donate their time and labor to ensure the quality of new work appearing in scholarly journals. An important consequence follows. All the key players in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA needn’t dispense with peer review or favor unrefereed manuscripts over refereed articles. We can aim for the prize of OA to peer-reviewed scholarship. (See section 5.1 on peer review.)
Of course, conventional publishers are not as free as authors, editors, and referees to forgo revenue. This is a central fact in the transition to OA, and it explains why the interests of scholars and conventional publishers diverge more in the digital age than they diverged earlier. But not all publishers are conventional, and not all conventional publishers will carry print-era business models into the digital age.
Academic publishers are not monolithic. Some new ones were born OA and some older ones have completely converted to OA. Many provide OA to some of their work but not all of it. Some are experimenting with OA, and some are watching the experiments of others. Most allow green OA (through repositories) and a growing number offer at least some kind of gold OA (through journals). Some are supportive, some undecided, some opposed. Among the opposed, some have merely decided not to provide OA themselves, while others lobby actively against policies to encourage or require OA. Some oppose gold but not green OA, while others oppose green but not gold OA.
OA gains nothing and loses potential allies by blurring these distinctions. This variety reminds us (to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly) that OA doesn’t threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt.
A growing number of journal publishers have chosen business models allowing them to dispense with subscription revenue and offer OA. They have expenses but they also have revenue to cover their expenses. In fact, some OA publishers are for-profit and profitable. (See chapter 7 on economics.)
Moreover, peer review is done by dedicated volunteers who don’t care how a journal pays its bills, or even whether the journal is in the red or the black. If all peer-reviewed journals converted to OA overnight, the authors, editors, and referees would have the same incentives to participate in peer review that they had the day before. They needn’t stop offering their services, needn’t lower their standards, and needn’t make sacrifices they weren’t already making. They volunteer their time not because of a journal’s choice of business model but because of its contribution to research. They could carry on with solvent or insolvent subscription publishers, with solvent or insolvent OA publishers, or even without publishers.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative said in February 2002: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment. . . . The new technology is the internet.”
To see what this willingness looks like without the medium to give it effect, look at scholarship in the age of print. Author gifts turned into publisher commodities, and access gaps for readers were harmfully large and widespread. (Access gaps are still harmfully large and widespread, but only because OA is not yet the default for new research.) To see what the medium looks like without the willingness, look at music and movies in the age of the internet. The need for royalties keeps creators from reaching everyone who would enjoy their work.
A beautiful opportunity exists where the willingness and the medium overlap. A scholarly custom that evolved in the seventeenth century frees scholars to take advantage of the access revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first. Because scholars are nearly unique in following this custom, they are nearly unique in their freedom to take advantage of this revolution without financial risk. In this sense, the planets have aligned for scholars. Most other authors are constrained to fear rather than seize the opportunities created by the internet.
1.2 What OA Is Not
We can dispel a cloud of objections and misunderstandings simply by pointing out a few things that OA is not. (Many of these points will be elaborated in later chapters.)
OA isn’t an attempt to bypass peer review. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most conservative to the most innovative, and all the major public statements on OA insist on its importance. Because scholarly journals generally don’t pay peer-reviewing editors and referees, just as they don’t pay authors, all the participants in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. While OA to unrefereed preprints is useful and widespread, the OA movement isn’t limited to unrefereed preprints and, if anything, focuses on OA to peer-reviewed articles. (More in section 5.1 on peer review.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reform, violate, or abolish copyright. It’s compatible with copyright law as it is. OA would benefit from the right kinds of copyright reforms, and many dedicated people are working on them. But it needn’t wait for reforms and hasn’t waited. OA literature avoids copyright problems in exactly the same way that conventional toll-access literature does. For older works, it takes advantage of the public domain, and for newer works, it rests on copyright-holder consent. (More in chapter 4 on policies and chapter 6 on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deprive royalty-earning authors of income. The OA movement focuses on research articles precisely because they don’t pay royalties. In any case, inside and outside that focus, OA for copyrighted work depends on copyright-holder consent. Hence, royalty-earning authors have nothing to fear but persuasion that the benefits of OA might outweigh the risks to royalties. (More in section 5.3 on OA for books.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deny the reality of costs. No serious OA advocate has ever argued that OA literature is costless to produce, although many argue that it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature, even less expensive than born-digital toll-access literature. The question is not whether research literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than charging readers and creating access barriers. (More in chapter 7 on economics.)
Terminology
We could talk about vigilante OA, infringing OA, piratical OA, or OA without consent. That sort of OA could violate copyrights and deprive royalty-earning authors of royalties against their will. But we could also talk about vigilante publishing, infringing publishing, piratical publishing, or publishing without consent. Both happen. However, we generally reserve the term “publishing” for lawful publishing, and tack on special adjectives to describe unlawful variations on the theme. Likewise, I’ll reserve the term “open access” for lawful OA that carries the consent of the relevant rightsholder.
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce authors’ rights over their work. On the contrary, OA depends on author decisions and requires authors to exercise more rights or control over their work than they are allowed to exercise under traditional publishing contracts. One OA strategy is for authors to retain some of the rights they formerly gave publishers, including the right to authorize OA. Another OA strategy is for publishers to permit more uses than they formerly permitted, including permission for authors to make OA copies of their work. By contrast, traditional journal-publishing contracts demand that authors transfer all rights to publishers, and author rights or control cannot sink lower than that. (See chapters
4
on policies and
6
on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce academic freedom. Academic authors remain free to submit their work to the journals or publishers of their choice. Policies requiring OA do so conditionally, for example, for researchers who choose to apply for a certain kind of grant. In addition, these policies generally build in exceptions, waiver options, or both. Since 2008 most university OA policies have been adopted by faculty deeply concerned to preserve and even enhance their prerogatives. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
OA isn’t an attempt to relax rules against plagiarism. All the public definitions of OA support author attribution, even construed as a “restriction” on users. All the major open licenses require author attribution. Moreover, plagiarism is typically punished by the plagiarist’s institution rather than by courts, that is, by social norms rather than by law. Hence, even when attribution is not legally required, plagiarism is still a punishable offense and no OA policy anywhere interferes with those punishments. In any case, if making literature digital and online makes plagiarism easier to commit, then OA makes plagiarism easier to detect. Not all plagiarists are smart, but the smart ones will not steal from OA sources indexed in every search engine. In this sense, OA deters plagiarism.
OA isn’t an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers. OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers, and research institutions. The goal is constructive, not destructive. If OA does eventually harm toll-access publishers, it will be in the way that personal computers harmed typewriter manufacturers. The harm was not the goal, but a side effect of developing something better. Moreover, OA doesn’t challenge publishers or publishing per se, just one business model for publishing, and it’s far easier for conventional publishers to adapt to OA than for typewriter manufacturers to adapt to computers. In fact, most toll-access publishers are already adapting, by allowing author-initiated OA, providing some OA themselves, or experimenting with OA. (See section 3.1 on green OA and chapter 8 on casualties.)
OA doesn’t require boycotting any kind of literature or publisher. It doesn’t require boycotting toll-access research any more than free online journalism requires boycotting priced online journalism. OA doesn’t require us to strike toll-access literature from our personal reading lists, course syllabi, or libraries. Some scholars who support OA decide to submit new work only to OA journals, or to donate their time as editors or referees only to OA journals, in effect boycotting toll-access journals as authors, editors, and referees. But this choice is not forced by the definition of OA, by a commitment to OA, or by any OA policy, and most scholars who support OA continue to work with toll-access journals. In any case, even those scholars who do boycott toll-access journals as authors, editors, or referees don’t boycott them as readers. (Here we needn’t get into the complexity that some toll-access journals effectively create involuntary reader boycotts by pricing their journals out of reach of readers who want access.)
OA isn’t primarily about bringing access to lay readers. If anything, the OA movement focuses on bringing access to professional researchers whose careers depend on access. But there’s no need to decide which users are primary and which are secondary. The publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. OA is about bringing access to everyone with an internet connection who wants access, regardless of their professions or purposes. There’s no doubt that if we put “professional researchers” and “everyone else” into separate categories, a higher percentage of researchers will want access to research literature, even after taking into account that many already have paid access through their institutions. But it’s far from clear why that would matter, especially when providing OA to all internet users is cheaper and simpler than providing OA to just a subset of worthy internet users.
If party-goers in New York and New Jersey can both enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks in New York Harbor, then the sponsors needn’t decide that one group is primary, even if a simple study could show which group is more numerous. If this analogy breaks down, it’s because New Jersey residents who can’t see the fireworks gain nothing from New Yorkers who can. But research does offer this double or indirect benefit. When OA research directly benefits many lay readers, so much the better. But when it doesn’t, it still benefits everyone indirectly by benefiting researchers directly. (Also see section 5.5.1 on access for lay readers.)
Finally, OA isn’t universal access. Even when we succeed at removing price and permission barriers, four other kinds of access barrier might remain in place:
Filtering and censorship barriers
Many schools, employers, ISPs, and governments want to limit what users can see.
Language barriers
Most online literature is in English, or another single language, and machine translation is still very weak.
Handicap access barriers
Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be.
Connectivity barriers
The digital divide keeps billions of people offline, including millions of scholars, and impedes millions of others with slow, flaky, or low-bandwidth internet connections.
Most us want to remove all four of these barriers. But there’s no reason to save the term
open access
until we succeed. In the long climb to universal access, removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name. | To make research literature available online without price barriers or without most permission barriers. | To allow researchers to reuse literature for scholarly purposes. | To allow reproduction and distribution by readers. | To allow readers to write derivative works. | 0 |
99924_YN01YWI7_8 | In which chapter can we find more on OA policies? | What Is Open Access?
Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. About thirty years ago this kind of free global sharing became something new under the sun. Before that, it would have sounded like a quixotic dream.
Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. Let’s call this one the access revolution.
Why don’t more authors take advantage of the access revolution to reach more readers? The answer is pretty clear. Authors who share their works in this way aren’t selling them, and even authors with purposes higher than money depend on sales to make a living. Or at least they appreciate sales.
Let’s sharpen the question, then, by putting to one side authors who want to sell their work. We can even acknowledge that we’re putting aside the vast majority of authors.
Imagine a tribe of authors who write serious and useful work, and who follow a centuries-old custom of giving it away without charge. I don’t mean a group of rich authors who don’t need money. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. In fact, very few are wealthy. For now, it doesn’t matter who these authors are, how rare they are, what they write, or why they follow this peculiar custom. It’s enough to know that their employers pay them salaries, freeing them to give away their work, that they write for impact rather than money, and that they score career points when they make the kind of impact they hoped to make. Suppose that selling their work would actually harm their interests by shrinking their audience, reducing their impact, and distorting their professional goals by steering them toward popular topics and away from the specialized questions on which they are experts.
If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. The dream of global free access can be a reality for them, even if most other authors hope to earn royalties and feel obliged to sit out this particular revolution.
These lucky authors are scholars, and the works they customarily write and publish without payment are peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals.
Open access
is the name of the revolutionary kind of access these authors, unencumbered by a motive of financial gain, are free to provide to their readers.
Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes.
A price tag
is a significant access barrier. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. But when a scholar needs to read or consult hundreds of works for one research project, or when a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics, and when the volume of new work grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers.
Copyright
can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. That makes sense when the author wants to sell the work and when the use you have in mind could undermine sales. But for research articles we’re generally talking about authors from the special tribe who want to share their work as widely as possible. Even these authors, however, tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries—publishers—who want to sell their work. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. OA removes these permission barriers.
Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it.
Terminology
When we need to, we can be more specific about access vehicles and access barriers. In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called
gold OA
, and OA delivered by repositories is called
green OA
. Work that is not open access, or that is available only for a price, is called
toll access
(TA). Over the years I’ve asked publishers for a neutral, nonpejorative and nonhonorific term for toll-access publishers, and
conventional publishers
is the suggestion I hear most often. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide
gratis OA
, and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide
libre OA
. (Also see section 3.1 on green/gold and section 3.3 on gratis/libre.)
OA was defined in three influential public statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003).
I sometimes refer to their overlap or common ground as the BBB definition of OA. My definition here is the BBB definition reduced to its essential elements and refined with some post-BBB terminology (green, gold, gratis, libre) for speaking precisely about subspecies of OA. Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA:
There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Here’s how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.”
Note that all three legs of the BBB definition go beyond removing price barriers to removing permission barriers, or beyond gratis OA to libre OA. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. The purpose of OA is to remove barriers to all legitimate scholarly uses for scholarly literature, but there’s no legitimate scholarly purpose in suppressing attribution to the texts we use. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.)
The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. If there are complexities, they lie in the transition from where we are now to a world in which OA is the default for new research. This is complicated because the major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural. (More in
chapter 9
on the future.)
In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. Moreover, any kind of content can be digital: texts, data, images, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software—and to different degrees we already do. But the term “open access” was coined by researchers trying to remove access barriers to research. The next section explains why.
1.1 What Makes OA Possible?
OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. But why would a copyright holder consent to OA?
Two background facts suggest the answer. First, authors are the copyright holders for their work until or unless they transfer rights to someone else, such as a publisher.
Second, scholarly journals generally don’t pay authors for their research articles, which frees this special tribe of authors to consent to OA without losing revenue. This fact distinguishes scholars decisively from musicians and moviemakers, and even from most other kinds of authors. This is why controversies about OA to music and movies don’t carry over to OA for research articles.
Both facts are critical, but the second is nearly unknown outside the academic world. It’s not a new fact of academic life, arising from a recent economic downturn in the publishing industry. Nor is it a case of corporate exploitation of unworldly academics. Scholarly journals haven’t paid authors for their articles since the first scholarly journals, the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society of London and the
Journal des sçavans
, launched in London and Paris in 1665.
The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. Or it may be a wise adaptation that would eventually evolve in any culture with a serious research subculture. (The optimist in me wants to believe the latter, but the evolution of copyright law taunts that optimism.) This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It also supports academic freedom and the kinds of serious inquiry that advance knowledge. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. At the same time it frees them to microspecialize and defend ideas of immediate interest to just a handful people in the world, which are essential to pushing the frontiers of knowledge.
This custom doesn’t guarantee that truth-seeking won’t be derailed by profit-seeking, and it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eventually fill the smallest gaps in our collaborative understanding of the world. It doesn’t even guarantee that scholars won’t sometimes play for the crowd and detour into fad thinking. But it removes a major distraction by allowing them, if they wish, to focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell. It’s a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to research, and it’s the key to the legal and economic lock that would otherwise shackle steps toward OA.
Creative people who live by royalties, such as novelists, musicians, and moviemakers, may consider this scholarly tradition a burden and sacrifice for scholars. We might even agree, provided we don’t overlook a few facts. First, it’s a sacrifice that scholars have been making for nearly 350 years. OA to research articles doesn’t depend on asking royalty-earning authors to give up their royalties. Second, academics have salaries from universities, freeing them to dive deeply into their research topics and publish specialized articles without market appeal. Many musicians and moviemakers might envy that freedom to disregard sales and popular taste. Third, academics receive other, less tangible rewards from their institutions—like promotion and tenure—when their research is recognized by others, accepted, cited, applied, and built upon.
It’s no accident that faculty who advance knowledge in their fields also advance their careers. Academics are passionate about certain topics, ideas, questions, inquiries, or disciplines. They feel lucky to have jobs in which they may pursue these passions and even luckier to be rewarded for pursuing them. Some focus single-mindedly on carrying an honest pebble to the pile of knowledge (as John Lange put it), having an impact on their field, or scooping others working on the same questions. Others focus strategically on building the case for promotion and tenure. But the two paths converge, which is not a fortuitous fact of nature but an engineered fact of life in the academy. As incentives for productivity, these intangible career benefits may be stronger for the average researcher than royalties are for the average novelist or musician. (In both domains, bountiful royalties for superstars tell us nothing about effective payment models for the long tail of less stellar professionals.)
There’s no sense in which research would be more free, efficient, or effective if academics took a more “businesslike” position, behaved more like musicians and moviemakers, abandoned their insulation from the market, and tied their income to the popularity of their ideas. Nonacademics who urge academics to come to their senses and demand royalties even for journal articles may be more naive about nonprofit research than academics are about for-profit business.
We can take this a step further. Scholars can afford to ignore sales because they have salaries and research grants to take the place of royalties. But why do universities pay salaries and why do funding agencies award grants? They do it to advance research and the range of public interests served by research. They don’t do it to earn profits from the results. They are all nonprofit. They certainly don’t do it to make scholarly writings into gifts to enrich publishers, especially when conventional publishers erect access barriers at the expense of research. Universities and funding agencies pay researchers to make their research into gifts to the public in the widest sense.
Public and private funding agencies are essentially public and private charities, funding research they regard as useful or beneficial. Universities have a public purpose as well, even when they are private institutions. We support the public institutions with public funds, and we support the private ones with tax exemptions for their property and tax deductions for their donors.
We’d have less knowledge, less academic freedom, and less OA if researchers worked for royalties and made their research articles into commodities rather than gifts. It should be no surprise, then, that more and more funding agencies and universities are adopting strong OA policies. Their mission to advance research leads them directly to logic of OA: With a few exceptions, such as classified research, research that is worth funding or facilitating is worth sharing with everyone who can make use of it. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
Newcomers to OA often assume that OA helps readers and hurts authors, and that the reader side of the scholarly soul must beg the author side to make the necessary sacrifice. But OA benefits authors as well as readers. Authors want access to readers at least as much as readers want access to authors. All authors want to cultivate a larger audience and greater impact. Authors who work for royalties have reason to compromise and settle for the smaller audience of paying customers. But authors who aren’t paid for their writing have no reason to compromise.
It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to recognize that scholarly publication is accompanied by a strong interest in impact and career building. The result is a mix of interested and disinterested motives. The reasons to make work OA are essentially the same as the reasons to publish. Authors who make their work OA are always serving others but not always acting from altruism. In fact, the idea that OA depends on author altruism slows down OA progress by hiding the role of author self-interest.
Another aspect of author self-interest emerges from the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles, even when they are published in the same issue of the same journal. There’s growing evidence that OA articles are downloaded more often as well, and that journals converting to OA see a rise in their submissions and citation impact.
There are many hypotheses to explain the correlation between OA and increased citations, but it’s likely that ongoing studies will show that much of the correlation is simply due to the larger audience and heightened visibility provided by OA itself. When you enlarge the audience for an article, you also enlarge the subset of the audience that will later cite it, including professionals in the same field at institutions unable to afford subscription access. OA enlarges the potential audience, including the potential professional audience, far beyond that for even the most prestigious and popular subscription journals.
In any case, these studies bring a welcome note of author self-interest to the case for OA. OA is not a sacrifice for authors who write for impact rather than money. It increases a work’s visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming. But as we’ll see, it’s not costly, not difficult, and not time-consuming.
My colleague Stevan Harnad frequently compares research articles to advertisements. They advertise the author’s research. Try telling advertisers that they’re making a needless sacrifice by allowing people to read their ads without having to pay for the privilege. Advertisers give away their ads and even pay to place them where they might be seen. They do this to benefit themselves, and scholars have the same interest in sharing their message as widely as possible.
Because any content can be digital, and any digital content can be OA, OA needn’t be limited to royalty-free literature like research articles. Research articles are just ripe examples of low-hanging fruit. OA could extend to royalty-producing work like monographs, textbooks, novels, news, music, and movies. But as soon as we cross the line into OA for royalty-producing work, authors will either lose revenue or fear that they will lose revenue. Either way, they’ll be harder to persuade. But instead of concluding that royalty-producing work is off limits to OA, we should merely conclude that it’s higher-hanging fruit. In many cases we can still persuade royalty-earning authors to consent to OA. (See section 5.3 on OA for books.)
Authors of scholarly research articles aren’t the only players who work without pay in the production of research literature. In general, scholarly journals don’t pay editors or referees either. In general, editors and referees are paid salaries by universities to free them, like authors, to donate their time and labor to ensure the quality of new work appearing in scholarly journals. An important consequence follows. All the key players in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA needn’t dispense with peer review or favor unrefereed manuscripts over refereed articles. We can aim for the prize of OA to peer-reviewed scholarship. (See section 5.1 on peer review.)
Of course, conventional publishers are not as free as authors, editors, and referees to forgo revenue. This is a central fact in the transition to OA, and it explains why the interests of scholars and conventional publishers diverge more in the digital age than they diverged earlier. But not all publishers are conventional, and not all conventional publishers will carry print-era business models into the digital age.
Academic publishers are not monolithic. Some new ones were born OA and some older ones have completely converted to OA. Many provide OA to some of their work but not all of it. Some are experimenting with OA, and some are watching the experiments of others. Most allow green OA (through repositories) and a growing number offer at least some kind of gold OA (through journals). Some are supportive, some undecided, some opposed. Among the opposed, some have merely decided not to provide OA themselves, while others lobby actively against policies to encourage or require OA. Some oppose gold but not green OA, while others oppose green but not gold OA.
OA gains nothing and loses potential allies by blurring these distinctions. This variety reminds us (to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly) that OA doesn’t threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt.
A growing number of journal publishers have chosen business models allowing them to dispense with subscription revenue and offer OA. They have expenses but they also have revenue to cover their expenses. In fact, some OA publishers are for-profit and profitable. (See chapter 7 on economics.)
Moreover, peer review is done by dedicated volunteers who don’t care how a journal pays its bills, or even whether the journal is in the red or the black. If all peer-reviewed journals converted to OA overnight, the authors, editors, and referees would have the same incentives to participate in peer review that they had the day before. They needn’t stop offering their services, needn’t lower their standards, and needn’t make sacrifices they weren’t already making. They volunteer their time not because of a journal’s choice of business model but because of its contribution to research. They could carry on with solvent or insolvent subscription publishers, with solvent or insolvent OA publishers, or even without publishers.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative said in February 2002: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment. . . . The new technology is the internet.”
To see what this willingness looks like without the medium to give it effect, look at scholarship in the age of print. Author gifts turned into publisher commodities, and access gaps for readers were harmfully large and widespread. (Access gaps are still harmfully large and widespread, but only because OA is not yet the default for new research.) To see what the medium looks like without the willingness, look at music and movies in the age of the internet. The need for royalties keeps creators from reaching everyone who would enjoy their work.
A beautiful opportunity exists where the willingness and the medium overlap. A scholarly custom that evolved in the seventeenth century frees scholars to take advantage of the access revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first. Because scholars are nearly unique in following this custom, they are nearly unique in their freedom to take advantage of this revolution without financial risk. In this sense, the planets have aligned for scholars. Most other authors are constrained to fear rather than seize the opportunities created by the internet.
1.2 What OA Is Not
We can dispel a cloud of objections and misunderstandings simply by pointing out a few things that OA is not. (Many of these points will be elaborated in later chapters.)
OA isn’t an attempt to bypass peer review. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most conservative to the most innovative, and all the major public statements on OA insist on its importance. Because scholarly journals generally don’t pay peer-reviewing editors and referees, just as they don’t pay authors, all the participants in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. While OA to unrefereed preprints is useful and widespread, the OA movement isn’t limited to unrefereed preprints and, if anything, focuses on OA to peer-reviewed articles. (More in section 5.1 on peer review.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reform, violate, or abolish copyright. It’s compatible with copyright law as it is. OA would benefit from the right kinds of copyright reforms, and many dedicated people are working on them. But it needn’t wait for reforms and hasn’t waited. OA literature avoids copyright problems in exactly the same way that conventional toll-access literature does. For older works, it takes advantage of the public domain, and for newer works, it rests on copyright-holder consent. (More in chapter 4 on policies and chapter 6 on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deprive royalty-earning authors of income. The OA movement focuses on research articles precisely because they don’t pay royalties. In any case, inside and outside that focus, OA for copyrighted work depends on copyright-holder consent. Hence, royalty-earning authors have nothing to fear but persuasion that the benefits of OA might outweigh the risks to royalties. (More in section 5.3 on OA for books.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deny the reality of costs. No serious OA advocate has ever argued that OA literature is costless to produce, although many argue that it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature, even less expensive than born-digital toll-access literature. The question is not whether research literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than charging readers and creating access barriers. (More in chapter 7 on economics.)
Terminology
We could talk about vigilante OA, infringing OA, piratical OA, or OA without consent. That sort of OA could violate copyrights and deprive royalty-earning authors of royalties against their will. But we could also talk about vigilante publishing, infringing publishing, piratical publishing, or publishing without consent. Both happen. However, we generally reserve the term “publishing” for lawful publishing, and tack on special adjectives to describe unlawful variations on the theme. Likewise, I’ll reserve the term “open access” for lawful OA that carries the consent of the relevant rightsholder.
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce authors’ rights over their work. On the contrary, OA depends on author decisions and requires authors to exercise more rights or control over their work than they are allowed to exercise under traditional publishing contracts. One OA strategy is for authors to retain some of the rights they formerly gave publishers, including the right to authorize OA. Another OA strategy is for publishers to permit more uses than they formerly permitted, including permission for authors to make OA copies of their work. By contrast, traditional journal-publishing contracts demand that authors transfer all rights to publishers, and author rights or control cannot sink lower than that. (See chapters
4
on policies and
6
on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce academic freedom. Academic authors remain free to submit their work to the journals or publishers of their choice. Policies requiring OA do so conditionally, for example, for researchers who choose to apply for a certain kind of grant. In addition, these policies generally build in exceptions, waiver options, or both. Since 2008 most university OA policies have been adopted by faculty deeply concerned to preserve and even enhance their prerogatives. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
OA isn’t an attempt to relax rules against plagiarism. All the public definitions of OA support author attribution, even construed as a “restriction” on users. All the major open licenses require author attribution. Moreover, plagiarism is typically punished by the plagiarist’s institution rather than by courts, that is, by social norms rather than by law. Hence, even when attribution is not legally required, plagiarism is still a punishable offense and no OA policy anywhere interferes with those punishments. In any case, if making literature digital and online makes plagiarism easier to commit, then OA makes plagiarism easier to detect. Not all plagiarists are smart, but the smart ones will not steal from OA sources indexed in every search engine. In this sense, OA deters plagiarism.
OA isn’t an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers. OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers, and research institutions. The goal is constructive, not destructive. If OA does eventually harm toll-access publishers, it will be in the way that personal computers harmed typewriter manufacturers. The harm was not the goal, but a side effect of developing something better. Moreover, OA doesn’t challenge publishers or publishing per se, just one business model for publishing, and it’s far easier for conventional publishers to adapt to OA than for typewriter manufacturers to adapt to computers. In fact, most toll-access publishers are already adapting, by allowing author-initiated OA, providing some OA themselves, or experimenting with OA. (See section 3.1 on green OA and chapter 8 on casualties.)
OA doesn’t require boycotting any kind of literature or publisher. It doesn’t require boycotting toll-access research any more than free online journalism requires boycotting priced online journalism. OA doesn’t require us to strike toll-access literature from our personal reading lists, course syllabi, or libraries. Some scholars who support OA decide to submit new work only to OA journals, or to donate their time as editors or referees only to OA journals, in effect boycotting toll-access journals as authors, editors, and referees. But this choice is not forced by the definition of OA, by a commitment to OA, or by any OA policy, and most scholars who support OA continue to work with toll-access journals. In any case, even those scholars who do boycott toll-access journals as authors, editors, or referees don’t boycott them as readers. (Here we needn’t get into the complexity that some toll-access journals effectively create involuntary reader boycotts by pricing their journals out of reach of readers who want access.)
OA isn’t primarily about bringing access to lay readers. If anything, the OA movement focuses on bringing access to professional researchers whose careers depend on access. But there’s no need to decide which users are primary and which are secondary. The publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. OA is about bringing access to everyone with an internet connection who wants access, regardless of their professions or purposes. There’s no doubt that if we put “professional researchers” and “everyone else” into separate categories, a higher percentage of researchers will want access to research literature, even after taking into account that many already have paid access through their institutions. But it’s far from clear why that would matter, especially when providing OA to all internet users is cheaper and simpler than providing OA to just a subset of worthy internet users.
If party-goers in New York and New Jersey can both enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks in New York Harbor, then the sponsors needn’t decide that one group is primary, even if a simple study could show which group is more numerous. If this analogy breaks down, it’s because New Jersey residents who can’t see the fireworks gain nothing from New Yorkers who can. But research does offer this double or indirect benefit. When OA research directly benefits many lay readers, so much the better. But when it doesn’t, it still benefits everyone indirectly by benefiting researchers directly. (Also see section 5.5.1 on access for lay readers.)
Finally, OA isn’t universal access. Even when we succeed at removing price and permission barriers, four other kinds of access barrier might remain in place:
Filtering and censorship barriers
Many schools, employers, ISPs, and governments want to limit what users can see.
Language barriers
Most online literature is in English, or another single language, and machine translation is still very weak.
Handicap access barriers
Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be.
Connectivity barriers
The digital divide keeps billions of people offline, including millions of scholars, and impedes millions of others with slow, flaky, or low-bandwidth internet connections.
Most us want to remove all four of these barriers. But there’s no reason to save the term
open access
until we succeed. In the long climb to universal access, removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name. | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 2 | 0 |
99924_YN01YWI7_9 | In which section can we find more about peer review? | What Is Open Access?
Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. About thirty years ago this kind of free global sharing became something new under the sun. Before that, it would have sounded like a quixotic dream.
Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. Let’s call this one the access revolution.
Why don’t more authors take advantage of the access revolution to reach more readers? The answer is pretty clear. Authors who share their works in this way aren’t selling them, and even authors with purposes higher than money depend on sales to make a living. Or at least they appreciate sales.
Let’s sharpen the question, then, by putting to one side authors who want to sell their work. We can even acknowledge that we’re putting aside the vast majority of authors.
Imagine a tribe of authors who write serious and useful work, and who follow a centuries-old custom of giving it away without charge. I don’t mean a group of rich authors who don’t need money. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. In fact, very few are wealthy. For now, it doesn’t matter who these authors are, how rare they are, what they write, or why they follow this peculiar custom. It’s enough to know that their employers pay them salaries, freeing them to give away their work, that they write for impact rather than money, and that they score career points when they make the kind of impact they hoped to make. Suppose that selling their work would actually harm their interests by shrinking their audience, reducing their impact, and distorting their professional goals by steering them toward popular topics and away from the specialized questions on which they are experts.
If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. The dream of global free access can be a reality for them, even if most other authors hope to earn royalties and feel obliged to sit out this particular revolution.
These lucky authors are scholars, and the works they customarily write and publish without payment are peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals.
Open access
is the name of the revolutionary kind of access these authors, unencumbered by a motive of financial gain, are free to provide to their readers.
Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes.
A price tag
is a significant access barrier. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. But when a scholar needs to read or consult hundreds of works for one research project, or when a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics, and when the volume of new work grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers.
Copyright
can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. That makes sense when the author wants to sell the work and when the use you have in mind could undermine sales. But for research articles we’re generally talking about authors from the special tribe who want to share their work as widely as possible. Even these authors, however, tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries—publishers—who want to sell their work. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. OA removes these permission barriers.
Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it.
Terminology
When we need to, we can be more specific about access vehicles and access barriers. In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called
gold OA
, and OA delivered by repositories is called
green OA
. Work that is not open access, or that is available only for a price, is called
toll access
(TA). Over the years I’ve asked publishers for a neutral, nonpejorative and nonhonorific term for toll-access publishers, and
conventional publishers
is the suggestion I hear most often. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide
gratis OA
, and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide
libre OA
. (Also see section 3.1 on green/gold and section 3.3 on gratis/libre.)
OA was defined in three influential public statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003).
I sometimes refer to their overlap or common ground as the BBB definition of OA. My definition here is the BBB definition reduced to its essential elements and refined with some post-BBB terminology (green, gold, gratis, libre) for speaking precisely about subspecies of OA. Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA:
There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Here’s how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.”
Note that all three legs of the BBB definition go beyond removing price barriers to removing permission barriers, or beyond gratis OA to libre OA. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. The purpose of OA is to remove barriers to all legitimate scholarly uses for scholarly literature, but there’s no legitimate scholarly purpose in suppressing attribution to the texts we use. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.)
The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. If there are complexities, they lie in the transition from where we are now to a world in which OA is the default for new research. This is complicated because the major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural. (More in
chapter 9
on the future.)
In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. Moreover, any kind of content can be digital: texts, data, images, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software—and to different degrees we already do. But the term “open access” was coined by researchers trying to remove access barriers to research. The next section explains why.
1.1 What Makes OA Possible?
OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. But why would a copyright holder consent to OA?
Two background facts suggest the answer. First, authors are the copyright holders for their work until or unless they transfer rights to someone else, such as a publisher.
Second, scholarly journals generally don’t pay authors for their research articles, which frees this special tribe of authors to consent to OA without losing revenue. This fact distinguishes scholars decisively from musicians and moviemakers, and even from most other kinds of authors. This is why controversies about OA to music and movies don’t carry over to OA for research articles.
Both facts are critical, but the second is nearly unknown outside the academic world. It’s not a new fact of academic life, arising from a recent economic downturn in the publishing industry. Nor is it a case of corporate exploitation of unworldly academics. Scholarly journals haven’t paid authors for their articles since the first scholarly journals, the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society of London and the
Journal des sçavans
, launched in London and Paris in 1665.
The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. Or it may be a wise adaptation that would eventually evolve in any culture with a serious research subculture. (The optimist in me wants to believe the latter, but the evolution of copyright law taunts that optimism.) This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It also supports academic freedom and the kinds of serious inquiry that advance knowledge. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. At the same time it frees them to microspecialize and defend ideas of immediate interest to just a handful people in the world, which are essential to pushing the frontiers of knowledge.
This custom doesn’t guarantee that truth-seeking won’t be derailed by profit-seeking, and it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eventually fill the smallest gaps in our collaborative understanding of the world. It doesn’t even guarantee that scholars won’t sometimes play for the crowd and detour into fad thinking. But it removes a major distraction by allowing them, if they wish, to focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell. It’s a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to research, and it’s the key to the legal and economic lock that would otherwise shackle steps toward OA.
Creative people who live by royalties, such as novelists, musicians, and moviemakers, may consider this scholarly tradition a burden and sacrifice for scholars. We might even agree, provided we don’t overlook a few facts. First, it’s a sacrifice that scholars have been making for nearly 350 years. OA to research articles doesn’t depend on asking royalty-earning authors to give up their royalties. Second, academics have salaries from universities, freeing them to dive deeply into their research topics and publish specialized articles without market appeal. Many musicians and moviemakers might envy that freedom to disregard sales and popular taste. Third, academics receive other, less tangible rewards from their institutions—like promotion and tenure—when their research is recognized by others, accepted, cited, applied, and built upon.
It’s no accident that faculty who advance knowledge in their fields also advance their careers. Academics are passionate about certain topics, ideas, questions, inquiries, or disciplines. They feel lucky to have jobs in which they may pursue these passions and even luckier to be rewarded for pursuing them. Some focus single-mindedly on carrying an honest pebble to the pile of knowledge (as John Lange put it), having an impact on their field, or scooping others working on the same questions. Others focus strategically on building the case for promotion and tenure. But the two paths converge, which is not a fortuitous fact of nature but an engineered fact of life in the academy. As incentives for productivity, these intangible career benefits may be stronger for the average researcher than royalties are for the average novelist or musician. (In both domains, bountiful royalties for superstars tell us nothing about effective payment models for the long tail of less stellar professionals.)
There’s no sense in which research would be more free, efficient, or effective if academics took a more “businesslike” position, behaved more like musicians and moviemakers, abandoned their insulation from the market, and tied their income to the popularity of their ideas. Nonacademics who urge academics to come to their senses and demand royalties even for journal articles may be more naive about nonprofit research than academics are about for-profit business.
We can take this a step further. Scholars can afford to ignore sales because they have salaries and research grants to take the place of royalties. But why do universities pay salaries and why do funding agencies award grants? They do it to advance research and the range of public interests served by research. They don’t do it to earn profits from the results. They are all nonprofit. They certainly don’t do it to make scholarly writings into gifts to enrich publishers, especially when conventional publishers erect access barriers at the expense of research. Universities and funding agencies pay researchers to make their research into gifts to the public in the widest sense.
Public and private funding agencies are essentially public and private charities, funding research they regard as useful or beneficial. Universities have a public purpose as well, even when they are private institutions. We support the public institutions with public funds, and we support the private ones with tax exemptions for their property and tax deductions for their donors.
We’d have less knowledge, less academic freedom, and less OA if researchers worked for royalties and made their research articles into commodities rather than gifts. It should be no surprise, then, that more and more funding agencies and universities are adopting strong OA policies. Their mission to advance research leads them directly to logic of OA: With a few exceptions, such as classified research, research that is worth funding or facilitating is worth sharing with everyone who can make use of it. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
Newcomers to OA often assume that OA helps readers and hurts authors, and that the reader side of the scholarly soul must beg the author side to make the necessary sacrifice. But OA benefits authors as well as readers. Authors want access to readers at least as much as readers want access to authors. All authors want to cultivate a larger audience and greater impact. Authors who work for royalties have reason to compromise and settle for the smaller audience of paying customers. But authors who aren’t paid for their writing have no reason to compromise.
It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to recognize that scholarly publication is accompanied by a strong interest in impact and career building. The result is a mix of interested and disinterested motives. The reasons to make work OA are essentially the same as the reasons to publish. Authors who make their work OA are always serving others but not always acting from altruism. In fact, the idea that OA depends on author altruism slows down OA progress by hiding the role of author self-interest.
Another aspect of author self-interest emerges from the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles, even when they are published in the same issue of the same journal. There’s growing evidence that OA articles are downloaded more often as well, and that journals converting to OA see a rise in their submissions and citation impact.
There are many hypotheses to explain the correlation between OA and increased citations, but it’s likely that ongoing studies will show that much of the correlation is simply due to the larger audience and heightened visibility provided by OA itself. When you enlarge the audience for an article, you also enlarge the subset of the audience that will later cite it, including professionals in the same field at institutions unable to afford subscription access. OA enlarges the potential audience, including the potential professional audience, far beyond that for even the most prestigious and popular subscription journals.
In any case, these studies bring a welcome note of author self-interest to the case for OA. OA is not a sacrifice for authors who write for impact rather than money. It increases a work’s visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming. But as we’ll see, it’s not costly, not difficult, and not time-consuming.
My colleague Stevan Harnad frequently compares research articles to advertisements. They advertise the author’s research. Try telling advertisers that they’re making a needless sacrifice by allowing people to read their ads without having to pay for the privilege. Advertisers give away their ads and even pay to place them where they might be seen. They do this to benefit themselves, and scholars have the same interest in sharing their message as widely as possible.
Because any content can be digital, and any digital content can be OA, OA needn’t be limited to royalty-free literature like research articles. Research articles are just ripe examples of low-hanging fruit. OA could extend to royalty-producing work like monographs, textbooks, novels, news, music, and movies. But as soon as we cross the line into OA for royalty-producing work, authors will either lose revenue or fear that they will lose revenue. Either way, they’ll be harder to persuade. But instead of concluding that royalty-producing work is off limits to OA, we should merely conclude that it’s higher-hanging fruit. In many cases we can still persuade royalty-earning authors to consent to OA. (See section 5.3 on OA for books.)
Authors of scholarly research articles aren’t the only players who work without pay in the production of research literature. In general, scholarly journals don’t pay editors or referees either. In general, editors and referees are paid salaries by universities to free them, like authors, to donate their time and labor to ensure the quality of new work appearing in scholarly journals. An important consequence follows. All the key players in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA needn’t dispense with peer review or favor unrefereed manuscripts over refereed articles. We can aim for the prize of OA to peer-reviewed scholarship. (See section 5.1 on peer review.)
Of course, conventional publishers are not as free as authors, editors, and referees to forgo revenue. This is a central fact in the transition to OA, and it explains why the interests of scholars and conventional publishers diverge more in the digital age than they diverged earlier. But not all publishers are conventional, and not all conventional publishers will carry print-era business models into the digital age.
Academic publishers are not monolithic. Some new ones were born OA and some older ones have completely converted to OA. Many provide OA to some of their work but not all of it. Some are experimenting with OA, and some are watching the experiments of others. Most allow green OA (through repositories) and a growing number offer at least some kind of gold OA (through journals). Some are supportive, some undecided, some opposed. Among the opposed, some have merely decided not to provide OA themselves, while others lobby actively against policies to encourage or require OA. Some oppose gold but not green OA, while others oppose green but not gold OA.
OA gains nothing and loses potential allies by blurring these distinctions. This variety reminds us (to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly) that OA doesn’t threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt.
A growing number of journal publishers have chosen business models allowing them to dispense with subscription revenue and offer OA. They have expenses but they also have revenue to cover their expenses. In fact, some OA publishers are for-profit and profitable. (See chapter 7 on economics.)
Moreover, peer review is done by dedicated volunteers who don’t care how a journal pays its bills, or even whether the journal is in the red or the black. If all peer-reviewed journals converted to OA overnight, the authors, editors, and referees would have the same incentives to participate in peer review that they had the day before. They needn’t stop offering their services, needn’t lower their standards, and needn’t make sacrifices they weren’t already making. They volunteer their time not because of a journal’s choice of business model but because of its contribution to research. They could carry on with solvent or insolvent subscription publishers, with solvent or insolvent OA publishers, or even without publishers.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative said in February 2002: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment. . . . The new technology is the internet.”
To see what this willingness looks like without the medium to give it effect, look at scholarship in the age of print. Author gifts turned into publisher commodities, and access gaps for readers were harmfully large and widespread. (Access gaps are still harmfully large and widespread, but only because OA is not yet the default for new research.) To see what the medium looks like without the willingness, look at music and movies in the age of the internet. The need for royalties keeps creators from reaching everyone who would enjoy their work.
A beautiful opportunity exists where the willingness and the medium overlap. A scholarly custom that evolved in the seventeenth century frees scholars to take advantage of the access revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first. Because scholars are nearly unique in following this custom, they are nearly unique in their freedom to take advantage of this revolution without financial risk. In this sense, the planets have aligned for scholars. Most other authors are constrained to fear rather than seize the opportunities created by the internet.
1.2 What OA Is Not
We can dispel a cloud of objections and misunderstandings simply by pointing out a few things that OA is not. (Many of these points will be elaborated in later chapters.)
OA isn’t an attempt to bypass peer review. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most conservative to the most innovative, and all the major public statements on OA insist on its importance. Because scholarly journals generally don’t pay peer-reviewing editors and referees, just as they don’t pay authors, all the participants in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. While OA to unrefereed preprints is useful and widespread, the OA movement isn’t limited to unrefereed preprints and, if anything, focuses on OA to peer-reviewed articles. (More in section 5.1 on peer review.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reform, violate, or abolish copyright. It’s compatible with copyright law as it is. OA would benefit from the right kinds of copyright reforms, and many dedicated people are working on them. But it needn’t wait for reforms and hasn’t waited. OA literature avoids copyright problems in exactly the same way that conventional toll-access literature does. For older works, it takes advantage of the public domain, and for newer works, it rests on copyright-holder consent. (More in chapter 4 on policies and chapter 6 on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deprive royalty-earning authors of income. The OA movement focuses on research articles precisely because they don’t pay royalties. In any case, inside and outside that focus, OA for copyrighted work depends on copyright-holder consent. Hence, royalty-earning authors have nothing to fear but persuasion that the benefits of OA might outweigh the risks to royalties. (More in section 5.3 on OA for books.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deny the reality of costs. No serious OA advocate has ever argued that OA literature is costless to produce, although many argue that it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature, even less expensive than born-digital toll-access literature. The question is not whether research literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than charging readers and creating access barriers. (More in chapter 7 on economics.)
Terminology
We could talk about vigilante OA, infringing OA, piratical OA, or OA without consent. That sort of OA could violate copyrights and deprive royalty-earning authors of royalties against their will. But we could also talk about vigilante publishing, infringing publishing, piratical publishing, or publishing without consent. Both happen. However, we generally reserve the term “publishing” for lawful publishing, and tack on special adjectives to describe unlawful variations on the theme. Likewise, I’ll reserve the term “open access” for lawful OA that carries the consent of the relevant rightsholder.
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce authors’ rights over their work. On the contrary, OA depends on author decisions and requires authors to exercise more rights or control over their work than they are allowed to exercise under traditional publishing contracts. One OA strategy is for authors to retain some of the rights they formerly gave publishers, including the right to authorize OA. Another OA strategy is for publishers to permit more uses than they formerly permitted, including permission for authors to make OA copies of their work. By contrast, traditional journal-publishing contracts demand that authors transfer all rights to publishers, and author rights or control cannot sink lower than that. (See chapters
4
on policies and
6
on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce academic freedom. Academic authors remain free to submit their work to the journals or publishers of their choice. Policies requiring OA do so conditionally, for example, for researchers who choose to apply for a certain kind of grant. In addition, these policies generally build in exceptions, waiver options, or both. Since 2008 most university OA policies have been adopted by faculty deeply concerned to preserve and even enhance their prerogatives. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
OA isn’t an attempt to relax rules against plagiarism. All the public definitions of OA support author attribution, even construed as a “restriction” on users. All the major open licenses require author attribution. Moreover, plagiarism is typically punished by the plagiarist’s institution rather than by courts, that is, by social norms rather than by law. Hence, even when attribution is not legally required, plagiarism is still a punishable offense and no OA policy anywhere interferes with those punishments. In any case, if making literature digital and online makes plagiarism easier to commit, then OA makes plagiarism easier to detect. Not all plagiarists are smart, but the smart ones will not steal from OA sources indexed in every search engine. In this sense, OA deters plagiarism.
OA isn’t an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers. OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers, and research institutions. The goal is constructive, not destructive. If OA does eventually harm toll-access publishers, it will be in the way that personal computers harmed typewriter manufacturers. The harm was not the goal, but a side effect of developing something better. Moreover, OA doesn’t challenge publishers or publishing per se, just one business model for publishing, and it’s far easier for conventional publishers to adapt to OA than for typewriter manufacturers to adapt to computers. In fact, most toll-access publishers are already adapting, by allowing author-initiated OA, providing some OA themselves, or experimenting with OA. (See section 3.1 on green OA and chapter 8 on casualties.)
OA doesn’t require boycotting any kind of literature or publisher. It doesn’t require boycotting toll-access research any more than free online journalism requires boycotting priced online journalism. OA doesn’t require us to strike toll-access literature from our personal reading lists, course syllabi, or libraries. Some scholars who support OA decide to submit new work only to OA journals, or to donate their time as editors or referees only to OA journals, in effect boycotting toll-access journals as authors, editors, and referees. But this choice is not forced by the definition of OA, by a commitment to OA, or by any OA policy, and most scholars who support OA continue to work with toll-access journals. In any case, even those scholars who do boycott toll-access journals as authors, editors, or referees don’t boycott them as readers. (Here we needn’t get into the complexity that some toll-access journals effectively create involuntary reader boycotts by pricing their journals out of reach of readers who want access.)
OA isn’t primarily about bringing access to lay readers. If anything, the OA movement focuses on bringing access to professional researchers whose careers depend on access. But there’s no need to decide which users are primary and which are secondary. The publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. OA is about bringing access to everyone with an internet connection who wants access, regardless of their professions or purposes. There’s no doubt that if we put “professional researchers” and “everyone else” into separate categories, a higher percentage of researchers will want access to research literature, even after taking into account that many already have paid access through their institutions. But it’s far from clear why that would matter, especially when providing OA to all internet users is cheaper and simpler than providing OA to just a subset of worthy internet users.
If party-goers in New York and New Jersey can both enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks in New York Harbor, then the sponsors needn’t decide that one group is primary, even if a simple study could show which group is more numerous. If this analogy breaks down, it’s because New Jersey residents who can’t see the fireworks gain nothing from New Yorkers who can. But research does offer this double or indirect benefit. When OA research directly benefits many lay readers, so much the better. But when it doesn’t, it still benefits everyone indirectly by benefiting researchers directly. (Also see section 5.5.1 on access for lay readers.)
Finally, OA isn’t universal access. Even when we succeed at removing price and permission barriers, four other kinds of access barrier might remain in place:
Filtering and censorship barriers
Many schools, employers, ISPs, and governments want to limit what users can see.
Language barriers
Most online literature is in English, or another single language, and machine translation is still very weak.
Handicap access barriers
Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be.
Connectivity barriers
The digital divide keeps billions of people offline, including millions of scholars, and impedes millions of others with slow, flaky, or low-bandwidth internet connections.
Most us want to remove all four of these barriers. But there’s no reason to save the term
open access
until we succeed. In the long climb to universal access, removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name. | Section 5.1 | Section 5.3 | Section 5.7 | Section 5.5 | 0 |
99924_YN01YWI7_10 | In which chapter can we find out more about OA economics? | What Is Open Access?
Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. About thirty years ago this kind of free global sharing became something new under the sun. Before that, it would have sounded like a quixotic dream.
Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. Let’s call this one the access revolution.
Why don’t more authors take advantage of the access revolution to reach more readers? The answer is pretty clear. Authors who share their works in this way aren’t selling them, and even authors with purposes higher than money depend on sales to make a living. Or at least they appreciate sales.
Let’s sharpen the question, then, by putting to one side authors who want to sell their work. We can even acknowledge that we’re putting aside the vast majority of authors.
Imagine a tribe of authors who write serious and useful work, and who follow a centuries-old custom of giving it away without charge. I don’t mean a group of rich authors who don’t need money. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. In fact, very few are wealthy. For now, it doesn’t matter who these authors are, how rare they are, what they write, or why they follow this peculiar custom. It’s enough to know that their employers pay them salaries, freeing them to give away their work, that they write for impact rather than money, and that they score career points when they make the kind of impact they hoped to make. Suppose that selling their work would actually harm their interests by shrinking their audience, reducing their impact, and distorting their professional goals by steering them toward popular topics and away from the specialized questions on which they are experts.
If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. The dream of global free access can be a reality for them, even if most other authors hope to earn royalties and feel obliged to sit out this particular revolution.
These lucky authors are scholars, and the works they customarily write and publish without payment are peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals.
Open access
is the name of the revolutionary kind of access these authors, unencumbered by a motive of financial gain, are free to provide to their readers.
Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes.
A price tag
is a significant access barrier. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. But when a scholar needs to read or consult hundreds of works for one research project, or when a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics, and when the volume of new work grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers.
Copyright
can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. That makes sense when the author wants to sell the work and when the use you have in mind could undermine sales. But for research articles we’re generally talking about authors from the special tribe who want to share their work as widely as possible. Even these authors, however, tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries—publishers—who want to sell their work. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. OA removes these permission barriers.
Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it.
Terminology
When we need to, we can be more specific about access vehicles and access barriers. In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called
gold OA
, and OA delivered by repositories is called
green OA
. Work that is not open access, or that is available only for a price, is called
toll access
(TA). Over the years I’ve asked publishers for a neutral, nonpejorative and nonhonorific term for toll-access publishers, and
conventional publishers
is the suggestion I hear most often. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide
gratis OA
, and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide
libre OA
. (Also see section 3.1 on green/gold and section 3.3 on gratis/libre.)
OA was defined in three influential public statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003).
I sometimes refer to their overlap or common ground as the BBB definition of OA. My definition here is the BBB definition reduced to its essential elements and refined with some post-BBB terminology (green, gold, gratis, libre) for speaking precisely about subspecies of OA. Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA:
There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Here’s how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.”
Note that all three legs of the BBB definition go beyond removing price barriers to removing permission barriers, or beyond gratis OA to libre OA. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. The purpose of OA is to remove barriers to all legitimate scholarly uses for scholarly literature, but there’s no legitimate scholarly purpose in suppressing attribution to the texts we use. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.)
The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. If there are complexities, they lie in the transition from where we are now to a world in which OA is the default for new research. This is complicated because the major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural. (More in
chapter 9
on the future.)
In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. Moreover, any kind of content can be digital: texts, data, images, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software—and to different degrees we already do. But the term “open access” was coined by researchers trying to remove access barriers to research. The next section explains why.
1.1 What Makes OA Possible?
OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. But why would a copyright holder consent to OA?
Two background facts suggest the answer. First, authors are the copyright holders for their work until or unless they transfer rights to someone else, such as a publisher.
Second, scholarly journals generally don’t pay authors for their research articles, which frees this special tribe of authors to consent to OA without losing revenue. This fact distinguishes scholars decisively from musicians and moviemakers, and even from most other kinds of authors. This is why controversies about OA to music and movies don’t carry over to OA for research articles.
Both facts are critical, but the second is nearly unknown outside the academic world. It’s not a new fact of academic life, arising from a recent economic downturn in the publishing industry. Nor is it a case of corporate exploitation of unworldly academics. Scholarly journals haven’t paid authors for their articles since the first scholarly journals, the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society of London and the
Journal des sçavans
, launched in London and Paris in 1665.
The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. Or it may be a wise adaptation that would eventually evolve in any culture with a serious research subculture. (The optimist in me wants to believe the latter, but the evolution of copyright law taunts that optimism.) This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It also supports academic freedom and the kinds of serious inquiry that advance knowledge. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. At the same time it frees them to microspecialize and defend ideas of immediate interest to just a handful people in the world, which are essential to pushing the frontiers of knowledge.
This custom doesn’t guarantee that truth-seeking won’t be derailed by profit-seeking, and it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eventually fill the smallest gaps in our collaborative understanding of the world. It doesn’t even guarantee that scholars won’t sometimes play for the crowd and detour into fad thinking. But it removes a major distraction by allowing them, if they wish, to focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell. It’s a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to research, and it’s the key to the legal and economic lock that would otherwise shackle steps toward OA.
Creative people who live by royalties, such as novelists, musicians, and moviemakers, may consider this scholarly tradition a burden and sacrifice for scholars. We might even agree, provided we don’t overlook a few facts. First, it’s a sacrifice that scholars have been making for nearly 350 years. OA to research articles doesn’t depend on asking royalty-earning authors to give up their royalties. Second, academics have salaries from universities, freeing them to dive deeply into their research topics and publish specialized articles without market appeal. Many musicians and moviemakers might envy that freedom to disregard sales and popular taste. Third, academics receive other, less tangible rewards from their institutions—like promotion and tenure—when their research is recognized by others, accepted, cited, applied, and built upon.
It’s no accident that faculty who advance knowledge in their fields also advance their careers. Academics are passionate about certain topics, ideas, questions, inquiries, or disciplines. They feel lucky to have jobs in which they may pursue these passions and even luckier to be rewarded for pursuing them. Some focus single-mindedly on carrying an honest pebble to the pile of knowledge (as John Lange put it), having an impact on their field, or scooping others working on the same questions. Others focus strategically on building the case for promotion and tenure. But the two paths converge, which is not a fortuitous fact of nature but an engineered fact of life in the academy. As incentives for productivity, these intangible career benefits may be stronger for the average researcher than royalties are for the average novelist or musician. (In both domains, bountiful royalties for superstars tell us nothing about effective payment models for the long tail of less stellar professionals.)
There’s no sense in which research would be more free, efficient, or effective if academics took a more “businesslike” position, behaved more like musicians and moviemakers, abandoned their insulation from the market, and tied their income to the popularity of their ideas. Nonacademics who urge academics to come to their senses and demand royalties even for journal articles may be more naive about nonprofit research than academics are about for-profit business.
We can take this a step further. Scholars can afford to ignore sales because they have salaries and research grants to take the place of royalties. But why do universities pay salaries and why do funding agencies award grants? They do it to advance research and the range of public interests served by research. They don’t do it to earn profits from the results. They are all nonprofit. They certainly don’t do it to make scholarly writings into gifts to enrich publishers, especially when conventional publishers erect access barriers at the expense of research. Universities and funding agencies pay researchers to make their research into gifts to the public in the widest sense.
Public and private funding agencies are essentially public and private charities, funding research they regard as useful or beneficial. Universities have a public purpose as well, even when they are private institutions. We support the public institutions with public funds, and we support the private ones with tax exemptions for their property and tax deductions for their donors.
We’d have less knowledge, less academic freedom, and less OA if researchers worked for royalties and made their research articles into commodities rather than gifts. It should be no surprise, then, that more and more funding agencies and universities are adopting strong OA policies. Their mission to advance research leads them directly to logic of OA: With a few exceptions, such as classified research, research that is worth funding or facilitating is worth sharing with everyone who can make use of it. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
Newcomers to OA often assume that OA helps readers and hurts authors, and that the reader side of the scholarly soul must beg the author side to make the necessary sacrifice. But OA benefits authors as well as readers. Authors want access to readers at least as much as readers want access to authors. All authors want to cultivate a larger audience and greater impact. Authors who work for royalties have reason to compromise and settle for the smaller audience of paying customers. But authors who aren’t paid for their writing have no reason to compromise.
It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to recognize that scholarly publication is accompanied by a strong interest in impact and career building. The result is a mix of interested and disinterested motives. The reasons to make work OA are essentially the same as the reasons to publish. Authors who make their work OA are always serving others but not always acting from altruism. In fact, the idea that OA depends on author altruism slows down OA progress by hiding the role of author self-interest.
Another aspect of author self-interest emerges from the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles, even when they are published in the same issue of the same journal. There’s growing evidence that OA articles are downloaded more often as well, and that journals converting to OA see a rise in their submissions and citation impact.
There are many hypotheses to explain the correlation between OA and increased citations, but it’s likely that ongoing studies will show that much of the correlation is simply due to the larger audience and heightened visibility provided by OA itself. When you enlarge the audience for an article, you also enlarge the subset of the audience that will later cite it, including professionals in the same field at institutions unable to afford subscription access. OA enlarges the potential audience, including the potential professional audience, far beyond that for even the most prestigious and popular subscription journals.
In any case, these studies bring a welcome note of author self-interest to the case for OA. OA is not a sacrifice for authors who write for impact rather than money. It increases a work’s visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming. But as we’ll see, it’s not costly, not difficult, and not time-consuming.
My colleague Stevan Harnad frequently compares research articles to advertisements. They advertise the author’s research. Try telling advertisers that they’re making a needless sacrifice by allowing people to read their ads without having to pay for the privilege. Advertisers give away their ads and even pay to place them where they might be seen. They do this to benefit themselves, and scholars have the same interest in sharing their message as widely as possible.
Because any content can be digital, and any digital content can be OA, OA needn’t be limited to royalty-free literature like research articles. Research articles are just ripe examples of low-hanging fruit. OA could extend to royalty-producing work like monographs, textbooks, novels, news, music, and movies. But as soon as we cross the line into OA for royalty-producing work, authors will either lose revenue or fear that they will lose revenue. Either way, they’ll be harder to persuade. But instead of concluding that royalty-producing work is off limits to OA, we should merely conclude that it’s higher-hanging fruit. In many cases we can still persuade royalty-earning authors to consent to OA. (See section 5.3 on OA for books.)
Authors of scholarly research articles aren’t the only players who work without pay in the production of research literature. In general, scholarly journals don’t pay editors or referees either. In general, editors and referees are paid salaries by universities to free them, like authors, to donate their time and labor to ensure the quality of new work appearing in scholarly journals. An important consequence follows. All the key players in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA needn’t dispense with peer review or favor unrefereed manuscripts over refereed articles. We can aim for the prize of OA to peer-reviewed scholarship. (See section 5.1 on peer review.)
Of course, conventional publishers are not as free as authors, editors, and referees to forgo revenue. This is a central fact in the transition to OA, and it explains why the interests of scholars and conventional publishers diverge more in the digital age than they diverged earlier. But not all publishers are conventional, and not all conventional publishers will carry print-era business models into the digital age.
Academic publishers are not monolithic. Some new ones were born OA and some older ones have completely converted to OA. Many provide OA to some of their work but not all of it. Some are experimenting with OA, and some are watching the experiments of others. Most allow green OA (through repositories) and a growing number offer at least some kind of gold OA (through journals). Some are supportive, some undecided, some opposed. Among the opposed, some have merely decided not to provide OA themselves, while others lobby actively against policies to encourage or require OA. Some oppose gold but not green OA, while others oppose green but not gold OA.
OA gains nothing and loses potential allies by blurring these distinctions. This variety reminds us (to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly) that OA doesn’t threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt.
A growing number of journal publishers have chosen business models allowing them to dispense with subscription revenue and offer OA. They have expenses but they also have revenue to cover their expenses. In fact, some OA publishers are for-profit and profitable. (See chapter 7 on economics.)
Moreover, peer review is done by dedicated volunteers who don’t care how a journal pays its bills, or even whether the journal is in the red or the black. If all peer-reviewed journals converted to OA overnight, the authors, editors, and referees would have the same incentives to participate in peer review that they had the day before. They needn’t stop offering their services, needn’t lower their standards, and needn’t make sacrifices they weren’t already making. They volunteer their time not because of a journal’s choice of business model but because of its contribution to research. They could carry on with solvent or insolvent subscription publishers, with solvent or insolvent OA publishers, or even without publishers.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative said in February 2002: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment. . . . The new technology is the internet.”
To see what this willingness looks like without the medium to give it effect, look at scholarship in the age of print. Author gifts turned into publisher commodities, and access gaps for readers were harmfully large and widespread. (Access gaps are still harmfully large and widespread, but only because OA is not yet the default for new research.) To see what the medium looks like without the willingness, look at music and movies in the age of the internet. The need for royalties keeps creators from reaching everyone who would enjoy their work.
A beautiful opportunity exists where the willingness and the medium overlap. A scholarly custom that evolved in the seventeenth century frees scholars to take advantage of the access revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first. Because scholars are nearly unique in following this custom, they are nearly unique in their freedom to take advantage of this revolution without financial risk. In this sense, the planets have aligned for scholars. Most other authors are constrained to fear rather than seize the opportunities created by the internet.
1.2 What OA Is Not
We can dispel a cloud of objections and misunderstandings simply by pointing out a few things that OA is not. (Many of these points will be elaborated in later chapters.)
OA isn’t an attempt to bypass peer review. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most conservative to the most innovative, and all the major public statements on OA insist on its importance. Because scholarly journals generally don’t pay peer-reviewing editors and referees, just as they don’t pay authors, all the participants in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. While OA to unrefereed preprints is useful and widespread, the OA movement isn’t limited to unrefereed preprints and, if anything, focuses on OA to peer-reviewed articles. (More in section 5.1 on peer review.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reform, violate, or abolish copyright. It’s compatible with copyright law as it is. OA would benefit from the right kinds of copyright reforms, and many dedicated people are working on them. But it needn’t wait for reforms and hasn’t waited. OA literature avoids copyright problems in exactly the same way that conventional toll-access literature does. For older works, it takes advantage of the public domain, and for newer works, it rests on copyright-holder consent. (More in chapter 4 on policies and chapter 6 on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deprive royalty-earning authors of income. The OA movement focuses on research articles precisely because they don’t pay royalties. In any case, inside and outside that focus, OA for copyrighted work depends on copyright-holder consent. Hence, royalty-earning authors have nothing to fear but persuasion that the benefits of OA might outweigh the risks to royalties. (More in section 5.3 on OA for books.)
OA isn’t an attempt to deny the reality of costs. No serious OA advocate has ever argued that OA literature is costless to produce, although many argue that it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature, even less expensive than born-digital toll-access literature. The question is not whether research literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than charging readers and creating access barriers. (More in chapter 7 on economics.)
Terminology
We could talk about vigilante OA, infringing OA, piratical OA, or OA without consent. That sort of OA could violate copyrights and deprive royalty-earning authors of royalties against their will. But we could also talk about vigilante publishing, infringing publishing, piratical publishing, or publishing without consent. Both happen. However, we generally reserve the term “publishing” for lawful publishing, and tack on special adjectives to describe unlawful variations on the theme. Likewise, I’ll reserve the term “open access” for lawful OA that carries the consent of the relevant rightsholder.
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce authors’ rights over their work. On the contrary, OA depends on author decisions and requires authors to exercise more rights or control over their work than they are allowed to exercise under traditional publishing contracts. One OA strategy is for authors to retain some of the rights they formerly gave publishers, including the right to authorize OA. Another OA strategy is for publishers to permit more uses than they formerly permitted, including permission for authors to make OA copies of their work. By contrast, traditional journal-publishing contracts demand that authors transfer all rights to publishers, and author rights or control cannot sink lower than that. (See chapters
4
on policies and
6
on copyright.)
OA isn’t an attempt to reduce academic freedom. Academic authors remain free to submit their work to the journals or publishers of their choice. Policies requiring OA do so conditionally, for example, for researchers who choose to apply for a certain kind of grant. In addition, these policies generally build in exceptions, waiver options, or both. Since 2008 most university OA policies have been adopted by faculty deeply concerned to preserve and even enhance their prerogatives. (See
chapter 4
on OA policies.)
OA isn’t an attempt to relax rules against plagiarism. All the public definitions of OA support author attribution, even construed as a “restriction” on users. All the major open licenses require author attribution. Moreover, plagiarism is typically punished by the plagiarist’s institution rather than by courts, that is, by social norms rather than by law. Hence, even when attribution is not legally required, plagiarism is still a punishable offense and no OA policy anywhere interferes with those punishments. In any case, if making literature digital and online makes plagiarism easier to commit, then OA makes plagiarism easier to detect. Not all plagiarists are smart, but the smart ones will not steal from OA sources indexed in every search engine. In this sense, OA deters plagiarism.
OA isn’t an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers. OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers, and research institutions. The goal is constructive, not destructive. If OA does eventually harm toll-access publishers, it will be in the way that personal computers harmed typewriter manufacturers. The harm was not the goal, but a side effect of developing something better. Moreover, OA doesn’t challenge publishers or publishing per se, just one business model for publishing, and it’s far easier for conventional publishers to adapt to OA than for typewriter manufacturers to adapt to computers. In fact, most toll-access publishers are already adapting, by allowing author-initiated OA, providing some OA themselves, or experimenting with OA. (See section 3.1 on green OA and chapter 8 on casualties.)
OA doesn’t require boycotting any kind of literature or publisher. It doesn’t require boycotting toll-access research any more than free online journalism requires boycotting priced online journalism. OA doesn’t require us to strike toll-access literature from our personal reading lists, course syllabi, or libraries. Some scholars who support OA decide to submit new work only to OA journals, or to donate their time as editors or referees only to OA journals, in effect boycotting toll-access journals as authors, editors, and referees. But this choice is not forced by the definition of OA, by a commitment to OA, or by any OA policy, and most scholars who support OA continue to work with toll-access journals. In any case, even those scholars who do boycott toll-access journals as authors, editors, or referees don’t boycott them as readers. (Here we needn’t get into the complexity that some toll-access journals effectively create involuntary reader boycotts by pricing their journals out of reach of readers who want access.)
OA isn’t primarily about bringing access to lay readers. If anything, the OA movement focuses on bringing access to professional researchers whose careers depend on access. But there’s no need to decide which users are primary and which are secondary. The publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. OA is about bringing access to everyone with an internet connection who wants access, regardless of their professions or purposes. There’s no doubt that if we put “professional researchers” and “everyone else” into separate categories, a higher percentage of researchers will want access to research literature, even after taking into account that many already have paid access through their institutions. But it’s far from clear why that would matter, especially when providing OA to all internet users is cheaper and simpler than providing OA to just a subset of worthy internet users.
If party-goers in New York and New Jersey can both enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks in New York Harbor, then the sponsors needn’t decide that one group is primary, even if a simple study could show which group is more numerous. If this analogy breaks down, it’s because New Jersey residents who can’t see the fireworks gain nothing from New Yorkers who can. But research does offer this double or indirect benefit. When OA research directly benefits many lay readers, so much the better. But when it doesn’t, it still benefits everyone indirectly by benefiting researchers directly. (Also see section 5.5.1 on access for lay readers.)
Finally, OA isn’t universal access. Even when we succeed at removing price and permission barriers, four other kinds of access barrier might remain in place:
Filtering and censorship barriers
Many schools, employers, ISPs, and governments want to limit what users can see.
Language barriers
Most online literature is in English, or another single language, and machine translation is still very weak.
Handicap access barriers
Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be.
Connectivity barriers
The digital divide keeps billions of people offline, including millions of scholars, and impedes millions of others with slow, flaky, or low-bandwidth internet connections.
Most us want to remove all four of these barriers. But there’s no reason to save the term
open access
until we succeed. In the long climb to universal access, removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name. | Chapter 7 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 3 | 0 |
99910_IUMXEL62_1 | What is a working example of a complementary currency? | New money: Do local currencies actually work?
It's lunchtime at Glasgow Chambers in late November, and Councillor George Redmond is getting worked up at the prospect a Glasgow Pound. "We would be Glasgow-centric about it," he says conspiratorially, as though there is any other way to be. "Can you imagine having the face of Billy Connolly on our local currency? Or Alex Ferguson, or Kenny Dalglish?"
Inventing an alternative to sterling might sound far-fetched, even illegal. But it's not that strange. In the UK we think of the pound like fish think about water, which is to say not at all. It might never have occurred to many of us that there are other types of exchange that can stand in for ragged bank notes tucked away in pockets, or other objects that can stand in for those notes.
Not every country is so lucky. In crisis-hit Greece, where the euro can be hard to come by, businesses and citizens have turned to bartering using a points system where goods like pianos, pot and pans can be exchanged for security services or loaned farming equipment. In India last year, desperate people burned sacks of illegal cash after the government withdrew two high-denomination notes as part of a crackdown on corruption. Hoarders woke up to discover the banknotes under their mattresses were suddenly worthless.
The pound has been trading at its lowest level since 1985 since the UK voted to leave the European Union and there are fears that it could dip further as Brexit ensues. Timebanks, local exchange trading systems (LETS) and digital inventions like bitcoin can provide alternative ways for people to pay for goods and services when mainstream currencies hit crises. But they will only work if Britons are ready to accept that they have the power to invent their own currency.
"At the moment, if the pound stops working for us, the whole economy grinds to a halt because there aren't alternatives," Duncan McCann, a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, tells those gathered in a gilded room at Glasgow Chambers to discuss the Glasgow Pound. McCann is a long-time advocate of alternative means of exchange. He is behind the ScotPound, a proposal for a new national currency for Scotland that emerged after the referendum on Scottish independence. It's an idea he no longer thinks will work, because the debate, since Brexit, has shifted from the currency issue back to ideas about Scottish independence.
Today, he's preaching to the converted. Alex Walker, the chairman of the 250-person Ekopia community in Northern Scotland, listens at the back. The Eko has been the main means of buying everything from beer to bananas in Ekopia since Walker founded it 20 years ago. On an adjacent table, Tracy Duff, a community learning and development worker from Clackmannanshire Council, digs out some papers. She runs the Clacks Youth Timebank, a scheme where 12- to 15-year-olds can earn credit for volunteering. Taking notes up front is Ailie Rutherford, one of the people who organised the meeting. Rutherford runs the People's Bank of Govanhill, a currency that changes value depending on the income of the user. "I don't see any reason why we shouldn't invent our own currency and play with it," she says.
Everyone has gathered to decide what a Glasgow Pound might look like at a time when many are asking if local currencies can work at all. Councillor Redmond says Glasgow has been closely watching existing alternative currencies like the Brixton Pound in London, which was introduced in 2011.
The founders of the Brixton Pound wanted to do something to stop 80p of every £1 spent locally from leaking out of the area into the pockets of corporations, at the expense of small local traders. So they printed a currency that would have the same value as the pound, but could only be traded in independent Brixton shops, where the shopkeeper would also have to spend it locally. This year the Brixton Pound got its own cashpoint, from where people can withdraw local banknotes bearing colourful images of local heroes, like David Bowie and secret Agent Violette Szabo, to spend in over 150 local shops. It can also be used by residents to pay council tax and by employers to pay wages.
No two local currencies are exactly the same. But the Brixton Pound and other recent schemes follow the example ten years ago of the Totnes Pound, a 'complementary currency': that is, one supplementing the national currency. As fears for financial stability took hold during the recession, complementary currencies grew in popularity. The Bank of England does not consider these forms of currency legal tender, but the notes hold value in the same way as a gift-card from a department store, with the same kind of restrictions about where they can be spent. Proponents say complementary currencies boost spending in smaller geographical areas, which can have environmental benefits as businesses cut transport distances to deal with local suppliers. Detractors say they have no real economic impact and work only as a game for the middle classes, who can afford to buy from independent shops rather than chains.
In Britain, there are now schemes in Totnes, Lewes, Brixton, Bristol and Exeter. Hull has its own local digital currency that can be earned from volunteering and used to pay council tax. Kingston, Birmingham and Liverpool have schemes underway. Glasgow could be next. But the working group has some serious questions to answer first, not least: do complementary currencies actually work?
"People don't understand money," Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for the South West of England and Gibraltar, says over the phone.
Scott Cato says the fish-in-water problem – the idea that sterling is so ubiquitous, it is never questioned – is the biggest challenge for complementary currencies. She knows all about it as a founder of the Stroud Pound in 2010, a currency that has since gone out of circulation.
"[People] think they put money into a bank and someone else takes it out. What they don't understand is that banks have the power to create money. We've given the power to create money to private corporations and people don't understand that we can have it back," she says.
In Stroud, suspicion of the local currency among local businesses became a barrier to success. Scott-Cato said traders refused to join the scheme because they were "running a business", as though putting the community first and placing the needs of others as equivalent to their own was in itself bad business practice, or as though they were somehow being disloyal to sterling.
The Bristol Pound (£B) entered into circulation in September 2012. By June 2015, 1m £B had been issued, with £B700,000 of that still in circulation. In a population of some 450,000 people, that's the equivalent of each Bristolian carrying less than £B2 in change in their pocket.
"The small scale is a problem and a strength," says Stephen Clarke, chief financial officer of the Bristol Pound. "The benefit comes from the fact that local currencies are trusted organisations: we're a Community Interest Company limited by guarantee." That means assets owned by the the Bristol Pound have to be used for the good of the community, rather than purely for profit.
Without enough currency in circulation, it ceases to work. Scott-Cato says Stroud's size meant meant the Stroud Pound was never viable: "We couldn't get the velocity of circulation right, which contrasts with the Bristol Pound."
Clarke also says the small scale of local currencies means they are "always scrabbling around looking for money". One way founders of the Bristol Pound have addressed his is by setting up an umbrella organisation, the Guild of Independent Currencies, to share information between local currencies in the UK and help new organisations. "At the moment we're all reinventing the wheel every time," Clarke says.
Technology might also have a solution. Peter Ferry, a commercial director, travels to Glasgow to tell those working on the Glasgow Pound that that his company Wallet has come up with a way to use the blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to make it easier for people to use multiple types of currency. "There might be many currencies around the country that people want to use. We need to make it simple for them to do that and also to make it simple to earn these currencies in many ways," he says.
Size doesn't always matter. Sometimes, the smallest places – like Totnes and the Ekopia community – are best able to support complementary currencies because the people who live there are engaged with their local economy in a meaningful way.
"Bristol is seen as a quirky, individualistic kind of place," Clarke says. "When we first produced the Bristol Pound note, people were really proud of it. It got through to people not just sat around coffee shops. I'm not sure a London Pound would work, because people identify with their local area in London rather than the city as a whole."
Bristol Pound users don't have high incomes necessarily, but surveys show they are engaged with their local community and they have a higher educational attainment than average. In the years since the financial crisis, as local authority budgets have shrunk, some areas have relied heavily on engaged communities to fill in gaps in public services. By contrast, deprived areas where people cannot afford time and money to put into their community have become more deprived, making them even harder for local currencies to reach.
"It is difficult to get into more disadvantaged areas," Stephen Clarke says. "We have a ten-year life expectancy gap between different parts of the city. When you go to disadvantaged areas with the Bristol Pound hat on you realise there aren't independent shops there, there's an Aldi and Lidl and that's it."
More than a third of children grow up in poverty in Glasgow. A Glasgow Pound might struggle to get poorer families to buy into a local currency that ties them to shopping at more expensive, independent shops, rather than getting deals at big supermarket chains.
When Scott-Cato and her colleagues wrote about the experience of setting up the Stroud Pound, they said it was telling that complementary currencies have been accused of being a game for middle-class people, rather than a genuine economic solution.
Perhaps for that reason, experts like Duncan McCann have stopped thinking of complementary currencies as a one-size-fits-all solution. He said they can function as a kind of 'gateway drug' to introduce people to a new way of thinking about money. "That is especially for those who use it, but also for those who just become aware of it," he says.
Ciaran Mundy, CEO of the Bristol Pound, says it is important to think of the systemic impact rather than looking for targeted treatment of symptoms of economic deprivation. "Poverty has many causes," he says. "One of these is how the economy is structured in terms of how money flows out of poor areas due to high dependence on larger national and international companies paying lower wages and using offshore accounts to hide the money from the tax man."
Nothing is tying Glasgow to existing models for complementary currencies. But during the first meeting about setting up the Glasgow Pound, the workshop shows just how hard it would be to invent a new system that works for everyone.
Each table is handed a wad of Post-it notes and a piece of white paper. A table leader asks everyone to write on the Post-its what they want the Glasgow Pound to achieve. Elbowing teacups out the way, people get to work. They scrawl a dizzying number of proposals, from keeping more wealth in the local area to empowering people who feel cut out of the national economy, or to moving towards land reform and saving the environment. Team leaders try to assemble these ideas in themes to report back to the room.
On one table, Duncan McCann encourages people to urge businesses to do things they have never done before. "One of the goals should be to move businesses from where they are today into the future," he says.
After years of researc,h McCann believes the only way complementary currencies can create real value for local economies is if they make transactions happen that wouldn't otherwise have taken place.
"They need to create additional spending power. This is this what the local currencies, despite all their good points, fail to do," McCann says.
Every time a Brixton Pound transaction is made, 1.5 per cent goes into a Brixton Fund. This is used to give micro-grants of between a few hundred and £2000 to local projects and community groups. "We aim to target projects that aren't large enough to apply for more formal grant funding," says Lucy Çava, project manager at the Brixton Pound.
"We see this as part of community building – linking the Brixton Pound user with community groups, so both groups become more visible to each other through the currency and fund. This is particularly important in Brixton because of the gentrification debates which are very salient round there," Çava says.
Meanwhile, the people behind the Bristol Pound are readying a mutual credit network called Bristol Prospects. Through this network, businesses in Bristol can exchange credit in the form of loans that are neutralised within the network, helping one another to grow without relying on the high rates of commercial lenders.
Once operational, loans offered through the Prospects network will have negative interest, so that businesses are encouraged to pass credit on as quickly as possible. "That's the plan," says Clarke, "because it's rather like a hot potato: people will want to pass it on."
"We know from research that a number of small businesses in Bristol are struggling to get money on reasonable terms," says Clarke, "and that banks are not interested in smaller loans to businesses. So we think there is a strength in the Bristol Pound network to start something like this that is linked, but separate."
Duncan McCann, with all his experience, knows that challenge is worthwhile. "As people we have a right to make credit and loan money. We mustn't forget that. We mustn't leave that to corporations and the state," he says.
This article is part of a series on local economies Hazel is documenting at farnearer.org, with funding from the Friends Provident Foundation
Illustration by PureSolution/Shutterstock
This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article. | The Brixton Pound | The Eko Pound | The Liverpool Pound | The Glasgow Pound | 0 |
99910_IUMXEL62_2 | Which complementary currency didn't work out? | New money: Do local currencies actually work?
It's lunchtime at Glasgow Chambers in late November, and Councillor George Redmond is getting worked up at the prospect a Glasgow Pound. "We would be Glasgow-centric about it," he says conspiratorially, as though there is any other way to be. "Can you imagine having the face of Billy Connolly on our local currency? Or Alex Ferguson, or Kenny Dalglish?"
Inventing an alternative to sterling might sound far-fetched, even illegal. But it's not that strange. In the UK we think of the pound like fish think about water, which is to say not at all. It might never have occurred to many of us that there are other types of exchange that can stand in for ragged bank notes tucked away in pockets, or other objects that can stand in for those notes.
Not every country is so lucky. In crisis-hit Greece, where the euro can be hard to come by, businesses and citizens have turned to bartering using a points system where goods like pianos, pot and pans can be exchanged for security services or loaned farming equipment. In India last year, desperate people burned sacks of illegal cash after the government withdrew two high-denomination notes as part of a crackdown on corruption. Hoarders woke up to discover the banknotes under their mattresses were suddenly worthless.
The pound has been trading at its lowest level since 1985 since the UK voted to leave the European Union and there are fears that it could dip further as Brexit ensues. Timebanks, local exchange trading systems (LETS) and digital inventions like bitcoin can provide alternative ways for people to pay for goods and services when mainstream currencies hit crises. But they will only work if Britons are ready to accept that they have the power to invent their own currency.
"At the moment, if the pound stops working for us, the whole economy grinds to a halt because there aren't alternatives," Duncan McCann, a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, tells those gathered in a gilded room at Glasgow Chambers to discuss the Glasgow Pound. McCann is a long-time advocate of alternative means of exchange. He is behind the ScotPound, a proposal for a new national currency for Scotland that emerged after the referendum on Scottish independence. It's an idea he no longer thinks will work, because the debate, since Brexit, has shifted from the currency issue back to ideas about Scottish independence.
Today, he's preaching to the converted. Alex Walker, the chairman of the 250-person Ekopia community in Northern Scotland, listens at the back. The Eko has been the main means of buying everything from beer to bananas in Ekopia since Walker founded it 20 years ago. On an adjacent table, Tracy Duff, a community learning and development worker from Clackmannanshire Council, digs out some papers. She runs the Clacks Youth Timebank, a scheme where 12- to 15-year-olds can earn credit for volunteering. Taking notes up front is Ailie Rutherford, one of the people who organised the meeting. Rutherford runs the People's Bank of Govanhill, a currency that changes value depending on the income of the user. "I don't see any reason why we shouldn't invent our own currency and play with it," she says.
Everyone has gathered to decide what a Glasgow Pound might look like at a time when many are asking if local currencies can work at all. Councillor Redmond says Glasgow has been closely watching existing alternative currencies like the Brixton Pound in London, which was introduced in 2011.
The founders of the Brixton Pound wanted to do something to stop 80p of every £1 spent locally from leaking out of the area into the pockets of corporations, at the expense of small local traders. So they printed a currency that would have the same value as the pound, but could only be traded in independent Brixton shops, where the shopkeeper would also have to spend it locally. This year the Brixton Pound got its own cashpoint, from where people can withdraw local banknotes bearing colourful images of local heroes, like David Bowie and secret Agent Violette Szabo, to spend in over 150 local shops. It can also be used by residents to pay council tax and by employers to pay wages.
No two local currencies are exactly the same. But the Brixton Pound and other recent schemes follow the example ten years ago of the Totnes Pound, a 'complementary currency': that is, one supplementing the national currency. As fears for financial stability took hold during the recession, complementary currencies grew in popularity. The Bank of England does not consider these forms of currency legal tender, but the notes hold value in the same way as a gift-card from a department store, with the same kind of restrictions about where they can be spent. Proponents say complementary currencies boost spending in smaller geographical areas, which can have environmental benefits as businesses cut transport distances to deal with local suppliers. Detractors say they have no real economic impact and work only as a game for the middle classes, who can afford to buy from independent shops rather than chains.
In Britain, there are now schemes in Totnes, Lewes, Brixton, Bristol and Exeter. Hull has its own local digital currency that can be earned from volunteering and used to pay council tax. Kingston, Birmingham and Liverpool have schemes underway. Glasgow could be next. But the working group has some serious questions to answer first, not least: do complementary currencies actually work?
"People don't understand money," Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for the South West of England and Gibraltar, says over the phone.
Scott Cato says the fish-in-water problem – the idea that sterling is so ubiquitous, it is never questioned – is the biggest challenge for complementary currencies. She knows all about it as a founder of the Stroud Pound in 2010, a currency that has since gone out of circulation.
"[People] think they put money into a bank and someone else takes it out. What they don't understand is that banks have the power to create money. We've given the power to create money to private corporations and people don't understand that we can have it back," she says.
In Stroud, suspicion of the local currency among local businesses became a barrier to success. Scott-Cato said traders refused to join the scheme because they were "running a business", as though putting the community first and placing the needs of others as equivalent to their own was in itself bad business practice, or as though they were somehow being disloyal to sterling.
The Bristol Pound (£B) entered into circulation in September 2012. By June 2015, 1m £B had been issued, with £B700,000 of that still in circulation. In a population of some 450,000 people, that's the equivalent of each Bristolian carrying less than £B2 in change in their pocket.
"The small scale is a problem and a strength," says Stephen Clarke, chief financial officer of the Bristol Pound. "The benefit comes from the fact that local currencies are trusted organisations: we're a Community Interest Company limited by guarantee." That means assets owned by the the Bristol Pound have to be used for the good of the community, rather than purely for profit.
Without enough currency in circulation, it ceases to work. Scott-Cato says Stroud's size meant meant the Stroud Pound was never viable: "We couldn't get the velocity of circulation right, which contrasts with the Bristol Pound."
Clarke also says the small scale of local currencies means they are "always scrabbling around looking for money". One way founders of the Bristol Pound have addressed his is by setting up an umbrella organisation, the Guild of Independent Currencies, to share information between local currencies in the UK and help new organisations. "At the moment we're all reinventing the wheel every time," Clarke says.
Technology might also have a solution. Peter Ferry, a commercial director, travels to Glasgow to tell those working on the Glasgow Pound that that his company Wallet has come up with a way to use the blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to make it easier for people to use multiple types of currency. "There might be many currencies around the country that people want to use. We need to make it simple for them to do that and also to make it simple to earn these currencies in many ways," he says.
Size doesn't always matter. Sometimes, the smallest places – like Totnes and the Ekopia community – are best able to support complementary currencies because the people who live there are engaged with their local economy in a meaningful way.
"Bristol is seen as a quirky, individualistic kind of place," Clarke says. "When we first produced the Bristol Pound note, people were really proud of it. It got through to people not just sat around coffee shops. I'm not sure a London Pound would work, because people identify with their local area in London rather than the city as a whole."
Bristol Pound users don't have high incomes necessarily, but surveys show they are engaged with their local community and they have a higher educational attainment than average. In the years since the financial crisis, as local authority budgets have shrunk, some areas have relied heavily on engaged communities to fill in gaps in public services. By contrast, deprived areas where people cannot afford time and money to put into their community have become more deprived, making them even harder for local currencies to reach.
"It is difficult to get into more disadvantaged areas," Stephen Clarke says. "We have a ten-year life expectancy gap between different parts of the city. When you go to disadvantaged areas with the Bristol Pound hat on you realise there aren't independent shops there, there's an Aldi and Lidl and that's it."
More than a third of children grow up in poverty in Glasgow. A Glasgow Pound might struggle to get poorer families to buy into a local currency that ties them to shopping at more expensive, independent shops, rather than getting deals at big supermarket chains.
When Scott-Cato and her colleagues wrote about the experience of setting up the Stroud Pound, they said it was telling that complementary currencies have been accused of being a game for middle-class people, rather than a genuine economic solution.
Perhaps for that reason, experts like Duncan McCann have stopped thinking of complementary currencies as a one-size-fits-all solution. He said they can function as a kind of 'gateway drug' to introduce people to a new way of thinking about money. "That is especially for those who use it, but also for those who just become aware of it," he says.
Ciaran Mundy, CEO of the Bristol Pound, says it is important to think of the systemic impact rather than looking for targeted treatment of symptoms of economic deprivation. "Poverty has many causes," he says. "One of these is how the economy is structured in terms of how money flows out of poor areas due to high dependence on larger national and international companies paying lower wages and using offshore accounts to hide the money from the tax man."
Nothing is tying Glasgow to existing models for complementary currencies. But during the first meeting about setting up the Glasgow Pound, the workshop shows just how hard it would be to invent a new system that works for everyone.
Each table is handed a wad of Post-it notes and a piece of white paper. A table leader asks everyone to write on the Post-its what they want the Glasgow Pound to achieve. Elbowing teacups out the way, people get to work. They scrawl a dizzying number of proposals, from keeping more wealth in the local area to empowering people who feel cut out of the national economy, or to moving towards land reform and saving the environment. Team leaders try to assemble these ideas in themes to report back to the room.
On one table, Duncan McCann encourages people to urge businesses to do things they have never done before. "One of the goals should be to move businesses from where they are today into the future," he says.
After years of researc,h McCann believes the only way complementary currencies can create real value for local economies is if they make transactions happen that wouldn't otherwise have taken place.
"They need to create additional spending power. This is this what the local currencies, despite all their good points, fail to do," McCann says.
Every time a Brixton Pound transaction is made, 1.5 per cent goes into a Brixton Fund. This is used to give micro-grants of between a few hundred and £2000 to local projects and community groups. "We aim to target projects that aren't large enough to apply for more formal grant funding," says Lucy Çava, project manager at the Brixton Pound.
"We see this as part of community building – linking the Brixton Pound user with community groups, so both groups become more visible to each other through the currency and fund. This is particularly important in Brixton because of the gentrification debates which are very salient round there," Çava says.
Meanwhile, the people behind the Bristol Pound are readying a mutual credit network called Bristol Prospects. Through this network, businesses in Bristol can exchange credit in the form of loans that are neutralised within the network, helping one another to grow without relying on the high rates of commercial lenders.
Once operational, loans offered through the Prospects network will have negative interest, so that businesses are encouraged to pass credit on as quickly as possible. "That's the plan," says Clarke, "because it's rather like a hot potato: people will want to pass it on."
"We know from research that a number of small businesses in Bristol are struggling to get money on reasonable terms," says Clarke, "and that banks are not interested in smaller loans to businesses. So we think there is a strength in the Bristol Pound network to start something like this that is linked, but separate."
Duncan McCann, with all his experience, knows that challenge is worthwhile. "As people we have a right to make credit and loan money. We mustn't forget that. We mustn't leave that to corporations and the state," he says.
This article is part of a series on local economies Hazel is documenting at farnearer.org, with funding from the Friends Provident Foundation
Illustration by PureSolution/Shutterstock
This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article. | The Stroud Pound | The Totnes Pound | The Liverpool Pound | The Brixton Pound | 0 |
99910_IUMXEL62_3 | What percent goes toward a Brixton Fund when a Brixton Pound is spent? | New money: Do local currencies actually work?
It's lunchtime at Glasgow Chambers in late November, and Councillor George Redmond is getting worked up at the prospect a Glasgow Pound. "We would be Glasgow-centric about it," he says conspiratorially, as though there is any other way to be. "Can you imagine having the face of Billy Connolly on our local currency? Or Alex Ferguson, or Kenny Dalglish?"
Inventing an alternative to sterling might sound far-fetched, even illegal. But it's not that strange. In the UK we think of the pound like fish think about water, which is to say not at all. It might never have occurred to many of us that there are other types of exchange that can stand in for ragged bank notes tucked away in pockets, or other objects that can stand in for those notes.
Not every country is so lucky. In crisis-hit Greece, where the euro can be hard to come by, businesses and citizens have turned to bartering using a points system where goods like pianos, pot and pans can be exchanged for security services or loaned farming equipment. In India last year, desperate people burned sacks of illegal cash after the government withdrew two high-denomination notes as part of a crackdown on corruption. Hoarders woke up to discover the banknotes under their mattresses were suddenly worthless.
The pound has been trading at its lowest level since 1985 since the UK voted to leave the European Union and there are fears that it could dip further as Brexit ensues. Timebanks, local exchange trading systems (LETS) and digital inventions like bitcoin can provide alternative ways for people to pay for goods and services when mainstream currencies hit crises. But they will only work if Britons are ready to accept that they have the power to invent their own currency.
"At the moment, if the pound stops working for us, the whole economy grinds to a halt because there aren't alternatives," Duncan McCann, a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, tells those gathered in a gilded room at Glasgow Chambers to discuss the Glasgow Pound. McCann is a long-time advocate of alternative means of exchange. He is behind the ScotPound, a proposal for a new national currency for Scotland that emerged after the referendum on Scottish independence. It's an idea he no longer thinks will work, because the debate, since Brexit, has shifted from the currency issue back to ideas about Scottish independence.
Today, he's preaching to the converted. Alex Walker, the chairman of the 250-person Ekopia community in Northern Scotland, listens at the back. The Eko has been the main means of buying everything from beer to bananas in Ekopia since Walker founded it 20 years ago. On an adjacent table, Tracy Duff, a community learning and development worker from Clackmannanshire Council, digs out some papers. She runs the Clacks Youth Timebank, a scheme where 12- to 15-year-olds can earn credit for volunteering. Taking notes up front is Ailie Rutherford, one of the people who organised the meeting. Rutherford runs the People's Bank of Govanhill, a currency that changes value depending on the income of the user. "I don't see any reason why we shouldn't invent our own currency and play with it," she says.
Everyone has gathered to decide what a Glasgow Pound might look like at a time when many are asking if local currencies can work at all. Councillor Redmond says Glasgow has been closely watching existing alternative currencies like the Brixton Pound in London, which was introduced in 2011.
The founders of the Brixton Pound wanted to do something to stop 80p of every £1 spent locally from leaking out of the area into the pockets of corporations, at the expense of small local traders. So they printed a currency that would have the same value as the pound, but could only be traded in independent Brixton shops, where the shopkeeper would also have to spend it locally. This year the Brixton Pound got its own cashpoint, from where people can withdraw local banknotes bearing colourful images of local heroes, like David Bowie and secret Agent Violette Szabo, to spend in over 150 local shops. It can also be used by residents to pay council tax and by employers to pay wages.
No two local currencies are exactly the same. But the Brixton Pound and other recent schemes follow the example ten years ago of the Totnes Pound, a 'complementary currency': that is, one supplementing the national currency. As fears for financial stability took hold during the recession, complementary currencies grew in popularity. The Bank of England does not consider these forms of currency legal tender, but the notes hold value in the same way as a gift-card from a department store, with the same kind of restrictions about where they can be spent. Proponents say complementary currencies boost spending in smaller geographical areas, which can have environmental benefits as businesses cut transport distances to deal with local suppliers. Detractors say they have no real economic impact and work only as a game for the middle classes, who can afford to buy from independent shops rather than chains.
In Britain, there are now schemes in Totnes, Lewes, Brixton, Bristol and Exeter. Hull has its own local digital currency that can be earned from volunteering and used to pay council tax. Kingston, Birmingham and Liverpool have schemes underway. Glasgow could be next. But the working group has some serious questions to answer first, not least: do complementary currencies actually work?
"People don't understand money," Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for the South West of England and Gibraltar, says over the phone.
Scott Cato says the fish-in-water problem – the idea that sterling is so ubiquitous, it is never questioned – is the biggest challenge for complementary currencies. She knows all about it as a founder of the Stroud Pound in 2010, a currency that has since gone out of circulation.
"[People] think they put money into a bank and someone else takes it out. What they don't understand is that banks have the power to create money. We've given the power to create money to private corporations and people don't understand that we can have it back," she says.
In Stroud, suspicion of the local currency among local businesses became a barrier to success. Scott-Cato said traders refused to join the scheme because they were "running a business", as though putting the community first and placing the needs of others as equivalent to their own was in itself bad business practice, or as though they were somehow being disloyal to sterling.
The Bristol Pound (£B) entered into circulation in September 2012. By June 2015, 1m £B had been issued, with £B700,000 of that still in circulation. In a population of some 450,000 people, that's the equivalent of each Bristolian carrying less than £B2 in change in their pocket.
"The small scale is a problem and a strength," says Stephen Clarke, chief financial officer of the Bristol Pound. "The benefit comes from the fact that local currencies are trusted organisations: we're a Community Interest Company limited by guarantee." That means assets owned by the the Bristol Pound have to be used for the good of the community, rather than purely for profit.
Without enough currency in circulation, it ceases to work. Scott-Cato says Stroud's size meant meant the Stroud Pound was never viable: "We couldn't get the velocity of circulation right, which contrasts with the Bristol Pound."
Clarke also says the small scale of local currencies means they are "always scrabbling around looking for money". One way founders of the Bristol Pound have addressed his is by setting up an umbrella organisation, the Guild of Independent Currencies, to share information between local currencies in the UK and help new organisations. "At the moment we're all reinventing the wheel every time," Clarke says.
Technology might also have a solution. Peter Ferry, a commercial director, travels to Glasgow to tell those working on the Glasgow Pound that that his company Wallet has come up with a way to use the blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to make it easier for people to use multiple types of currency. "There might be many currencies around the country that people want to use. We need to make it simple for them to do that and also to make it simple to earn these currencies in many ways," he says.
Size doesn't always matter. Sometimes, the smallest places – like Totnes and the Ekopia community – are best able to support complementary currencies because the people who live there are engaged with their local economy in a meaningful way.
"Bristol is seen as a quirky, individualistic kind of place," Clarke says. "When we first produced the Bristol Pound note, people were really proud of it. It got through to people not just sat around coffee shops. I'm not sure a London Pound would work, because people identify with their local area in London rather than the city as a whole."
Bristol Pound users don't have high incomes necessarily, but surveys show they are engaged with their local community and they have a higher educational attainment than average. In the years since the financial crisis, as local authority budgets have shrunk, some areas have relied heavily on engaged communities to fill in gaps in public services. By contrast, deprived areas where people cannot afford time and money to put into their community have become more deprived, making them even harder for local currencies to reach.
"It is difficult to get into more disadvantaged areas," Stephen Clarke says. "We have a ten-year life expectancy gap between different parts of the city. When you go to disadvantaged areas with the Bristol Pound hat on you realise there aren't independent shops there, there's an Aldi and Lidl and that's it."
More than a third of children grow up in poverty in Glasgow. A Glasgow Pound might struggle to get poorer families to buy into a local currency that ties them to shopping at more expensive, independent shops, rather than getting deals at big supermarket chains.
When Scott-Cato and her colleagues wrote about the experience of setting up the Stroud Pound, they said it was telling that complementary currencies have been accused of being a game for middle-class people, rather than a genuine economic solution.
Perhaps for that reason, experts like Duncan McCann have stopped thinking of complementary currencies as a one-size-fits-all solution. He said they can function as a kind of 'gateway drug' to introduce people to a new way of thinking about money. "That is especially for those who use it, but also for those who just become aware of it," he says.
Ciaran Mundy, CEO of the Bristol Pound, says it is important to think of the systemic impact rather than looking for targeted treatment of symptoms of economic deprivation. "Poverty has many causes," he says. "One of these is how the economy is structured in terms of how money flows out of poor areas due to high dependence on larger national and international companies paying lower wages and using offshore accounts to hide the money from the tax man."
Nothing is tying Glasgow to existing models for complementary currencies. But during the first meeting about setting up the Glasgow Pound, the workshop shows just how hard it would be to invent a new system that works for everyone.
Each table is handed a wad of Post-it notes and a piece of white paper. A table leader asks everyone to write on the Post-its what they want the Glasgow Pound to achieve. Elbowing teacups out the way, people get to work. They scrawl a dizzying number of proposals, from keeping more wealth in the local area to empowering people who feel cut out of the national economy, or to moving towards land reform and saving the environment. Team leaders try to assemble these ideas in themes to report back to the room.
On one table, Duncan McCann encourages people to urge businesses to do things they have never done before. "One of the goals should be to move businesses from where they are today into the future," he says.
After years of researc,h McCann believes the only way complementary currencies can create real value for local economies is if they make transactions happen that wouldn't otherwise have taken place.
"They need to create additional spending power. This is this what the local currencies, despite all their good points, fail to do," McCann says.
Every time a Brixton Pound transaction is made, 1.5 per cent goes into a Brixton Fund. This is used to give micro-grants of between a few hundred and £2000 to local projects and community groups. "We aim to target projects that aren't large enough to apply for more formal grant funding," says Lucy Çava, project manager at the Brixton Pound.
"We see this as part of community building – linking the Brixton Pound user with community groups, so both groups become more visible to each other through the currency and fund. This is particularly important in Brixton because of the gentrification debates which are very salient round there," Çava says.
Meanwhile, the people behind the Bristol Pound are readying a mutual credit network called Bristol Prospects. Through this network, businesses in Bristol can exchange credit in the form of loans that are neutralised within the network, helping one another to grow without relying on the high rates of commercial lenders.
Once operational, loans offered through the Prospects network will have negative interest, so that businesses are encouraged to pass credit on as quickly as possible. "That's the plan," says Clarke, "because it's rather like a hot potato: people will want to pass it on."
"We know from research that a number of small businesses in Bristol are struggling to get money on reasonable terms," says Clarke, "and that banks are not interested in smaller loans to businesses. So we think there is a strength in the Bristol Pound network to start something like this that is linked, but separate."
Duncan McCann, with all his experience, knows that challenge is worthwhile. "As people we have a right to make credit and loan money. We mustn't forget that. We mustn't leave that to corporations and the state," he says.
This article is part of a series on local economies Hazel is documenting at farnearer.org, with funding from the Friends Provident Foundation
Illustration by PureSolution/Shutterstock
This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article. | 2.0 percent | 0.5 percent | 1.0 percent | 1.5 percent | 3 |
99910_IUMXEL62_4 | Who came up with the Stroud Pound? | New money: Do local currencies actually work?
It's lunchtime at Glasgow Chambers in late November, and Councillor George Redmond is getting worked up at the prospect a Glasgow Pound. "We would be Glasgow-centric about it," he says conspiratorially, as though there is any other way to be. "Can you imagine having the face of Billy Connolly on our local currency? Or Alex Ferguson, or Kenny Dalglish?"
Inventing an alternative to sterling might sound far-fetched, even illegal. But it's not that strange. In the UK we think of the pound like fish think about water, which is to say not at all. It might never have occurred to many of us that there are other types of exchange that can stand in for ragged bank notes tucked away in pockets, or other objects that can stand in for those notes.
Not every country is so lucky. In crisis-hit Greece, where the euro can be hard to come by, businesses and citizens have turned to bartering using a points system where goods like pianos, pot and pans can be exchanged for security services or loaned farming equipment. In India last year, desperate people burned sacks of illegal cash after the government withdrew two high-denomination notes as part of a crackdown on corruption. Hoarders woke up to discover the banknotes under their mattresses were suddenly worthless.
The pound has been trading at its lowest level since 1985 since the UK voted to leave the European Union and there are fears that it could dip further as Brexit ensues. Timebanks, local exchange trading systems (LETS) and digital inventions like bitcoin can provide alternative ways for people to pay for goods and services when mainstream currencies hit crises. But they will only work if Britons are ready to accept that they have the power to invent their own currency.
"At the moment, if the pound stops working for us, the whole economy grinds to a halt because there aren't alternatives," Duncan McCann, a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, tells those gathered in a gilded room at Glasgow Chambers to discuss the Glasgow Pound. McCann is a long-time advocate of alternative means of exchange. He is behind the ScotPound, a proposal for a new national currency for Scotland that emerged after the referendum on Scottish independence. It's an idea he no longer thinks will work, because the debate, since Brexit, has shifted from the currency issue back to ideas about Scottish independence.
Today, he's preaching to the converted. Alex Walker, the chairman of the 250-person Ekopia community in Northern Scotland, listens at the back. The Eko has been the main means of buying everything from beer to bananas in Ekopia since Walker founded it 20 years ago. On an adjacent table, Tracy Duff, a community learning and development worker from Clackmannanshire Council, digs out some papers. She runs the Clacks Youth Timebank, a scheme where 12- to 15-year-olds can earn credit for volunteering. Taking notes up front is Ailie Rutherford, one of the people who organised the meeting. Rutherford runs the People's Bank of Govanhill, a currency that changes value depending on the income of the user. "I don't see any reason why we shouldn't invent our own currency and play with it," she says.
Everyone has gathered to decide what a Glasgow Pound might look like at a time when many are asking if local currencies can work at all. Councillor Redmond says Glasgow has been closely watching existing alternative currencies like the Brixton Pound in London, which was introduced in 2011.
The founders of the Brixton Pound wanted to do something to stop 80p of every £1 spent locally from leaking out of the area into the pockets of corporations, at the expense of small local traders. So they printed a currency that would have the same value as the pound, but could only be traded in independent Brixton shops, where the shopkeeper would also have to spend it locally. This year the Brixton Pound got its own cashpoint, from where people can withdraw local banknotes bearing colourful images of local heroes, like David Bowie and secret Agent Violette Szabo, to spend in over 150 local shops. It can also be used by residents to pay council tax and by employers to pay wages.
No two local currencies are exactly the same. But the Brixton Pound and other recent schemes follow the example ten years ago of the Totnes Pound, a 'complementary currency': that is, one supplementing the national currency. As fears for financial stability took hold during the recession, complementary currencies grew in popularity. The Bank of England does not consider these forms of currency legal tender, but the notes hold value in the same way as a gift-card from a department store, with the same kind of restrictions about where they can be spent. Proponents say complementary currencies boost spending in smaller geographical areas, which can have environmental benefits as businesses cut transport distances to deal with local suppliers. Detractors say they have no real economic impact and work only as a game for the middle classes, who can afford to buy from independent shops rather than chains.
In Britain, there are now schemes in Totnes, Lewes, Brixton, Bristol and Exeter. Hull has its own local digital currency that can be earned from volunteering and used to pay council tax. Kingston, Birmingham and Liverpool have schemes underway. Glasgow could be next. But the working group has some serious questions to answer first, not least: do complementary currencies actually work?
"People don't understand money," Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for the South West of England and Gibraltar, says over the phone.
Scott Cato says the fish-in-water problem – the idea that sterling is so ubiquitous, it is never questioned – is the biggest challenge for complementary currencies. She knows all about it as a founder of the Stroud Pound in 2010, a currency that has since gone out of circulation.
"[People] think they put money into a bank and someone else takes it out. What they don't understand is that banks have the power to create money. We've given the power to create money to private corporations and people don't understand that we can have it back," she says.
In Stroud, suspicion of the local currency among local businesses became a barrier to success. Scott-Cato said traders refused to join the scheme because they were "running a business", as though putting the community first and placing the needs of others as equivalent to their own was in itself bad business practice, or as though they were somehow being disloyal to sterling.
The Bristol Pound (£B) entered into circulation in September 2012. By June 2015, 1m £B had been issued, with £B700,000 of that still in circulation. In a population of some 450,000 people, that's the equivalent of each Bristolian carrying less than £B2 in change in their pocket.
"The small scale is a problem and a strength," says Stephen Clarke, chief financial officer of the Bristol Pound. "The benefit comes from the fact that local currencies are trusted organisations: we're a Community Interest Company limited by guarantee." That means assets owned by the the Bristol Pound have to be used for the good of the community, rather than purely for profit.
Without enough currency in circulation, it ceases to work. Scott-Cato says Stroud's size meant meant the Stroud Pound was never viable: "We couldn't get the velocity of circulation right, which contrasts with the Bristol Pound."
Clarke also says the small scale of local currencies means they are "always scrabbling around looking for money". One way founders of the Bristol Pound have addressed his is by setting up an umbrella organisation, the Guild of Independent Currencies, to share information between local currencies in the UK and help new organisations. "At the moment we're all reinventing the wheel every time," Clarke says.
Technology might also have a solution. Peter Ferry, a commercial director, travels to Glasgow to tell those working on the Glasgow Pound that that his company Wallet has come up with a way to use the blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to make it easier for people to use multiple types of currency. "There might be many currencies around the country that people want to use. We need to make it simple for them to do that and also to make it simple to earn these currencies in many ways," he says.
Size doesn't always matter. Sometimes, the smallest places – like Totnes and the Ekopia community – are best able to support complementary currencies because the people who live there are engaged with their local economy in a meaningful way.
"Bristol is seen as a quirky, individualistic kind of place," Clarke says. "When we first produced the Bristol Pound note, people were really proud of it. It got through to people not just sat around coffee shops. I'm not sure a London Pound would work, because people identify with their local area in London rather than the city as a whole."
Bristol Pound users don't have high incomes necessarily, but surveys show they are engaged with their local community and they have a higher educational attainment than average. In the years since the financial crisis, as local authority budgets have shrunk, some areas have relied heavily on engaged communities to fill in gaps in public services. By contrast, deprived areas where people cannot afford time and money to put into their community have become more deprived, making them even harder for local currencies to reach.
"It is difficult to get into more disadvantaged areas," Stephen Clarke says. "We have a ten-year life expectancy gap between different parts of the city. When you go to disadvantaged areas with the Bristol Pound hat on you realise there aren't independent shops there, there's an Aldi and Lidl and that's it."
More than a third of children grow up in poverty in Glasgow. A Glasgow Pound might struggle to get poorer families to buy into a local currency that ties them to shopping at more expensive, independent shops, rather than getting deals at big supermarket chains.
When Scott-Cato and her colleagues wrote about the experience of setting up the Stroud Pound, they said it was telling that complementary currencies have been accused of being a game for middle-class people, rather than a genuine economic solution.
Perhaps for that reason, experts like Duncan McCann have stopped thinking of complementary currencies as a one-size-fits-all solution. He said they can function as a kind of 'gateway drug' to introduce people to a new way of thinking about money. "That is especially for those who use it, but also for those who just become aware of it," he says.
Ciaran Mundy, CEO of the Bristol Pound, says it is important to think of the systemic impact rather than looking for targeted treatment of symptoms of economic deprivation. "Poverty has many causes," he says. "One of these is how the economy is structured in terms of how money flows out of poor areas due to high dependence on larger national and international companies paying lower wages and using offshore accounts to hide the money from the tax man."
Nothing is tying Glasgow to existing models for complementary currencies. But during the first meeting about setting up the Glasgow Pound, the workshop shows just how hard it would be to invent a new system that works for everyone.
Each table is handed a wad of Post-it notes and a piece of white paper. A table leader asks everyone to write on the Post-its what they want the Glasgow Pound to achieve. Elbowing teacups out the way, people get to work. They scrawl a dizzying number of proposals, from keeping more wealth in the local area to empowering people who feel cut out of the national economy, or to moving towards land reform and saving the environment. Team leaders try to assemble these ideas in themes to report back to the room.
On one table, Duncan McCann encourages people to urge businesses to do things they have never done before. "One of the goals should be to move businesses from where they are today into the future," he says.
After years of researc,h McCann believes the only way complementary currencies can create real value for local economies is if they make transactions happen that wouldn't otherwise have taken place.
"They need to create additional spending power. This is this what the local currencies, despite all their good points, fail to do," McCann says.
Every time a Brixton Pound transaction is made, 1.5 per cent goes into a Brixton Fund. This is used to give micro-grants of between a few hundred and £2000 to local projects and community groups. "We aim to target projects that aren't large enough to apply for more formal grant funding," says Lucy Çava, project manager at the Brixton Pound.
"We see this as part of community building – linking the Brixton Pound user with community groups, so both groups become more visible to each other through the currency and fund. This is particularly important in Brixton because of the gentrification debates which are very salient round there," Çava says.
Meanwhile, the people behind the Bristol Pound are readying a mutual credit network called Bristol Prospects. Through this network, businesses in Bristol can exchange credit in the form of loans that are neutralised within the network, helping one another to grow without relying on the high rates of commercial lenders.
Once operational, loans offered through the Prospects network will have negative interest, so that businesses are encouraged to pass credit on as quickly as possible. "That's the plan," says Clarke, "because it's rather like a hot potato: people will want to pass it on."
"We know from research that a number of small businesses in Bristol are struggling to get money on reasonable terms," says Clarke, "and that banks are not interested in smaller loans to businesses. So we think there is a strength in the Bristol Pound network to start something like this that is linked, but separate."
Duncan McCann, with all his experience, knows that challenge is worthwhile. "As people we have a right to make credit and loan money. We mustn't forget that. We mustn't leave that to corporations and the state," he says.
This article is part of a series on local economies Hazel is documenting at farnearer.org, with funding from the Friends Provident Foundation
Illustration by PureSolution/Shutterstock
This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article. | Ciaran Mundy | Duncan McCann | Stephen Clarke | Molly Scott Cato | 3 |
99910_IUMXEL62_5 | Who is the CFO of the Bristol Pound | New money: Do local currencies actually work?
It's lunchtime at Glasgow Chambers in late November, and Councillor George Redmond is getting worked up at the prospect a Glasgow Pound. "We would be Glasgow-centric about it," he says conspiratorially, as though there is any other way to be. "Can you imagine having the face of Billy Connolly on our local currency? Or Alex Ferguson, or Kenny Dalglish?"
Inventing an alternative to sterling might sound far-fetched, even illegal. But it's not that strange. In the UK we think of the pound like fish think about water, which is to say not at all. It might never have occurred to many of us that there are other types of exchange that can stand in for ragged bank notes tucked away in pockets, or other objects that can stand in for those notes.
Not every country is so lucky. In crisis-hit Greece, where the euro can be hard to come by, businesses and citizens have turned to bartering using a points system where goods like pianos, pot and pans can be exchanged for security services or loaned farming equipment. In India last year, desperate people burned sacks of illegal cash after the government withdrew two high-denomination notes as part of a crackdown on corruption. Hoarders woke up to discover the banknotes under their mattresses were suddenly worthless.
The pound has been trading at its lowest level since 1985 since the UK voted to leave the European Union and there are fears that it could dip further as Brexit ensues. Timebanks, local exchange trading systems (LETS) and digital inventions like bitcoin can provide alternative ways for people to pay for goods and services when mainstream currencies hit crises. But they will only work if Britons are ready to accept that they have the power to invent their own currency.
"At the moment, if the pound stops working for us, the whole economy grinds to a halt because there aren't alternatives," Duncan McCann, a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, tells those gathered in a gilded room at Glasgow Chambers to discuss the Glasgow Pound. McCann is a long-time advocate of alternative means of exchange. He is behind the ScotPound, a proposal for a new national currency for Scotland that emerged after the referendum on Scottish independence. It's an idea he no longer thinks will work, because the debate, since Brexit, has shifted from the currency issue back to ideas about Scottish independence.
Today, he's preaching to the converted. Alex Walker, the chairman of the 250-person Ekopia community in Northern Scotland, listens at the back. The Eko has been the main means of buying everything from beer to bananas in Ekopia since Walker founded it 20 years ago. On an adjacent table, Tracy Duff, a community learning and development worker from Clackmannanshire Council, digs out some papers. She runs the Clacks Youth Timebank, a scheme where 12- to 15-year-olds can earn credit for volunteering. Taking notes up front is Ailie Rutherford, one of the people who organised the meeting. Rutherford runs the People's Bank of Govanhill, a currency that changes value depending on the income of the user. "I don't see any reason why we shouldn't invent our own currency and play with it," she says.
Everyone has gathered to decide what a Glasgow Pound might look like at a time when many are asking if local currencies can work at all. Councillor Redmond says Glasgow has been closely watching existing alternative currencies like the Brixton Pound in London, which was introduced in 2011.
The founders of the Brixton Pound wanted to do something to stop 80p of every £1 spent locally from leaking out of the area into the pockets of corporations, at the expense of small local traders. So they printed a currency that would have the same value as the pound, but could only be traded in independent Brixton shops, where the shopkeeper would also have to spend it locally. This year the Brixton Pound got its own cashpoint, from where people can withdraw local banknotes bearing colourful images of local heroes, like David Bowie and secret Agent Violette Szabo, to spend in over 150 local shops. It can also be used by residents to pay council tax and by employers to pay wages.
No two local currencies are exactly the same. But the Brixton Pound and other recent schemes follow the example ten years ago of the Totnes Pound, a 'complementary currency': that is, one supplementing the national currency. As fears for financial stability took hold during the recession, complementary currencies grew in popularity. The Bank of England does not consider these forms of currency legal tender, but the notes hold value in the same way as a gift-card from a department store, with the same kind of restrictions about where they can be spent. Proponents say complementary currencies boost spending in smaller geographical areas, which can have environmental benefits as businesses cut transport distances to deal with local suppliers. Detractors say they have no real economic impact and work only as a game for the middle classes, who can afford to buy from independent shops rather than chains.
In Britain, there are now schemes in Totnes, Lewes, Brixton, Bristol and Exeter. Hull has its own local digital currency that can be earned from volunteering and used to pay council tax. Kingston, Birmingham and Liverpool have schemes underway. Glasgow could be next. But the working group has some serious questions to answer first, not least: do complementary currencies actually work?
"People don't understand money," Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for the South West of England and Gibraltar, says over the phone.
Scott Cato says the fish-in-water problem – the idea that sterling is so ubiquitous, it is never questioned – is the biggest challenge for complementary currencies. She knows all about it as a founder of the Stroud Pound in 2010, a currency that has since gone out of circulation.
"[People] think they put money into a bank and someone else takes it out. What they don't understand is that banks have the power to create money. We've given the power to create money to private corporations and people don't understand that we can have it back," she says.
In Stroud, suspicion of the local currency among local businesses became a barrier to success. Scott-Cato said traders refused to join the scheme because they were "running a business", as though putting the community first and placing the needs of others as equivalent to their own was in itself bad business practice, or as though they were somehow being disloyal to sterling.
The Bristol Pound (£B) entered into circulation in September 2012. By June 2015, 1m £B had been issued, with £B700,000 of that still in circulation. In a population of some 450,000 people, that's the equivalent of each Bristolian carrying less than £B2 in change in their pocket.
"The small scale is a problem and a strength," says Stephen Clarke, chief financial officer of the Bristol Pound. "The benefit comes from the fact that local currencies are trusted organisations: we're a Community Interest Company limited by guarantee." That means assets owned by the the Bristol Pound have to be used for the good of the community, rather than purely for profit.
Without enough currency in circulation, it ceases to work. Scott-Cato says Stroud's size meant meant the Stroud Pound was never viable: "We couldn't get the velocity of circulation right, which contrasts with the Bristol Pound."
Clarke also says the small scale of local currencies means they are "always scrabbling around looking for money". One way founders of the Bristol Pound have addressed his is by setting up an umbrella organisation, the Guild of Independent Currencies, to share information between local currencies in the UK and help new organisations. "At the moment we're all reinventing the wheel every time," Clarke says.
Technology might also have a solution. Peter Ferry, a commercial director, travels to Glasgow to tell those working on the Glasgow Pound that that his company Wallet has come up with a way to use the blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to make it easier for people to use multiple types of currency. "There might be many currencies around the country that people want to use. We need to make it simple for them to do that and also to make it simple to earn these currencies in many ways," he says.
Size doesn't always matter. Sometimes, the smallest places – like Totnes and the Ekopia community – are best able to support complementary currencies because the people who live there are engaged with their local economy in a meaningful way.
"Bristol is seen as a quirky, individualistic kind of place," Clarke says. "When we first produced the Bristol Pound note, people were really proud of it. It got through to people not just sat around coffee shops. I'm not sure a London Pound would work, because people identify with their local area in London rather than the city as a whole."
Bristol Pound users don't have high incomes necessarily, but surveys show they are engaged with their local community and they have a higher educational attainment than average. In the years since the financial crisis, as local authority budgets have shrunk, some areas have relied heavily on engaged communities to fill in gaps in public services. By contrast, deprived areas where people cannot afford time and money to put into their community have become more deprived, making them even harder for local currencies to reach.
"It is difficult to get into more disadvantaged areas," Stephen Clarke says. "We have a ten-year life expectancy gap between different parts of the city. When you go to disadvantaged areas with the Bristol Pound hat on you realise there aren't independent shops there, there's an Aldi and Lidl and that's it."
More than a third of children grow up in poverty in Glasgow. A Glasgow Pound might struggle to get poorer families to buy into a local currency that ties them to shopping at more expensive, independent shops, rather than getting deals at big supermarket chains.
When Scott-Cato and her colleagues wrote about the experience of setting up the Stroud Pound, they said it was telling that complementary currencies have been accused of being a game for middle-class people, rather than a genuine economic solution.
Perhaps for that reason, experts like Duncan McCann have stopped thinking of complementary currencies as a one-size-fits-all solution. He said they can function as a kind of 'gateway drug' to introduce people to a new way of thinking about money. "That is especially for those who use it, but also for those who just become aware of it," he says.
Ciaran Mundy, CEO of the Bristol Pound, says it is important to think of the systemic impact rather than looking for targeted treatment of symptoms of economic deprivation. "Poverty has many causes," he says. "One of these is how the economy is structured in terms of how money flows out of poor areas due to high dependence on larger national and international companies paying lower wages and using offshore accounts to hide the money from the tax man."
Nothing is tying Glasgow to existing models for complementary currencies. But during the first meeting about setting up the Glasgow Pound, the workshop shows just how hard it would be to invent a new system that works for everyone.
Each table is handed a wad of Post-it notes and a piece of white paper. A table leader asks everyone to write on the Post-its what they want the Glasgow Pound to achieve. Elbowing teacups out the way, people get to work. They scrawl a dizzying number of proposals, from keeping more wealth in the local area to empowering people who feel cut out of the national economy, or to moving towards land reform and saving the environment. Team leaders try to assemble these ideas in themes to report back to the room.
On one table, Duncan McCann encourages people to urge businesses to do things they have never done before. "One of the goals should be to move businesses from where they are today into the future," he says.
After years of researc,h McCann believes the only way complementary currencies can create real value for local economies is if they make transactions happen that wouldn't otherwise have taken place.
"They need to create additional spending power. This is this what the local currencies, despite all their good points, fail to do," McCann says.
Every time a Brixton Pound transaction is made, 1.5 per cent goes into a Brixton Fund. This is used to give micro-grants of between a few hundred and £2000 to local projects and community groups. "We aim to target projects that aren't large enough to apply for more formal grant funding," says Lucy Çava, project manager at the Brixton Pound.
"We see this as part of community building – linking the Brixton Pound user with community groups, so both groups become more visible to each other through the currency and fund. This is particularly important in Brixton because of the gentrification debates which are very salient round there," Çava says.
Meanwhile, the people behind the Bristol Pound are readying a mutual credit network called Bristol Prospects. Through this network, businesses in Bristol can exchange credit in the form of loans that are neutralised within the network, helping one another to grow without relying on the high rates of commercial lenders.
Once operational, loans offered through the Prospects network will have negative interest, so that businesses are encouraged to pass credit on as quickly as possible. "That's the plan," says Clarke, "because it's rather like a hot potato: people will want to pass it on."
"We know from research that a number of small businesses in Bristol are struggling to get money on reasonable terms," says Clarke, "and that banks are not interested in smaller loans to businesses. So we think there is a strength in the Bristol Pound network to start something like this that is linked, but separate."
Duncan McCann, with all his experience, knows that challenge is worthwhile. "As people we have a right to make credit and loan money. We mustn't forget that. We mustn't leave that to corporations and the state," he says.
This article is part of a series on local economies Hazel is documenting at farnearer.org, with funding from the Friends Provident Foundation
Illustration by PureSolution/Shutterstock
This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article. | Stephen Clarke | Molly Scott Cato | Duncan McCann | Ciaran Mundy | 0 |
99910_IUMXEL62_6 | When did people start using the Bristol Pound? | New money: Do local currencies actually work?
It's lunchtime at Glasgow Chambers in late November, and Councillor George Redmond is getting worked up at the prospect a Glasgow Pound. "We would be Glasgow-centric about it," he says conspiratorially, as though there is any other way to be. "Can you imagine having the face of Billy Connolly on our local currency? Or Alex Ferguson, or Kenny Dalglish?"
Inventing an alternative to sterling might sound far-fetched, even illegal. But it's not that strange. In the UK we think of the pound like fish think about water, which is to say not at all. It might never have occurred to many of us that there are other types of exchange that can stand in for ragged bank notes tucked away in pockets, or other objects that can stand in for those notes.
Not every country is so lucky. In crisis-hit Greece, where the euro can be hard to come by, businesses and citizens have turned to bartering using a points system where goods like pianos, pot and pans can be exchanged for security services or loaned farming equipment. In India last year, desperate people burned sacks of illegal cash after the government withdrew two high-denomination notes as part of a crackdown on corruption. Hoarders woke up to discover the banknotes under their mattresses were suddenly worthless.
The pound has been trading at its lowest level since 1985 since the UK voted to leave the European Union and there are fears that it could dip further as Brexit ensues. Timebanks, local exchange trading systems (LETS) and digital inventions like bitcoin can provide alternative ways for people to pay for goods and services when mainstream currencies hit crises. But they will only work if Britons are ready to accept that they have the power to invent their own currency.
"At the moment, if the pound stops working for us, the whole economy grinds to a halt because there aren't alternatives," Duncan McCann, a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, tells those gathered in a gilded room at Glasgow Chambers to discuss the Glasgow Pound. McCann is a long-time advocate of alternative means of exchange. He is behind the ScotPound, a proposal for a new national currency for Scotland that emerged after the referendum on Scottish independence. It's an idea he no longer thinks will work, because the debate, since Brexit, has shifted from the currency issue back to ideas about Scottish independence.
Today, he's preaching to the converted. Alex Walker, the chairman of the 250-person Ekopia community in Northern Scotland, listens at the back. The Eko has been the main means of buying everything from beer to bananas in Ekopia since Walker founded it 20 years ago. On an adjacent table, Tracy Duff, a community learning and development worker from Clackmannanshire Council, digs out some papers. She runs the Clacks Youth Timebank, a scheme where 12- to 15-year-olds can earn credit for volunteering. Taking notes up front is Ailie Rutherford, one of the people who organised the meeting. Rutherford runs the People's Bank of Govanhill, a currency that changes value depending on the income of the user. "I don't see any reason why we shouldn't invent our own currency and play with it," she says.
Everyone has gathered to decide what a Glasgow Pound might look like at a time when many are asking if local currencies can work at all. Councillor Redmond says Glasgow has been closely watching existing alternative currencies like the Brixton Pound in London, which was introduced in 2011.
The founders of the Brixton Pound wanted to do something to stop 80p of every £1 spent locally from leaking out of the area into the pockets of corporations, at the expense of small local traders. So they printed a currency that would have the same value as the pound, but could only be traded in independent Brixton shops, where the shopkeeper would also have to spend it locally. This year the Brixton Pound got its own cashpoint, from where people can withdraw local banknotes bearing colourful images of local heroes, like David Bowie and secret Agent Violette Szabo, to spend in over 150 local shops. It can also be used by residents to pay council tax and by employers to pay wages.
No two local currencies are exactly the same. But the Brixton Pound and other recent schemes follow the example ten years ago of the Totnes Pound, a 'complementary currency': that is, one supplementing the national currency. As fears for financial stability took hold during the recession, complementary currencies grew in popularity. The Bank of England does not consider these forms of currency legal tender, but the notes hold value in the same way as a gift-card from a department store, with the same kind of restrictions about where they can be spent. Proponents say complementary currencies boost spending in smaller geographical areas, which can have environmental benefits as businesses cut transport distances to deal with local suppliers. Detractors say they have no real economic impact and work only as a game for the middle classes, who can afford to buy from independent shops rather than chains.
In Britain, there are now schemes in Totnes, Lewes, Brixton, Bristol and Exeter. Hull has its own local digital currency that can be earned from volunteering and used to pay council tax. Kingston, Birmingham and Liverpool have schemes underway. Glasgow could be next. But the working group has some serious questions to answer first, not least: do complementary currencies actually work?
"People don't understand money," Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for the South West of England and Gibraltar, says over the phone.
Scott Cato says the fish-in-water problem – the idea that sterling is so ubiquitous, it is never questioned – is the biggest challenge for complementary currencies. She knows all about it as a founder of the Stroud Pound in 2010, a currency that has since gone out of circulation.
"[People] think they put money into a bank and someone else takes it out. What they don't understand is that banks have the power to create money. We've given the power to create money to private corporations and people don't understand that we can have it back," she says.
In Stroud, suspicion of the local currency among local businesses became a barrier to success. Scott-Cato said traders refused to join the scheme because they were "running a business", as though putting the community first and placing the needs of others as equivalent to their own was in itself bad business practice, or as though they were somehow being disloyal to sterling.
The Bristol Pound (£B) entered into circulation in September 2012. By June 2015, 1m £B had been issued, with £B700,000 of that still in circulation. In a population of some 450,000 people, that's the equivalent of each Bristolian carrying less than £B2 in change in their pocket.
"The small scale is a problem and a strength," says Stephen Clarke, chief financial officer of the Bristol Pound. "The benefit comes from the fact that local currencies are trusted organisations: we're a Community Interest Company limited by guarantee." That means assets owned by the the Bristol Pound have to be used for the good of the community, rather than purely for profit.
Without enough currency in circulation, it ceases to work. Scott-Cato says Stroud's size meant meant the Stroud Pound was never viable: "We couldn't get the velocity of circulation right, which contrasts with the Bristol Pound."
Clarke also says the small scale of local currencies means they are "always scrabbling around looking for money". One way founders of the Bristol Pound have addressed his is by setting up an umbrella organisation, the Guild of Independent Currencies, to share information between local currencies in the UK and help new organisations. "At the moment we're all reinventing the wheel every time," Clarke says.
Technology might also have a solution. Peter Ferry, a commercial director, travels to Glasgow to tell those working on the Glasgow Pound that that his company Wallet has come up with a way to use the blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to make it easier for people to use multiple types of currency. "There might be many currencies around the country that people want to use. We need to make it simple for them to do that and also to make it simple to earn these currencies in many ways," he says.
Size doesn't always matter. Sometimes, the smallest places – like Totnes and the Ekopia community – are best able to support complementary currencies because the people who live there are engaged with their local economy in a meaningful way.
"Bristol is seen as a quirky, individualistic kind of place," Clarke says. "When we first produced the Bristol Pound note, people were really proud of it. It got through to people not just sat around coffee shops. I'm not sure a London Pound would work, because people identify with their local area in London rather than the city as a whole."
Bristol Pound users don't have high incomes necessarily, but surveys show they are engaged with their local community and they have a higher educational attainment than average. In the years since the financial crisis, as local authority budgets have shrunk, some areas have relied heavily on engaged communities to fill in gaps in public services. By contrast, deprived areas where people cannot afford time and money to put into their community have become more deprived, making them even harder for local currencies to reach.
"It is difficult to get into more disadvantaged areas," Stephen Clarke says. "We have a ten-year life expectancy gap between different parts of the city. When you go to disadvantaged areas with the Bristol Pound hat on you realise there aren't independent shops there, there's an Aldi and Lidl and that's it."
More than a third of children grow up in poverty in Glasgow. A Glasgow Pound might struggle to get poorer families to buy into a local currency that ties them to shopping at more expensive, independent shops, rather than getting deals at big supermarket chains.
When Scott-Cato and her colleagues wrote about the experience of setting up the Stroud Pound, they said it was telling that complementary currencies have been accused of being a game for middle-class people, rather than a genuine economic solution.
Perhaps for that reason, experts like Duncan McCann have stopped thinking of complementary currencies as a one-size-fits-all solution. He said they can function as a kind of 'gateway drug' to introduce people to a new way of thinking about money. "That is especially for those who use it, but also for those who just become aware of it," he says.
Ciaran Mundy, CEO of the Bristol Pound, says it is important to think of the systemic impact rather than looking for targeted treatment of symptoms of economic deprivation. "Poverty has many causes," he says. "One of these is how the economy is structured in terms of how money flows out of poor areas due to high dependence on larger national and international companies paying lower wages and using offshore accounts to hide the money from the tax man."
Nothing is tying Glasgow to existing models for complementary currencies. But during the first meeting about setting up the Glasgow Pound, the workshop shows just how hard it would be to invent a new system that works for everyone.
Each table is handed a wad of Post-it notes and a piece of white paper. A table leader asks everyone to write on the Post-its what they want the Glasgow Pound to achieve. Elbowing teacups out the way, people get to work. They scrawl a dizzying number of proposals, from keeping more wealth in the local area to empowering people who feel cut out of the national economy, or to moving towards land reform and saving the environment. Team leaders try to assemble these ideas in themes to report back to the room.
On one table, Duncan McCann encourages people to urge businesses to do things they have never done before. "One of the goals should be to move businesses from where they are today into the future," he says.
After years of researc,h McCann believes the only way complementary currencies can create real value for local economies is if they make transactions happen that wouldn't otherwise have taken place.
"They need to create additional spending power. This is this what the local currencies, despite all their good points, fail to do," McCann says.
Every time a Brixton Pound transaction is made, 1.5 per cent goes into a Brixton Fund. This is used to give micro-grants of between a few hundred and £2000 to local projects and community groups. "We aim to target projects that aren't large enough to apply for more formal grant funding," says Lucy Çava, project manager at the Brixton Pound.
"We see this as part of community building – linking the Brixton Pound user with community groups, so both groups become more visible to each other through the currency and fund. This is particularly important in Brixton because of the gentrification debates which are very salient round there," Çava says.
Meanwhile, the people behind the Bristol Pound are readying a mutual credit network called Bristol Prospects. Through this network, businesses in Bristol can exchange credit in the form of loans that are neutralised within the network, helping one another to grow without relying on the high rates of commercial lenders.
Once operational, loans offered through the Prospects network will have negative interest, so that businesses are encouraged to pass credit on as quickly as possible. "That's the plan," says Clarke, "because it's rather like a hot potato: people will want to pass it on."
"We know from research that a number of small businesses in Bristol are struggling to get money on reasonable terms," says Clarke, "and that banks are not interested in smaller loans to businesses. So we think there is a strength in the Bristol Pound network to start something like this that is linked, but separate."
Duncan McCann, with all his experience, knows that challenge is worthwhile. "As people we have a right to make credit and loan money. We mustn't forget that. We mustn't leave that to corporations and the state," he says.
This article is part of a series on local economies Hazel is documenting at farnearer.org, with funding from the Friends Provident Foundation
Illustration by PureSolution/Shutterstock
This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article. | 2012 | 2015 | 2016 | 2010 | 0 |
99910_IUMXEL62_7 | What is a big obstacle for the Glasgow Pound? | New money: Do local currencies actually work?
It's lunchtime at Glasgow Chambers in late November, and Councillor George Redmond is getting worked up at the prospect a Glasgow Pound. "We would be Glasgow-centric about it," he says conspiratorially, as though there is any other way to be. "Can you imagine having the face of Billy Connolly on our local currency? Or Alex Ferguson, or Kenny Dalglish?"
Inventing an alternative to sterling might sound far-fetched, even illegal. But it's not that strange. In the UK we think of the pound like fish think about water, which is to say not at all. It might never have occurred to many of us that there are other types of exchange that can stand in for ragged bank notes tucked away in pockets, or other objects that can stand in for those notes.
Not every country is so lucky. In crisis-hit Greece, where the euro can be hard to come by, businesses and citizens have turned to bartering using a points system where goods like pianos, pot and pans can be exchanged for security services or loaned farming equipment. In India last year, desperate people burned sacks of illegal cash after the government withdrew two high-denomination notes as part of a crackdown on corruption. Hoarders woke up to discover the banknotes under their mattresses were suddenly worthless.
The pound has been trading at its lowest level since 1985 since the UK voted to leave the European Union and there are fears that it could dip further as Brexit ensues. Timebanks, local exchange trading systems (LETS) and digital inventions like bitcoin can provide alternative ways for people to pay for goods and services when mainstream currencies hit crises. But they will only work if Britons are ready to accept that they have the power to invent their own currency.
"At the moment, if the pound stops working for us, the whole economy grinds to a halt because there aren't alternatives," Duncan McCann, a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, tells those gathered in a gilded room at Glasgow Chambers to discuss the Glasgow Pound. McCann is a long-time advocate of alternative means of exchange. He is behind the ScotPound, a proposal for a new national currency for Scotland that emerged after the referendum on Scottish independence. It's an idea he no longer thinks will work, because the debate, since Brexit, has shifted from the currency issue back to ideas about Scottish independence.
Today, he's preaching to the converted. Alex Walker, the chairman of the 250-person Ekopia community in Northern Scotland, listens at the back. The Eko has been the main means of buying everything from beer to bananas in Ekopia since Walker founded it 20 years ago. On an adjacent table, Tracy Duff, a community learning and development worker from Clackmannanshire Council, digs out some papers. She runs the Clacks Youth Timebank, a scheme where 12- to 15-year-olds can earn credit for volunteering. Taking notes up front is Ailie Rutherford, one of the people who organised the meeting. Rutherford runs the People's Bank of Govanhill, a currency that changes value depending on the income of the user. "I don't see any reason why we shouldn't invent our own currency and play with it," she says.
Everyone has gathered to decide what a Glasgow Pound might look like at a time when many are asking if local currencies can work at all. Councillor Redmond says Glasgow has been closely watching existing alternative currencies like the Brixton Pound in London, which was introduced in 2011.
The founders of the Brixton Pound wanted to do something to stop 80p of every £1 spent locally from leaking out of the area into the pockets of corporations, at the expense of small local traders. So they printed a currency that would have the same value as the pound, but could only be traded in independent Brixton shops, where the shopkeeper would also have to spend it locally. This year the Brixton Pound got its own cashpoint, from where people can withdraw local banknotes bearing colourful images of local heroes, like David Bowie and secret Agent Violette Szabo, to spend in over 150 local shops. It can also be used by residents to pay council tax and by employers to pay wages.
No two local currencies are exactly the same. But the Brixton Pound and other recent schemes follow the example ten years ago of the Totnes Pound, a 'complementary currency': that is, one supplementing the national currency. As fears for financial stability took hold during the recession, complementary currencies grew in popularity. The Bank of England does not consider these forms of currency legal tender, but the notes hold value in the same way as a gift-card from a department store, with the same kind of restrictions about where they can be spent. Proponents say complementary currencies boost spending in smaller geographical areas, which can have environmental benefits as businesses cut transport distances to deal with local suppliers. Detractors say they have no real economic impact and work only as a game for the middle classes, who can afford to buy from independent shops rather than chains.
In Britain, there are now schemes in Totnes, Lewes, Brixton, Bristol and Exeter. Hull has its own local digital currency that can be earned from volunteering and used to pay council tax. Kingston, Birmingham and Liverpool have schemes underway. Glasgow could be next. But the working group has some serious questions to answer first, not least: do complementary currencies actually work?
"People don't understand money," Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for the South West of England and Gibraltar, says over the phone.
Scott Cato says the fish-in-water problem – the idea that sterling is so ubiquitous, it is never questioned – is the biggest challenge for complementary currencies. She knows all about it as a founder of the Stroud Pound in 2010, a currency that has since gone out of circulation.
"[People] think they put money into a bank and someone else takes it out. What they don't understand is that banks have the power to create money. We've given the power to create money to private corporations and people don't understand that we can have it back," she says.
In Stroud, suspicion of the local currency among local businesses became a barrier to success. Scott-Cato said traders refused to join the scheme because they were "running a business", as though putting the community first and placing the needs of others as equivalent to their own was in itself bad business practice, or as though they were somehow being disloyal to sterling.
The Bristol Pound (£B) entered into circulation in September 2012. By June 2015, 1m £B had been issued, with £B700,000 of that still in circulation. In a population of some 450,000 people, that's the equivalent of each Bristolian carrying less than £B2 in change in their pocket.
"The small scale is a problem and a strength," says Stephen Clarke, chief financial officer of the Bristol Pound. "The benefit comes from the fact that local currencies are trusted organisations: we're a Community Interest Company limited by guarantee." That means assets owned by the the Bristol Pound have to be used for the good of the community, rather than purely for profit.
Without enough currency in circulation, it ceases to work. Scott-Cato says Stroud's size meant meant the Stroud Pound was never viable: "We couldn't get the velocity of circulation right, which contrasts with the Bristol Pound."
Clarke also says the small scale of local currencies means they are "always scrabbling around looking for money". One way founders of the Bristol Pound have addressed his is by setting up an umbrella organisation, the Guild of Independent Currencies, to share information between local currencies in the UK and help new organisations. "At the moment we're all reinventing the wheel every time," Clarke says.
Technology might also have a solution. Peter Ferry, a commercial director, travels to Glasgow to tell those working on the Glasgow Pound that that his company Wallet has come up with a way to use the blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to make it easier for people to use multiple types of currency. "There might be many currencies around the country that people want to use. We need to make it simple for them to do that and also to make it simple to earn these currencies in many ways," he says.
Size doesn't always matter. Sometimes, the smallest places – like Totnes and the Ekopia community – are best able to support complementary currencies because the people who live there are engaged with their local economy in a meaningful way.
"Bristol is seen as a quirky, individualistic kind of place," Clarke says. "When we first produced the Bristol Pound note, people were really proud of it. It got through to people not just sat around coffee shops. I'm not sure a London Pound would work, because people identify with their local area in London rather than the city as a whole."
Bristol Pound users don't have high incomes necessarily, but surveys show they are engaged with their local community and they have a higher educational attainment than average. In the years since the financial crisis, as local authority budgets have shrunk, some areas have relied heavily on engaged communities to fill in gaps in public services. By contrast, deprived areas where people cannot afford time and money to put into their community have become more deprived, making them even harder for local currencies to reach.
"It is difficult to get into more disadvantaged areas," Stephen Clarke says. "We have a ten-year life expectancy gap between different parts of the city. When you go to disadvantaged areas with the Bristol Pound hat on you realise there aren't independent shops there, there's an Aldi and Lidl and that's it."
More than a third of children grow up in poverty in Glasgow. A Glasgow Pound might struggle to get poorer families to buy into a local currency that ties them to shopping at more expensive, independent shops, rather than getting deals at big supermarket chains.
When Scott-Cato and her colleagues wrote about the experience of setting up the Stroud Pound, they said it was telling that complementary currencies have been accused of being a game for middle-class people, rather than a genuine economic solution.
Perhaps for that reason, experts like Duncan McCann have stopped thinking of complementary currencies as a one-size-fits-all solution. He said they can function as a kind of 'gateway drug' to introduce people to a new way of thinking about money. "That is especially for those who use it, but also for those who just become aware of it," he says.
Ciaran Mundy, CEO of the Bristol Pound, says it is important to think of the systemic impact rather than looking for targeted treatment of symptoms of economic deprivation. "Poverty has many causes," he says. "One of these is how the economy is structured in terms of how money flows out of poor areas due to high dependence on larger national and international companies paying lower wages and using offshore accounts to hide the money from the tax man."
Nothing is tying Glasgow to existing models for complementary currencies. But during the first meeting about setting up the Glasgow Pound, the workshop shows just how hard it would be to invent a new system that works for everyone.
Each table is handed a wad of Post-it notes and a piece of white paper. A table leader asks everyone to write on the Post-its what they want the Glasgow Pound to achieve. Elbowing teacups out the way, people get to work. They scrawl a dizzying number of proposals, from keeping more wealth in the local area to empowering people who feel cut out of the national economy, or to moving towards land reform and saving the environment. Team leaders try to assemble these ideas in themes to report back to the room.
On one table, Duncan McCann encourages people to urge businesses to do things they have never done before. "One of the goals should be to move businesses from where they are today into the future," he says.
After years of researc,h McCann believes the only way complementary currencies can create real value for local economies is if they make transactions happen that wouldn't otherwise have taken place.
"They need to create additional spending power. This is this what the local currencies, despite all their good points, fail to do," McCann says.
Every time a Brixton Pound transaction is made, 1.5 per cent goes into a Brixton Fund. This is used to give micro-grants of between a few hundred and £2000 to local projects and community groups. "We aim to target projects that aren't large enough to apply for more formal grant funding," says Lucy Çava, project manager at the Brixton Pound.
"We see this as part of community building – linking the Brixton Pound user with community groups, so both groups become more visible to each other through the currency and fund. This is particularly important in Brixton because of the gentrification debates which are very salient round there," Çava says.
Meanwhile, the people behind the Bristol Pound are readying a mutual credit network called Bristol Prospects. Through this network, businesses in Bristol can exchange credit in the form of loans that are neutralised within the network, helping one another to grow without relying on the high rates of commercial lenders.
Once operational, loans offered through the Prospects network will have negative interest, so that businesses are encouraged to pass credit on as quickly as possible. "That's the plan," says Clarke, "because it's rather like a hot potato: people will want to pass it on."
"We know from research that a number of small businesses in Bristol are struggling to get money on reasonable terms," says Clarke, "and that banks are not interested in smaller loans to businesses. So we think there is a strength in the Bristol Pound network to start something like this that is linked, but separate."
Duncan McCann, with all his experience, knows that challenge is worthwhile. "As people we have a right to make credit and loan money. We mustn't forget that. We mustn't leave that to corporations and the state," he says.
This article is part of a series on local economies Hazel is documenting at farnearer.org, with funding from the Friends Provident Foundation
Illustration by PureSolution/Shutterstock
This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article. | There is a ten-year life expectancy gap between different parts of the city. | More than a third of the families grow up in poverty. A local currency makes shopping a little more expensive. | They must be used at independent shops, instead of big supermarket chains. | In deprived areas, people cannot afford time and money to put into their communities. | 1 |
99910_IUMXEL62_8 | Who is the CEO of the Bristol Pound? | New money: Do local currencies actually work?
It's lunchtime at Glasgow Chambers in late November, and Councillor George Redmond is getting worked up at the prospect a Glasgow Pound. "We would be Glasgow-centric about it," he says conspiratorially, as though there is any other way to be. "Can you imagine having the face of Billy Connolly on our local currency? Or Alex Ferguson, or Kenny Dalglish?"
Inventing an alternative to sterling might sound far-fetched, even illegal. But it's not that strange. In the UK we think of the pound like fish think about water, which is to say not at all. It might never have occurred to many of us that there are other types of exchange that can stand in for ragged bank notes tucked away in pockets, or other objects that can stand in for those notes.
Not every country is so lucky. In crisis-hit Greece, where the euro can be hard to come by, businesses and citizens have turned to bartering using a points system where goods like pianos, pot and pans can be exchanged for security services or loaned farming equipment. In India last year, desperate people burned sacks of illegal cash after the government withdrew two high-denomination notes as part of a crackdown on corruption. Hoarders woke up to discover the banknotes under their mattresses were suddenly worthless.
The pound has been trading at its lowest level since 1985 since the UK voted to leave the European Union and there are fears that it could dip further as Brexit ensues. Timebanks, local exchange trading systems (LETS) and digital inventions like bitcoin can provide alternative ways for people to pay for goods and services when mainstream currencies hit crises. But they will only work if Britons are ready to accept that they have the power to invent their own currency.
"At the moment, if the pound stops working for us, the whole economy grinds to a halt because there aren't alternatives," Duncan McCann, a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, tells those gathered in a gilded room at Glasgow Chambers to discuss the Glasgow Pound. McCann is a long-time advocate of alternative means of exchange. He is behind the ScotPound, a proposal for a new national currency for Scotland that emerged after the referendum on Scottish independence. It's an idea he no longer thinks will work, because the debate, since Brexit, has shifted from the currency issue back to ideas about Scottish independence.
Today, he's preaching to the converted. Alex Walker, the chairman of the 250-person Ekopia community in Northern Scotland, listens at the back. The Eko has been the main means of buying everything from beer to bananas in Ekopia since Walker founded it 20 years ago. On an adjacent table, Tracy Duff, a community learning and development worker from Clackmannanshire Council, digs out some papers. She runs the Clacks Youth Timebank, a scheme where 12- to 15-year-olds can earn credit for volunteering. Taking notes up front is Ailie Rutherford, one of the people who organised the meeting. Rutherford runs the People's Bank of Govanhill, a currency that changes value depending on the income of the user. "I don't see any reason why we shouldn't invent our own currency and play with it," she says.
Everyone has gathered to decide what a Glasgow Pound might look like at a time when many are asking if local currencies can work at all. Councillor Redmond says Glasgow has been closely watching existing alternative currencies like the Brixton Pound in London, which was introduced in 2011.
The founders of the Brixton Pound wanted to do something to stop 80p of every £1 spent locally from leaking out of the area into the pockets of corporations, at the expense of small local traders. So they printed a currency that would have the same value as the pound, but could only be traded in independent Brixton shops, where the shopkeeper would also have to spend it locally. This year the Brixton Pound got its own cashpoint, from where people can withdraw local banknotes bearing colourful images of local heroes, like David Bowie and secret Agent Violette Szabo, to spend in over 150 local shops. It can also be used by residents to pay council tax and by employers to pay wages.
No two local currencies are exactly the same. But the Brixton Pound and other recent schemes follow the example ten years ago of the Totnes Pound, a 'complementary currency': that is, one supplementing the national currency. As fears for financial stability took hold during the recession, complementary currencies grew in popularity. The Bank of England does not consider these forms of currency legal tender, but the notes hold value in the same way as a gift-card from a department store, with the same kind of restrictions about where they can be spent. Proponents say complementary currencies boost spending in smaller geographical areas, which can have environmental benefits as businesses cut transport distances to deal with local suppliers. Detractors say they have no real economic impact and work only as a game for the middle classes, who can afford to buy from independent shops rather than chains.
In Britain, there are now schemes in Totnes, Lewes, Brixton, Bristol and Exeter. Hull has its own local digital currency that can be earned from volunteering and used to pay council tax. Kingston, Birmingham and Liverpool have schemes underway. Glasgow could be next. But the working group has some serious questions to answer first, not least: do complementary currencies actually work?
"People don't understand money," Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for the South West of England and Gibraltar, says over the phone.
Scott Cato says the fish-in-water problem – the idea that sterling is so ubiquitous, it is never questioned – is the biggest challenge for complementary currencies. She knows all about it as a founder of the Stroud Pound in 2010, a currency that has since gone out of circulation.
"[People] think they put money into a bank and someone else takes it out. What they don't understand is that banks have the power to create money. We've given the power to create money to private corporations and people don't understand that we can have it back," she says.
In Stroud, suspicion of the local currency among local businesses became a barrier to success. Scott-Cato said traders refused to join the scheme because they were "running a business", as though putting the community first and placing the needs of others as equivalent to their own was in itself bad business practice, or as though they were somehow being disloyal to sterling.
The Bristol Pound (£B) entered into circulation in September 2012. By June 2015, 1m £B had been issued, with £B700,000 of that still in circulation. In a population of some 450,000 people, that's the equivalent of each Bristolian carrying less than £B2 in change in their pocket.
"The small scale is a problem and a strength," says Stephen Clarke, chief financial officer of the Bristol Pound. "The benefit comes from the fact that local currencies are trusted organisations: we're a Community Interest Company limited by guarantee." That means assets owned by the the Bristol Pound have to be used for the good of the community, rather than purely for profit.
Without enough currency in circulation, it ceases to work. Scott-Cato says Stroud's size meant meant the Stroud Pound was never viable: "We couldn't get the velocity of circulation right, which contrasts with the Bristol Pound."
Clarke also says the small scale of local currencies means they are "always scrabbling around looking for money". One way founders of the Bristol Pound have addressed his is by setting up an umbrella organisation, the Guild of Independent Currencies, to share information between local currencies in the UK and help new organisations. "At the moment we're all reinventing the wheel every time," Clarke says.
Technology might also have a solution. Peter Ferry, a commercial director, travels to Glasgow to tell those working on the Glasgow Pound that that his company Wallet has come up with a way to use the blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to make it easier for people to use multiple types of currency. "There might be many currencies around the country that people want to use. We need to make it simple for them to do that and also to make it simple to earn these currencies in many ways," he says.
Size doesn't always matter. Sometimes, the smallest places – like Totnes and the Ekopia community – are best able to support complementary currencies because the people who live there are engaged with their local economy in a meaningful way.
"Bristol is seen as a quirky, individualistic kind of place," Clarke says. "When we first produced the Bristol Pound note, people were really proud of it. It got through to people not just sat around coffee shops. I'm not sure a London Pound would work, because people identify with their local area in London rather than the city as a whole."
Bristol Pound users don't have high incomes necessarily, but surveys show they are engaged with their local community and they have a higher educational attainment than average. In the years since the financial crisis, as local authority budgets have shrunk, some areas have relied heavily on engaged communities to fill in gaps in public services. By contrast, deprived areas where people cannot afford time and money to put into their community have become more deprived, making them even harder for local currencies to reach.
"It is difficult to get into more disadvantaged areas," Stephen Clarke says. "We have a ten-year life expectancy gap between different parts of the city. When you go to disadvantaged areas with the Bristol Pound hat on you realise there aren't independent shops there, there's an Aldi and Lidl and that's it."
More than a third of children grow up in poverty in Glasgow. A Glasgow Pound might struggle to get poorer families to buy into a local currency that ties them to shopping at more expensive, independent shops, rather than getting deals at big supermarket chains.
When Scott-Cato and her colleagues wrote about the experience of setting up the Stroud Pound, they said it was telling that complementary currencies have been accused of being a game for middle-class people, rather than a genuine economic solution.
Perhaps for that reason, experts like Duncan McCann have stopped thinking of complementary currencies as a one-size-fits-all solution. He said they can function as a kind of 'gateway drug' to introduce people to a new way of thinking about money. "That is especially for those who use it, but also for those who just become aware of it," he says.
Ciaran Mundy, CEO of the Bristol Pound, says it is important to think of the systemic impact rather than looking for targeted treatment of symptoms of economic deprivation. "Poverty has many causes," he says. "One of these is how the economy is structured in terms of how money flows out of poor areas due to high dependence on larger national and international companies paying lower wages and using offshore accounts to hide the money from the tax man."
Nothing is tying Glasgow to existing models for complementary currencies. But during the first meeting about setting up the Glasgow Pound, the workshop shows just how hard it would be to invent a new system that works for everyone.
Each table is handed a wad of Post-it notes and a piece of white paper. A table leader asks everyone to write on the Post-its what they want the Glasgow Pound to achieve. Elbowing teacups out the way, people get to work. They scrawl a dizzying number of proposals, from keeping more wealth in the local area to empowering people who feel cut out of the national economy, or to moving towards land reform and saving the environment. Team leaders try to assemble these ideas in themes to report back to the room.
On one table, Duncan McCann encourages people to urge businesses to do things they have never done before. "One of the goals should be to move businesses from where they are today into the future," he says.
After years of researc,h McCann believes the only way complementary currencies can create real value for local economies is if they make transactions happen that wouldn't otherwise have taken place.
"They need to create additional spending power. This is this what the local currencies, despite all their good points, fail to do," McCann says.
Every time a Brixton Pound transaction is made, 1.5 per cent goes into a Brixton Fund. This is used to give micro-grants of between a few hundred and £2000 to local projects and community groups. "We aim to target projects that aren't large enough to apply for more formal grant funding," says Lucy Çava, project manager at the Brixton Pound.
"We see this as part of community building – linking the Brixton Pound user with community groups, so both groups become more visible to each other through the currency and fund. This is particularly important in Brixton because of the gentrification debates which are very salient round there," Çava says.
Meanwhile, the people behind the Bristol Pound are readying a mutual credit network called Bristol Prospects. Through this network, businesses in Bristol can exchange credit in the form of loans that are neutralised within the network, helping one another to grow without relying on the high rates of commercial lenders.
Once operational, loans offered through the Prospects network will have negative interest, so that businesses are encouraged to pass credit on as quickly as possible. "That's the plan," says Clarke, "because it's rather like a hot potato: people will want to pass it on."
"We know from research that a number of small businesses in Bristol are struggling to get money on reasonable terms," says Clarke, "and that banks are not interested in smaller loans to businesses. So we think there is a strength in the Bristol Pound network to start something like this that is linked, but separate."
Duncan McCann, with all his experience, knows that challenge is worthwhile. "As people we have a right to make credit and loan money. We mustn't forget that. We mustn't leave that to corporations and the state," he says.
This article is part of a series on local economies Hazel is documenting at farnearer.org, with funding from the Friends Provident Foundation
Illustration by PureSolution/Shutterstock
This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article. | Ciaran Mundy | Stephen Clarke | Peter Ferry | Duncan McCann | 0 |
99910_IUMXEL62_9 | Who would look great on a Glasgow Pound? | New money: Do local currencies actually work?
It's lunchtime at Glasgow Chambers in late November, and Councillor George Redmond is getting worked up at the prospect a Glasgow Pound. "We would be Glasgow-centric about it," he says conspiratorially, as though there is any other way to be. "Can you imagine having the face of Billy Connolly on our local currency? Or Alex Ferguson, or Kenny Dalglish?"
Inventing an alternative to sterling might sound far-fetched, even illegal. But it's not that strange. In the UK we think of the pound like fish think about water, which is to say not at all. It might never have occurred to many of us that there are other types of exchange that can stand in for ragged bank notes tucked away in pockets, or other objects that can stand in for those notes.
Not every country is so lucky. In crisis-hit Greece, where the euro can be hard to come by, businesses and citizens have turned to bartering using a points system where goods like pianos, pot and pans can be exchanged for security services or loaned farming equipment. In India last year, desperate people burned sacks of illegal cash after the government withdrew two high-denomination notes as part of a crackdown on corruption. Hoarders woke up to discover the banknotes under their mattresses were suddenly worthless.
The pound has been trading at its lowest level since 1985 since the UK voted to leave the European Union and there are fears that it could dip further as Brexit ensues. Timebanks, local exchange trading systems (LETS) and digital inventions like bitcoin can provide alternative ways for people to pay for goods and services when mainstream currencies hit crises. But they will only work if Britons are ready to accept that they have the power to invent their own currency.
"At the moment, if the pound stops working for us, the whole economy grinds to a halt because there aren't alternatives," Duncan McCann, a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, tells those gathered in a gilded room at Glasgow Chambers to discuss the Glasgow Pound. McCann is a long-time advocate of alternative means of exchange. He is behind the ScotPound, a proposal for a new national currency for Scotland that emerged after the referendum on Scottish independence. It's an idea he no longer thinks will work, because the debate, since Brexit, has shifted from the currency issue back to ideas about Scottish independence.
Today, he's preaching to the converted. Alex Walker, the chairman of the 250-person Ekopia community in Northern Scotland, listens at the back. The Eko has been the main means of buying everything from beer to bananas in Ekopia since Walker founded it 20 years ago. On an adjacent table, Tracy Duff, a community learning and development worker from Clackmannanshire Council, digs out some papers. She runs the Clacks Youth Timebank, a scheme where 12- to 15-year-olds can earn credit for volunteering. Taking notes up front is Ailie Rutherford, one of the people who organised the meeting. Rutherford runs the People's Bank of Govanhill, a currency that changes value depending on the income of the user. "I don't see any reason why we shouldn't invent our own currency and play with it," she says.
Everyone has gathered to decide what a Glasgow Pound might look like at a time when many are asking if local currencies can work at all. Councillor Redmond says Glasgow has been closely watching existing alternative currencies like the Brixton Pound in London, which was introduced in 2011.
The founders of the Brixton Pound wanted to do something to stop 80p of every £1 spent locally from leaking out of the area into the pockets of corporations, at the expense of small local traders. So they printed a currency that would have the same value as the pound, but could only be traded in independent Brixton shops, where the shopkeeper would also have to spend it locally. This year the Brixton Pound got its own cashpoint, from where people can withdraw local banknotes bearing colourful images of local heroes, like David Bowie and secret Agent Violette Szabo, to spend in over 150 local shops. It can also be used by residents to pay council tax and by employers to pay wages.
No two local currencies are exactly the same. But the Brixton Pound and other recent schemes follow the example ten years ago of the Totnes Pound, a 'complementary currency': that is, one supplementing the national currency. As fears for financial stability took hold during the recession, complementary currencies grew in popularity. The Bank of England does not consider these forms of currency legal tender, but the notes hold value in the same way as a gift-card from a department store, with the same kind of restrictions about where they can be spent. Proponents say complementary currencies boost spending in smaller geographical areas, which can have environmental benefits as businesses cut transport distances to deal with local suppliers. Detractors say they have no real economic impact and work only as a game for the middle classes, who can afford to buy from independent shops rather than chains.
In Britain, there are now schemes in Totnes, Lewes, Brixton, Bristol and Exeter. Hull has its own local digital currency that can be earned from volunteering and used to pay council tax. Kingston, Birmingham and Liverpool have schemes underway. Glasgow could be next. But the working group has some serious questions to answer first, not least: do complementary currencies actually work?
"People don't understand money," Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for the South West of England and Gibraltar, says over the phone.
Scott Cato says the fish-in-water problem – the idea that sterling is so ubiquitous, it is never questioned – is the biggest challenge for complementary currencies. She knows all about it as a founder of the Stroud Pound in 2010, a currency that has since gone out of circulation.
"[People] think they put money into a bank and someone else takes it out. What they don't understand is that banks have the power to create money. We've given the power to create money to private corporations and people don't understand that we can have it back," she says.
In Stroud, suspicion of the local currency among local businesses became a barrier to success. Scott-Cato said traders refused to join the scheme because they were "running a business", as though putting the community first and placing the needs of others as equivalent to their own was in itself bad business practice, or as though they were somehow being disloyal to sterling.
The Bristol Pound (£B) entered into circulation in September 2012. By June 2015, 1m £B had been issued, with £B700,000 of that still in circulation. In a population of some 450,000 people, that's the equivalent of each Bristolian carrying less than £B2 in change in their pocket.
"The small scale is a problem and a strength," says Stephen Clarke, chief financial officer of the Bristol Pound. "The benefit comes from the fact that local currencies are trusted organisations: we're a Community Interest Company limited by guarantee." That means assets owned by the the Bristol Pound have to be used for the good of the community, rather than purely for profit.
Without enough currency in circulation, it ceases to work. Scott-Cato says Stroud's size meant meant the Stroud Pound was never viable: "We couldn't get the velocity of circulation right, which contrasts with the Bristol Pound."
Clarke also says the small scale of local currencies means they are "always scrabbling around looking for money". One way founders of the Bristol Pound have addressed his is by setting up an umbrella organisation, the Guild of Independent Currencies, to share information between local currencies in the UK and help new organisations. "At the moment we're all reinventing the wheel every time," Clarke says.
Technology might also have a solution. Peter Ferry, a commercial director, travels to Glasgow to tell those working on the Glasgow Pound that that his company Wallet has come up with a way to use the blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to make it easier for people to use multiple types of currency. "There might be many currencies around the country that people want to use. We need to make it simple for them to do that and also to make it simple to earn these currencies in many ways," he says.
Size doesn't always matter. Sometimes, the smallest places – like Totnes and the Ekopia community – are best able to support complementary currencies because the people who live there are engaged with their local economy in a meaningful way.
"Bristol is seen as a quirky, individualistic kind of place," Clarke says. "When we first produced the Bristol Pound note, people were really proud of it. It got through to people not just sat around coffee shops. I'm not sure a London Pound would work, because people identify with their local area in London rather than the city as a whole."
Bristol Pound users don't have high incomes necessarily, but surveys show they are engaged with their local community and they have a higher educational attainment than average. In the years since the financial crisis, as local authority budgets have shrunk, some areas have relied heavily on engaged communities to fill in gaps in public services. By contrast, deprived areas where people cannot afford time and money to put into their community have become more deprived, making them even harder for local currencies to reach.
"It is difficult to get into more disadvantaged areas," Stephen Clarke says. "We have a ten-year life expectancy gap between different parts of the city. When you go to disadvantaged areas with the Bristol Pound hat on you realise there aren't independent shops there, there's an Aldi and Lidl and that's it."
More than a third of children grow up in poverty in Glasgow. A Glasgow Pound might struggle to get poorer families to buy into a local currency that ties them to shopping at more expensive, independent shops, rather than getting deals at big supermarket chains.
When Scott-Cato and her colleagues wrote about the experience of setting up the Stroud Pound, they said it was telling that complementary currencies have been accused of being a game for middle-class people, rather than a genuine economic solution.
Perhaps for that reason, experts like Duncan McCann have stopped thinking of complementary currencies as a one-size-fits-all solution. He said they can function as a kind of 'gateway drug' to introduce people to a new way of thinking about money. "That is especially for those who use it, but also for those who just become aware of it," he says.
Ciaran Mundy, CEO of the Bristol Pound, says it is important to think of the systemic impact rather than looking for targeted treatment of symptoms of economic deprivation. "Poverty has many causes," he says. "One of these is how the economy is structured in terms of how money flows out of poor areas due to high dependence on larger national and international companies paying lower wages and using offshore accounts to hide the money from the tax man."
Nothing is tying Glasgow to existing models for complementary currencies. But during the first meeting about setting up the Glasgow Pound, the workshop shows just how hard it would be to invent a new system that works for everyone.
Each table is handed a wad of Post-it notes and a piece of white paper. A table leader asks everyone to write on the Post-its what they want the Glasgow Pound to achieve. Elbowing teacups out the way, people get to work. They scrawl a dizzying number of proposals, from keeping more wealth in the local area to empowering people who feel cut out of the national economy, or to moving towards land reform and saving the environment. Team leaders try to assemble these ideas in themes to report back to the room.
On one table, Duncan McCann encourages people to urge businesses to do things they have never done before. "One of the goals should be to move businesses from where they are today into the future," he says.
After years of researc,h McCann believes the only way complementary currencies can create real value for local economies is if they make transactions happen that wouldn't otherwise have taken place.
"They need to create additional spending power. This is this what the local currencies, despite all their good points, fail to do," McCann says.
Every time a Brixton Pound transaction is made, 1.5 per cent goes into a Brixton Fund. This is used to give micro-grants of between a few hundred and £2000 to local projects and community groups. "We aim to target projects that aren't large enough to apply for more formal grant funding," says Lucy Çava, project manager at the Brixton Pound.
"We see this as part of community building – linking the Brixton Pound user with community groups, so both groups become more visible to each other through the currency and fund. This is particularly important in Brixton because of the gentrification debates which are very salient round there," Çava says.
Meanwhile, the people behind the Bristol Pound are readying a mutual credit network called Bristol Prospects. Through this network, businesses in Bristol can exchange credit in the form of loans that are neutralised within the network, helping one another to grow without relying on the high rates of commercial lenders.
Once operational, loans offered through the Prospects network will have negative interest, so that businesses are encouraged to pass credit on as quickly as possible. "That's the plan," says Clarke, "because it's rather like a hot potato: people will want to pass it on."
"We know from research that a number of small businesses in Bristol are struggling to get money on reasonable terms," says Clarke, "and that banks are not interested in smaller loans to businesses. So we think there is a strength in the Bristol Pound network to start something like this that is linked, but separate."
Duncan McCann, with all his experience, knows that challenge is worthwhile. "As people we have a right to make credit and loan money. We mustn't forget that. We mustn't leave that to corporations and the state," he says.
This article is part of a series on local economies Hazel is documenting at farnearer.org, with funding from the Friends Provident Foundation
Illustration by PureSolution/Shutterstock
This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article. | Karen Gillian | Billy Connolly | Gerard Butler | Sean Connery | 1 |
51597_L4VT5NLR_1 | The Captain is characterized in all of the following ways EXCEPT: | GOURMET
By ALLEN KIM LANG
This was the endless problem of all
spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men
tomorrow on what they had eaten today!
Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls,
men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's
true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion
can never replace practice in an art. Food, on the other hand, is a
challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts
that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list.
In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing
seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers,
celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The
Limey sailor got the name of the anti-scorbutic citrus squeezed into
his diet, a fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age
only as garnish for our groundside gin-and-tonic. And today we Marsmen
are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the
Chlorella
and
Scenedesmus
algae that, by filling up the spaces within, open the
road to the larger Space without.
Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in
history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis
to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with
cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the
hundred-and-first chapter of
Moby Dick
, a book spooled in the
amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that
no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more
than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of
Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a
man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space.
The
Pequod's
crew ate wormy biscuit and salt beef. Nimitz's men won
their war on canned pork and beans. The
Triton
made her underwater
periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and
concentrated apple-juice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the
skies, a decline set in.
The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent
food. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings
from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the
groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes.
Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky
through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting
exordium of
Isaiah
36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today
what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water.
The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning
offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a
spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount.
Slimeheads remember the H. M. S.
Ajax
fiasco, for example, in which a
galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's
shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from
the
Ajax
in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think
of the
Benjo Maru
incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed
his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing
Saccharomycodes
yeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at
Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into
the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent
bite he ate to a superior grade of
sake
. And for a third footnote to
the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks,"
Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the
Charles Partlow
Sale
.
The
Sale
blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due
in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking
the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the
human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir
seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted
in the
maria
to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had
aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's
Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann,
the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was
Robert Bailey.
Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating
tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming,
dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to
see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of
water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food.
This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a
statement of the least fuel a man can run on.
Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo
compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the
C. P. Sale
no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to
work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons
of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West
and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat,
protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the
algae fed us.
All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. Even the stubble
from our 2,680 shaves and the clippings from our 666 haircuts en route
and back would be fed into the Chlorella tanks. Human hair is rich in
essential amino acids.
The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the
smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a
hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite
wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of
oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the
end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the
glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling
politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a
breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of
squeamishness.
Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife
in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher
extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,
guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.
Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim
is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.
If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties
of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann
was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do
so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have
done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart
was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet
Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as
Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a
Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social
hemorrhoid.
The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.
It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, "Bailey,
Robert," on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate
shipmate "Belly-Robber." It was Winkelmann who discussed
haut
cuisine
and the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our
algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was
Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any
other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.
Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste
of synthetic methionine—an essential amino acid not synthesized by
Chlorella—by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano
and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink,
textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the
slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat.
For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of
the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not.
"Belly-Robber," he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea,
"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun
in my home country:
Mensch ist was er isst.
It means, you are what
you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this
Schweinerei
you are feeding me." Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin
with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the
ladder from the dining-cubby.
"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?" the Cook asked me.
"Not much," I said. "I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can
give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got
to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship."
"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook," Bailey said. "The fat swine!"
"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey," I
said. "He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in
my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none."
Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It
was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. "This
is what I have to work with," he said. He tossed the stuff back into
its bin. "In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies,
we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings."
"You'll never make Winkelmann happy," I said. "Even the simultaneous
death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up
the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat."
Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye
from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook
waved my gift aside. "Not now, Doc," he said. "I'm thinking about
tomorrow's menu."
The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the
next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed
with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of
burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only
guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and
drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine
heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The
pièce de
résistance
was again a "hamburger steak;" but this time the algaeal
mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only
faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had
been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. "It's
so tender," the radioman joked, "that I can hardly believe it's really
steak."
Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently
imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big
man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.
"Belly-Robber," Winkelmann said, "I had almost rather you served me
this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and
cycler-salt."
"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain," I said. I
gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.
"Yes, I eat it," the Captain said, taking and talking through another
bite. "But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and
grasshoppers, to stay alive."
"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded.
"Only good food," Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised
algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This—the brain that guides
the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,
Belly-Robber?"
Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really
don't know what I can do to please you."
"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban
Hausfrau
with the
vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums
or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will
keep my belly content and my brain alive."
"Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British
term Dumb Insolence.
Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I
followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard.
You're asking him to make bricks without straw."
Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think, Doctor,
that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged
man?"
"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said.
"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,"
Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the
Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of
Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the
mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him
uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,
to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn
somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks."
"You're driving him too hard, Sir," I said. "He'll crack."
"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we
ground at Brady Station," Captain Winkelmann said. "So much money buys
many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova."
"Crew morale on the ship...." I began.
"That will be all, Doctor Vilanova," Captain Winkelmann repeated.
Bailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical
path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate
the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned
by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at
mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. "Convey my
compliments to the Chef, please," the Captain would instruct one of
the crew, "and ask him to step down here a moment." And the Cook would
cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius
acidly called in question again.
I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go
into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in
brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an
ersatz
hot
turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella
turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy
a grainy and delicious "cornbread," and had extracted from his algae
a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot "bread" with a
genuinely dairy smell. "Splendid, Bailey," I said.
"We are not amused," said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second
helping of the pseudo-turkey. "You are improving, Belly-Robber, but
only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require
a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere
edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will
have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics
student. That will be all, Bailey."
The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of
Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their
Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark
on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last
few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many
memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had
lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,
seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,
and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our
Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice
that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when
Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.
Each man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects
besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As
his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this
ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of
books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help
him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a
fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of
spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice,
and a dozen others.
Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards
interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien
to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd
exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance
to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.
To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come
aboard their ship mother-naked.
But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects
baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon
mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet
on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.
"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,
Belly-Robber?" he asked the Cook.
Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd
had much practice. "I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir,"
he said. "I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the
texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?"
"I understand," Winkelmann growled. "You intend that your latest mess
should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?"
"Yes, Sir," Bailey said. "Well, I squeezed the
steak-substrate—Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special
seasonings—through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal
oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out.
Voila!
I had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine
meat."
"Remarkable, Bailey," I said.
"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with
our food," the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of
distaste. "It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I
never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils
the meal."
Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of
the table and tenderly lifted a small "steak" onto each of our plates.
"Try it," he urged the Captain.
Captain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The
color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell
of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. "Not
too bad, Belly-Robber," he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed
his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A
kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a
more reasonable man. "But it still needs something ... something,"
Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella.
"Aha! I have it!"
"Yes, Sir?" Bailey asked.
"This, Belly-Robber!" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and
ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed
the cap. "Ketchup," he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's
masterpiece. "The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks."
Lifting a hunk of the "steak," streaming ketchup, to his mouth,
Winkelmann chewed. "Just the thing," he smiled.
"Damn you!" Bailey shouted.
Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.
"... Sir," Bailey added.
"That's better," Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said
meditatively, "Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have
sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a
bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber."
"But, Sir...." Bailey began.
"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat
to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic
slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of
this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in
no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you
understand, Belly-Robber?" he demanded.
"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,
slave-driving...."
"Watch your noun," Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. "Your adjectives are
insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous."
"Captain, you've gone too far," I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was
scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.
"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's
Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain," Winkelmann said.
"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you," I said. "The other officers
and the men have been more than satisfied with his work."
"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds," Winkelmann said.
"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber," he added.
Bailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him
to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my
bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal
bulkhead. "You'll have that drink now," I said.
"No, dammit!" he shouted.
"Orders," I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. "This is
therapy, Bailey," I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat
like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.
After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. "Sorry, Doc," he said.
"You've taken more pressure than most men would," I said. "Nothing to
be ashamed of."
"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel
and sauerkraut and
Backhahndl nach suddeutscher Art
out of an algae
tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out
molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And
he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet
of the Friends of Escoffier!"
"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey," I said. "You've worked your
fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not
appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year
from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that
restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman."
"I hate him," Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He
reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be
an apt confederate of
vis medicatrix naturae
, the healing power of
nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it
off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.
For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in
horribleness, a pottage or boiled
Chlorella vulgaris
that looked
and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,
red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as
though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the
disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, "Belly-Robber, you're
improving a little at last."
Bailey nodded and smiled. "Thank you, Sir," he said.
I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were
now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of
irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was
a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann
theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain
had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I
thought.
Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted
of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were
vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for
the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served
the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley
oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.
There being only three seats in the
Sale's
mess compartment, we ate
our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to
supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell
to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,
of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss
of canned beer being church-keyed. "He's done it, Doc!" one of the
first-shift diners said. "It actually tastes of food!"
"Then he's beat the Captain at his game," I said.
"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks," the crewman
said.
I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric
warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of
us with the small "steaks." Each contained about a pound of dried
Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched
in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron
skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut
a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are
limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the
galley door. I gestured for him to join me. "You've done it, Bailey,"
I said. "Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is
actually
good
."
"Thanks, Doc," Bailey said.
I smiled and took another bite. "You may not realize it, Bailey; but
this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;
you couldn't have done it without him."
"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?"
Bailey asked.
"He was driving you to do the impossible," I said; "and you did it. Our
Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum
performance out of his Ship's Cook."
Bailey stood up. "Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?" he asked.
I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.
He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good
of the ship and his crew. "Do I like Captain Winkelmann?" I asked,
spearing another piece of my artificial steak. "Bailey, I'm afraid I'll
have to admit that I do."
Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my
plate. "Then have another piece," he said. | melodramatic | sardonic | exasperating | acrimonious | 3 |
51597_L4VT5NLR_2 | What is the narrator's profession? | GOURMET
By ALLEN KIM LANG
This was the endless problem of all
spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men
tomorrow on what they had eaten today!
Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls,
men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's
true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion
can never replace practice in an art. Food, on the other hand, is a
challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts
that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list.
In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing
seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers,
celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The
Limey sailor got the name of the anti-scorbutic citrus squeezed into
his diet, a fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age
only as garnish for our groundside gin-and-tonic. And today we Marsmen
are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the
Chlorella
and
Scenedesmus
algae that, by filling up the spaces within, open the
road to the larger Space without.
Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in
history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis
to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with
cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the
hundred-and-first chapter of
Moby Dick
, a book spooled in the
amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that
no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more
than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of
Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a
man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space.
The
Pequod's
crew ate wormy biscuit and salt beef. Nimitz's men won
their war on canned pork and beans. The
Triton
made her underwater
periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and
concentrated apple-juice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the
skies, a decline set in.
The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent
food. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings
from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the
groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes.
Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky
through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting
exordium of
Isaiah
36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today
what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water.
The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning
offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a
spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount.
Slimeheads remember the H. M. S.
Ajax
fiasco, for example, in which a
galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's
shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from
the
Ajax
in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think
of the
Benjo Maru
incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed
his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing
Saccharomycodes
yeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at
Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into
the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent
bite he ate to a superior grade of
sake
. And for a third footnote to
the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks,"
Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the
Charles Partlow
Sale
.
The
Sale
blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due
in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking
the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the
human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir
seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted
in the
maria
to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had
aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's
Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann,
the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was
Robert Bailey.
Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating
tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming,
dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to
see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of
water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food.
This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a
statement of the least fuel a man can run on.
Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo
compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the
C. P. Sale
no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to
work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons
of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West
and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat,
protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the
algae fed us.
All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. Even the stubble
from our 2,680 shaves and the clippings from our 666 haircuts en route
and back would be fed into the Chlorella tanks. Human hair is rich in
essential amino acids.
The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the
smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a
hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite
wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of
oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the
end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the
glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling
politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a
breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of
squeamishness.
Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife
in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher
extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,
guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.
Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim
is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.
If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties
of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann
was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do
so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have
done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart
was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet
Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as
Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a
Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social
hemorrhoid.
The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.
It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, "Bailey,
Robert," on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate
shipmate "Belly-Robber." It was Winkelmann who discussed
haut
cuisine
and the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our
algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was
Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any
other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.
Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste
of synthetic methionine—an essential amino acid not synthesized by
Chlorella—by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano
and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink,
textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the
slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat.
For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of
the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not.
"Belly-Robber," he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea,
"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun
in my home country:
Mensch ist was er isst.
It means, you are what
you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this
Schweinerei
you are feeding me." Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin
with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the
ladder from the dining-cubby.
"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?" the Cook asked me.
"Not much," I said. "I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can
give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got
to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship."
"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook," Bailey said. "The fat swine!"
"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey," I
said. "He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in
my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none."
Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It
was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. "This
is what I have to work with," he said. He tossed the stuff back into
its bin. "In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies,
we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings."
"You'll never make Winkelmann happy," I said. "Even the simultaneous
death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up
the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat."
Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye
from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook
waved my gift aside. "Not now, Doc," he said. "I'm thinking about
tomorrow's menu."
The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the
next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed
with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of
burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only
guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and
drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine
heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The
pièce de
résistance
was again a "hamburger steak;" but this time the algaeal
mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only
faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had
been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. "It's
so tender," the radioman joked, "that I can hardly believe it's really
steak."
Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently
imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big
man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.
"Belly-Robber," Winkelmann said, "I had almost rather you served me
this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and
cycler-salt."
"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain," I said. I
gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.
"Yes, I eat it," the Captain said, taking and talking through another
bite. "But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and
grasshoppers, to stay alive."
"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded.
"Only good food," Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised
algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This—the brain that guides
the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,
Belly-Robber?"
Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really
don't know what I can do to please you."
"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban
Hausfrau
with the
vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums
or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will
keep my belly content and my brain alive."
"Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British
term Dumb Insolence.
Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I
followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard.
You're asking him to make bricks without straw."
Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think, Doctor,
that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged
man?"
"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said.
"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,"
Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the
Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of
Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the
mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him
uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,
to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn
somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks."
"You're driving him too hard, Sir," I said. "He'll crack."
"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we
ground at Brady Station," Captain Winkelmann said. "So much money buys
many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova."
"Crew morale on the ship...." I began.
"That will be all, Doctor Vilanova," Captain Winkelmann repeated.
Bailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical
path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate
the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned
by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at
mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. "Convey my
compliments to the Chef, please," the Captain would instruct one of
the crew, "and ask him to step down here a moment." And the Cook would
cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius
acidly called in question again.
I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go
into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in
brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an
ersatz
hot
turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella
turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy
a grainy and delicious "cornbread," and had extracted from his algae
a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot "bread" with a
genuinely dairy smell. "Splendid, Bailey," I said.
"We are not amused," said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second
helping of the pseudo-turkey. "You are improving, Belly-Robber, but
only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require
a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere
edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will
have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics
student. That will be all, Bailey."
The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of
Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their
Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark
on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last
few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many
memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had
lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,
seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,
and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our
Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice
that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when
Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.
Each man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects
besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As
his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this
ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of
books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help
him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a
fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of
spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice,
and a dozen others.
Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards
interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien
to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd
exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance
to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.
To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come
aboard their ship mother-naked.
But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects
baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon
mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet
on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.
"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,
Belly-Robber?" he asked the Cook.
Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd
had much practice. "I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir,"
he said. "I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the
texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?"
"I understand," Winkelmann growled. "You intend that your latest mess
should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?"
"Yes, Sir," Bailey said. "Well, I squeezed the
steak-substrate—Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special
seasonings—through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal
oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out.
Voila!
I had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine
meat."
"Remarkable, Bailey," I said.
"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with
our food," the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of
distaste. "It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I
never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils
the meal."
Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of
the table and tenderly lifted a small "steak" onto each of our plates.
"Try it," he urged the Captain.
Captain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The
color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell
of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. "Not
too bad, Belly-Robber," he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed
his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A
kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a
more reasonable man. "But it still needs something ... something,"
Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella.
"Aha! I have it!"
"Yes, Sir?" Bailey asked.
"This, Belly-Robber!" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and
ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed
the cap. "Ketchup," he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's
masterpiece. "The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks."
Lifting a hunk of the "steak," streaming ketchup, to his mouth,
Winkelmann chewed. "Just the thing," he smiled.
"Damn you!" Bailey shouted.
Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.
"... Sir," Bailey added.
"That's better," Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said
meditatively, "Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have
sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a
bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber."
"But, Sir...." Bailey began.
"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat
to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic
slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of
this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in
no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you
understand, Belly-Robber?" he demanded.
"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,
slave-driving...."
"Watch your noun," Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. "Your adjectives are
insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous."
"Captain, you've gone too far," I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was
scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.
"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's
Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain," Winkelmann said.
"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you," I said. "The other officers
and the men have been more than satisfied with his work."
"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds," Winkelmann said.
"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber," he added.
Bailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him
to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my
bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal
bulkhead. "You'll have that drink now," I said.
"No, dammit!" he shouted.
"Orders," I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. "This is
therapy, Bailey," I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat
like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.
After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. "Sorry, Doc," he said.
"You've taken more pressure than most men would," I said. "Nothing to
be ashamed of."
"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel
and sauerkraut and
Backhahndl nach suddeutscher Art
out of an algae
tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out
molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And
he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet
of the Friends of Escoffier!"
"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey," I said. "You've worked your
fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not
appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year
from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that
restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman."
"I hate him," Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He
reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be
an apt confederate of
vis medicatrix naturae
, the healing power of
nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it
off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.
For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in
horribleness, a pottage or boiled
Chlorella vulgaris
that looked
and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,
red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as
though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the
disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, "Belly-Robber, you're
improving a little at last."
Bailey nodded and smiled. "Thank you, Sir," he said.
I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were
now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of
irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was
a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann
theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain
had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I
thought.
Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted
of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were
vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for
the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served
the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley
oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.
There being only three seats in the
Sale's
mess compartment, we ate
our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to
supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell
to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,
of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss
of canned beer being church-keyed. "He's done it, Doc!" one of the
first-shift diners said. "It actually tastes of food!"
"Then he's beat the Captain at his game," I said.
"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks," the crewman
said.
I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric
warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of
us with the small "steaks." Each contained about a pound of dried
Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched
in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron
skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut
a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are
limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the
galley door. I gestured for him to join me. "You've done it, Bailey,"
I said. "Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is
actually
good
."
"Thanks, Doc," Bailey said.
I smiled and took another bite. "You may not realize it, Bailey; but
this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;
you couldn't have done it without him."
"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?"
Bailey asked.
"He was driving you to do the impossible," I said; "and you did it. Our
Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum
performance out of his Ship's Cook."
Bailey stood up. "Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?" he asked.
I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.
He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good
of the ship and his crew. "Do I like Captain Winkelmann?" I asked,
spearing another piece of my artificial steak. "Bailey, I'm afraid I'll
have to admit that I do."
Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my
plate. "Then have another piece," he said. | astronaut | doctor | sailor | cook | 1 |
51597_L4VT5NLR_3 | The Pequod, Nimitz, and Triton are all references to? | GOURMET
By ALLEN KIM LANG
This was the endless problem of all
spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men
tomorrow on what they had eaten today!
Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls,
men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's
true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion
can never replace practice in an art. Food, on the other hand, is a
challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts
that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list.
In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing
seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers,
celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The
Limey sailor got the name of the anti-scorbutic citrus squeezed into
his diet, a fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age
only as garnish for our groundside gin-and-tonic. And today we Marsmen
are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the
Chlorella
and
Scenedesmus
algae that, by filling up the spaces within, open the
road to the larger Space without.
Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in
history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis
to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with
cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the
hundred-and-first chapter of
Moby Dick
, a book spooled in the
amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that
no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more
than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of
Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a
man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space.
The
Pequod's
crew ate wormy biscuit and salt beef. Nimitz's men won
their war on canned pork and beans. The
Triton
made her underwater
periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and
concentrated apple-juice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the
skies, a decline set in.
The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent
food. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings
from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the
groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes.
Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky
through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting
exordium of
Isaiah
36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today
what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water.
The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning
offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a
spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount.
Slimeheads remember the H. M. S.
Ajax
fiasco, for example, in which a
galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's
shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from
the
Ajax
in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think
of the
Benjo Maru
incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed
his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing
Saccharomycodes
yeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at
Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into
the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent
bite he ate to a superior grade of
sake
. And for a third footnote to
the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks,"
Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the
Charles Partlow
Sale
.
The
Sale
blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due
in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking
the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the
human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir
seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted
in the
maria
to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had
aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's
Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann,
the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was
Robert Bailey.
Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating
tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming,
dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to
see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of
water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food.
This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a
statement of the least fuel a man can run on.
Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo
compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the
C. P. Sale
no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to
work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons
of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West
and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat,
protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the
algae fed us.
All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. Even the stubble
from our 2,680 shaves and the clippings from our 666 haircuts en route
and back would be fed into the Chlorella tanks. Human hair is rich in
essential amino acids.
The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the
smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a
hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite
wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of
oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the
end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the
glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling
politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a
breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of
squeamishness.
Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife
in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher
extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,
guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.
Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim
is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.
If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties
of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann
was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do
so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have
done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart
was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet
Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as
Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a
Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social
hemorrhoid.
The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.
It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, "Bailey,
Robert," on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate
shipmate "Belly-Robber." It was Winkelmann who discussed
haut
cuisine
and the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our
algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was
Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any
other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.
Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste
of synthetic methionine—an essential amino acid not synthesized by
Chlorella—by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano
and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink,
textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the
slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat.
For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of
the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not.
"Belly-Robber," he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea,
"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun
in my home country:
Mensch ist was er isst.
It means, you are what
you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this
Schweinerei
you are feeding me." Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin
with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the
ladder from the dining-cubby.
"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?" the Cook asked me.
"Not much," I said. "I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can
give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got
to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship."
"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook," Bailey said. "The fat swine!"
"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey," I
said. "He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in
my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none."
Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It
was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. "This
is what I have to work with," he said. He tossed the stuff back into
its bin. "In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies,
we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings."
"You'll never make Winkelmann happy," I said. "Even the simultaneous
death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up
the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat."
Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye
from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook
waved my gift aside. "Not now, Doc," he said. "I'm thinking about
tomorrow's menu."
The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the
next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed
with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of
burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only
guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and
drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine
heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The
pièce de
résistance
was again a "hamburger steak;" but this time the algaeal
mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only
faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had
been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. "It's
so tender," the radioman joked, "that I can hardly believe it's really
steak."
Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently
imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big
man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.
"Belly-Robber," Winkelmann said, "I had almost rather you served me
this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and
cycler-salt."
"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain," I said. I
gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.
"Yes, I eat it," the Captain said, taking and talking through another
bite. "But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and
grasshoppers, to stay alive."
"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded.
"Only good food," Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised
algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This—the brain that guides
the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,
Belly-Robber?"
Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really
don't know what I can do to please you."
"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban
Hausfrau
with the
vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums
or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will
keep my belly content and my brain alive."
"Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British
term Dumb Insolence.
Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I
followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard.
You're asking him to make bricks without straw."
Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think, Doctor,
that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged
man?"
"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said.
"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,"
Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the
Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of
Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the
mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him
uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,
to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn
somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks."
"You're driving him too hard, Sir," I said. "He'll crack."
"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we
ground at Brady Station," Captain Winkelmann said. "So much money buys
many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova."
"Crew morale on the ship...." I began.
"That will be all, Doctor Vilanova," Captain Winkelmann repeated.
Bailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical
path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate
the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned
by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at
mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. "Convey my
compliments to the Chef, please," the Captain would instruct one of
the crew, "and ask him to step down here a moment." And the Cook would
cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius
acidly called in question again.
I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go
into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in
brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an
ersatz
hot
turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella
turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy
a grainy and delicious "cornbread," and had extracted from his algae
a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot "bread" with a
genuinely dairy smell. "Splendid, Bailey," I said.
"We are not amused," said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second
helping of the pseudo-turkey. "You are improving, Belly-Robber, but
only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require
a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere
edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will
have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics
student. That will be all, Bailey."
The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of
Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their
Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark
on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last
few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many
memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had
lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,
seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,
and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our
Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice
that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when
Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.
Each man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects
besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As
his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this
ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of
books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help
him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a
fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of
spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice,
and a dozen others.
Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards
interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien
to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd
exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance
to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.
To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come
aboard their ship mother-naked.
But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects
baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon
mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet
on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.
"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,
Belly-Robber?" he asked the Cook.
Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd
had much practice. "I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir,"
he said. "I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the
texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?"
"I understand," Winkelmann growled. "You intend that your latest mess
should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?"
"Yes, Sir," Bailey said. "Well, I squeezed the
steak-substrate—Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special
seasonings—through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal
oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out.
Voila!
I had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine
meat."
"Remarkable, Bailey," I said.
"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with
our food," the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of
distaste. "It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I
never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils
the meal."
Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of
the table and tenderly lifted a small "steak" onto each of our plates.
"Try it," he urged the Captain.
Captain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The
color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell
of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. "Not
too bad, Belly-Robber," he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed
his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A
kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a
more reasonable man. "But it still needs something ... something,"
Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella.
"Aha! I have it!"
"Yes, Sir?" Bailey asked.
"This, Belly-Robber!" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and
ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed
the cap. "Ketchup," he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's
masterpiece. "The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks."
Lifting a hunk of the "steak," streaming ketchup, to his mouth,
Winkelmann chewed. "Just the thing," he smiled.
"Damn you!" Bailey shouted.
Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.
"... Sir," Bailey added.
"That's better," Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said
meditatively, "Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have
sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a
bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber."
"But, Sir...." Bailey began.
"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat
to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic
slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of
this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in
no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you
understand, Belly-Robber?" he demanded.
"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,
slave-driving...."
"Watch your noun," Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. "Your adjectives are
insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous."
"Captain, you've gone too far," I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was
scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.
"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's
Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain," Winkelmann said.
"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you," I said. "The other officers
and the men have been more than satisfied with his work."
"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds," Winkelmann said.
"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber," he added.
Bailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him
to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my
bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal
bulkhead. "You'll have that drink now," I said.
"No, dammit!" he shouted.
"Orders," I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. "This is
therapy, Bailey," I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat
like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.
After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. "Sorry, Doc," he said.
"You've taken more pressure than most men would," I said. "Nothing to
be ashamed of."
"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel
and sauerkraut and
Backhahndl nach suddeutscher Art
out of an algae
tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out
molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And
he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet
of the Friends of Escoffier!"
"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey," I said. "You've worked your
fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not
appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year
from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that
restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman."
"I hate him," Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He
reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be
an apt confederate of
vis medicatrix naturae
, the healing power of
nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it
off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.
For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in
horribleness, a pottage or boiled
Chlorella vulgaris
that looked
and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,
red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as
though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the
disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, "Belly-Robber, you're
improving a little at last."
Bailey nodded and smiled. "Thank you, Sir," he said.
I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were
now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of
irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was
a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann
theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain
had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I
thought.
Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted
of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were
vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for
the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served
the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley
oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.
There being only three seats in the
Sale's
mess compartment, we ate
our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to
supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell
to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,
of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss
of canned beer being church-keyed. "He's done it, Doc!" one of the
first-shift diners said. "It actually tastes of food!"
"Then he's beat the Captain at his game," I said.
"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks," the crewman
said.
I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric
warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of
us with the small "steaks." Each contained about a pound of dried
Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched
in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron
skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut
a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are
limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the
galley door. I gestured for him to join me. "You've done it, Bailey,"
I said. "Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is
actually
good
."
"Thanks, Doc," Bailey said.
I smiled and took another bite. "You may not realize it, Bailey; but
this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;
you couldn't have done it without him."
"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?"
Bailey asked.
"He was driving you to do the impossible," I said; "and you did it. Our
Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum
performance out of his Ship's Cook."
Bailey stood up. "Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?" he asked.
I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.
He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good
of the ship and his crew. "Do I like Captain Winkelmann?" I asked,
spearing another piece of my artificial steak. "Bailey, I'm afraid I'll
have to admit that I do."
Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my
plate. "Then have another piece," he said. | crewmen aboard the Charles Partlow Sale | seafaring men or ships from literature | names of scientists who invented food recycling techniques | the most palatable strains of algae | 1 |
51597_L4VT5NLR_4 | According to the narrator, who is the most important figure onboard a spacecraft? | GOURMET
By ALLEN KIM LANG
This was the endless problem of all
spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men
tomorrow on what they had eaten today!
Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls,
men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's
true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion
can never replace practice in an art. Food, on the other hand, is a
challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts
that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list.
In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing
seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers,
celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The
Limey sailor got the name of the anti-scorbutic citrus squeezed into
his diet, a fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age
only as garnish for our groundside gin-and-tonic. And today we Marsmen
are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the
Chlorella
and
Scenedesmus
algae that, by filling up the spaces within, open the
road to the larger Space without.
Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in
history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis
to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with
cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the
hundred-and-first chapter of
Moby Dick
, a book spooled in the
amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that
no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more
than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of
Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a
man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space.
The
Pequod's
crew ate wormy biscuit and salt beef. Nimitz's men won
their war on canned pork and beans. The
Triton
made her underwater
periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and
concentrated apple-juice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the
skies, a decline set in.
The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent
food. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings
from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the
groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes.
Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky
through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting
exordium of
Isaiah
36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today
what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water.
The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning
offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a
spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount.
Slimeheads remember the H. M. S.
Ajax
fiasco, for example, in which a
galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's
shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from
the
Ajax
in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think
of the
Benjo Maru
incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed
his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing
Saccharomycodes
yeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at
Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into
the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent
bite he ate to a superior grade of
sake
. And for a third footnote to
the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks,"
Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the
Charles Partlow
Sale
.
The
Sale
blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due
in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking
the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the
human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir
seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted
in the
maria
to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had
aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's
Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann,
the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was
Robert Bailey.
Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating
tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming,
dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to
see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of
water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food.
This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a
statement of the least fuel a man can run on.
Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo
compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the
C. P. Sale
no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to
work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons
of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West
and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat,
protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the
algae fed us.
All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. Even the stubble
from our 2,680 shaves and the clippings from our 666 haircuts en route
and back would be fed into the Chlorella tanks. Human hair is rich in
essential amino acids.
The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the
smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a
hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite
wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of
oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the
end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the
glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling
politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a
breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of
squeamishness.
Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife
in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher
extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,
guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.
Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim
is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.
If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties
of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann
was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do
so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have
done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart
was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet
Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as
Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a
Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social
hemorrhoid.
The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.
It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, "Bailey,
Robert," on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate
shipmate "Belly-Robber." It was Winkelmann who discussed
haut
cuisine
and the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our
algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was
Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any
other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.
Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste
of synthetic methionine—an essential amino acid not synthesized by
Chlorella—by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano
and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink,
textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the
slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat.
For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of
the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not.
"Belly-Robber," he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea,
"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun
in my home country:
Mensch ist was er isst.
It means, you are what
you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this
Schweinerei
you are feeding me." Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin
with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the
ladder from the dining-cubby.
"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?" the Cook asked me.
"Not much," I said. "I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can
give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got
to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship."
"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook," Bailey said. "The fat swine!"
"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey," I
said. "He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in
my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none."
Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It
was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. "This
is what I have to work with," he said. He tossed the stuff back into
its bin. "In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies,
we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings."
"You'll never make Winkelmann happy," I said. "Even the simultaneous
death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up
the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat."
Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye
from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook
waved my gift aside. "Not now, Doc," he said. "I'm thinking about
tomorrow's menu."
The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the
next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed
with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of
burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only
guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and
drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine
heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The
pièce de
résistance
was again a "hamburger steak;" but this time the algaeal
mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only
faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had
been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. "It's
so tender," the radioman joked, "that I can hardly believe it's really
steak."
Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently
imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big
man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.
"Belly-Robber," Winkelmann said, "I had almost rather you served me
this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and
cycler-salt."
"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain," I said. I
gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.
"Yes, I eat it," the Captain said, taking and talking through another
bite. "But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and
grasshoppers, to stay alive."
"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded.
"Only good food," Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised
algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This—the brain that guides
the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,
Belly-Robber?"
Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really
don't know what I can do to please you."
"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban
Hausfrau
with the
vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums
or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will
keep my belly content and my brain alive."
"Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British
term Dumb Insolence.
Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I
followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard.
You're asking him to make bricks without straw."
Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think, Doctor,
that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged
man?"
"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said.
"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,"
Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the
Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of
Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the
mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him
uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,
to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn
somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks."
"You're driving him too hard, Sir," I said. "He'll crack."
"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we
ground at Brady Station," Captain Winkelmann said. "So much money buys
many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova."
"Crew morale on the ship...." I began.
"That will be all, Doctor Vilanova," Captain Winkelmann repeated.
Bailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical
path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate
the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned
by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at
mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. "Convey my
compliments to the Chef, please," the Captain would instruct one of
the crew, "and ask him to step down here a moment." And the Cook would
cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius
acidly called in question again.
I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go
into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in
brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an
ersatz
hot
turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella
turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy
a grainy and delicious "cornbread," and had extracted from his algae
a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot "bread" with a
genuinely dairy smell. "Splendid, Bailey," I said.
"We are not amused," said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second
helping of the pseudo-turkey. "You are improving, Belly-Robber, but
only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require
a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere
edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will
have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics
student. That will be all, Bailey."
The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of
Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their
Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark
on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last
few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many
memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had
lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,
seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,
and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our
Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice
that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when
Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.
Each man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects
besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As
his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this
ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of
books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help
him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a
fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of
spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice,
and a dozen others.
Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards
interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien
to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd
exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance
to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.
To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come
aboard their ship mother-naked.
But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects
baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon
mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet
on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.
"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,
Belly-Robber?" he asked the Cook.
Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd
had much practice. "I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir,"
he said. "I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the
texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?"
"I understand," Winkelmann growled. "You intend that your latest mess
should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?"
"Yes, Sir," Bailey said. "Well, I squeezed the
steak-substrate—Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special
seasonings—through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal
oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out.
Voila!
I had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine
meat."
"Remarkable, Bailey," I said.
"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with
our food," the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of
distaste. "It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I
never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils
the meal."
Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of
the table and tenderly lifted a small "steak" onto each of our plates.
"Try it," he urged the Captain.
Captain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The
color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell
of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. "Not
too bad, Belly-Robber," he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed
his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A
kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a
more reasonable man. "But it still needs something ... something,"
Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella.
"Aha! I have it!"
"Yes, Sir?" Bailey asked.
"This, Belly-Robber!" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and
ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed
the cap. "Ketchup," he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's
masterpiece. "The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks."
Lifting a hunk of the "steak," streaming ketchup, to his mouth,
Winkelmann chewed. "Just the thing," he smiled.
"Damn you!" Bailey shouted.
Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.
"... Sir," Bailey added.
"That's better," Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said
meditatively, "Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have
sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a
bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber."
"But, Sir...." Bailey began.
"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat
to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic
slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of
this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in
no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you
understand, Belly-Robber?" he demanded.
"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,
slave-driving...."
"Watch your noun," Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. "Your adjectives are
insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous."
"Captain, you've gone too far," I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was
scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.
"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's
Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain," Winkelmann said.
"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you," I said. "The other officers
and the men have been more than satisfied with his work."
"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds," Winkelmann said.
"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber," he added.
Bailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him
to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my
bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal
bulkhead. "You'll have that drink now," I said.
"No, dammit!" he shouted.
"Orders," I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. "This is
therapy, Bailey," I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat
like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.
After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. "Sorry, Doc," he said.
"You've taken more pressure than most men would," I said. "Nothing to
be ashamed of."
"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel
and sauerkraut and
Backhahndl nach suddeutscher Art
out of an algae
tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out
molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And
he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet
of the Friends of Escoffier!"
"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey," I said. "You've worked your
fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not
appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year
from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that
restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman."
"I hate him," Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He
reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be
an apt confederate of
vis medicatrix naturae
, the healing power of
nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it
off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.
For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in
horribleness, a pottage or boiled
Chlorella vulgaris
that looked
and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,
red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as
though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the
disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, "Belly-Robber, you're
improving a little at last."
Bailey nodded and smiled. "Thank you, Sir," he said.
I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were
now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of
irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was
a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann
theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain
had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I
thought.
Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted
of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were
vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for
the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served
the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley
oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.
There being only three seats in the
Sale's
mess compartment, we ate
our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to
supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell
to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,
of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss
of canned beer being church-keyed. "He's done it, Doc!" one of the
first-shift diners said. "It actually tastes of food!"
"Then he's beat the Captain at his game," I said.
"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks," the crewman
said.
I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric
warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of
us with the small "steaks." Each contained about a pound of dried
Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched
in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron
skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut
a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are
limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the
galley door. I gestured for him to join me. "You've done it, Bailey,"
I said. "Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is
actually
good
."
"Thanks, Doc," Bailey said.
I smiled and took another bite. "You may not realize it, Bailey; but
this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;
you couldn't have done it without him."
"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?"
Bailey asked.
"He was driving you to do the impossible," I said; "and you did it. Our
Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum
performance out of his Ship's Cook."
Bailey stood up. "Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?" he asked.
I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.
He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good
of the ship and his crew. "Do I like Captain Winkelmann?" I asked,
spearing another piece of my artificial steak. "Bailey, I'm afraid I'll
have to admit that I do."
Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my
plate. "Then have another piece," he said. | the Captain | the chef | the waste manager | the 'doctor' | 1 |
51597_L4VT5NLR_5 | All of the following is 'recycled' to create extra 'food' EXCEPT for: | GOURMET
By ALLEN KIM LANG
This was the endless problem of all
spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men
tomorrow on what they had eaten today!
Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls,
men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's
true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion
can never replace practice in an art. Food, on the other hand, is a
challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts
that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list.
In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing
seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers,
celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The
Limey sailor got the name of the anti-scorbutic citrus squeezed into
his diet, a fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age
only as garnish for our groundside gin-and-tonic. And today we Marsmen
are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the
Chlorella
and
Scenedesmus
algae that, by filling up the spaces within, open the
road to the larger Space without.
Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in
history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis
to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with
cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the
hundred-and-first chapter of
Moby Dick
, a book spooled in the
amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that
no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more
than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of
Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a
man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space.
The
Pequod's
crew ate wormy biscuit and salt beef. Nimitz's men won
their war on canned pork and beans. The
Triton
made her underwater
periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and
concentrated apple-juice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the
skies, a decline set in.
The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent
food. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings
from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the
groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes.
Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky
through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting
exordium of
Isaiah
36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today
what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water.
The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning
offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a
spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount.
Slimeheads remember the H. M. S.
Ajax
fiasco, for example, in which a
galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's
shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from
the
Ajax
in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think
of the
Benjo Maru
incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed
his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing
Saccharomycodes
yeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at
Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into
the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent
bite he ate to a superior grade of
sake
. And for a third footnote to
the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks,"
Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the
Charles Partlow
Sale
.
The
Sale
blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due
in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking
the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the
human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir
seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted
in the
maria
to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had
aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's
Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann,
the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was
Robert Bailey.
Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating
tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming,
dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to
see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of
water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food.
This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a
statement of the least fuel a man can run on.
Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo
compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the
C. P. Sale
no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to
work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons
of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West
and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat,
protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the
algae fed us.
All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. Even the stubble
from our 2,680 shaves and the clippings from our 666 haircuts en route
and back would be fed into the Chlorella tanks. Human hair is rich in
essential amino acids.
The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the
smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a
hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite
wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of
oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the
end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the
glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling
politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a
breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of
squeamishness.
Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife
in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher
extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,
guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.
Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim
is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.
If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties
of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann
was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do
so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have
done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart
was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet
Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as
Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a
Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social
hemorrhoid.
The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.
It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, "Bailey,
Robert," on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate
shipmate "Belly-Robber." It was Winkelmann who discussed
haut
cuisine
and the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our
algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was
Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any
other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.
Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste
of synthetic methionine—an essential amino acid not synthesized by
Chlorella—by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano
and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink,
textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the
slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat.
For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of
the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not.
"Belly-Robber," he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea,
"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun
in my home country:
Mensch ist was er isst.
It means, you are what
you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this
Schweinerei
you are feeding me." Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin
with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the
ladder from the dining-cubby.
"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?" the Cook asked me.
"Not much," I said. "I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can
give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got
to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship."
"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook," Bailey said. "The fat swine!"
"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey," I
said. "He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in
my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none."
Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It
was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. "This
is what I have to work with," he said. He tossed the stuff back into
its bin. "In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies,
we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings."
"You'll never make Winkelmann happy," I said. "Even the simultaneous
death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up
the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat."
Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye
from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook
waved my gift aside. "Not now, Doc," he said. "I'm thinking about
tomorrow's menu."
The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the
next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed
with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of
burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only
guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and
drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine
heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The
pièce de
résistance
was again a "hamburger steak;" but this time the algaeal
mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only
faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had
been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. "It's
so tender," the radioman joked, "that I can hardly believe it's really
steak."
Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently
imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big
man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.
"Belly-Robber," Winkelmann said, "I had almost rather you served me
this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and
cycler-salt."
"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain," I said. I
gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.
"Yes, I eat it," the Captain said, taking and talking through another
bite. "But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and
grasshoppers, to stay alive."
"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded.
"Only good food," Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised
algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This—the brain that guides
the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,
Belly-Robber?"
Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really
don't know what I can do to please you."
"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban
Hausfrau
with the
vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums
or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will
keep my belly content and my brain alive."
"Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British
term Dumb Insolence.
Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I
followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard.
You're asking him to make bricks without straw."
Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think, Doctor,
that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged
man?"
"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said.
"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,"
Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the
Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of
Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the
mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him
uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,
to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn
somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks."
"You're driving him too hard, Sir," I said. "He'll crack."
"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we
ground at Brady Station," Captain Winkelmann said. "So much money buys
many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova."
"Crew morale on the ship...." I began.
"That will be all, Doctor Vilanova," Captain Winkelmann repeated.
Bailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical
path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate
the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned
by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at
mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. "Convey my
compliments to the Chef, please," the Captain would instruct one of
the crew, "and ask him to step down here a moment." And the Cook would
cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius
acidly called in question again.
I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go
into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in
brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an
ersatz
hot
turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella
turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy
a grainy and delicious "cornbread," and had extracted from his algae
a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot "bread" with a
genuinely dairy smell. "Splendid, Bailey," I said.
"We are not amused," said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second
helping of the pseudo-turkey. "You are improving, Belly-Robber, but
only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require
a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere
edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will
have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics
student. That will be all, Bailey."
The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of
Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their
Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark
on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last
few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many
memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had
lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,
seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,
and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our
Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice
that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when
Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.
Each man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects
besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As
his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this
ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of
books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help
him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a
fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of
spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice,
and a dozen others.
Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards
interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien
to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd
exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance
to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.
To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come
aboard their ship mother-naked.
But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects
baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon
mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet
on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.
"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,
Belly-Robber?" he asked the Cook.
Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd
had much practice. "I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir,"
he said. "I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the
texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?"
"I understand," Winkelmann growled. "You intend that your latest mess
should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?"
"Yes, Sir," Bailey said. "Well, I squeezed the
steak-substrate—Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special
seasonings—through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal
oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out.
Voila!
I had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine
meat."
"Remarkable, Bailey," I said.
"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with
our food," the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of
distaste. "It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I
never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils
the meal."
Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of
the table and tenderly lifted a small "steak" onto each of our plates.
"Try it," he urged the Captain.
Captain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The
color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell
of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. "Not
too bad, Belly-Robber," he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed
his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A
kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a
more reasonable man. "But it still needs something ... something,"
Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella.
"Aha! I have it!"
"Yes, Sir?" Bailey asked.
"This, Belly-Robber!" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and
ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed
the cap. "Ketchup," he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's
masterpiece. "The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks."
Lifting a hunk of the "steak," streaming ketchup, to his mouth,
Winkelmann chewed. "Just the thing," he smiled.
"Damn you!" Bailey shouted.
Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.
"... Sir," Bailey added.
"That's better," Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said
meditatively, "Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have
sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a
bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber."
"But, Sir...." Bailey began.
"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat
to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic
slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of
this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in
no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you
understand, Belly-Robber?" he demanded.
"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,
slave-driving...."
"Watch your noun," Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. "Your adjectives are
insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous."
"Captain, you've gone too far," I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was
scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.
"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's
Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain," Winkelmann said.
"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you," I said. "The other officers
and the men have been more than satisfied with his work."
"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds," Winkelmann said.
"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber," he added.
Bailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him
to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my
bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal
bulkhead. "You'll have that drink now," I said.
"No, dammit!" he shouted.
"Orders," I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. "This is
therapy, Bailey," I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat
like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.
After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. "Sorry, Doc," he said.
"You've taken more pressure than most men would," I said. "Nothing to
be ashamed of."
"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel
and sauerkraut and
Backhahndl nach suddeutscher Art
out of an algae
tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out
molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And
he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet
of the Friends of Escoffier!"
"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey," I said. "You've worked your
fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not
appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year
from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that
restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman."
"I hate him," Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He
reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be
an apt confederate of
vis medicatrix naturae
, the healing power of
nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it
off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.
For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in
horribleness, a pottage or boiled
Chlorella vulgaris
that looked
and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,
red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as
though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the
disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, "Belly-Robber, you're
improving a little at last."
Bailey nodded and smiled. "Thank you, Sir," he said.
I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were
now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of
irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was
a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann
theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain
had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I
thought.
Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted
of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were
vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for
the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served
the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley
oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.
There being only three seats in the
Sale's
mess compartment, we ate
our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to
supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell
to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,
of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss
of canned beer being church-keyed. "He's done it, Doc!" one of the
first-shift diners said. "It actually tastes of food!"
"Then he's beat the Captain at his game," I said.
"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks," the crewman
said.
I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric
warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of
us with the small "steaks." Each contained about a pound of dried
Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched
in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron
skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut
a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are
limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the
galley door. I gestured for him to join me. "You've done it, Bailey,"
I said. "Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is
actually
good
."
"Thanks, Doc," Bailey said.
I smiled and took another bite. "You may not realize it, Bailey; but
this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;
you couldn't have done it without him."
"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?"
Bailey asked.
"He was driving you to do the impossible," I said; "and you did it. Our
Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum
performance out of his Ship's Cook."
Bailey stood up. "Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?" he asked.
I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.
He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good
of the ship and his crew. "Do I like Captain Winkelmann?" I asked,
spearing another piece of my artificial steak. "Bailey, I'm afraid I'll
have to admit that I do."
Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my
plate. "Then have another piece," he said. | urine | hair | algae | bones | 3 |
51597_L4VT5NLR_6 | How do the crewmen view the tension between Winkelmann and Bailey? | GOURMET
By ALLEN KIM LANG
This was the endless problem of all
spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men
tomorrow on what they had eaten today!
Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls,
men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's
true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion
can never replace practice in an art. Food, on the other hand, is a
challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts
that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list.
In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing
seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers,
celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The
Limey sailor got the name of the anti-scorbutic citrus squeezed into
his diet, a fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age
only as garnish for our groundside gin-and-tonic. And today we Marsmen
are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the
Chlorella
and
Scenedesmus
algae that, by filling up the spaces within, open the
road to the larger Space without.
Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in
history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis
to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with
cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the
hundred-and-first chapter of
Moby Dick
, a book spooled in the
amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that
no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more
than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of
Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a
man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space.
The
Pequod's
crew ate wormy biscuit and salt beef. Nimitz's men won
their war on canned pork and beans. The
Triton
made her underwater
periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and
concentrated apple-juice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the
skies, a decline set in.
The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent
food. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings
from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the
groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes.
Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky
through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting
exordium of
Isaiah
36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today
what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water.
The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning
offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a
spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount.
Slimeheads remember the H. M. S.
Ajax
fiasco, for example, in which a
galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's
shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from
the
Ajax
in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think
of the
Benjo Maru
incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed
his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing
Saccharomycodes
yeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at
Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into
the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent
bite he ate to a superior grade of
sake
. And for a third footnote to
the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks,"
Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the
Charles Partlow
Sale
.
The
Sale
blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due
in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking
the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the
human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir
seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted
in the
maria
to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had
aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's
Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann,
the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was
Robert Bailey.
Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating
tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming,
dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to
see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of
water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food.
This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a
statement of the least fuel a man can run on.
Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo
compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the
C. P. Sale
no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to
work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons
of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West
and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat,
protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the
algae fed us.
All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. Even the stubble
from our 2,680 shaves and the clippings from our 666 haircuts en route
and back would be fed into the Chlorella tanks. Human hair is rich in
essential amino acids.
The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the
smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a
hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite
wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of
oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the
end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the
glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling
politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a
breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of
squeamishness.
Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife
in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher
extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,
guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.
Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim
is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.
If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties
of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann
was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do
so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have
done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart
was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet
Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as
Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a
Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social
hemorrhoid.
The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.
It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, "Bailey,
Robert," on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate
shipmate "Belly-Robber." It was Winkelmann who discussed
haut
cuisine
and the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our
algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was
Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any
other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.
Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste
of synthetic methionine—an essential amino acid not synthesized by
Chlorella—by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano
and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink,
textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the
slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat.
For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of
the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not.
"Belly-Robber," he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea,
"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun
in my home country:
Mensch ist was er isst.
It means, you are what
you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this
Schweinerei
you are feeding me." Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin
with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the
ladder from the dining-cubby.
"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?" the Cook asked me.
"Not much," I said. "I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can
give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got
to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship."
"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook," Bailey said. "The fat swine!"
"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey," I
said. "He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in
my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none."
Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It
was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. "This
is what I have to work with," he said. He tossed the stuff back into
its bin. "In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies,
we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings."
"You'll never make Winkelmann happy," I said. "Even the simultaneous
death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up
the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat."
Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye
from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook
waved my gift aside. "Not now, Doc," he said. "I'm thinking about
tomorrow's menu."
The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the
next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed
with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of
burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only
guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and
drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine
heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The
pièce de
résistance
was again a "hamburger steak;" but this time the algaeal
mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only
faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had
been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. "It's
so tender," the radioman joked, "that I can hardly believe it's really
steak."
Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently
imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big
man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.
"Belly-Robber," Winkelmann said, "I had almost rather you served me
this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and
cycler-salt."
"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain," I said. I
gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.
"Yes, I eat it," the Captain said, taking and talking through another
bite. "But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and
grasshoppers, to stay alive."
"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded.
"Only good food," Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised
algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This—the brain that guides
the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,
Belly-Robber?"
Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really
don't know what I can do to please you."
"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban
Hausfrau
with the
vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums
or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will
keep my belly content and my brain alive."
"Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British
term Dumb Insolence.
Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I
followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard.
You're asking him to make bricks without straw."
Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think, Doctor,
that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged
man?"
"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said.
"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,"
Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the
Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of
Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the
mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him
uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,
to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn
somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks."
"You're driving him too hard, Sir," I said. "He'll crack."
"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we
ground at Brady Station," Captain Winkelmann said. "So much money buys
many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova."
"Crew morale on the ship...." I began.
"That will be all, Doctor Vilanova," Captain Winkelmann repeated.
Bailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical
path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate
the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned
by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at
mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. "Convey my
compliments to the Chef, please," the Captain would instruct one of
the crew, "and ask him to step down here a moment." And the Cook would
cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius
acidly called in question again.
I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go
into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in
brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an
ersatz
hot
turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella
turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy
a grainy and delicious "cornbread," and had extracted from his algae
a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot "bread" with a
genuinely dairy smell. "Splendid, Bailey," I said.
"We are not amused," said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second
helping of the pseudo-turkey. "You are improving, Belly-Robber, but
only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require
a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere
edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will
have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics
student. That will be all, Bailey."
The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of
Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their
Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark
on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last
few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many
memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had
lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,
seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,
and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our
Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice
that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when
Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.
Each man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects
besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As
his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this
ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of
books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help
him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a
fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of
spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice,
and a dozen others.
Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards
interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien
to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd
exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance
to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.
To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come
aboard their ship mother-naked.
But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects
baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon
mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet
on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.
"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,
Belly-Robber?" he asked the Cook.
Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd
had much practice. "I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir,"
he said. "I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the
texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?"
"I understand," Winkelmann growled. "You intend that your latest mess
should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?"
"Yes, Sir," Bailey said. "Well, I squeezed the
steak-substrate—Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special
seasonings—through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal
oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out.
Voila!
I had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine
meat."
"Remarkable, Bailey," I said.
"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with
our food," the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of
distaste. "It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I
never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils
the meal."
Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of
the table and tenderly lifted a small "steak" onto each of our plates.
"Try it," he urged the Captain.
Captain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The
color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell
of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. "Not
too bad, Belly-Robber," he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed
his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A
kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a
more reasonable man. "But it still needs something ... something,"
Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella.
"Aha! I have it!"
"Yes, Sir?" Bailey asked.
"This, Belly-Robber!" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and
ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed
the cap. "Ketchup," he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's
masterpiece. "The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks."
Lifting a hunk of the "steak," streaming ketchup, to his mouth,
Winkelmann chewed. "Just the thing," he smiled.
"Damn you!" Bailey shouted.
Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.
"... Sir," Bailey added.
"That's better," Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said
meditatively, "Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have
sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a
bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber."
"But, Sir...." Bailey began.
"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat
to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic
slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of
this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in
no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you
understand, Belly-Robber?" he demanded.
"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,
slave-driving...."
"Watch your noun," Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. "Your adjectives are
insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous."
"Captain, you've gone too far," I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was
scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.
"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's
Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain," Winkelmann said.
"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you," I said. "The other officers
and the men have been more than satisfied with his work."
"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds," Winkelmann said.
"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber," he added.
Bailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him
to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my
bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal
bulkhead. "You'll have that drink now," I said.
"No, dammit!" he shouted.
"Orders," I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. "This is
therapy, Bailey," I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat
like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.
After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. "Sorry, Doc," he said.
"You've taken more pressure than most men would," I said. "Nothing to
be ashamed of."
"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel
and sauerkraut and
Backhahndl nach suddeutscher Art
out of an algae
tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out
molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And
he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet
of the Friends of Escoffier!"
"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey," I said. "You've worked your
fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not
appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year
from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that
restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman."
"I hate him," Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He
reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be
an apt confederate of
vis medicatrix naturae
, the healing power of
nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it
off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.
For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in
horribleness, a pottage or boiled
Chlorella vulgaris
that looked
and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,
red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as
though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the
disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, "Belly-Robber, you're
improving a little at last."
Bailey nodded and smiled. "Thank you, Sir," he said.
I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were
now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of
irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was
a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann
theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain
had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I
thought.
Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted
of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were
vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for
the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served
the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley
oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.
There being only three seats in the
Sale's
mess compartment, we ate
our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to
supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell
to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,
of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss
of canned beer being church-keyed. "He's done it, Doc!" one of the
first-shift diners said. "It actually tastes of food!"
"Then he's beat the Captain at his game," I said.
"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks," the crewman
said.
I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric
warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of
us with the small "steaks." Each contained about a pound of dried
Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched
in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron
skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut
a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are
limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the
galley door. I gestured for him to join me. "You've done it, Bailey,"
I said. "Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is
actually
good
."
"Thanks, Doc," Bailey said.
I smiled and took another bite. "You may not realize it, Bailey; but
this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;
you couldn't have done it without him."
"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?"
Bailey asked.
"He was driving you to do the impossible," I said; "and you did it. Our
Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum
performance out of his Ship's Cook."
Bailey stood up. "Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?" he asked.
I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.
He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good
of the ship and his crew. "Do I like Captain Winkelmann?" I asked,
spearing another piece of my artificial steak. "Bailey, I'm afraid I'll
have to admit that I do."
Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my
plate. "Then have another piece," he said. | They are repulsed by the Captain's condescending remarks | They are thankful that the Captain's cruelty influences Bailey to create more palatable food | They are determined to stay out of the conflict, for fear of being punished by the Captain | They are concerned that Bailey will mutiny by refusing to fulfill his job responsibilities | 1 |
51597_L4VT5NLR_7 | How does Winkelmann justify his critical stance towards Bailey's cooking? | GOURMET
By ALLEN KIM LANG
This was the endless problem of all
spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men
tomorrow on what they had eaten today!
Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls,
men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's
true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion
can never replace practice in an art. Food, on the other hand, is a
challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts
that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list.
In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing
seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers,
celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The
Limey sailor got the name of the anti-scorbutic citrus squeezed into
his diet, a fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age
only as garnish for our groundside gin-and-tonic. And today we Marsmen
are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the
Chlorella
and
Scenedesmus
algae that, by filling up the spaces within, open the
road to the larger Space without.
Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in
history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis
to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with
cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the
hundred-and-first chapter of
Moby Dick
, a book spooled in the
amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that
no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more
than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of
Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a
man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space.
The
Pequod's
crew ate wormy biscuit and salt beef. Nimitz's men won
their war on canned pork and beans. The
Triton
made her underwater
periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and
concentrated apple-juice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the
skies, a decline set in.
The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent
food. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings
from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the
groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes.
Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky
through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting
exordium of
Isaiah
36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today
what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water.
The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning
offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a
spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount.
Slimeheads remember the H. M. S.
Ajax
fiasco, for example, in which a
galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's
shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from
the
Ajax
in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think
of the
Benjo Maru
incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed
his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing
Saccharomycodes
yeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at
Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into
the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent
bite he ate to a superior grade of
sake
. And for a third footnote to
the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks,"
Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the
Charles Partlow
Sale
.
The
Sale
blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due
in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking
the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the
human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir
seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted
in the
maria
to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had
aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's
Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann,
the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was
Robert Bailey.
Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating
tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming,
dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to
see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of
water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food.
This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a
statement of the least fuel a man can run on.
Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo
compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the
C. P. Sale
no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to
work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons
of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West
and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat,
protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the
algae fed us.
All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. Even the stubble
from our 2,680 shaves and the clippings from our 666 haircuts en route
and back would be fed into the Chlorella tanks. Human hair is rich in
essential amino acids.
The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the
smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a
hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite
wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of
oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the
end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the
glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling
politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a
breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of
squeamishness.
Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife
in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher
extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,
guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.
Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim
is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.
If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties
of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann
was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do
so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have
done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart
was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet
Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as
Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a
Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social
hemorrhoid.
The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.
It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, "Bailey,
Robert," on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate
shipmate "Belly-Robber." It was Winkelmann who discussed
haut
cuisine
and the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our
algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was
Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any
other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.
Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste
of synthetic methionine—an essential amino acid not synthesized by
Chlorella—by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano
and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink,
textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the
slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat.
For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of
the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not.
"Belly-Robber," he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea,
"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun
in my home country:
Mensch ist was er isst.
It means, you are what
you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this
Schweinerei
you are feeding me." Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin
with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the
ladder from the dining-cubby.
"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?" the Cook asked me.
"Not much," I said. "I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can
give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got
to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship."
"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook," Bailey said. "The fat swine!"
"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey," I
said. "He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in
my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none."
Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It
was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. "This
is what I have to work with," he said. He tossed the stuff back into
its bin. "In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies,
we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings."
"You'll never make Winkelmann happy," I said. "Even the simultaneous
death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up
the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat."
Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye
from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook
waved my gift aside. "Not now, Doc," he said. "I'm thinking about
tomorrow's menu."
The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the
next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed
with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of
burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only
guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and
drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine
heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The
pièce de
résistance
was again a "hamburger steak;" but this time the algaeal
mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only
faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had
been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. "It's
so tender," the radioman joked, "that I can hardly believe it's really
steak."
Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently
imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big
man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.
"Belly-Robber," Winkelmann said, "I had almost rather you served me
this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and
cycler-salt."
"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain," I said. I
gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.
"Yes, I eat it," the Captain said, taking and talking through another
bite. "But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and
grasshoppers, to stay alive."
"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded.
"Only good food," Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised
algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This—the brain that guides
the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,
Belly-Robber?"
Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really
don't know what I can do to please you."
"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban
Hausfrau
with the
vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums
or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will
keep my belly content and my brain alive."
"Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British
term Dumb Insolence.
Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I
followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard.
You're asking him to make bricks without straw."
Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think, Doctor,
that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged
man?"
"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said.
"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,"
Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the
Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of
Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the
mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him
uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,
to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn
somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks."
"You're driving him too hard, Sir," I said. "He'll crack."
"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we
ground at Brady Station," Captain Winkelmann said. "So much money buys
many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova."
"Crew morale on the ship...." I began.
"That will be all, Doctor Vilanova," Captain Winkelmann repeated.
Bailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical
path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate
the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned
by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at
mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. "Convey my
compliments to the Chef, please," the Captain would instruct one of
the crew, "and ask him to step down here a moment." And the Cook would
cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius
acidly called in question again.
I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go
into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in
brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an
ersatz
hot
turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella
turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy
a grainy and delicious "cornbread," and had extracted from his algae
a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot "bread" with a
genuinely dairy smell. "Splendid, Bailey," I said.
"We are not amused," said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second
helping of the pseudo-turkey. "You are improving, Belly-Robber, but
only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require
a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere
edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will
have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics
student. That will be all, Bailey."
The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of
Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their
Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark
on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last
few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many
memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had
lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,
seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,
and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our
Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice
that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when
Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.
Each man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects
besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As
his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this
ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of
books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help
him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a
fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of
spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice,
and a dozen others.
Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards
interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien
to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd
exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance
to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.
To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come
aboard their ship mother-naked.
But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects
baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon
mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet
on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.
"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,
Belly-Robber?" he asked the Cook.
Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd
had much practice. "I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir,"
he said. "I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the
texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?"
"I understand," Winkelmann growled. "You intend that your latest mess
should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?"
"Yes, Sir," Bailey said. "Well, I squeezed the
steak-substrate—Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special
seasonings—through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal
oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out.
Voila!
I had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine
meat."
"Remarkable, Bailey," I said.
"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with
our food," the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of
distaste. "It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I
never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils
the meal."
Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of
the table and tenderly lifted a small "steak" onto each of our plates.
"Try it," he urged the Captain.
Captain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The
color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell
of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. "Not
too bad, Belly-Robber," he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed
his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A
kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a
more reasonable man. "But it still needs something ... something,"
Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella.
"Aha! I have it!"
"Yes, Sir?" Bailey asked.
"This, Belly-Robber!" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and
ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed
the cap. "Ketchup," he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's
masterpiece. "The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks."
Lifting a hunk of the "steak," streaming ketchup, to his mouth,
Winkelmann chewed. "Just the thing," he smiled.
"Damn you!" Bailey shouted.
Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.
"... Sir," Bailey added.
"That's better," Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said
meditatively, "Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have
sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a
bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber."
"But, Sir...." Bailey began.
"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat
to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic
slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of
this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in
no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you
understand, Belly-Robber?" he demanded.
"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,
slave-driving...."
"Watch your noun," Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. "Your adjectives are
insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous."
"Captain, you've gone too far," I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was
scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.
"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's
Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain," Winkelmann said.
"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you," I said. "The other officers
and the men have been more than satisfied with his work."
"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds," Winkelmann said.
"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber," he added.
Bailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him
to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my
bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal
bulkhead. "You'll have that drink now," I said.
"No, dammit!" he shouted.
"Orders," I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. "This is
therapy, Bailey," I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat
like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.
After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. "Sorry, Doc," he said.
"You've taken more pressure than most men would," I said. "Nothing to
be ashamed of."
"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel
and sauerkraut and
Backhahndl nach suddeutscher Art
out of an algae
tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out
molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And
he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet
of the Friends of Escoffier!"
"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey," I said. "You've worked your
fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not
appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year
from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that
restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman."
"I hate him," Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He
reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be
an apt confederate of
vis medicatrix naturae
, the healing power of
nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it
off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.
For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in
horribleness, a pottage or boiled
Chlorella vulgaris
that looked
and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,
red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as
though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the
disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, "Belly-Robber, you're
improving a little at last."
Bailey nodded and smiled. "Thank you, Sir," he said.
I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were
now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of
irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was
a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann
theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain
had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I
thought.
Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted
of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were
vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for
the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served
the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley
oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.
There being only three seats in the
Sale's
mess compartment, we ate
our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to
supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell
to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,
of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss
of canned beer being church-keyed. "He's done it, Doc!" one of the
first-shift diners said. "It actually tastes of food!"
"Then he's beat the Captain at his game," I said.
"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks," the crewman
said.
I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric
warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of
us with the small "steaks." Each contained about a pound of dried
Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched
in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron
skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut
a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are
limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the
galley door. I gestured for him to join me. "You've done it, Bailey,"
I said. "Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is
actually
good
."
"Thanks, Doc," Bailey said.
I smiled and took another bite. "You may not realize it, Bailey; but
this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;
you couldn't have done it without him."
"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?"
Bailey asked.
"He was driving you to do the impossible," I said; "and you did it. Our
Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum
performance out of his Ship's Cook."
Bailey stood up. "Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?" he asked.
I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.
He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good
of the ship and his crew. "Do I like Captain Winkelmann?" I asked,
spearing another piece of my artificial steak. "Bailey, I'm afraid I'll
have to admit that I do."
Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my
plate. "Then have another piece," he said. | It motivates Bailey to seek the approval of his shipmates | It prevents Bailey from becoming apathetic in the kitchen | It compels Bailey to be more creative with his resources | It builds Bailey's character and makes him more resilient | 2 |
51597_L4VT5NLR_8 | What was Winkelmann's greatest insult to Bailey? | GOURMET
By ALLEN KIM LANG
This was the endless problem of all
spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men
tomorrow on what they had eaten today!
Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls,
men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's
true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion
can never replace practice in an art. Food, on the other hand, is a
challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts
that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list.
In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing
seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers,
celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The
Limey sailor got the name of the anti-scorbutic citrus squeezed into
his diet, a fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age
only as garnish for our groundside gin-and-tonic. And today we Marsmen
are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the
Chlorella
and
Scenedesmus
algae that, by filling up the spaces within, open the
road to the larger Space without.
Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in
history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis
to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with
cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the
hundred-and-first chapter of
Moby Dick
, a book spooled in the
amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that
no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more
than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of
Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a
man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space.
The
Pequod's
crew ate wormy biscuit and salt beef. Nimitz's men won
their war on canned pork and beans. The
Triton
made her underwater
periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and
concentrated apple-juice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the
skies, a decline set in.
The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent
food. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings
from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the
groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes.
Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky
through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting
exordium of
Isaiah
36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today
what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water.
The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning
offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a
spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount.
Slimeheads remember the H. M. S.
Ajax
fiasco, for example, in which a
galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's
shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from
the
Ajax
in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think
of the
Benjo Maru
incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed
his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing
Saccharomycodes
yeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at
Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into
the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent
bite he ate to a superior grade of
sake
. And for a third footnote to
the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks,"
Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the
Charles Partlow
Sale
.
The
Sale
blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due
in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking
the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the
human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir
seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted
in the
maria
to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had
aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's
Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann,
the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was
Robert Bailey.
Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating
tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming,
dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to
see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of
water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food.
This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a
statement of the least fuel a man can run on.
Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo
compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the
C. P. Sale
no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to
work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons
of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West
and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat,
protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the
algae fed us.
All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. Even the stubble
from our 2,680 shaves and the clippings from our 666 haircuts en route
and back would be fed into the Chlorella tanks. Human hair is rich in
essential amino acids.
The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the
smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a
hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite
wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of
oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the
end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the
glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling
politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a
breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of
squeamishness.
Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife
in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher
extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,
guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.
Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim
is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.
If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties
of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann
was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do
so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have
done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart
was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet
Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as
Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a
Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social
hemorrhoid.
The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.
It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, "Bailey,
Robert," on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate
shipmate "Belly-Robber." It was Winkelmann who discussed
haut
cuisine
and the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our
algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was
Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any
other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.
Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste
of synthetic methionine—an essential amino acid not synthesized by
Chlorella—by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano
and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink,
textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the
slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat.
For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of
the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not.
"Belly-Robber," he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea,
"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun
in my home country:
Mensch ist was er isst.
It means, you are what
you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this
Schweinerei
you are feeding me." Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin
with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the
ladder from the dining-cubby.
"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?" the Cook asked me.
"Not much," I said. "I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can
give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got
to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship."
"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook," Bailey said. "The fat swine!"
"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey," I
said. "He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in
my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none."
Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It
was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. "This
is what I have to work with," he said. He tossed the stuff back into
its bin. "In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies,
we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings."
"You'll never make Winkelmann happy," I said. "Even the simultaneous
death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up
the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat."
Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye
from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook
waved my gift aside. "Not now, Doc," he said. "I'm thinking about
tomorrow's menu."
The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the
next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed
with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of
burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only
guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and
drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine
heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The
pièce de
résistance
was again a "hamburger steak;" but this time the algaeal
mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only
faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had
been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. "It's
so tender," the radioman joked, "that I can hardly believe it's really
steak."
Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently
imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big
man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.
"Belly-Robber," Winkelmann said, "I had almost rather you served me
this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and
cycler-salt."
"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain," I said. I
gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.
"Yes, I eat it," the Captain said, taking and talking through another
bite. "But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and
grasshoppers, to stay alive."
"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded.
"Only good food," Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised
algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This—the brain that guides
the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,
Belly-Robber?"
Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really
don't know what I can do to please you."
"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban
Hausfrau
with the
vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums
or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will
keep my belly content and my brain alive."
"Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British
term Dumb Insolence.
Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I
followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard.
You're asking him to make bricks without straw."
Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think, Doctor,
that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged
man?"
"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said.
"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,"
Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the
Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of
Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the
mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him
uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,
to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn
somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks."
"You're driving him too hard, Sir," I said. "He'll crack."
"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we
ground at Brady Station," Captain Winkelmann said. "So much money buys
many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova."
"Crew morale on the ship...." I began.
"That will be all, Doctor Vilanova," Captain Winkelmann repeated.
Bailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical
path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate
the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned
by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at
mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. "Convey my
compliments to the Chef, please," the Captain would instruct one of
the crew, "and ask him to step down here a moment." And the Cook would
cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius
acidly called in question again.
I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go
into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in
brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an
ersatz
hot
turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella
turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy
a grainy and delicious "cornbread," and had extracted from his algae
a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot "bread" with a
genuinely dairy smell. "Splendid, Bailey," I said.
"We are not amused," said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second
helping of the pseudo-turkey. "You are improving, Belly-Robber, but
only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require
a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere
edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will
have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics
student. That will be all, Bailey."
The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of
Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their
Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark
on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last
few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many
memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had
lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,
seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,
and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our
Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice
that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when
Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.
Each man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects
besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As
his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this
ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of
books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help
him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a
fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of
spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice,
and a dozen others.
Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards
interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien
to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd
exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance
to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.
To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come
aboard their ship mother-naked.
But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects
baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon
mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet
on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.
"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,
Belly-Robber?" he asked the Cook.
Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd
had much practice. "I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir,"
he said. "I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the
texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?"
"I understand," Winkelmann growled. "You intend that your latest mess
should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?"
"Yes, Sir," Bailey said. "Well, I squeezed the
steak-substrate—Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special
seasonings—through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal
oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out.
Voila!
I had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine
meat."
"Remarkable, Bailey," I said.
"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with
our food," the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of
distaste. "It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I
never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils
the meal."
Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of
the table and tenderly lifted a small "steak" onto each of our plates.
"Try it," he urged the Captain.
Captain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The
color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell
of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. "Not
too bad, Belly-Robber," he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed
his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A
kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a
more reasonable man. "But it still needs something ... something,"
Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella.
"Aha! I have it!"
"Yes, Sir?" Bailey asked.
"This, Belly-Robber!" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and
ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed
the cap. "Ketchup," he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's
masterpiece. "The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks."
Lifting a hunk of the "steak," streaming ketchup, to his mouth,
Winkelmann chewed. "Just the thing," he smiled.
"Damn you!" Bailey shouted.
Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.
"... Sir," Bailey added.
"That's better," Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said
meditatively, "Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have
sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a
bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber."
"But, Sir...." Bailey began.
"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat
to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic
slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of
this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in
no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you
understand, Belly-Robber?" he demanded.
"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,
slave-driving...."
"Watch your noun," Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. "Your adjectives are
insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous."
"Captain, you've gone too far," I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was
scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.
"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's
Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain," Winkelmann said.
"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you," I said. "The other officers
and the men have been more than satisfied with his work."
"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds," Winkelmann said.
"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber," he added.
Bailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him
to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my
bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal
bulkhead. "You'll have that drink now," I said.
"No, dammit!" he shouted.
"Orders," I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. "This is
therapy, Bailey," I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat
like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.
After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. "Sorry, Doc," he said.
"You've taken more pressure than most men would," I said. "Nothing to
be ashamed of."
"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel
and sauerkraut and
Backhahndl nach suddeutscher Art
out of an algae
tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out
molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And
he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet
of the Friends of Escoffier!"
"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey," I said. "You've worked your
fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not
appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year
from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that
restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman."
"I hate him," Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He
reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be
an apt confederate of
vis medicatrix naturae
, the healing power of
nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it
off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.
For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in
horribleness, a pottage or boiled
Chlorella vulgaris
that looked
and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,
red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as
though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the
disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, "Belly-Robber, you're
improving a little at last."
Bailey nodded and smiled. "Thank you, Sir," he said.
I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were
now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of
irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was
a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann
theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain
had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I
thought.
Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted
of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were
vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for
the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served
the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley
oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.
There being only three seats in the
Sale's
mess compartment, we ate
our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to
supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell
to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,
of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss
of canned beer being church-keyed. "He's done it, Doc!" one of the
first-shift diners said. "It actually tastes of food!"
"Then he's beat the Captain at his game," I said.
"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks," the crewman
said.
I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric
warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of
us with the small "steaks." Each contained about a pound of dried
Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched
in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron
skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut
a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are
limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the
galley door. I gestured for him to join me. "You've done it, Bailey,"
I said. "Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is
actually
good
."
"Thanks, Doc," Bailey said.
I smiled and took another bite. "You may not realize it, Bailey; but
this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;
you couldn't have done it without him."
"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?"
Bailey asked.
"He was driving you to do the impossible," I said; "and you did it. Our
Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum
performance out of his Ship's Cook."
Bailey stood up. "Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?" he asked.
I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.
He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good
of the ship and his crew. "Do I like Captain Winkelmann?" I asked,
spearing another piece of my artificial steak. "Bailey, I'm afraid I'll
have to admit that I do."
Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my
plate. "Then have another piece," he said. | Slathering ketchup on Bailey's most proud concoction | Reducing his compensation | Refusing to eat the steaks that Bailey innovated | Remarking that the food in which he invested the least effort in making was the most delicious | 0 |
51597_L4VT5NLR_9 | How did Bailey achieve the meal that tasted like barbeque? | GOURMET
By ALLEN KIM LANG
This was the endless problem of all
spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men
tomorrow on what they had eaten today!
Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls,
men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's
true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion
can never replace practice in an art. Food, on the other hand, is a
challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts
that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list.
In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing
seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers,
celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The
Limey sailor got the name of the anti-scorbutic citrus squeezed into
his diet, a fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age
only as garnish for our groundside gin-and-tonic. And today we Marsmen
are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the
Chlorella
and
Scenedesmus
algae that, by filling up the spaces within, open the
road to the larger Space without.
Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in
history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis
to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with
cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the
hundred-and-first chapter of
Moby Dick
, a book spooled in the
amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that
no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more
than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of
Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a
man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space.
The
Pequod's
crew ate wormy biscuit and salt beef. Nimitz's men won
their war on canned pork and beans. The
Triton
made her underwater
periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and
concentrated apple-juice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the
skies, a decline set in.
The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent
food. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings
from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the
groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes.
Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky
through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting
exordium of
Isaiah
36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today
what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water.
The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning
offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a
spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount.
Slimeheads remember the H. M. S.
Ajax
fiasco, for example, in which a
galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's
shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from
the
Ajax
in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think
of the
Benjo Maru
incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed
his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing
Saccharomycodes
yeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at
Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into
the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent
bite he ate to a superior grade of
sake
. And for a third footnote to
the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks,"
Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the
Charles Partlow
Sale
.
The
Sale
blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due
in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking
the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the
human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir
seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted
in the
maria
to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had
aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's
Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann,
the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was
Robert Bailey.
Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating
tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming,
dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to
see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of
water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food.
This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a
statement of the least fuel a man can run on.
Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo
compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the
C. P. Sale
no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to
work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons
of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West
and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat,
protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the
algae fed us.
All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. Even the stubble
from our 2,680 shaves and the clippings from our 666 haircuts en route
and back would be fed into the Chlorella tanks. Human hair is rich in
essential amino acids.
The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the
smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a
hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite
wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of
oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the
end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the
glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling
politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a
breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of
squeamishness.
Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife
in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher
extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,
guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.
Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim
is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.
If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties
of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann
was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do
so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have
done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart
was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet
Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as
Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a
Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social
hemorrhoid.
The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.
It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, "Bailey,
Robert," on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate
shipmate "Belly-Robber." It was Winkelmann who discussed
haut
cuisine
and the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our
algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was
Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any
other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.
Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste
of synthetic methionine—an essential amino acid not synthesized by
Chlorella—by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano
and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink,
textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the
slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat.
For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of
the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not.
"Belly-Robber," he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea,
"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun
in my home country:
Mensch ist was er isst.
It means, you are what
you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this
Schweinerei
you are feeding me." Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin
with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the
ladder from the dining-cubby.
"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?" the Cook asked me.
"Not much," I said. "I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can
give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got
to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship."
"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook," Bailey said. "The fat swine!"
"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey," I
said. "He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in
my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none."
Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It
was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. "This
is what I have to work with," he said. He tossed the stuff back into
its bin. "In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies,
we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings."
"You'll never make Winkelmann happy," I said. "Even the simultaneous
death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up
the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat."
Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye
from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook
waved my gift aside. "Not now, Doc," he said. "I'm thinking about
tomorrow's menu."
The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the
next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed
with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of
burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only
guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and
drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine
heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The
pièce de
résistance
was again a "hamburger steak;" but this time the algaeal
mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only
faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had
been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. "It's
so tender," the radioman joked, "that I can hardly believe it's really
steak."
Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently
imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big
man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.
"Belly-Robber," Winkelmann said, "I had almost rather you served me
this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and
cycler-salt."
"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain," I said. I
gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.
"Yes, I eat it," the Captain said, taking and talking through another
bite. "But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and
grasshoppers, to stay alive."
"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded.
"Only good food," Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised
algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This—the brain that guides
the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,
Belly-Robber?"
Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really
don't know what I can do to please you."
"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban
Hausfrau
with the
vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums
or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will
keep my belly content and my brain alive."
"Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British
term Dumb Insolence.
Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I
followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard.
You're asking him to make bricks without straw."
Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think, Doctor,
that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged
man?"
"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said.
"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,"
Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the
Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of
Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the
mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him
uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,
to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn
somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks."
"You're driving him too hard, Sir," I said. "He'll crack."
"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we
ground at Brady Station," Captain Winkelmann said. "So much money buys
many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova."
"Crew morale on the ship...." I began.
"That will be all, Doctor Vilanova," Captain Winkelmann repeated.
Bailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical
path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate
the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned
by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at
mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. "Convey my
compliments to the Chef, please," the Captain would instruct one of
the crew, "and ask him to step down here a moment." And the Cook would
cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius
acidly called in question again.
I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go
into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in
brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an
ersatz
hot
turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella
turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy
a grainy and delicious "cornbread," and had extracted from his algae
a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot "bread" with a
genuinely dairy smell. "Splendid, Bailey," I said.
"We are not amused," said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second
helping of the pseudo-turkey. "You are improving, Belly-Robber, but
only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require
a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere
edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will
have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics
student. That will be all, Bailey."
The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of
Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their
Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark
on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last
few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many
memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had
lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,
seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,
and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our
Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice
that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when
Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.
Each man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects
besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As
his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this
ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of
books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help
him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a
fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of
spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice,
and a dozen others.
Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards
interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien
to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd
exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance
to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.
To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come
aboard their ship mother-naked.
But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects
baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon
mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet
on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.
"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,
Belly-Robber?" he asked the Cook.
Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd
had much practice. "I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir,"
he said. "I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the
texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?"
"I understand," Winkelmann growled. "You intend that your latest mess
should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?"
"Yes, Sir," Bailey said. "Well, I squeezed the
steak-substrate—Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special
seasonings—through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal
oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out.
Voila!
I had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine
meat."
"Remarkable, Bailey," I said.
"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with
our food," the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of
distaste. "It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I
never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils
the meal."
Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of
the table and tenderly lifted a small "steak" onto each of our plates.
"Try it," he urged the Captain.
Captain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The
color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell
of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. "Not
too bad, Belly-Robber," he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed
his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A
kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a
more reasonable man. "But it still needs something ... something,"
Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella.
"Aha! I have it!"
"Yes, Sir?" Bailey asked.
"This, Belly-Robber!" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and
ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed
the cap. "Ketchup," he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's
masterpiece. "The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks."
Lifting a hunk of the "steak," streaming ketchup, to his mouth,
Winkelmann chewed. "Just the thing," he smiled.
"Damn you!" Bailey shouted.
Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.
"... Sir," Bailey added.
"That's better," Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said
meditatively, "Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have
sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a
bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber."
"But, Sir...." Bailey began.
"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat
to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic
slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of
this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in
no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you
understand, Belly-Robber?" he demanded.
"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,
slave-driving...."
"Watch your noun," Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. "Your adjectives are
insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous."
"Captain, you've gone too far," I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was
scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.
"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's
Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain," Winkelmann said.
"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you," I said. "The other officers
and the men have been more than satisfied with his work."
"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds," Winkelmann said.
"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber," he added.
Bailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him
to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my
bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal
bulkhead. "You'll have that drink now," I said.
"No, dammit!" he shouted.
"Orders," I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. "This is
therapy, Bailey," I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat
like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.
After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. "Sorry, Doc," he said.
"You've taken more pressure than most men would," I said. "Nothing to
be ashamed of."
"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel
and sauerkraut and
Backhahndl nach suddeutscher Art
out of an algae
tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out
molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And
he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet
of the Friends of Escoffier!"
"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey," I said. "You've worked your
fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not
appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year
from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that
restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman."
"I hate him," Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He
reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be
an apt confederate of
vis medicatrix naturae
, the healing power of
nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it
off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.
For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in
horribleness, a pottage or boiled
Chlorella vulgaris
that looked
and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,
red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as
though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the
disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, "Belly-Robber, you're
improving a little at last."
Bailey nodded and smiled. "Thank you, Sir," he said.
I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were
now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of
irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was
a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann
theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain
had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I
thought.
Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted
of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were
vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for
the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served
the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley
oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.
There being only three seats in the
Sale's
mess compartment, we ate
our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to
supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell
to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,
of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss
of canned beer being church-keyed. "He's done it, Doc!" one of the
first-shift diners said. "It actually tastes of food!"
"Then he's beat the Captain at his game," I said.
"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks," the crewman
said.
I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric
warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of
us with the small "steaks." Each contained about a pound of dried
Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched
in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron
skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut
a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are
limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the
galley door. I gestured for him to join me. "You've done it, Bailey,"
I said. "Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is
actually
good
."
"Thanks, Doc," Bailey said.
I smiled and took another bite. "You may not realize it, Bailey; but
this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;
you couldn't have done it without him."
"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?"
Bailey asked.
"He was driving you to do the impossible," I said; "and you did it. Our
Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum
performance out of his Ship's Cook."
Bailey stood up. "Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?" he asked.
I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.
He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good
of the ship and his crew. "Do I like Captain Winkelmann?" I asked,
spearing another piece of my artificial steak. "Bailey, I'm afraid I'll
have to admit that I do."
Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my
plate. "Then have another piece," he said. | He added the Captain's entrails | He allowed the chlorella to ferment longer | He used actual pork products | He added his own refuse | 0 |
60995_B2JLL3Y9_1 | What is the central theme of February Strawberries? | FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES
By JIM HARMON
How much is the impossible worth?
Linton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency
of the restaurant water glass.
"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?" he heard himself say stupidly.
Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without
looking. "Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You
know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?"
Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What
were they trying to pull on him? "The man who isn't Snead is leaving,"
Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. "If that's
Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects."
"No," Howell said, "I wouldn't do that."
"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do."
"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks
like him."
"He's practically running," Linton said. "He almost ran out of the
restaurant."
"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean."
"Yes," Linton said.
A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back
intimately against Linton's own chair.
"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?" the
thick man said.
"Couldn't have been him, though," Linton answered automatically. "My
friend's dead."
The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw
paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded
out of the place quickly.
Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. "Now
you've probably got old Snead into trouble."
"Snead's dead," Linton said.
"Oh, well, 'dead,'" Howell replied.
"What do you say it like that for?" Linton demanded angrily. "The
man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein
Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing."
"You know how it is," Howell said.
Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,
or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on
the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he
sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had
let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had
known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about
death at all.
Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.
"I don't know, mind you," Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, "but
I suppose he might have been resurrected."
"Who by?" Linton asked, thinking:
God?
"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?"
"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to
life?" Linton said.
He knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that
some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died
in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so
patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to
the surface immediately.
"An invention? I guess that's how it is," Howell agreed. "I don't know
much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman."
"But it's wonderful," Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.
"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know
about it?"
"Sh-h," Howell said uneasily. "This is a public place."
"I don't understand," Linton said helplessly.
"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection," Howell
said with feigned patience. "There are strong religious convictions to
consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right
in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is
their whole life. You got to realize that."
"That's not enough. Not nearly enough."
"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.
Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take
it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?"
"But what do they do about it? Against it?"
"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When
the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment
and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The
charges, if any, come under general vice classification."
"I don't understand," Linton complained. "Why haven't I heard about it?"
"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read
an article in
Time
the other day that said 'death' was our dirty
word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going
to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The
opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'"
"I see," Linton said.
He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been
out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be
trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.
But the temptation was too strong.
"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?"
Howell looked away. "Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind
of people and if you're smart, you'll not either."
Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. "Damn you, Howell, you tell me!"
Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. "I take you out to dinner to
console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make
you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the
hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you
yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!"
Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as
the thick-set man and stalked out.
I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!
The doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. "Well,
well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances."
"Not really," Linton said modestly.
"Come, come," the doctor chided. "You started riots in two places,
attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very
disturbing."
"I was only trying to find out something," Linton maintained. "They
could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me."
The doctor clucked his tongue. "Let's not think any such thing. People
don't know more than you do."
Linton rubbed his shoulder. "That cop knew more about Judo holds than I
did."
"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me
ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?"
"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a
thing like that?"
"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You
can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person
at the right time."
Linton stared suspiciously. "Do you know where I can find a
resurrectionist?"
"I am a resurrectionist."
"But the policeman brought me to you!"
"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a
policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are
cynics."
Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really
looked at the doctor for the first time.
"Doctor, can you
really
resurrect the dead?"
"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!"
"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you," Linton said, "but tell me,
can you resurrect the
long
dead?"
"Size has nothing to do with it."
"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months."
"Months?" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. "It
could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only
one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest
of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a
degree of risk involved."
"Infallible risk, yes," Linton murmured. "Could you go to work right
away?"
"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you."
Linton grasped the situation immediately. "You mean you want money. You
realize I've just got out of an institution...."
"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics
addiction and more."
"What a wonderful professional career," Linton said, when he couldn't
care less.
"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke."
"Neither did I," Linton said hastily. "I invested in shifty stocks,
faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom."
"Then—"
"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I
would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life."
"All that's ended now," the doctor assured him. "Now we must go dig up
the corpse. The female corpse, eh?"
Resurrection Day!
"Doctor," Linton whispered, "my mind is singing with battalions of
choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you."
The doctor stroked his oily palms together. "Oh, but it does.
Beautifully."
The certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible
to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed
them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,
smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.
Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the
olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner
sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.
It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to
prepare himself.
Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her
body. "Darling!" she said.
"Greta!" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No
doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same
way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing
her ears the way she enjoyed.
Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.
She kissed his cheek. "It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a
celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends."
"Yes," he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. "But tell
me—how was it being
away
?"
The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his
Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.
"I can't remember," she said. "I can't really remember anything. Not
really. My memories are ghosts...."
"Now, now," Linton said, "we mustn't get excited. You've been through a
trial."
She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It
was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of
course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered
the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.
"I must see all our old friends," Greta persisted. "Helen and
Johnny...."
"My darling," he said gently, "about Johnny—"
Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. "Yes? What about Johnny?"
"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months
ago. He was killed."
"Killed?" Greta repeated blankly. "Johnny Gorman was killed?"
"Traffic accident. Killed instantly."
"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him
resurrected the same way you did me?"
"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You
have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer
have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny."
Greta turned her back to him. "It's just as well. You shouldn't bring
back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the
photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.
But you're
sure
you haven't the money to do it?"
"No," Linton said. "I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the
hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you
can resurrect me."
"Of course," Greta said. She sighed. "Poor Johnny. He was such a good
friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you."
"I have you," he said with great simplicity.
"Frank," she said, "you should see that place in there. There are
foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals
to quench death and smother decay. It's
perfect
."
"It sounds carnal," he said uneasily.
"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done."
Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on
something.
Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray
stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a
pedestal.
Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him
with it over her head.
Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.
Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.
Greta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She
writhed against him provocatively. "Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have
to have that insurance money. It's hell!"
Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that
money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles
green. No one must ever know.
Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face
in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and
acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.
He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.
Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and
those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in
institutional advertising.
He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering
wreckage.
Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat
in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like
pouring water on a wilted geranium.
Or—
Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for
if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the
old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?
But it didn't matter. Not a bit.
She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the
finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.
It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way
around.
"I've killed my wife!" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching
his hands out to something.
The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left
a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to
follow the camel in his turn.
He opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The
doctor looked down at him consolingly. "You'll have to go back, Mr.
Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your
wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again."
"Do you
really
think so, Doctor?" Linton asked hopefully. | Death, while tragic, should be permanent | Just because technology has the means to accomplish great feats does not mean it should cross certain lines | It is better to have all the details before making a life-changing and costly decision | The value of a human life cannot transfer once one is resurrected | 1 |
60995_B2JLL3Y9_2 | Why does Howell not want Linton to approach Snead in the restaurant? | FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES
By JIM HARMON
How much is the impossible worth?
Linton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency
of the restaurant water glass.
"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?" he heard himself say stupidly.
Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without
looking. "Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You
know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?"
Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What
were they trying to pull on him? "The man who isn't Snead is leaving,"
Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. "If that's
Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects."
"No," Howell said, "I wouldn't do that."
"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do."
"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks
like him."
"He's practically running," Linton said. "He almost ran out of the
restaurant."
"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean."
"Yes," Linton said.
A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back
intimately against Linton's own chair.
"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?" the
thick man said.
"Couldn't have been him, though," Linton answered automatically. "My
friend's dead."
The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw
paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded
out of the place quickly.
Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. "Now
you've probably got old Snead into trouble."
"Snead's dead," Linton said.
"Oh, well, 'dead,'" Howell replied.
"What do you say it like that for?" Linton demanded angrily. "The
man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein
Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing."
"You know how it is," Howell said.
Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,
or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on
the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he
sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had
let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had
known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about
death at all.
Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.
"I don't know, mind you," Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, "but
I suppose he might have been resurrected."
"Who by?" Linton asked, thinking:
God?
"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?"
"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to
life?" Linton said.
He knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that
some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died
in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so
patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to
the surface immediately.
"An invention? I guess that's how it is," Howell agreed. "I don't know
much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman."
"But it's wonderful," Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.
"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know
about it?"
"Sh-h," Howell said uneasily. "This is a public place."
"I don't understand," Linton said helplessly.
"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection," Howell
said with feigned patience. "There are strong religious convictions to
consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right
in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is
their whole life. You got to realize that."
"That's not enough. Not nearly enough."
"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.
Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take
it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?"
"But what do they do about it? Against it?"
"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When
the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment
and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The
charges, if any, come under general vice classification."
"I don't understand," Linton complained. "Why haven't I heard about it?"
"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read
an article in
Time
the other day that said 'death' was our dirty
word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going
to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The
opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'"
"I see," Linton said.
He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been
out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be
trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.
But the temptation was too strong.
"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?"
Howell looked away. "Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind
of people and if you're smart, you'll not either."
Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. "Damn you, Howell, you tell me!"
Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. "I take you out to dinner to
console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make
you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the
hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you
yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!"
Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as
the thick-set man and stalked out.
I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!
The doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. "Well,
well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances."
"Not really," Linton said modestly.
"Come, come," the doctor chided. "You started riots in two places,
attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very
disturbing."
"I was only trying to find out something," Linton maintained. "They
could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me."
The doctor clucked his tongue. "Let's not think any such thing. People
don't know more than you do."
Linton rubbed his shoulder. "That cop knew more about Judo holds than I
did."
"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me
ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?"
"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a
thing like that?"
"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You
can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person
at the right time."
Linton stared suspiciously. "Do you know where I can find a
resurrectionist?"
"I am a resurrectionist."
"But the policeman brought me to you!"
"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a
policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are
cynics."
Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really
looked at the doctor for the first time.
"Doctor, can you
really
resurrect the dead?"
"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!"
"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you," Linton said, "but tell me,
can you resurrect the
long
dead?"
"Size has nothing to do with it."
"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months."
"Months?" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. "It
could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only
one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest
of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a
degree of risk involved."
"Infallible risk, yes," Linton murmured. "Could you go to work right
away?"
"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you."
Linton grasped the situation immediately. "You mean you want money. You
realize I've just got out of an institution...."
"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics
addiction and more."
"What a wonderful professional career," Linton said, when he couldn't
care less.
"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke."
"Neither did I," Linton said hastily. "I invested in shifty stocks,
faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom."
"Then—"
"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I
would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life."
"All that's ended now," the doctor assured him. "Now we must go dig up
the corpse. The female corpse, eh?"
Resurrection Day!
"Doctor," Linton whispered, "my mind is singing with battalions of
choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you."
The doctor stroked his oily palms together. "Oh, but it does.
Beautifully."
The certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible
to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed
them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,
smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.
Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the
olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner
sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.
It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to
prepare himself.
Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her
body. "Darling!" she said.
"Greta!" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No
doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same
way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing
her ears the way she enjoyed.
Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.
She kissed his cheek. "It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a
celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends."
"Yes," he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. "But tell
me—how was it being
away
?"
The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his
Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.
"I can't remember," she said. "I can't really remember anything. Not
really. My memories are ghosts...."
"Now, now," Linton said, "we mustn't get excited. You've been through a
trial."
She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It
was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of
course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered
the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.
"I must see all our old friends," Greta persisted. "Helen and
Johnny...."
"My darling," he said gently, "about Johnny—"
Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. "Yes? What about Johnny?"
"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months
ago. He was killed."
"Killed?" Greta repeated blankly. "Johnny Gorman was killed?"
"Traffic accident. Killed instantly."
"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him
resurrected the same way you did me?"
"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You
have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer
have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny."
Greta turned her back to him. "It's just as well. You shouldn't bring
back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the
photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.
But you're
sure
you haven't the money to do it?"
"No," Linton said. "I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the
hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you
can resurrect me."
"Of course," Greta said. She sighed. "Poor Johnny. He was such a good
friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you."
"I have you," he said with great simplicity.
"Frank," she said, "you should see that place in there. There are
foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals
to quench death and smother decay. It's
perfect
."
"It sounds carnal," he said uneasily.
"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done."
Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on
something.
Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray
stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a
pedestal.
Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him
with it over her head.
Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.
Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.
Greta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She
writhed against him provocatively. "Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have
to have that insurance money. It's hell!"
Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that
money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles
green. No one must ever know.
Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face
in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and
acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.
He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.
Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and
those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in
institutional advertising.
He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering
wreckage.
Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat
in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like
pouring water on a wilted geranium.
Or—
Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for
if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the
old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?
But it didn't matter. Not a bit.
She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the
finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.
It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way
around.
"I've killed my wife!" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching
his hands out to something.
The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left
a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to
follow the camel in his turn.
He opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The
doctor looked down at him consolingly. "You'll have to go back, Mr.
Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your
wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again."
"Do you
really
think so, Doctor?" Linton asked hopefully. | Howell imagines that Snead has likely been resurrected and will try to go after Linton | Howell knows that Linton has been resurrected and does not want him to be embarrassed if Linton commits a social faux pas | Howell does not want Linton to learn about resurrection after what he did to become institutionalized | Howell knows that Linton attempted to murder Snead before he suffered from a nervous breakdown | 2 |
60995_B2JLL3Y9_3 | Howell offers all of the following reasons why resurrection is problematic EXCEPT: | FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES
By JIM HARMON
How much is the impossible worth?
Linton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency
of the restaurant water glass.
"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?" he heard himself say stupidly.
Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without
looking. "Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You
know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?"
Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What
were they trying to pull on him? "The man who isn't Snead is leaving,"
Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. "If that's
Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects."
"No," Howell said, "I wouldn't do that."
"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do."
"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks
like him."
"He's practically running," Linton said. "He almost ran out of the
restaurant."
"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean."
"Yes," Linton said.
A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back
intimately against Linton's own chair.
"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?" the
thick man said.
"Couldn't have been him, though," Linton answered automatically. "My
friend's dead."
The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw
paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded
out of the place quickly.
Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. "Now
you've probably got old Snead into trouble."
"Snead's dead," Linton said.
"Oh, well, 'dead,'" Howell replied.
"What do you say it like that for?" Linton demanded angrily. "The
man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein
Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing."
"You know how it is," Howell said.
Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,
or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on
the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he
sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had
let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had
known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about
death at all.
Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.
"I don't know, mind you," Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, "but
I suppose he might have been resurrected."
"Who by?" Linton asked, thinking:
God?
"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?"
"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to
life?" Linton said.
He knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that
some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died
in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so
patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to
the surface immediately.
"An invention? I guess that's how it is," Howell agreed. "I don't know
much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman."
"But it's wonderful," Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.
"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know
about it?"
"Sh-h," Howell said uneasily. "This is a public place."
"I don't understand," Linton said helplessly.
"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection," Howell
said with feigned patience. "There are strong religious convictions to
consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right
in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is
their whole life. You got to realize that."
"That's not enough. Not nearly enough."
"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.
Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take
it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?"
"But what do they do about it? Against it?"
"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When
the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment
and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The
charges, if any, come under general vice classification."
"I don't understand," Linton complained. "Why haven't I heard about it?"
"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read
an article in
Time
the other day that said 'death' was our dirty
word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going
to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The
opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'"
"I see," Linton said.
He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been
out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be
trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.
But the temptation was too strong.
"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?"
Howell looked away. "Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind
of people and if you're smart, you'll not either."
Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. "Damn you, Howell, you tell me!"
Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. "I take you out to dinner to
console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make
you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the
hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you
yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!"
Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as
the thick-set man and stalked out.
I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!
The doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. "Well,
well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances."
"Not really," Linton said modestly.
"Come, come," the doctor chided. "You started riots in two places,
attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very
disturbing."
"I was only trying to find out something," Linton maintained. "They
could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me."
The doctor clucked his tongue. "Let's not think any such thing. People
don't know more than you do."
Linton rubbed his shoulder. "That cop knew more about Judo holds than I
did."
"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me
ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?"
"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a
thing like that?"
"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You
can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person
at the right time."
Linton stared suspiciously. "Do you know where I can find a
resurrectionist?"
"I am a resurrectionist."
"But the policeman brought me to you!"
"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a
policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are
cynics."
Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really
looked at the doctor for the first time.
"Doctor, can you
really
resurrect the dead?"
"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!"
"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you," Linton said, "but tell me,
can you resurrect the
long
dead?"
"Size has nothing to do with it."
"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months."
"Months?" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. "It
could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only
one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest
of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a
degree of risk involved."
"Infallible risk, yes," Linton murmured. "Could you go to work right
away?"
"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you."
Linton grasped the situation immediately. "You mean you want money. You
realize I've just got out of an institution...."
"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics
addiction and more."
"What a wonderful professional career," Linton said, when he couldn't
care less.
"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke."
"Neither did I," Linton said hastily. "I invested in shifty stocks,
faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom."
"Then—"
"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I
would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life."
"All that's ended now," the doctor assured him. "Now we must go dig up
the corpse. The female corpse, eh?"
Resurrection Day!
"Doctor," Linton whispered, "my mind is singing with battalions of
choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you."
The doctor stroked his oily palms together. "Oh, but it does.
Beautifully."
The certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible
to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed
them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,
smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.
Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the
olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner
sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.
It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to
prepare himself.
Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her
body. "Darling!" she said.
"Greta!" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No
doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same
way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing
her ears the way she enjoyed.
Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.
She kissed his cheek. "It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a
celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends."
"Yes," he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. "But tell
me—how was it being
away
?"
The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his
Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.
"I can't remember," she said. "I can't really remember anything. Not
really. My memories are ghosts...."
"Now, now," Linton said, "we mustn't get excited. You've been through a
trial."
She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It
was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of
course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered
the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.
"I must see all our old friends," Greta persisted. "Helen and
Johnny...."
"My darling," he said gently, "about Johnny—"
Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. "Yes? What about Johnny?"
"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months
ago. He was killed."
"Killed?" Greta repeated blankly. "Johnny Gorman was killed?"
"Traffic accident. Killed instantly."
"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him
resurrected the same way you did me?"
"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You
have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer
have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny."
Greta turned her back to him. "It's just as well. You shouldn't bring
back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the
photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.
But you're
sure
you haven't the money to do it?"
"No," Linton said. "I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the
hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you
can resurrect me."
"Of course," Greta said. She sighed. "Poor Johnny. He was such a good
friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you."
"I have you," he said with great simplicity.
"Frank," she said, "you should see that place in there. There are
foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals
to quench death and smother decay. It's
perfect
."
"It sounds carnal," he said uneasily.
"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done."
Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on
something.
Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray
stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a
pedestal.
Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him
with it over her head.
Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.
Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.
Greta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She
writhed against him provocatively. "Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have
to have that insurance money. It's hell!"
Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that
money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles
green. No one must ever know.
Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face
in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and
acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.
He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.
Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and
those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in
institutional advertising.
He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering
wreckage.
Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat
in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like
pouring water on a wilted geranium.
Or—
Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for
if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the
old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?
But it didn't matter. Not a bit.
She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the
finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.
It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way
around.
"I've killed my wife!" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching
his hands out to something.
The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left
a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to
follow the camel in his turn.
He opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The
doctor looked down at him consolingly. "You'll have to go back, Mr.
Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your
wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again."
"Do you
really
think so, Doctor?" Linton asked hopefully. | It is illegal | It conflicts with many people's religious beliefs | It compromises the death industry | It is extremely costly | 3 |
60995_B2JLL3Y9_4 | According to Howell, all of the following issues might arise from resurrecting people EXCEPT for? | FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES
By JIM HARMON
How much is the impossible worth?
Linton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency
of the restaurant water glass.
"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?" he heard himself say stupidly.
Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without
looking. "Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You
know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?"
Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What
were they trying to pull on him? "The man who isn't Snead is leaving,"
Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. "If that's
Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects."
"No," Howell said, "I wouldn't do that."
"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do."
"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks
like him."
"He's practically running," Linton said. "He almost ran out of the
restaurant."
"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean."
"Yes," Linton said.
A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back
intimately against Linton's own chair.
"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?" the
thick man said.
"Couldn't have been him, though," Linton answered automatically. "My
friend's dead."
The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw
paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded
out of the place quickly.
Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. "Now
you've probably got old Snead into trouble."
"Snead's dead," Linton said.
"Oh, well, 'dead,'" Howell replied.
"What do you say it like that for?" Linton demanded angrily. "The
man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein
Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing."
"You know how it is," Howell said.
Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,
or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on
the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he
sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had
let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had
known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about
death at all.
Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.
"I don't know, mind you," Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, "but
I suppose he might have been resurrected."
"Who by?" Linton asked, thinking:
God?
"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?"
"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to
life?" Linton said.
He knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that
some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died
in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so
patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to
the surface immediately.
"An invention? I guess that's how it is," Howell agreed. "I don't know
much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman."
"But it's wonderful," Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.
"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know
about it?"
"Sh-h," Howell said uneasily. "This is a public place."
"I don't understand," Linton said helplessly.
"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection," Howell
said with feigned patience. "There are strong religious convictions to
consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right
in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is
their whole life. You got to realize that."
"That's not enough. Not nearly enough."
"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.
Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take
it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?"
"But what do they do about it? Against it?"
"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When
the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment
and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The
charges, if any, come under general vice classification."
"I don't understand," Linton complained. "Why haven't I heard about it?"
"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read
an article in
Time
the other day that said 'death' was our dirty
word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going
to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The
opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'"
"I see," Linton said.
He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been
out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be
trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.
But the temptation was too strong.
"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?"
Howell looked away. "Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind
of people and if you're smart, you'll not either."
Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. "Damn you, Howell, you tell me!"
Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. "I take you out to dinner to
console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make
you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the
hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you
yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!"
Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as
the thick-set man and stalked out.
I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!
The doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. "Well,
well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances."
"Not really," Linton said modestly.
"Come, come," the doctor chided. "You started riots in two places,
attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very
disturbing."
"I was only trying to find out something," Linton maintained. "They
could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me."
The doctor clucked his tongue. "Let's not think any such thing. People
don't know more than you do."
Linton rubbed his shoulder. "That cop knew more about Judo holds than I
did."
"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me
ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?"
"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a
thing like that?"
"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You
can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person
at the right time."
Linton stared suspiciously. "Do you know where I can find a
resurrectionist?"
"I am a resurrectionist."
"But the policeman brought me to you!"
"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a
policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are
cynics."
Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really
looked at the doctor for the first time.
"Doctor, can you
really
resurrect the dead?"
"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!"
"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you," Linton said, "but tell me,
can you resurrect the
long
dead?"
"Size has nothing to do with it."
"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months."
"Months?" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. "It
could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only
one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest
of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a
degree of risk involved."
"Infallible risk, yes," Linton murmured. "Could you go to work right
away?"
"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you."
Linton grasped the situation immediately. "You mean you want money. You
realize I've just got out of an institution...."
"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics
addiction and more."
"What a wonderful professional career," Linton said, when he couldn't
care less.
"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke."
"Neither did I," Linton said hastily. "I invested in shifty stocks,
faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom."
"Then—"
"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I
would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life."
"All that's ended now," the doctor assured him. "Now we must go dig up
the corpse. The female corpse, eh?"
Resurrection Day!
"Doctor," Linton whispered, "my mind is singing with battalions of
choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you."
The doctor stroked his oily palms together. "Oh, but it does.
Beautifully."
The certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible
to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed
them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,
smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.
Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the
olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner
sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.
It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to
prepare himself.
Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her
body. "Darling!" she said.
"Greta!" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No
doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same
way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing
her ears the way she enjoyed.
Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.
She kissed his cheek. "It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a
celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends."
"Yes," he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. "But tell
me—how was it being
away
?"
The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his
Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.
"I can't remember," she said. "I can't really remember anything. Not
really. My memories are ghosts...."
"Now, now," Linton said, "we mustn't get excited. You've been through a
trial."
She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It
was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of
course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered
the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.
"I must see all our old friends," Greta persisted. "Helen and
Johnny...."
"My darling," he said gently, "about Johnny—"
Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. "Yes? What about Johnny?"
"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months
ago. He was killed."
"Killed?" Greta repeated blankly. "Johnny Gorman was killed?"
"Traffic accident. Killed instantly."
"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him
resurrected the same way you did me?"
"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You
have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer
have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny."
Greta turned her back to him. "It's just as well. You shouldn't bring
back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the
photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.
But you're
sure
you haven't the money to do it?"
"No," Linton said. "I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the
hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you
can resurrect me."
"Of course," Greta said. She sighed. "Poor Johnny. He was such a good
friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you."
"I have you," he said with great simplicity.
"Frank," she said, "you should see that place in there. There are
foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals
to quench death and smother decay. It's
perfect
."
"It sounds carnal," he said uneasily.
"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done."
Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on
something.
Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray
stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a
pedestal.
Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him
with it over her head.
Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.
Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.
Greta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She
writhed against him provocatively. "Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have
to have that insurance money. It's hell!"
Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that
money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles
green. No one must ever know.
Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face
in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and
acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.
He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.
Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and
those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in
institutional advertising.
He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering
wreckage.
Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat
in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like
pouring water on a wilted geranium.
Or—
Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for
if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the
old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?
But it didn't matter. Not a bit.
She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the
finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.
It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way
around.
"I've killed my wife!" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching
his hands out to something.
The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left
a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to
follow the camel in his turn.
He opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The
doctor looked down at him consolingly. "You'll have to go back, Mr.
Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your
wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again."
"Do you
really
think so, Doctor?" Linton asked hopefully. | overpopulation | unskilled practitioners | insurance fraud | android takeover | 3 |
60995_B2JLL3Y9_5 | Why did Linton spend time in an asylum? | FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES
By JIM HARMON
How much is the impossible worth?
Linton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency
of the restaurant water glass.
"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?" he heard himself say stupidly.
Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without
looking. "Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You
know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?"
Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What
were they trying to pull on him? "The man who isn't Snead is leaving,"
Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. "If that's
Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects."
"No," Howell said, "I wouldn't do that."
"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do."
"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks
like him."
"He's practically running," Linton said. "He almost ran out of the
restaurant."
"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean."
"Yes," Linton said.
A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back
intimately against Linton's own chair.
"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?" the
thick man said.
"Couldn't have been him, though," Linton answered automatically. "My
friend's dead."
The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw
paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded
out of the place quickly.
Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. "Now
you've probably got old Snead into trouble."
"Snead's dead," Linton said.
"Oh, well, 'dead,'" Howell replied.
"What do you say it like that for?" Linton demanded angrily. "The
man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein
Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing."
"You know how it is," Howell said.
Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,
or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on
the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he
sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had
let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had
known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about
death at all.
Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.
"I don't know, mind you," Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, "but
I suppose he might have been resurrected."
"Who by?" Linton asked, thinking:
God?
"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?"
"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to
life?" Linton said.
He knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that
some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died
in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so
patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to
the surface immediately.
"An invention? I guess that's how it is," Howell agreed. "I don't know
much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman."
"But it's wonderful," Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.
"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know
about it?"
"Sh-h," Howell said uneasily. "This is a public place."
"I don't understand," Linton said helplessly.
"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection," Howell
said with feigned patience. "There are strong religious convictions to
consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right
in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is
their whole life. You got to realize that."
"That's not enough. Not nearly enough."
"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.
Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take
it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?"
"But what do they do about it? Against it?"
"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When
the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment
and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The
charges, if any, come under general vice classification."
"I don't understand," Linton complained. "Why haven't I heard about it?"
"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read
an article in
Time
the other day that said 'death' was our dirty
word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going
to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The
opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'"
"I see," Linton said.
He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been
out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be
trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.
But the temptation was too strong.
"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?"
Howell looked away. "Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind
of people and if you're smart, you'll not either."
Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. "Damn you, Howell, you tell me!"
Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. "I take you out to dinner to
console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make
you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the
hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you
yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!"
Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as
the thick-set man and stalked out.
I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!
The doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. "Well,
well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances."
"Not really," Linton said modestly.
"Come, come," the doctor chided. "You started riots in two places,
attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very
disturbing."
"I was only trying to find out something," Linton maintained. "They
could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me."
The doctor clucked his tongue. "Let's not think any such thing. People
don't know more than you do."
Linton rubbed his shoulder. "That cop knew more about Judo holds than I
did."
"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me
ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?"
"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a
thing like that?"
"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You
can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person
at the right time."
Linton stared suspiciously. "Do you know where I can find a
resurrectionist?"
"I am a resurrectionist."
"But the policeman brought me to you!"
"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a
policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are
cynics."
Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really
looked at the doctor for the first time.
"Doctor, can you
really
resurrect the dead?"
"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!"
"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you," Linton said, "but tell me,
can you resurrect the
long
dead?"
"Size has nothing to do with it."
"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months."
"Months?" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. "It
could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only
one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest
of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a
degree of risk involved."
"Infallible risk, yes," Linton murmured. "Could you go to work right
away?"
"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you."
Linton grasped the situation immediately. "You mean you want money. You
realize I've just got out of an institution...."
"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics
addiction and more."
"What a wonderful professional career," Linton said, when he couldn't
care less.
"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke."
"Neither did I," Linton said hastily. "I invested in shifty stocks,
faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom."
"Then—"
"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I
would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life."
"All that's ended now," the doctor assured him. "Now we must go dig up
the corpse. The female corpse, eh?"
Resurrection Day!
"Doctor," Linton whispered, "my mind is singing with battalions of
choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you."
The doctor stroked his oily palms together. "Oh, but it does.
Beautifully."
The certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible
to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed
them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,
smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.
Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the
olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner
sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.
It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to
prepare himself.
Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her
body. "Darling!" she said.
"Greta!" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No
doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same
way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing
her ears the way she enjoyed.
Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.
She kissed his cheek. "It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a
celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends."
"Yes," he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. "But tell
me—how was it being
away
?"
The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his
Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.
"I can't remember," she said. "I can't really remember anything. Not
really. My memories are ghosts...."
"Now, now," Linton said, "we mustn't get excited. You've been through a
trial."
She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It
was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of
course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered
the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.
"I must see all our old friends," Greta persisted. "Helen and
Johnny...."
"My darling," he said gently, "about Johnny—"
Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. "Yes? What about Johnny?"
"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months
ago. He was killed."
"Killed?" Greta repeated blankly. "Johnny Gorman was killed?"
"Traffic accident. Killed instantly."
"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him
resurrected the same way you did me?"
"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You
have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer
have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny."
Greta turned her back to him. "It's just as well. You shouldn't bring
back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the
photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.
But you're
sure
you haven't the money to do it?"
"No," Linton said. "I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the
hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you
can resurrect me."
"Of course," Greta said. She sighed. "Poor Johnny. He was such a good
friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you."
"I have you," he said with great simplicity.
"Frank," she said, "you should see that place in there. There are
foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals
to quench death and smother decay. It's
perfect
."
"It sounds carnal," he said uneasily.
"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done."
Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on
something.
Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray
stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a
pedestal.
Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him
with it over her head.
Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.
Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.
Greta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She
writhed against him provocatively. "Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have
to have that insurance money. It's hell!"
Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that
money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles
green. No one must ever know.
Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face
in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and
acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.
He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.
Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and
those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in
institutional advertising.
He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering
wreckage.
Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat
in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like
pouring water on a wilted geranium.
Or—
Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for
if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the
old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?
But it didn't matter. Not a bit.
She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the
finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.
It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way
around.
"I've killed my wife!" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching
his hands out to something.
The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left
a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to
follow the camel in his turn.
He opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The
doctor looked down at him consolingly. "You'll have to go back, Mr.
Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your
wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again."
"Do you
really
think so, Doctor?" Linton asked hopefully. | he invested in bad stocks | he committed murder | suffers from delusions and hallucinations | his wife died from cancer | 1 |
60995_B2JLL3Y9_6 | Which of the following risks are explicitly associated with bringing someone back to life? | FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES
By JIM HARMON
How much is the impossible worth?
Linton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency
of the restaurant water glass.
"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?" he heard himself say stupidly.
Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without
looking. "Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You
know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?"
Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What
were they trying to pull on him? "The man who isn't Snead is leaving,"
Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. "If that's
Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects."
"No," Howell said, "I wouldn't do that."
"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do."
"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks
like him."
"He's practically running," Linton said. "He almost ran out of the
restaurant."
"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean."
"Yes," Linton said.
A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back
intimately against Linton's own chair.
"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?" the
thick man said.
"Couldn't have been him, though," Linton answered automatically. "My
friend's dead."
The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw
paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded
out of the place quickly.
Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. "Now
you've probably got old Snead into trouble."
"Snead's dead," Linton said.
"Oh, well, 'dead,'" Howell replied.
"What do you say it like that for?" Linton demanded angrily. "The
man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein
Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing."
"You know how it is," Howell said.
Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,
or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on
the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he
sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had
let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had
known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about
death at all.
Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.
"I don't know, mind you," Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, "but
I suppose he might have been resurrected."
"Who by?" Linton asked, thinking:
God?
"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?"
"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to
life?" Linton said.
He knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that
some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died
in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so
patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to
the surface immediately.
"An invention? I guess that's how it is," Howell agreed. "I don't know
much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman."
"But it's wonderful," Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.
"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know
about it?"
"Sh-h," Howell said uneasily. "This is a public place."
"I don't understand," Linton said helplessly.
"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection," Howell
said with feigned patience. "There are strong religious convictions to
consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right
in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is
their whole life. You got to realize that."
"That's not enough. Not nearly enough."
"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.
Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take
it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?"
"But what do they do about it? Against it?"
"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When
the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment
and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The
charges, if any, come under general vice classification."
"I don't understand," Linton complained. "Why haven't I heard about it?"
"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read
an article in
Time
the other day that said 'death' was our dirty
word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going
to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The
opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'"
"I see," Linton said.
He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been
out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be
trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.
But the temptation was too strong.
"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?"
Howell looked away. "Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind
of people and if you're smart, you'll not either."
Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. "Damn you, Howell, you tell me!"
Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. "I take you out to dinner to
console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make
you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the
hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you
yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!"
Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as
the thick-set man and stalked out.
I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!
The doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. "Well,
well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances."
"Not really," Linton said modestly.
"Come, come," the doctor chided. "You started riots in two places,
attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very
disturbing."
"I was only trying to find out something," Linton maintained. "They
could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me."
The doctor clucked his tongue. "Let's not think any such thing. People
don't know more than you do."
Linton rubbed his shoulder. "That cop knew more about Judo holds than I
did."
"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me
ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?"
"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a
thing like that?"
"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You
can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person
at the right time."
Linton stared suspiciously. "Do you know where I can find a
resurrectionist?"
"I am a resurrectionist."
"But the policeman brought me to you!"
"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a
policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are
cynics."
Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really
looked at the doctor for the first time.
"Doctor, can you
really
resurrect the dead?"
"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!"
"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you," Linton said, "but tell me,
can you resurrect the
long
dead?"
"Size has nothing to do with it."
"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months."
"Months?" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. "It
could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only
one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest
of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a
degree of risk involved."
"Infallible risk, yes," Linton murmured. "Could you go to work right
away?"
"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you."
Linton grasped the situation immediately. "You mean you want money. You
realize I've just got out of an institution...."
"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics
addiction and more."
"What a wonderful professional career," Linton said, when he couldn't
care less.
"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke."
"Neither did I," Linton said hastily. "I invested in shifty stocks,
faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom."
"Then—"
"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I
would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life."
"All that's ended now," the doctor assured him. "Now we must go dig up
the corpse. The female corpse, eh?"
Resurrection Day!
"Doctor," Linton whispered, "my mind is singing with battalions of
choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you."
The doctor stroked his oily palms together. "Oh, but it does.
Beautifully."
The certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible
to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed
them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,
smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.
Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the
olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner
sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.
It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to
prepare himself.
Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her
body. "Darling!" she said.
"Greta!" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No
doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same
way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing
her ears the way she enjoyed.
Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.
She kissed his cheek. "It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a
celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends."
"Yes," he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. "But tell
me—how was it being
away
?"
The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his
Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.
"I can't remember," she said. "I can't really remember anything. Not
really. My memories are ghosts...."
"Now, now," Linton said, "we mustn't get excited. You've been through a
trial."
She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It
was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of
course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered
the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.
"I must see all our old friends," Greta persisted. "Helen and
Johnny...."
"My darling," he said gently, "about Johnny—"
Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. "Yes? What about Johnny?"
"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months
ago. He was killed."
"Killed?" Greta repeated blankly. "Johnny Gorman was killed?"
"Traffic accident. Killed instantly."
"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him
resurrected the same way you did me?"
"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You
have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer
have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny."
Greta turned her back to him. "It's just as well. You shouldn't bring
back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the
photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.
But you're
sure
you haven't the money to do it?"
"No," Linton said. "I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the
hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you
can resurrect me."
"Of course," Greta said. She sighed. "Poor Johnny. He was such a good
friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you."
"I have you," he said with great simplicity.
"Frank," she said, "you should see that place in there. There are
foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals
to quench death and smother decay. It's
perfect
."
"It sounds carnal," he said uneasily.
"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done."
Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on
something.
Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray
stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a
pedestal.
Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him
with it over her head.
Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.
Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.
Greta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She
writhed against him provocatively. "Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have
to have that insurance money. It's hell!"
Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that
money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles
green. No one must ever know.
Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face
in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and
acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.
He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.
Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and
those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in
institutional advertising.
He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering
wreckage.
Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat
in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like
pouring water on a wilted geranium.
Or—
Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for
if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the
old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?
But it didn't matter. Not a bit.
She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the
finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.
It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way
around.
"I've killed my wife!" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching
his hands out to something.
The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left
a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to
follow the camel in his turn.
He opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The
doctor looked down at him consolingly. "You'll have to go back, Mr.
Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your
wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again."
"Do you
really
think so, Doctor?" Linton asked hopefully. | They may desire to seek revenge on the person who killed them | They may not recognize the person who resurrected them | The person who received their insurance settlement will have to return it | They may suffer from cell deterioration | 0 |
60995_B2JLL3Y9_7 | Why does Linton murder Greta after just resurrecting her? | FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES
By JIM HARMON
How much is the impossible worth?
Linton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency
of the restaurant water glass.
"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?" he heard himself say stupidly.
Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without
looking. "Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You
know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?"
Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What
were they trying to pull on him? "The man who isn't Snead is leaving,"
Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. "If that's
Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects."
"No," Howell said, "I wouldn't do that."
"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do."
"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks
like him."
"He's practically running," Linton said. "He almost ran out of the
restaurant."
"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean."
"Yes," Linton said.
A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back
intimately against Linton's own chair.
"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?" the
thick man said.
"Couldn't have been him, though," Linton answered automatically. "My
friend's dead."
The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw
paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded
out of the place quickly.
Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. "Now
you've probably got old Snead into trouble."
"Snead's dead," Linton said.
"Oh, well, 'dead,'" Howell replied.
"What do you say it like that for?" Linton demanded angrily. "The
man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein
Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing."
"You know how it is," Howell said.
Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,
or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on
the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he
sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had
let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had
known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about
death at all.
Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.
"I don't know, mind you," Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, "but
I suppose he might have been resurrected."
"Who by?" Linton asked, thinking:
God?
"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?"
"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to
life?" Linton said.
He knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that
some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died
in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so
patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to
the surface immediately.
"An invention? I guess that's how it is," Howell agreed. "I don't know
much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman."
"But it's wonderful," Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.
"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know
about it?"
"Sh-h," Howell said uneasily. "This is a public place."
"I don't understand," Linton said helplessly.
"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection," Howell
said with feigned patience. "There are strong religious convictions to
consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right
in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is
their whole life. You got to realize that."
"That's not enough. Not nearly enough."
"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.
Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take
it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?"
"But what do they do about it? Against it?"
"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When
the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment
and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The
charges, if any, come under general vice classification."
"I don't understand," Linton complained. "Why haven't I heard about it?"
"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read
an article in
Time
the other day that said 'death' was our dirty
word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going
to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The
opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'"
"I see," Linton said.
He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been
out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be
trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.
But the temptation was too strong.
"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?"
Howell looked away. "Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind
of people and if you're smart, you'll not either."
Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. "Damn you, Howell, you tell me!"
Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. "I take you out to dinner to
console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make
you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the
hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you
yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!"
Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as
the thick-set man and stalked out.
I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!
The doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. "Well,
well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances."
"Not really," Linton said modestly.
"Come, come," the doctor chided. "You started riots in two places,
attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very
disturbing."
"I was only trying to find out something," Linton maintained. "They
could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me."
The doctor clucked his tongue. "Let's not think any such thing. People
don't know more than you do."
Linton rubbed his shoulder. "That cop knew more about Judo holds than I
did."
"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me
ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?"
"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a
thing like that?"
"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You
can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person
at the right time."
Linton stared suspiciously. "Do you know where I can find a
resurrectionist?"
"I am a resurrectionist."
"But the policeman brought me to you!"
"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a
policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are
cynics."
Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really
looked at the doctor for the first time.
"Doctor, can you
really
resurrect the dead?"
"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!"
"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you," Linton said, "but tell me,
can you resurrect the
long
dead?"
"Size has nothing to do with it."
"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months."
"Months?" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. "It
could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only
one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest
of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a
degree of risk involved."
"Infallible risk, yes," Linton murmured. "Could you go to work right
away?"
"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you."
Linton grasped the situation immediately. "You mean you want money. You
realize I've just got out of an institution...."
"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics
addiction and more."
"What a wonderful professional career," Linton said, when he couldn't
care less.
"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke."
"Neither did I," Linton said hastily. "I invested in shifty stocks,
faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom."
"Then—"
"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I
would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life."
"All that's ended now," the doctor assured him. "Now we must go dig up
the corpse. The female corpse, eh?"
Resurrection Day!
"Doctor," Linton whispered, "my mind is singing with battalions of
choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you."
The doctor stroked his oily palms together. "Oh, but it does.
Beautifully."
The certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible
to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed
them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,
smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.
Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the
olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner
sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.
It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to
prepare himself.
Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her
body. "Darling!" she said.
"Greta!" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No
doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same
way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing
her ears the way she enjoyed.
Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.
She kissed his cheek. "It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a
celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends."
"Yes," he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. "But tell
me—how was it being
away
?"
The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his
Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.
"I can't remember," she said. "I can't really remember anything. Not
really. My memories are ghosts...."
"Now, now," Linton said, "we mustn't get excited. You've been through a
trial."
She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It
was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of
course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered
the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.
"I must see all our old friends," Greta persisted. "Helen and
Johnny...."
"My darling," he said gently, "about Johnny—"
Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. "Yes? What about Johnny?"
"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months
ago. He was killed."
"Killed?" Greta repeated blankly. "Johnny Gorman was killed?"
"Traffic accident. Killed instantly."
"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him
resurrected the same way you did me?"
"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You
have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer
have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny."
Greta turned her back to him. "It's just as well. You shouldn't bring
back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the
photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.
But you're
sure
you haven't the money to do it?"
"No," Linton said. "I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the
hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you
can resurrect me."
"Of course," Greta said. She sighed. "Poor Johnny. He was such a good
friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you."
"I have you," he said with great simplicity.
"Frank," she said, "you should see that place in there. There are
foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals
to quench death and smother decay. It's
perfect
."
"It sounds carnal," he said uneasily.
"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done."
Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on
something.
Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray
stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a
pedestal.
Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him
with it over her head.
Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.
Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.
Greta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She
writhed against him provocatively. "Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have
to have that insurance money. It's hell!"
Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that
money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles
green. No one must ever know.
Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face
in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and
acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.
He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.
Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and
those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in
institutional advertising.
He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering
wreckage.
Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat
in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like
pouring water on a wilted geranium.
Or—
Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for
if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the
old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?
But it didn't matter. Not a bit.
She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the
finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.
It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way
around.
"I've killed my wife!" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching
his hands out to something.
The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left
a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to
follow the camel in his turn.
He opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The
doctor looked down at him consolingly. "You'll have to go back, Mr.
Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your
wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again."
"Do you
really
think so, Doctor?" Linton asked hopefully. | Greta wants him to relieve her of her suffering | He desires the rest of her insurance money | He realized he resurrected the wrong person | Greta attempted to kill him | 3 |
60995_B2JLL3Y9_8 | What will likely happen after Mr. Linton killed Greta? | FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES
By JIM HARMON
How much is the impossible worth?
Linton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency
of the restaurant water glass.
"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?" he heard himself say stupidly.
Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without
looking. "Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You
know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?"
Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What
were they trying to pull on him? "The man who isn't Snead is leaving,"
Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. "If that's
Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects."
"No," Howell said, "I wouldn't do that."
"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do."
"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks
like him."
"He's practically running," Linton said. "He almost ran out of the
restaurant."
"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean."
"Yes," Linton said.
A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back
intimately against Linton's own chair.
"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?" the
thick man said.
"Couldn't have been him, though," Linton answered automatically. "My
friend's dead."
The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw
paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded
out of the place quickly.
Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. "Now
you've probably got old Snead into trouble."
"Snead's dead," Linton said.
"Oh, well, 'dead,'" Howell replied.
"What do you say it like that for?" Linton demanded angrily. "The
man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein
Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing."
"You know how it is," Howell said.
Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,
or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on
the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he
sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had
let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had
known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about
death at all.
Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.
"I don't know, mind you," Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, "but
I suppose he might have been resurrected."
"Who by?" Linton asked, thinking:
God?
"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?"
"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to
life?" Linton said.
He knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that
some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died
in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so
patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to
the surface immediately.
"An invention? I guess that's how it is," Howell agreed. "I don't know
much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman."
"But it's wonderful," Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.
"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know
about it?"
"Sh-h," Howell said uneasily. "This is a public place."
"I don't understand," Linton said helplessly.
"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection," Howell
said with feigned patience. "There are strong religious convictions to
consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right
in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is
their whole life. You got to realize that."
"That's not enough. Not nearly enough."
"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.
Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take
it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?"
"But what do they do about it? Against it?"
"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When
the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment
and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The
charges, if any, come under general vice classification."
"I don't understand," Linton complained. "Why haven't I heard about it?"
"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read
an article in
Time
the other day that said 'death' was our dirty
word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going
to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The
opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'"
"I see," Linton said.
He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been
out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be
trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.
But the temptation was too strong.
"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?"
Howell looked away. "Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind
of people and if you're smart, you'll not either."
Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. "Damn you, Howell, you tell me!"
Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. "I take you out to dinner to
console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make
you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the
hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you
yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!"
Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as
the thick-set man and stalked out.
I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!
The doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. "Well,
well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances."
"Not really," Linton said modestly.
"Come, come," the doctor chided. "You started riots in two places,
attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very
disturbing."
"I was only trying to find out something," Linton maintained. "They
could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me."
The doctor clucked his tongue. "Let's not think any such thing. People
don't know more than you do."
Linton rubbed his shoulder. "That cop knew more about Judo holds than I
did."
"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me
ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?"
"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a
thing like that?"
"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You
can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person
at the right time."
Linton stared suspiciously. "Do you know where I can find a
resurrectionist?"
"I am a resurrectionist."
"But the policeman brought me to you!"
"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a
policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are
cynics."
Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really
looked at the doctor for the first time.
"Doctor, can you
really
resurrect the dead?"
"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!"
"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you," Linton said, "but tell me,
can you resurrect the
long
dead?"
"Size has nothing to do with it."
"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months."
"Months?" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. "It
could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only
one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest
of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a
degree of risk involved."
"Infallible risk, yes," Linton murmured. "Could you go to work right
away?"
"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you."
Linton grasped the situation immediately. "You mean you want money. You
realize I've just got out of an institution...."
"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics
addiction and more."
"What a wonderful professional career," Linton said, when he couldn't
care less.
"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke."
"Neither did I," Linton said hastily. "I invested in shifty stocks,
faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom."
"Then—"
"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I
would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life."
"All that's ended now," the doctor assured him. "Now we must go dig up
the corpse. The female corpse, eh?"
Resurrection Day!
"Doctor," Linton whispered, "my mind is singing with battalions of
choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you."
The doctor stroked his oily palms together. "Oh, but it does.
Beautifully."
The certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible
to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed
them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,
smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.
Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the
olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner
sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.
It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to
prepare himself.
Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her
body. "Darling!" she said.
"Greta!" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No
doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same
way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing
her ears the way she enjoyed.
Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.
She kissed his cheek. "It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a
celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends."
"Yes," he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. "But tell
me—how was it being
away
?"
The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his
Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.
"I can't remember," she said. "I can't really remember anything. Not
really. My memories are ghosts...."
"Now, now," Linton said, "we mustn't get excited. You've been through a
trial."
She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It
was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of
course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered
the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.
"I must see all our old friends," Greta persisted. "Helen and
Johnny...."
"My darling," he said gently, "about Johnny—"
Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. "Yes? What about Johnny?"
"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months
ago. He was killed."
"Killed?" Greta repeated blankly. "Johnny Gorman was killed?"
"Traffic accident. Killed instantly."
"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him
resurrected the same way you did me?"
"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You
have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer
have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny."
Greta turned her back to him. "It's just as well. You shouldn't bring
back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the
photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.
But you're
sure
you haven't the money to do it?"
"No," Linton said. "I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the
hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you
can resurrect me."
"Of course," Greta said. She sighed. "Poor Johnny. He was such a good
friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you."
"I have you," he said with great simplicity.
"Frank," she said, "you should see that place in there. There are
foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals
to quench death and smother decay. It's
perfect
."
"It sounds carnal," he said uneasily.
"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done."
Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on
something.
Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray
stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a
pedestal.
Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him
with it over her head.
Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.
Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.
Greta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She
writhed against him provocatively. "Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have
to have that insurance money. It's hell!"
Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that
money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles
green. No one must ever know.
Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face
in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and
acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.
He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.
Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and
those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in
institutional advertising.
He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering
wreckage.
Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat
in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like
pouring water on a wilted geranium.
Or—
Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for
if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the
old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?
But it didn't matter. Not a bit.
She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the
finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.
It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way
around.
"I've killed my wife!" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching
his hands out to something.
The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left
a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to
follow the camel in his turn.
He opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The
doctor looked down at him consolingly. "You'll have to go back, Mr.
Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your
wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again."
"Do you
really
think so, Doctor?" Linton asked hopefully. | He will attempt to resurrect her again | He will be re-institutionalized | No one will ever find out what happened | He will lose all of his money | 1 |
60995_B2JLL3Y9_9 | What is the most likely identity of the man Linton believes to be Mr. Snead? | FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES
By JIM HARMON
How much is the impossible worth?
Linton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency
of the restaurant water glass.
"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?" he heard himself say stupidly.
Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without
looking. "Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You
know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?"
Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What
were they trying to pull on him? "The man who isn't Snead is leaving,"
Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. "If that's
Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects."
"No," Howell said, "I wouldn't do that."
"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do."
"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks
like him."
"He's practically running," Linton said. "He almost ran out of the
restaurant."
"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean."
"Yes," Linton said.
A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back
intimately against Linton's own chair.
"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?" the
thick man said.
"Couldn't have been him, though," Linton answered automatically. "My
friend's dead."
The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw
paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded
out of the place quickly.
Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. "Now
you've probably got old Snead into trouble."
"Snead's dead," Linton said.
"Oh, well, 'dead,'" Howell replied.
"What do you say it like that for?" Linton demanded angrily. "The
man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein
Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing."
"You know how it is," Howell said.
Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,
or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on
the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he
sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had
let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had
known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about
death at all.
Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.
"I don't know, mind you," Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, "but
I suppose he might have been resurrected."
"Who by?" Linton asked, thinking:
God?
"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?"
"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to
life?" Linton said.
He knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that
some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died
in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so
patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to
the surface immediately.
"An invention? I guess that's how it is," Howell agreed. "I don't know
much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman."
"But it's wonderful," Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.
"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know
about it?"
"Sh-h," Howell said uneasily. "This is a public place."
"I don't understand," Linton said helplessly.
"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection," Howell
said with feigned patience. "There are strong religious convictions to
consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right
in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is
their whole life. You got to realize that."
"That's not enough. Not nearly enough."
"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.
Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take
it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?"
"But what do they do about it? Against it?"
"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When
the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment
and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The
charges, if any, come under general vice classification."
"I don't understand," Linton complained. "Why haven't I heard about it?"
"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read
an article in
Time
the other day that said 'death' was our dirty
word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going
to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The
opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'"
"I see," Linton said.
He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been
out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be
trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.
But the temptation was too strong.
"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?"
Howell looked away. "Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind
of people and if you're smart, you'll not either."
Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. "Damn you, Howell, you tell me!"
Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. "I take you out to dinner to
console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make
you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the
hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you
yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!"
Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as
the thick-set man and stalked out.
I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!
The doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. "Well,
well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances."
"Not really," Linton said modestly.
"Come, come," the doctor chided. "You started riots in two places,
attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very
disturbing."
"I was only trying to find out something," Linton maintained. "They
could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me."
The doctor clucked his tongue. "Let's not think any such thing. People
don't know more than you do."
Linton rubbed his shoulder. "That cop knew more about Judo holds than I
did."
"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me
ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?"
"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a
thing like that?"
"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You
can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person
at the right time."
Linton stared suspiciously. "Do you know where I can find a
resurrectionist?"
"I am a resurrectionist."
"But the policeman brought me to you!"
"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a
policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are
cynics."
Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really
looked at the doctor for the first time.
"Doctor, can you
really
resurrect the dead?"
"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!"
"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you," Linton said, "but tell me,
can you resurrect the
long
dead?"
"Size has nothing to do with it."
"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months."
"Months?" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. "It
could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only
one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest
of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a
degree of risk involved."
"Infallible risk, yes," Linton murmured. "Could you go to work right
away?"
"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you."
Linton grasped the situation immediately. "You mean you want money. You
realize I've just got out of an institution...."
"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics
addiction and more."
"What a wonderful professional career," Linton said, when he couldn't
care less.
"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke."
"Neither did I," Linton said hastily. "I invested in shifty stocks,
faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom."
"Then—"
"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I
would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life."
"All that's ended now," the doctor assured him. "Now we must go dig up
the corpse. The female corpse, eh?"
Resurrection Day!
"Doctor," Linton whispered, "my mind is singing with battalions of
choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you."
The doctor stroked his oily palms together. "Oh, but it does.
Beautifully."
The certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible
to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed
them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,
smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.
Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the
olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner
sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.
It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to
prepare himself.
Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her
body. "Darling!" she said.
"Greta!" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No
doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same
way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing
her ears the way she enjoyed.
Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.
She kissed his cheek. "It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a
celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends."
"Yes," he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. "But tell
me—how was it being
away
?"
The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his
Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.
"I can't remember," she said. "I can't really remember anything. Not
really. My memories are ghosts...."
"Now, now," Linton said, "we mustn't get excited. You've been through a
trial."
She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It
was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of
course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered
the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.
"I must see all our old friends," Greta persisted. "Helen and
Johnny...."
"My darling," he said gently, "about Johnny—"
Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. "Yes? What about Johnny?"
"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months
ago. He was killed."
"Killed?" Greta repeated blankly. "Johnny Gorman was killed?"
"Traffic accident. Killed instantly."
"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him
resurrected the same way you did me?"
"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You
have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer
have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny."
Greta turned her back to him. "It's just as well. You shouldn't bring
back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the
photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.
But you're
sure
you haven't the money to do it?"
"No," Linton said. "I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the
hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you
can resurrect me."
"Of course," Greta said. She sighed. "Poor Johnny. He was such a good
friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you."
"I have you," he said with great simplicity.
"Frank," she said, "you should see that place in there. There are
foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals
to quench death and smother decay. It's
perfect
."
"It sounds carnal," he said uneasily.
"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done."
Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on
something.
Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray
stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a
pedestal.
Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him
with it over her head.
Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.
Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.
Greta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She
writhed against him provocatively. "Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have
to have that insurance money. It's hell!"
Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that
money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles
green. No one must ever know.
Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face
in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and
acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.
He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.
Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and
those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in
institutional advertising.
He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering
wreckage.
Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat
in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like
pouring water on a wilted geranium.
Or—
Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for
if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the
old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?
But it didn't matter. Not a bit.
She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the
finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.
It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way
around.
"I've killed my wife!" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching
his hands out to something.
The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left
a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to
follow the camel in his turn.
He opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The
doctor looked down at him consolingly. "You'll have to go back, Mr.
Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your
wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again."
"Do you
really
think so, Doctor?" Linton asked hopefully. | Snead's twin brother | A complete stranger | Snead (who never died) | A resurrected Snead | 3 |
60995_B2JLL3Y9_10 | Why does Linton initially believe that Greta attempted to murder him after he resurrected her? | FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES
By JIM HARMON
How much is the impossible worth?
Linton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency
of the restaurant water glass.
"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?" he heard himself say stupidly.
Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without
looking. "Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You
know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?"
Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What
were they trying to pull on him? "The man who isn't Snead is leaving,"
Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. "If that's
Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects."
"No," Howell said, "I wouldn't do that."
"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do."
"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks
like him."
"He's practically running," Linton said. "He almost ran out of the
restaurant."
"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean."
"Yes," Linton said.
A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back
intimately against Linton's own chair.
"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?" the
thick man said.
"Couldn't have been him, though," Linton answered automatically. "My
friend's dead."
The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw
paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded
out of the place quickly.
Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. "Now
you've probably got old Snead into trouble."
"Snead's dead," Linton said.
"Oh, well, 'dead,'" Howell replied.
"What do you say it like that for?" Linton demanded angrily. "The
man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein
Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing."
"You know how it is," Howell said.
Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,
or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on
the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he
sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had
let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had
known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about
death at all.
Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.
"I don't know, mind you," Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, "but
I suppose he might have been resurrected."
"Who by?" Linton asked, thinking:
God?
"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?"
"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to
life?" Linton said.
He knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that
some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died
in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so
patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to
the surface immediately.
"An invention? I guess that's how it is," Howell agreed. "I don't know
much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman."
"But it's wonderful," Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.
"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know
about it?"
"Sh-h," Howell said uneasily. "This is a public place."
"I don't understand," Linton said helplessly.
"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection," Howell
said with feigned patience. "There are strong religious convictions to
consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right
in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is
their whole life. You got to realize that."
"That's not enough. Not nearly enough."
"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.
Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take
it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?"
"But what do they do about it? Against it?"
"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When
the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment
and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The
charges, if any, come under general vice classification."
"I don't understand," Linton complained. "Why haven't I heard about it?"
"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read
an article in
Time
the other day that said 'death' was our dirty
word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going
to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The
opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'"
"I see," Linton said.
He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been
out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be
trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.
But the temptation was too strong.
"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?"
Howell looked away. "Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind
of people and if you're smart, you'll not either."
Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. "Damn you, Howell, you tell me!"
Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. "I take you out to dinner to
console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make
you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the
hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you
yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!"
Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as
the thick-set man and stalked out.
I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!
The doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. "Well,
well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances."
"Not really," Linton said modestly.
"Come, come," the doctor chided. "You started riots in two places,
attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very
disturbing."
"I was only trying to find out something," Linton maintained. "They
could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me."
The doctor clucked his tongue. "Let's not think any such thing. People
don't know more than you do."
Linton rubbed his shoulder. "That cop knew more about Judo holds than I
did."
"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me
ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?"
"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a
thing like that?"
"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You
can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person
at the right time."
Linton stared suspiciously. "Do you know where I can find a
resurrectionist?"
"I am a resurrectionist."
"But the policeman brought me to you!"
"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a
policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are
cynics."
Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really
looked at the doctor for the first time.
"Doctor, can you
really
resurrect the dead?"
"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!"
"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you," Linton said, "but tell me,
can you resurrect the
long
dead?"
"Size has nothing to do with it."
"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months."
"Months?" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. "It
could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only
one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest
of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a
degree of risk involved."
"Infallible risk, yes," Linton murmured. "Could you go to work right
away?"
"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you."
Linton grasped the situation immediately. "You mean you want money. You
realize I've just got out of an institution...."
"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics
addiction and more."
"What a wonderful professional career," Linton said, when he couldn't
care less.
"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke."
"Neither did I," Linton said hastily. "I invested in shifty stocks,
faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom."
"Then—"
"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I
would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life."
"All that's ended now," the doctor assured him. "Now we must go dig up
the corpse. The female corpse, eh?"
Resurrection Day!
"Doctor," Linton whispered, "my mind is singing with battalions of
choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you."
The doctor stroked his oily palms together. "Oh, but it does.
Beautifully."
The certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible
to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed
them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,
smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.
Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the
olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner
sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.
It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to
prepare himself.
Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her
body. "Darling!" she said.
"Greta!" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No
doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same
way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing
her ears the way she enjoyed.
Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.
She kissed his cheek. "It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a
celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends."
"Yes," he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. "But tell
me—how was it being
away
?"
The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his
Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.
"I can't remember," she said. "I can't really remember anything. Not
really. My memories are ghosts...."
"Now, now," Linton said, "we mustn't get excited. You've been through a
trial."
She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It
was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of
course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered
the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.
"I must see all our old friends," Greta persisted. "Helen and
Johnny...."
"My darling," he said gently, "about Johnny—"
Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. "Yes? What about Johnny?"
"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months
ago. He was killed."
"Killed?" Greta repeated blankly. "Johnny Gorman was killed?"
"Traffic accident. Killed instantly."
"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him
resurrected the same way you did me?"
"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You
have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer
have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny."
Greta turned her back to him. "It's just as well. You shouldn't bring
back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the
photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.
But you're
sure
you haven't the money to do it?"
"No," Linton said. "I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the
hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you
can resurrect me."
"Of course," Greta said. She sighed. "Poor Johnny. He was such a good
friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you."
"I have you," he said with great simplicity.
"Frank," she said, "you should see that place in there. There are
foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals
to quench death and smother decay. It's
perfect
."
"It sounds carnal," he said uneasily.
"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done."
Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on
something.
Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray
stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a
pedestal.
Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him
with it over her head.
Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.
Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.
Greta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She
writhed against him provocatively. "Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have
to have that insurance money. It's hell!"
Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that
money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles
green. No one must ever know.
Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face
in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and
acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.
He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.
Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and
those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in
institutional advertising.
He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering
wreckage.
Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat
in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like
pouring water on a wilted geranium.
Or—
Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for
if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the
old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?
But it didn't matter. Not a bit.
She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the
finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.
It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way
around.
"I've killed my wife!" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching
his hands out to something.
The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left
a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to
follow the camel in his turn.
He opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The
doctor looked down at him consolingly. "You'll have to go back, Mr.
Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your
wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again."
"Do you
really
think so, Doctor?" Linton asked hopefully. | She wants the rest of his fortune | She had a brain malfunction | She is suffering from hallucinations | She is part of an android cult | 1 |
25627_61MWU4OY_1 | Val and Ron's geiger is programmed to identify: | THE
HUNTED
HEROES
By ROBERT SILVERBERG
The planet itself was tough enough—barren, desolate,
forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and
dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad
genius who had a motto:
Death to all Terrans!
"Let's
keep moving," I told
Val. "The surest way to
die out here on Mars is to
give up." I reached over and
turned up the pressure on her
oxymask to make things a
little easier for her. Through
the glassite of the mask, I
could see her face contorted
in an agony of fatigue.
And she probably thought
the failure of the sandcat was
all my fault, too. Val's usually
about the best wife a guy
could ask for, but when she
wants to be she can be a real
flying bother.
It was beyond her to see
that some grease monkey back
at the Dome was at fault—whoever
it was who had failed
to fasten down the engine
hood. Nothing but what had
stopped us
could
stop a sandcat:
sand in the delicate
mechanism of the atomic engine.
But no; she blamed it all on
me somehow: So we were out
walking on the spongy sand
of the Martian desert. We'd
been walking a good eight
hours.
"Can't we turn back now,
Ron?" Val pleaded. "Maybe
there isn't any uranium in
this sector at all. I think
we're crazy to keep on searching
out here!"
I started to tell her that the
UranCo chief had assured me
we'd hit something out this
way, but changed my mind.
When Val's tired and overwrought
there's no sense in
arguing with her.
I stared ahead at the bleak,
desolate wastes of the Martian
landscape. Behind us
somewhere was the comfort
of the Dome, ahead nothing
but the mazes and gullies of
this dead world.
He was a cripple in a wheelchair—helpless as a rattlesnake.
"Try to keep going, Val."
My gloved hand reached out
and clumsily enfolded hers.
"Come on, kid. Remember—we're
doing this for Earth.
We're heroes."
She glared at me. "Heroes,
hell!" she muttered. "That's
the way it looked back home,
but, out there it doesn't seem
so glorious. And UranCo's
pay is stinking."
"We didn't come out here
for the pay, Val."
"I know, I know, but just
the same—"
It must have been hell for
her. We had wandered fruitlessly
over the red sands all
day, both of us listening for
the clicks of the counter. And
the geigers had been obstinately
hushed all day, except
for their constant undercurrent
of meaningless noises.
Even though the Martian
gravity was only a fraction of
Earth's, I was starting to
tire, and I knew it must have
been really rough on Val with
her lovely but unrugged legs.
"Heroes," she said bitterly.
"We're not heroes—we're
suckers! Why did I ever let
you volunteer for the Geig
Corps and drag me along?"
Which wasn't anywhere
close to the truth. Now I
knew she was at the breaking
point, because Val didn't lie
unless she was so exhausted
she didn't know what she was
doing. She had been just as
much inflamed by the idea of
coming to Mars to help in the
search for uranium as I was.
We knew the pay was poor,
but we had felt it a sort of
obligation, something we
could do as individuals to
keep the industries of radioactives-starved
Earth going.
And we'd always had a roving
foot, both of us.
No, we had decided together
to come to Mars—the
way we decided together on
everything. Now she was
turning against me.
I tried to jolly her. "Buck
up, kid," I said. I didn't dare
turn up her oxy pressure any
higher, but it was obvious she
couldn't keep going. She was
almost sleep-walking now.
We pressed on over the
barren terrain. The geiger
kept up a fairly steady click-pattern,
but never broke into
that sudden explosive tumult
that meant we had found pay-dirt.
I started to feel tired
myself, terribly tired. I longed
to lie down on the soft,
spongy Martian sand and
bury myself.
I looked at Val. She was
dragging along with her eyes
half-shut. I felt almost guilty
for having dragged her out to
Mars, until I recalled that I
hadn't. In fact, she had come
up with the idea before I did.
I wished there was some way
of turning the weary, bedraggled
girl at my side back into
the Val who had so enthusiastically
suggested we join
the Geigs.
Twelve steps later, I decided
this was about as far as
we could go.
I stopped, slipped out of
the geiger harness, and lowered
myself ponderously to
the ground. "What'samatter,
Ron?" Val asked sleepily.
"Something wrong?"
"No, baby," I said, putting
out a hand and taking hers.
"I think we ought to rest a
little before we go any further.
It's been a long, hard
day."
It didn't take much to persuade
her. She slid down beside
me, curled up, and in a
moment she was fast asleep,
sprawled out on the sands.
Poor kid
, I thought. Maybe
we shouldn't have come to
Mars after all. But, I reminded
myself,
someone
had to do
the job.
A second thought appeared,
but I squelched it:
Why the hell me?
I looked down at Valerie's
sleeping form, and thought of
our warm, comfortable little
home on Earth. It wasn't
much, but people in love don't
need very fancy surroundings.
I watched her, sleeping
peacefully, a wayward lock of
her soft blonde hair trailing
down over one eyebrow, and
it seemed hard to believe that
we'd exchanged Earth and all
it held for us for the raw, untamed
struggle that was Mars.
But I knew I'd do it again, if
I had the chance. It's because
we wanted to keep what we
had. Heroes? Hell, no. We
just liked our comforts, and
wanted to keep them. Which
took a little work.
Time to get moving.
But
then Val stirred and rolled
over in her sleep, and I didn't
have the heart to wake her. I
sat there, holding her, staring
out over the desert, watching
the wind whip the sand up
into weird shapes.
The Geig Corps preferred
married couples, working in
teams. That's what had finally
decided it for us—we were a
good team. We had no ties on
Earth that couldn't be broken
without much difficulty. So
we volunteered.
And here we are.
Heroes.
The wind blasted a mass of
sand into my face, and I felt
it tinkle against the oxymask.
I glanced at the suit-chronometer.
Getting late. I decided
once again to wake Val.
But she was tired. And I was
tired too, tired from our
wearying journey across the
empty desert.
I started to shake Val. But
I never finished. It would be
so
nice just to lean back and
nuzzle up to her, down in the
sand. So nice. I yawned, and
stretched back.
I awoke with a sudden startled
shiver, and realized angrily
I had let myself doze off.
"Come on, Val," I said savagely,
and started to rise to
my feet.
I couldn't.
I looked down. I was neatly
bound in thin, tough, plastic
tangle-cord, swathed from
chin to boot-bottoms, my
arms imprisoned, my feet
caught. And tangle-cord is
about as easy to get out of as
a spider's web is for a trapped
fly.
It wasn't Martians that
had done it. There weren't
any Martians, hadn't been for
a million years. It was some
Earthman who had bound us.
I rolled my eyes toward
Val, and saw that she was
similarly trussed in the sticky
stuff. The tangle-cord was still
fresh, giving off a faint, repugnant
odor like that of drying
fish. It had been spun on
us only a short time ago, I
realized.
"Ron—"
"Don't try to move, baby.
This stuff can break your
neck if you twist it wrong."
She continued for a moment
to struggle futilely, and I had
to snap, "Lie still, Val!"
"A very wise statement,"
said a brittle, harsh voice
from above me. I looked up
and saw a helmeted figure
above us. He wasn't wearing
the customary skin-tight pliable
oxysuits we had. He
wore an outmoded, bulky
spacesuit and a fishbowl helmet,
all but the face area
opaque. The oxygen cannisters
weren't attached to his
back as expected, though.
They were strapped to the
back of the wheelchair in
which he sat.
Through the fishbowl I
could see hard little eyes, a
yellowed, parchment-like face,
a grim-set jaw. I didn't recognize
him, and this struck me
odd. I thought I knew everyone
on sparsely-settled Mars.
Somehow I'd missed him.
What shocked me most was
that he had no legs. The
spacesuit ended neatly at the
thighs.
He was holding in his left
hand the tanglegun with
which he had entrapped us,
and a very efficient-looking
blaster was in his right.
"I didn't want to disturb
your sleep," he said coldly.
"So I've been waiting here
for you to wake up."
I could just see it. He might
have been sitting there for
hours, complacently waiting
to see how we'd wake up.
That was when I realized he
must be totally insane. I could
feel my stomach-muscles
tighten, my throat constrict
painfully.
Then anger ripped through
me, washing away the terror.
"What's going on?" I demanded,
staring at the half
of a man who confronted us
from the wheelchair. "Who
are you?"
"You'll find out soon
enough," he said. "Suppose
now you come with me." He
reached for the tanglegun,
flipped the little switch on its
side to MELT, and shot a
stream of watery fluid over
our legs, keeping the blaster
trained on us all the while.
Our legs were free.
"You may get up now," he
said. "Slowly, without trying
to make trouble." Val and I
helped each other to our feet
as best we could, considering
our arms were still tightly
bound against the sides of our
oxysuits.
"Walk," the stranger said,
waving the tanglegun to indicate
the direction. "I'll be
right behind you." He holstered
the tanglegun.
I glimpsed the bulk of an
outboard atomic rigging behind
him, strapped to the
back of the wheelchair. He
fingered a knob on the arm of
the chair and the two exhaust
ducts behind the wheel-housings
flamed for a moment,
and the chair began to roll.
Obediently, we started
walking. You don't argue
with a blaster, even if the
man pointing it is in a wheelchair.
"What's going on, Ron?"
Val asked in a low voice as we
walked. Behind us the wheelchair
hissed steadily.
"I don't quite know, Val.
I've never seen this guy before,
and I thought I knew
everyone at the Dome."
"Quiet up there!" our captor
called, and we stopped
talking. We trudged along together,
with him following
behind; I could hear the
crunch-crunch
of the wheelchair
as its wheels chewed
into the sand. I wondered
where we were going, and
why. I wondered why we had
ever left Earth.
The answer to that came to
me quick enough: we had to.
Earth needed radioactives,
and the only way to get them
was to get out and look. The
great atomic wars of the late
20th Century had used up
much of the supply, but the
amount used to blow up half
the great cities of the world
hardly compared with the
amount we needed to put
them back together again.
In three centuries the shattered
world had been completely
rebuilt. The wreckage
of New York and Shanghai
and London and all the other
ruined cities had been hidden
by a shining new world of
gleaming towers and flying
roadways. We had profited by
our grandparents' mistakes.
They had used their atomics
to make bombs. We used ours
for fuel.
It was an atomic world.
Everything: power drills,
printing presses, typewriters,
can openers, ocean liners,
powered by the inexhaustible
energy of the dividing atom.
But though the energy is
inexhaustible, the supply of
nuclei isn't. After three centuries
of heavy consumption,
the supply failed. The mighty
machine that was Earth's industry
had started to slow
down.
And that started the chain
of events that led Val and me
to end up as a madman's prisoners,
on Mars. With every
source of uranium mined dry
on Earth, we had tried other
possibilities. All sorts of
schemes came forth. Project
Sea-Dredge was trying to get
uranium from the oceans. In
forty or fifty years, they'd
get some results, we hoped.
But there wasn't forty or
fifty years' worth of raw stuff
to tide us over until then. In a
decade or so, our power would
be just about gone. I could
picture the sort of dog-eat-dog
world we'd revert back
to. Millions of starving, freezing
humans tooth-and-clawing
in it in the useless shell of
a great atomic civilization.
So, Mars. There's not much
uranium on Mars, and it's not
easy to find or any cinch to
mine. But what little is there,
helps. It's a stopgap effort,
just to keep things moving
until Project Sea-Dredge
starts functioning.
Enter the Geig Corps: volunteers
out on the face of
Mars, combing for its uranium
deposits.
And here we are, I thought.
After we walked on a
while, a Dome became visible
up ahead. It slid up over the
crest of a hill, set back between
two hummocks on the
desert. Just out of the way
enough to escape observation.
For a puzzled moment I
thought it was our Dome, the
settlement where all of UranCo's
Geig Corps were located,
but another look told me that
this was actually quite near
us and fairly small. A one-man
Dome, of all things!
"Welcome to my home," he
said. "The name is Gregory
Ledman." He herded us off to
one side of the airlock, uttered
a few words keyed to his
voice, and motioned us inside
when the door slid up. When
we were inside he reached up,
clumsily holding the blaster,
and unscrewed the ancient
spacesuit fishbowl.
His face was a bitter,
dried-up mask. He was a man
who hated.
The place was spartanly
furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,
no decoration of any
sort. Hard bulkhead walls,
rivet-studded, glared back
at us. He had an automatic
chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,
and no other furniture.
Suddenly he drew the tanglegun
and sprayed our legs
again. We toppled heavily to
the floor. I looked up angrily.
"I imagine you want to
know the whole story," he
said. "The others did, too."
Valerie looked at me anxiously.
Her pretty face was a
dead white behind her oxymask.
"What others?"
"I never bothered to find
out their names," Ledman
said casually. "They were
other Geigs I caught unawares,
like you, out on the
desert. That's the only sport I
have left—Geig-hunting. Look
out there."
He gestured through the
translucent skin of the Dome,
and I felt sick. There was a
little heap of bones lying
there, looking oddly bright
against the redness of the
sands. They were the dried,
parched skeletons of Earthmen.
Bits of cloth and plastic,
once oxymasks and suits, still
clung to them.
Suddenly I remembered.
There had been a pattern
there all the time. We didn't
much talk about it; we chalked
it off as occupational hazards.
There had been a pattern
of disappearances on the desert.
I could think of six, eight
names now. None of them
had been particularly close
friends. You don't get time to
make close friends out here.
But we'd vowed it wouldn't
happen to us.
It had.
"You've been hunting
Geigs?" I asked. "
Why?
What've they ever done to
you?"
He smiled, as calmly as if
I'd just praised his house-keeping.
"Because I hate
you," he said blandly. "I intend
to wipe every last one of
you out, one by one."
I stared at him. I'd never
seen a man like this before; I
thought all his kind had died
at the time of the atomic
wars.
I heard Val sob, "He's a
madman!"
"No," Ledman said evenly.
"I'm quite sane, believe me.
But I'm determined to drive
the Geigs—and UranCo—off
Mars. Eventually I'll scare
you all away."
"Just pick us off in the desert?"
"Exactly," replied Ledman.
"And I have no fears of an
armed attack. This place is
well fortified. I've devoted
years to building it. And I'm
back against those hills. They
couldn't pry me out." He let
his pale hand run up into his
gnarled hair. "I've devoted
years to this. Ever since—ever
since I landed here on
Mars."
"What are you going to do
with us?" Val finally asked,
after a long silence.
He didn't smile this time.
"Kill you," he told her. "Not
your husband. I want him as
an envoy, to go back and tell
the others to clear off." He
rocked back and forth in his
wheelchair, toying with the
gleaming, deadly blaster in
his hand.
We stared in horror. It was
a nightmare—sitting there,
placidly rocking back and
forth, a nightmare.
I found myself fervently
wishing I was back out there
on the infinitely safer desert.
"Do I shock you?" he asked.
"I shouldn't—not when
you see my motives."
"We don't see them," I
snapped.
"Well, let me show you.
You're on Mars hunting uranium,
right? To mine and
ship the radioactives back to
Earth to keep the atomic engines
going. Right?"
I nodded over at our geiger
counters.
"We volunteered to come to
Mars," Val said irrelevantly.
"Ah—two young heroes,"
Ledman said acidly. "How
sad. I could almost feel sorry
for you. Almost."
"Just what is it you're
after?" I said, stalling, stalling.
"Atomics cost me my legs,"
he said. "You remember the
Sadlerville Blast?" he asked.
"Of course." And I did, too.
I'd never forget it. No one
would. How could I forget
that great accident—killing
hundreds, injuring thousands
more, sterilizing forty miles
of Mississippi land—when
the Sadlerville pile went up?
"I was there on business at
the time," Ledman said. "I
represented Ledman Atomics.
I was there to sign a new
contract for my company.
You know who I am, now?"
I nodded.
"I was fairly well shielded
when it happened. I never got
the contract, but I got a good
dose of radiation instead. Not
enough to kill me," he said.
"Just enough to necessitate
the removal of—" he indicated
the empty space at his
thighs. "So I got off lightly."
He gestured at the wheelchair
blanket.
I still didn't understand.
"But why kill us Geigs?
We
had nothing to do with it."
"You're just in this by accident,"
he said. "You see, after
the explosion and the amputation,
my fellow-members on
the board of Ledman Atomics
decided that a semi-basket
case like myself was a poor
risk as Head of the Board,
and they took my company
away. All quite legal, I assure
you. They left me almost a
pauper!" Then he snapped
the punchline at me.
"They renamed Ledman
Atomics. Who did you say you
worked for?"
I began, "Uran—"
"Don't bother. A more inventive
title than Ledman
Atomics, but not quite as
much heart, wouldn't you
say?" He grinned. "I saved
for years; then I came to
Mars, lost myself, built this
Dome, and swore to get even.
There's not a great deal of
uranium on this planet, but
enough to keep me in a style
to which, unfortunately, I'm
no longer accustomed."
He consulted his wrist
watch. "Time for my injection."
He pulled out the tanglegun
and sprayed us again,
just to make doubly certain.
"That's another little souvenir
of Sadlerville. I'm short
on red blood corpuscles."
He rolled over to a wall
table and fumbled in a container
among a pile of hypodermics.
"There are other injections,
too. Adrenalin, insulin.
Others. The Blast turned
me into a walking pin-cushion.
But I'll pay it all
back," he said. He plunged
the needle into his arm.
My eyes widened. It was
too nightmarish to be real. I
wasn't seriously worried
about his threat to wipe out
the entire Geig Corps, since
it was unlikely that one man
in a wheelchair could pick us
all off. No, it wasn't the
threat that disturbed me, so
much as the whole concept, so
strange to me, that the human
mind could be as warped
and twisted as Ledman's.
I saw the horror on Val's
face, and I knew she felt the
same way I did.
"Do you really think you
can succeed?" I taunted him.
"Really think you can kill
every Earthman on Mars? Of
all the insane, cockeyed—"
Val's quick, worried head-shake
cut me off. But Ledman
had felt my words, all right.
"Yes! I'll get even with
every one of you for taking
away my legs! If we hadn't
meddled with the atom in the
first place, I'd be as tall and
powerful as you, today—instead
of a useless cripple in a
wheelchair."
"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,"
Val said quietly.
"You've conceived an impossible
scheme of revenge and
now you're taking it out on
innocent people who've done
nothing, nothing at all to you.
That's not sane!"
His eyes blazed. "Who are
you to talk of sanity?"
Uneasily I caught Val's
glance from a corner of my
eye. Sweat was rolling down
her smooth forehead faster
than the auto-wiper could
swab it away.
"Why don't you do something?
What are you waiting
for, Ron?"
"Easy, baby," I said. I
knew what our ace in the hole
was. But I had to get Ledman
within reach of me first.
"Enough," he said. "I'm going
to turn you loose outside,
right after—"
"
Get sick!
" I hissed to Val,
low. She began immediately
to cough violently, emitting
harsh, choking sobs. "Can't
breathe!" She began to yell,
writhing in her bonds.
That did it. Ledman hadn't
much humanity left in him,
but there was a little. He lowered
the blaster a bit and
wheeled one-hand over to see
what was wrong with Val.
She continued to retch and
moan most horribly. It almost
convinced me. I saw Val's
pale, frightened face turn to
me.
He approached and peered
down at her. He opened his
mouth to say something, and
at that moment I snapped my
leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord
with a snicking rasp,
and kicked his wheelchair
over.
The blaster went off, burning
a hole through the Dome
roof. The automatic sealers
glued-in instantly. Ledman
went sprawling helplessly out
into the middle of the floor,
the wheelchair upended next
to him, its wheels slowly revolving
in the air. The blaster
flew from his hands at the
impact of landing and spun
out near me. In one quick motion
I rolled over and covered
it with my body.
Ledman clawed his way to
me with tremendous effort
and tried wildly to pry the
blaster out from under me,
but without success. I twisted
a bit, reached out with my
free leg, and booted him
across the floor. He fetched
up against the wall of the
Dome and lay there.
Val rolled over to me.
"Now if I could get free of
this stuff," I said, "I could get
him covered before he comes
to. But how?"
"Teamwork," Val said. She
swivelled around on the floor
until her head was near my
boot. "Push my oxymask off
with your foot, if you can."
I searched for the clamp
and tried to flip it. No luck,
with my heavy, clumsy boot.
I tried again, and this time it
snapped open. I got the tip
of my boot in and pried upward.
The oxymask came off,
slowly, scraping a jagged red
scratch up the side of Val's
neck as it came.
"There," she breathed.
"That's that."
I looked uneasily at Ledman.
He was groaning and
beginning to stir.
Val rolled on the floor and
her face lay near my right
arm. I saw what she had in
mind. She began to nibble the
vile-tasting tangle-cord, running
her teeth up and down
it until it started to give. She
continued unfailingly.
Finally one strand snapped.
Then another. At last I
had enough use of my hand
to reach out and grasp the
blaster. Then I pulled myself
across the floor to Ledman,
removed the tanglegun, and
melted the remaining tangle-cord
off.
My muscles were stiff and
bunched, and rising made me
wince. I turned and freed Val.
Then I turned and faced Ledman.
"I suppose you'll kill me
now," he said.
"No. That's the difference
between sane people and insane,"
I told him. "I'm not
going to kill you at all. I'm
going to see to it that you're
sent back to Earth."
"
No!
" he shouted. "No!
Anything but back there. I
don't want to face them again—not
after what they did to
me—"
"Not so loud," I broke in.
"They'll help you on Earth.
They'll take all the hatred and
sickness out of you, and turn
you into a useful member of
society again."
"I hate Earthmen," he spat
out. "I hate all of them."
"I know," I said sarcastically.
"You're just all full of
hate. You hated us so much
that you couldn't bear to hang
around on Earth for as much
as a year after the Sadlerville
Blast. You had to take right
off for Mars without a moment's
delay, didn't you? You
hated Earth so much you
had
to leave."
"Why are you telling all
this to me?"
"Because if you'd stayed
long enough, you'd have used
some of your pension money
to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic
legs, and then you
wouldn't need this wheelchair."
Ledman scowled, and then
his face went belligerent
again. "They told me I was
paralyzed below the waist.
That I'd never walk again,
even with prosthetic legs, because
I had no muscles to fit
them to."
"You left Earth too quickly,"
Val said.
"It was the only way," he
protested. "I had to get off—"
"She's right," I told him.
"The atom can take away, but
it can give as well. Soon after
you left they developed
atomic-powered
prosthetics—amazing
things, virtually robot
legs. All the survivors of
the Sadlerville Blast were
given the necessary replacement
limbs free of charge. All
except you. You were so sick
you had to get away from the
world you despised and come
here."
"You're lying," he said.
"It's not true!"
"Oh, but it is," Val smiled.
I saw him wilt visibly, and
for a moment I almost felt
sorry for him, a pathetic legless
figure propped up against
the wall of the Dome at
blaster-point. But then I remembered
he'd killed twelve
Geigs—or more—and would
have added Val to the number
had he had the chance.
"You're a very sick man,
Ledman," I said. "All this
time you could have been
happy, useful on Earth, instead
of being holed up here
nursing your hatred. You
might have been useful, on
Earth. But you decided to
channel everything out as revenge."
"I still don't believe it—those
legs. I might have walked
again. No—no, it's all a lie.
They told me I'd never walk,"
he said, weakly but stubbornly
still.
I could see his whole structure
of hate starting to topple,
and I decided to give it
the final push.
"Haven't you wondered
how I managed to break the
tangle-cord when I kicked you
over?"
"Yes—human legs aren't
strong enough to break tangle-cord
that way."
"Of course not," I said. I
gave Val the blaster and slipped
out of my oxysuit.
"Look," I said. I pointed to
my smooth, gleaming metal
legs. The almost soundless
purr of their motors was the
only noise in the room. "I was
in the Sadlerville Blast, too,"
I said. "But I didn't go crazy
with hate when I lost
my
legs."
Ledman was sobbing.
"Okay, Ledman," I said.
Val got him into his suit, and
brought him the fishbowl helmet.
"Get your helmet on and
let's go. Between the psychs
and the prosthetics men,
you'll be a new man inside of
a year."
"But I'm a murderer!"
"That's right. And you'll be
sentenced to psych adjustment.
When they're finished,
Gregory Ledman the killer
will be as dead as if they'd
electrocuted you, but there'll
be a new—and sane—Gregory
Ledman." I turned to Val.
"Got the geigers, honey?"
For the first time since
Ledman had caught us, I remembered
how tired Val had
been out on the desert. I realized
now that I had been driving
her mercilessly—me, with
my chromium legs and atomic-powered
muscles. No wonder
she was ready to fold!
And I'd been too dense to see
how unfair I had been.
She lifted the geiger harnesses,
and I put Ledman
back in his wheelchair.
Val slipped her oxymask
back on and fastened it shut.
"Let's get back to the Dome
in a hurry," I said. "We'll
turn Ledman over to the authorities.
Then we can catch
the next ship for Earth."
"Go back?
Go back?
If you
think I'm backing down now
and quitting you can find
yourself another wife! After
we dump this guy I'm sacking
in for twenty hours, and then
we're going back out there to
finish that search-pattern.
Earth needs uranium, honey,
and I know you'd never be
happy quitting in the middle
like that." She smiled. "I
can't wait to get out there
and start listening for those
tell-tale clicks."
I gave a joyful whoop and
swung her around. When I
put her down, she squeezed
my hand, hard.
"Let's get moving, fellow
hero," she said.
I pressed the stud for the
airlock, smiling.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories
September 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | The Sandcat | The Dome | Uranium | humans | 2 |
25627_61MWU4OY_2 | Why have Val and Ron joined a mission on Mars? | THE
HUNTED
HEROES
By ROBERT SILVERBERG
The planet itself was tough enough—barren, desolate,
forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and
dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad
genius who had a motto:
Death to all Terrans!
"Let's
keep moving," I told
Val. "The surest way to
die out here on Mars is to
give up." I reached over and
turned up the pressure on her
oxymask to make things a
little easier for her. Through
the glassite of the mask, I
could see her face contorted
in an agony of fatigue.
And she probably thought
the failure of the sandcat was
all my fault, too. Val's usually
about the best wife a guy
could ask for, but when she
wants to be she can be a real
flying bother.
It was beyond her to see
that some grease monkey back
at the Dome was at fault—whoever
it was who had failed
to fasten down the engine
hood. Nothing but what had
stopped us
could
stop a sandcat:
sand in the delicate
mechanism of the atomic engine.
But no; she blamed it all on
me somehow: So we were out
walking on the spongy sand
of the Martian desert. We'd
been walking a good eight
hours.
"Can't we turn back now,
Ron?" Val pleaded. "Maybe
there isn't any uranium in
this sector at all. I think
we're crazy to keep on searching
out here!"
I started to tell her that the
UranCo chief had assured me
we'd hit something out this
way, but changed my mind.
When Val's tired and overwrought
there's no sense in
arguing with her.
I stared ahead at the bleak,
desolate wastes of the Martian
landscape. Behind us
somewhere was the comfort
of the Dome, ahead nothing
but the mazes and gullies of
this dead world.
He was a cripple in a wheelchair—helpless as a rattlesnake.
"Try to keep going, Val."
My gloved hand reached out
and clumsily enfolded hers.
"Come on, kid. Remember—we're
doing this for Earth.
We're heroes."
She glared at me. "Heroes,
hell!" she muttered. "That's
the way it looked back home,
but, out there it doesn't seem
so glorious. And UranCo's
pay is stinking."
"We didn't come out here
for the pay, Val."
"I know, I know, but just
the same—"
It must have been hell for
her. We had wandered fruitlessly
over the red sands all
day, both of us listening for
the clicks of the counter. And
the geigers had been obstinately
hushed all day, except
for their constant undercurrent
of meaningless noises.
Even though the Martian
gravity was only a fraction of
Earth's, I was starting to
tire, and I knew it must have
been really rough on Val with
her lovely but unrugged legs.
"Heroes," she said bitterly.
"We're not heroes—we're
suckers! Why did I ever let
you volunteer for the Geig
Corps and drag me along?"
Which wasn't anywhere
close to the truth. Now I
knew she was at the breaking
point, because Val didn't lie
unless she was so exhausted
she didn't know what she was
doing. She had been just as
much inflamed by the idea of
coming to Mars to help in the
search for uranium as I was.
We knew the pay was poor,
but we had felt it a sort of
obligation, something we
could do as individuals to
keep the industries of radioactives-starved
Earth going.
And we'd always had a roving
foot, both of us.
No, we had decided together
to come to Mars—the
way we decided together on
everything. Now she was
turning against me.
I tried to jolly her. "Buck
up, kid," I said. I didn't dare
turn up her oxy pressure any
higher, but it was obvious she
couldn't keep going. She was
almost sleep-walking now.
We pressed on over the
barren terrain. The geiger
kept up a fairly steady click-pattern,
but never broke into
that sudden explosive tumult
that meant we had found pay-dirt.
I started to feel tired
myself, terribly tired. I longed
to lie down on the soft,
spongy Martian sand and
bury myself.
I looked at Val. She was
dragging along with her eyes
half-shut. I felt almost guilty
for having dragged her out to
Mars, until I recalled that I
hadn't. In fact, she had come
up with the idea before I did.
I wished there was some way
of turning the weary, bedraggled
girl at my side back into
the Val who had so enthusiastically
suggested we join
the Geigs.
Twelve steps later, I decided
this was about as far as
we could go.
I stopped, slipped out of
the geiger harness, and lowered
myself ponderously to
the ground. "What'samatter,
Ron?" Val asked sleepily.
"Something wrong?"
"No, baby," I said, putting
out a hand and taking hers.
"I think we ought to rest a
little before we go any further.
It's been a long, hard
day."
It didn't take much to persuade
her. She slid down beside
me, curled up, and in a
moment she was fast asleep,
sprawled out on the sands.
Poor kid
, I thought. Maybe
we shouldn't have come to
Mars after all. But, I reminded
myself,
someone
had to do
the job.
A second thought appeared,
but I squelched it:
Why the hell me?
I looked down at Valerie's
sleeping form, and thought of
our warm, comfortable little
home on Earth. It wasn't
much, but people in love don't
need very fancy surroundings.
I watched her, sleeping
peacefully, a wayward lock of
her soft blonde hair trailing
down over one eyebrow, and
it seemed hard to believe that
we'd exchanged Earth and all
it held for us for the raw, untamed
struggle that was Mars.
But I knew I'd do it again, if
I had the chance. It's because
we wanted to keep what we
had. Heroes? Hell, no. We
just liked our comforts, and
wanted to keep them. Which
took a little work.
Time to get moving.
But
then Val stirred and rolled
over in her sleep, and I didn't
have the heart to wake her. I
sat there, holding her, staring
out over the desert, watching
the wind whip the sand up
into weird shapes.
The Geig Corps preferred
married couples, working in
teams. That's what had finally
decided it for us—we were a
good team. We had no ties on
Earth that couldn't be broken
without much difficulty. So
we volunteered.
And here we are.
Heroes.
The wind blasted a mass of
sand into my face, and I felt
it tinkle against the oxymask.
I glanced at the suit-chronometer.
Getting late. I decided
once again to wake Val.
But she was tired. And I was
tired too, tired from our
wearying journey across the
empty desert.
I started to shake Val. But
I never finished. It would be
so
nice just to lean back and
nuzzle up to her, down in the
sand. So nice. I yawned, and
stretched back.
I awoke with a sudden startled
shiver, and realized angrily
I had let myself doze off.
"Come on, Val," I said savagely,
and started to rise to
my feet.
I couldn't.
I looked down. I was neatly
bound in thin, tough, plastic
tangle-cord, swathed from
chin to boot-bottoms, my
arms imprisoned, my feet
caught. And tangle-cord is
about as easy to get out of as
a spider's web is for a trapped
fly.
It wasn't Martians that
had done it. There weren't
any Martians, hadn't been for
a million years. It was some
Earthman who had bound us.
I rolled my eyes toward
Val, and saw that she was
similarly trussed in the sticky
stuff. The tangle-cord was still
fresh, giving off a faint, repugnant
odor like that of drying
fish. It had been spun on
us only a short time ago, I
realized.
"Ron—"
"Don't try to move, baby.
This stuff can break your
neck if you twist it wrong."
She continued for a moment
to struggle futilely, and I had
to snap, "Lie still, Val!"
"A very wise statement,"
said a brittle, harsh voice
from above me. I looked up
and saw a helmeted figure
above us. He wasn't wearing
the customary skin-tight pliable
oxysuits we had. He
wore an outmoded, bulky
spacesuit and a fishbowl helmet,
all but the face area
opaque. The oxygen cannisters
weren't attached to his
back as expected, though.
They were strapped to the
back of the wheelchair in
which he sat.
Through the fishbowl I
could see hard little eyes, a
yellowed, parchment-like face,
a grim-set jaw. I didn't recognize
him, and this struck me
odd. I thought I knew everyone
on sparsely-settled Mars.
Somehow I'd missed him.
What shocked me most was
that he had no legs. The
spacesuit ended neatly at the
thighs.
He was holding in his left
hand the tanglegun with
which he had entrapped us,
and a very efficient-looking
blaster was in his right.
"I didn't want to disturb
your sleep," he said coldly.
"So I've been waiting here
for you to wake up."
I could just see it. He might
have been sitting there for
hours, complacently waiting
to see how we'd wake up.
That was when I realized he
must be totally insane. I could
feel my stomach-muscles
tighten, my throat constrict
painfully.
Then anger ripped through
me, washing away the terror.
"What's going on?" I demanded,
staring at the half
of a man who confronted us
from the wheelchair. "Who
are you?"
"You'll find out soon
enough," he said. "Suppose
now you come with me." He
reached for the tanglegun,
flipped the little switch on its
side to MELT, and shot a
stream of watery fluid over
our legs, keeping the blaster
trained on us all the while.
Our legs were free.
"You may get up now," he
said. "Slowly, without trying
to make trouble." Val and I
helped each other to our feet
as best we could, considering
our arms were still tightly
bound against the sides of our
oxysuits.
"Walk," the stranger said,
waving the tanglegun to indicate
the direction. "I'll be
right behind you." He holstered
the tanglegun.
I glimpsed the bulk of an
outboard atomic rigging behind
him, strapped to the
back of the wheelchair. He
fingered a knob on the arm of
the chair and the two exhaust
ducts behind the wheel-housings
flamed for a moment,
and the chair began to roll.
Obediently, we started
walking. You don't argue
with a blaster, even if the
man pointing it is in a wheelchair.
"What's going on, Ron?"
Val asked in a low voice as we
walked. Behind us the wheelchair
hissed steadily.
"I don't quite know, Val.
I've never seen this guy before,
and I thought I knew
everyone at the Dome."
"Quiet up there!" our captor
called, and we stopped
talking. We trudged along together,
with him following
behind; I could hear the
crunch-crunch
of the wheelchair
as its wheels chewed
into the sand. I wondered
where we were going, and
why. I wondered why we had
ever left Earth.
The answer to that came to
me quick enough: we had to.
Earth needed radioactives,
and the only way to get them
was to get out and look. The
great atomic wars of the late
20th Century had used up
much of the supply, but the
amount used to blow up half
the great cities of the world
hardly compared with the
amount we needed to put
them back together again.
In three centuries the shattered
world had been completely
rebuilt. The wreckage
of New York and Shanghai
and London and all the other
ruined cities had been hidden
by a shining new world of
gleaming towers and flying
roadways. We had profited by
our grandparents' mistakes.
They had used their atomics
to make bombs. We used ours
for fuel.
It was an atomic world.
Everything: power drills,
printing presses, typewriters,
can openers, ocean liners,
powered by the inexhaustible
energy of the dividing atom.
But though the energy is
inexhaustible, the supply of
nuclei isn't. After three centuries
of heavy consumption,
the supply failed. The mighty
machine that was Earth's industry
had started to slow
down.
And that started the chain
of events that led Val and me
to end up as a madman's prisoners,
on Mars. With every
source of uranium mined dry
on Earth, we had tried other
possibilities. All sorts of
schemes came forth. Project
Sea-Dredge was trying to get
uranium from the oceans. In
forty or fifty years, they'd
get some results, we hoped.
But there wasn't forty or
fifty years' worth of raw stuff
to tide us over until then. In a
decade or so, our power would
be just about gone. I could
picture the sort of dog-eat-dog
world we'd revert back
to. Millions of starving, freezing
humans tooth-and-clawing
in it in the useless shell of
a great atomic civilization.
So, Mars. There's not much
uranium on Mars, and it's not
easy to find or any cinch to
mine. But what little is there,
helps. It's a stopgap effort,
just to keep things moving
until Project Sea-Dredge
starts functioning.
Enter the Geig Corps: volunteers
out on the face of
Mars, combing for its uranium
deposits.
And here we are, I thought.
After we walked on a
while, a Dome became visible
up ahead. It slid up over the
crest of a hill, set back between
two hummocks on the
desert. Just out of the way
enough to escape observation.
For a puzzled moment I
thought it was our Dome, the
settlement where all of UranCo's
Geig Corps were located,
but another look told me that
this was actually quite near
us and fairly small. A one-man
Dome, of all things!
"Welcome to my home," he
said. "The name is Gregory
Ledman." He herded us off to
one side of the airlock, uttered
a few words keyed to his
voice, and motioned us inside
when the door slid up. When
we were inside he reached up,
clumsily holding the blaster,
and unscrewed the ancient
spacesuit fishbowl.
His face was a bitter,
dried-up mask. He was a man
who hated.
The place was spartanly
furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,
no decoration of any
sort. Hard bulkhead walls,
rivet-studded, glared back
at us. He had an automatic
chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,
and no other furniture.
Suddenly he drew the tanglegun
and sprayed our legs
again. We toppled heavily to
the floor. I looked up angrily.
"I imagine you want to
know the whole story," he
said. "The others did, too."
Valerie looked at me anxiously.
Her pretty face was a
dead white behind her oxymask.
"What others?"
"I never bothered to find
out their names," Ledman
said casually. "They were
other Geigs I caught unawares,
like you, out on the
desert. That's the only sport I
have left—Geig-hunting. Look
out there."
He gestured through the
translucent skin of the Dome,
and I felt sick. There was a
little heap of bones lying
there, looking oddly bright
against the redness of the
sands. They were the dried,
parched skeletons of Earthmen.
Bits of cloth and plastic,
once oxymasks and suits, still
clung to them.
Suddenly I remembered.
There had been a pattern
there all the time. We didn't
much talk about it; we chalked
it off as occupational hazards.
There had been a pattern
of disappearances on the desert.
I could think of six, eight
names now. None of them
had been particularly close
friends. You don't get time to
make close friends out here.
But we'd vowed it wouldn't
happen to us.
It had.
"You've been hunting
Geigs?" I asked. "
Why?
What've they ever done to
you?"
He smiled, as calmly as if
I'd just praised his house-keeping.
"Because I hate
you," he said blandly. "I intend
to wipe every last one of
you out, one by one."
I stared at him. I'd never
seen a man like this before; I
thought all his kind had died
at the time of the atomic
wars.
I heard Val sob, "He's a
madman!"
"No," Ledman said evenly.
"I'm quite sane, believe me.
But I'm determined to drive
the Geigs—and UranCo—off
Mars. Eventually I'll scare
you all away."
"Just pick us off in the desert?"
"Exactly," replied Ledman.
"And I have no fears of an
armed attack. This place is
well fortified. I've devoted
years to building it. And I'm
back against those hills. They
couldn't pry me out." He let
his pale hand run up into his
gnarled hair. "I've devoted
years to this. Ever since—ever
since I landed here on
Mars."
"What are you going to do
with us?" Val finally asked,
after a long silence.
He didn't smile this time.
"Kill you," he told her. "Not
your husband. I want him as
an envoy, to go back and tell
the others to clear off." He
rocked back and forth in his
wheelchair, toying with the
gleaming, deadly blaster in
his hand.
We stared in horror. It was
a nightmare—sitting there,
placidly rocking back and
forth, a nightmare.
I found myself fervently
wishing I was back out there
on the infinitely safer desert.
"Do I shock you?" he asked.
"I shouldn't—not when
you see my motives."
"We don't see them," I
snapped.
"Well, let me show you.
You're on Mars hunting uranium,
right? To mine and
ship the radioactives back to
Earth to keep the atomic engines
going. Right?"
I nodded over at our geiger
counters.
"We volunteered to come to
Mars," Val said irrelevantly.
"Ah—two young heroes,"
Ledman said acidly. "How
sad. I could almost feel sorry
for you. Almost."
"Just what is it you're
after?" I said, stalling, stalling.
"Atomics cost me my legs,"
he said. "You remember the
Sadlerville Blast?" he asked.
"Of course." And I did, too.
I'd never forget it. No one
would. How could I forget
that great accident—killing
hundreds, injuring thousands
more, sterilizing forty miles
of Mississippi land—when
the Sadlerville pile went up?
"I was there on business at
the time," Ledman said. "I
represented Ledman Atomics.
I was there to sign a new
contract for my company.
You know who I am, now?"
I nodded.
"I was fairly well shielded
when it happened. I never got
the contract, but I got a good
dose of radiation instead. Not
enough to kill me," he said.
"Just enough to necessitate
the removal of—" he indicated
the empty space at his
thighs. "So I got off lightly."
He gestured at the wheelchair
blanket.
I still didn't understand.
"But why kill us Geigs?
We
had nothing to do with it."
"You're just in this by accident,"
he said. "You see, after
the explosion and the amputation,
my fellow-members on
the board of Ledman Atomics
decided that a semi-basket
case like myself was a poor
risk as Head of the Board,
and they took my company
away. All quite legal, I assure
you. They left me almost a
pauper!" Then he snapped
the punchline at me.
"They renamed Ledman
Atomics. Who did you say you
worked for?"
I began, "Uran—"
"Don't bother. A more inventive
title than Ledman
Atomics, but not quite as
much heart, wouldn't you
say?" He grinned. "I saved
for years; then I came to
Mars, lost myself, built this
Dome, and swore to get even.
There's not a great deal of
uranium on this planet, but
enough to keep me in a style
to which, unfortunately, I'm
no longer accustomed."
He consulted his wrist
watch. "Time for my injection."
He pulled out the tanglegun
and sprayed us again,
just to make doubly certain.
"That's another little souvenir
of Sadlerville. I'm short
on red blood corpuscles."
He rolled over to a wall
table and fumbled in a container
among a pile of hypodermics.
"There are other injections,
too. Adrenalin, insulin.
Others. The Blast turned
me into a walking pin-cushion.
But I'll pay it all
back," he said. He plunged
the needle into his arm.
My eyes widened. It was
too nightmarish to be real. I
wasn't seriously worried
about his threat to wipe out
the entire Geig Corps, since
it was unlikely that one man
in a wheelchair could pick us
all off. No, it wasn't the
threat that disturbed me, so
much as the whole concept, so
strange to me, that the human
mind could be as warped
and twisted as Ledman's.
I saw the horror on Val's
face, and I knew she felt the
same way I did.
"Do you really think you
can succeed?" I taunted him.
"Really think you can kill
every Earthman on Mars? Of
all the insane, cockeyed—"
Val's quick, worried head-shake
cut me off. But Ledman
had felt my words, all right.
"Yes! I'll get even with
every one of you for taking
away my legs! If we hadn't
meddled with the atom in the
first place, I'd be as tall and
powerful as you, today—instead
of a useless cripple in a
wheelchair."
"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,"
Val said quietly.
"You've conceived an impossible
scheme of revenge and
now you're taking it out on
innocent people who've done
nothing, nothing at all to you.
That's not sane!"
His eyes blazed. "Who are
you to talk of sanity?"
Uneasily I caught Val's
glance from a corner of my
eye. Sweat was rolling down
her smooth forehead faster
than the auto-wiper could
swab it away.
"Why don't you do something?
What are you waiting
for, Ron?"
"Easy, baby," I said. I
knew what our ace in the hole
was. But I had to get Ledman
within reach of me first.
"Enough," he said. "I'm going
to turn you loose outside,
right after—"
"
Get sick!
" I hissed to Val,
low. She began immediately
to cough violently, emitting
harsh, choking sobs. "Can't
breathe!" She began to yell,
writhing in her bonds.
That did it. Ledman hadn't
much humanity left in him,
but there was a little. He lowered
the blaster a bit and
wheeled one-hand over to see
what was wrong with Val.
She continued to retch and
moan most horribly. It almost
convinced me. I saw Val's
pale, frightened face turn to
me.
He approached and peered
down at her. He opened his
mouth to say something, and
at that moment I snapped my
leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord
with a snicking rasp,
and kicked his wheelchair
over.
The blaster went off, burning
a hole through the Dome
roof. The automatic sealers
glued-in instantly. Ledman
went sprawling helplessly out
into the middle of the floor,
the wheelchair upended next
to him, its wheels slowly revolving
in the air. The blaster
flew from his hands at the
impact of landing and spun
out near me. In one quick motion
I rolled over and covered
it with my body.
Ledman clawed his way to
me with tremendous effort
and tried wildly to pry the
blaster out from under me,
but without success. I twisted
a bit, reached out with my
free leg, and booted him
across the floor. He fetched
up against the wall of the
Dome and lay there.
Val rolled over to me.
"Now if I could get free of
this stuff," I said, "I could get
him covered before he comes
to. But how?"
"Teamwork," Val said. She
swivelled around on the floor
until her head was near my
boot. "Push my oxymask off
with your foot, if you can."
I searched for the clamp
and tried to flip it. No luck,
with my heavy, clumsy boot.
I tried again, and this time it
snapped open. I got the tip
of my boot in and pried upward.
The oxymask came off,
slowly, scraping a jagged red
scratch up the side of Val's
neck as it came.
"There," she breathed.
"That's that."
I looked uneasily at Ledman.
He was groaning and
beginning to stir.
Val rolled on the floor and
her face lay near my right
arm. I saw what she had in
mind. She began to nibble the
vile-tasting tangle-cord, running
her teeth up and down
it until it started to give. She
continued unfailingly.
Finally one strand snapped.
Then another. At last I
had enough use of my hand
to reach out and grasp the
blaster. Then I pulled myself
across the floor to Ledman,
removed the tanglegun, and
melted the remaining tangle-cord
off.
My muscles were stiff and
bunched, and rising made me
wince. I turned and freed Val.
Then I turned and faced Ledman.
"I suppose you'll kill me
now," he said.
"No. That's the difference
between sane people and insane,"
I told him. "I'm not
going to kill you at all. I'm
going to see to it that you're
sent back to Earth."
"
No!
" he shouted. "No!
Anything but back there. I
don't want to face them again—not
after what they did to
me—"
"Not so loud," I broke in.
"They'll help you on Earth.
They'll take all the hatred and
sickness out of you, and turn
you into a useful member of
society again."
"I hate Earthmen," he spat
out. "I hate all of them."
"I know," I said sarcastically.
"You're just all full of
hate. You hated us so much
that you couldn't bear to hang
around on Earth for as much
as a year after the Sadlerville
Blast. You had to take right
off for Mars without a moment's
delay, didn't you? You
hated Earth so much you
had
to leave."
"Why are you telling all
this to me?"
"Because if you'd stayed
long enough, you'd have used
some of your pension money
to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic
legs, and then you
wouldn't need this wheelchair."
Ledman scowled, and then
his face went belligerent
again. "They told me I was
paralyzed below the waist.
That I'd never walk again,
even with prosthetic legs, because
I had no muscles to fit
them to."
"You left Earth too quickly,"
Val said.
"It was the only way," he
protested. "I had to get off—"
"She's right," I told him.
"The atom can take away, but
it can give as well. Soon after
you left they developed
atomic-powered
prosthetics—amazing
things, virtually robot
legs. All the survivors of
the Sadlerville Blast were
given the necessary replacement
limbs free of charge. All
except you. You were so sick
you had to get away from the
world you despised and come
here."
"You're lying," he said.
"It's not true!"
"Oh, but it is," Val smiled.
I saw him wilt visibly, and
for a moment I almost felt
sorry for him, a pathetic legless
figure propped up against
the wall of the Dome at
blaster-point. But then I remembered
he'd killed twelve
Geigs—or more—and would
have added Val to the number
had he had the chance.
"You're a very sick man,
Ledman," I said. "All this
time you could have been
happy, useful on Earth, instead
of being holed up here
nursing your hatred. You
might have been useful, on
Earth. But you decided to
channel everything out as revenge."
"I still don't believe it—those
legs. I might have walked
again. No—no, it's all a lie.
They told me I'd never walk,"
he said, weakly but stubbornly
still.
I could see his whole structure
of hate starting to topple,
and I decided to give it
the final push.
"Haven't you wondered
how I managed to break the
tangle-cord when I kicked you
over?"
"Yes—human legs aren't
strong enough to break tangle-cord
that way."
"Of course not," I said. I
gave Val the blaster and slipped
out of my oxysuit.
"Look," I said. I pointed to
my smooth, gleaming metal
legs. The almost soundless
purr of their motors was the
only noise in the room. "I was
in the Sadlerville Blast, too,"
I said. "But I didn't go crazy
with hate when I lost
my
legs."
Ledman was sobbing.
"Okay, Ledman," I said.
Val got him into his suit, and
brought him the fishbowl helmet.
"Get your helmet on and
let's go. Between the psychs
and the prosthetics men,
you'll be a new man inside of
a year."
"But I'm a murderer!"
"That's right. And you'll be
sentenced to psych adjustment.
When they're finished,
Gregory Ledman the killer
will be as dead as if they'd
electrocuted you, but there'll
be a new—and sane—Gregory
Ledman." I turned to Val.
"Got the geigers, honey?"
For the first time since
Ledman had caught us, I remembered
how tired Val had
been out on the desert. I realized
now that I had been driving
her mercilessly—me, with
my chromium legs and atomic-powered
muscles. No wonder
she was ready to fold!
And I'd been too dense to see
how unfair I had been.
She lifted the geiger harnesses,
and I put Ledman
back in his wheelchair.
Val slipped her oxymask
back on and fastened it shut.
"Let's get back to the Dome
in a hurry," I said. "We'll
turn Ledman over to the authorities.
Then we can catch
the next ship for Earth."
"Go back?
Go back?
If you
think I'm backing down now
and quitting you can find
yourself another wife! After
we dump this guy I'm sacking
in for twenty hours, and then
we're going back out there to
finish that search-pattern.
Earth needs uranium, honey,
and I know you'd never be
happy quitting in the middle
like that." She smiled. "I
can't wait to get out there
and start listening for those
tell-tale clicks."
I gave a joyful whoop and
swung her around. When I
put her down, she squeezed
my hand, hard.
"Let's get moving, fellow
hero," she said.
I pressed the stud for the
airlock, smiling.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories
September 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | to locate a new source of fuel | to restore Earth's depleted fuel reserves | to determine if the planet can be colonized | to identify the source of recent astronaut murders | 1 |
25627_61MWU4OY_3 | According to Ron, what motivated him and Val to join the Geigs? | THE
HUNTED
HEROES
By ROBERT SILVERBERG
The planet itself was tough enough—barren, desolate,
forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and
dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad
genius who had a motto:
Death to all Terrans!
"Let's
keep moving," I told
Val. "The surest way to
die out here on Mars is to
give up." I reached over and
turned up the pressure on her
oxymask to make things a
little easier for her. Through
the glassite of the mask, I
could see her face contorted
in an agony of fatigue.
And she probably thought
the failure of the sandcat was
all my fault, too. Val's usually
about the best wife a guy
could ask for, but when she
wants to be she can be a real
flying bother.
It was beyond her to see
that some grease monkey back
at the Dome was at fault—whoever
it was who had failed
to fasten down the engine
hood. Nothing but what had
stopped us
could
stop a sandcat:
sand in the delicate
mechanism of the atomic engine.
But no; she blamed it all on
me somehow: So we were out
walking on the spongy sand
of the Martian desert. We'd
been walking a good eight
hours.
"Can't we turn back now,
Ron?" Val pleaded. "Maybe
there isn't any uranium in
this sector at all. I think
we're crazy to keep on searching
out here!"
I started to tell her that the
UranCo chief had assured me
we'd hit something out this
way, but changed my mind.
When Val's tired and overwrought
there's no sense in
arguing with her.
I stared ahead at the bleak,
desolate wastes of the Martian
landscape. Behind us
somewhere was the comfort
of the Dome, ahead nothing
but the mazes and gullies of
this dead world.
He was a cripple in a wheelchair—helpless as a rattlesnake.
"Try to keep going, Val."
My gloved hand reached out
and clumsily enfolded hers.
"Come on, kid. Remember—we're
doing this for Earth.
We're heroes."
She glared at me. "Heroes,
hell!" she muttered. "That's
the way it looked back home,
but, out there it doesn't seem
so glorious. And UranCo's
pay is stinking."
"We didn't come out here
for the pay, Val."
"I know, I know, but just
the same—"
It must have been hell for
her. We had wandered fruitlessly
over the red sands all
day, both of us listening for
the clicks of the counter. And
the geigers had been obstinately
hushed all day, except
for their constant undercurrent
of meaningless noises.
Even though the Martian
gravity was only a fraction of
Earth's, I was starting to
tire, and I knew it must have
been really rough on Val with
her lovely but unrugged legs.
"Heroes," she said bitterly.
"We're not heroes—we're
suckers! Why did I ever let
you volunteer for the Geig
Corps and drag me along?"
Which wasn't anywhere
close to the truth. Now I
knew she was at the breaking
point, because Val didn't lie
unless she was so exhausted
she didn't know what she was
doing. She had been just as
much inflamed by the idea of
coming to Mars to help in the
search for uranium as I was.
We knew the pay was poor,
but we had felt it a sort of
obligation, something we
could do as individuals to
keep the industries of radioactives-starved
Earth going.
And we'd always had a roving
foot, both of us.
No, we had decided together
to come to Mars—the
way we decided together on
everything. Now she was
turning against me.
I tried to jolly her. "Buck
up, kid," I said. I didn't dare
turn up her oxy pressure any
higher, but it was obvious she
couldn't keep going. She was
almost sleep-walking now.
We pressed on over the
barren terrain. The geiger
kept up a fairly steady click-pattern,
but never broke into
that sudden explosive tumult
that meant we had found pay-dirt.
I started to feel tired
myself, terribly tired. I longed
to lie down on the soft,
spongy Martian sand and
bury myself.
I looked at Val. She was
dragging along with her eyes
half-shut. I felt almost guilty
for having dragged her out to
Mars, until I recalled that I
hadn't. In fact, she had come
up with the idea before I did.
I wished there was some way
of turning the weary, bedraggled
girl at my side back into
the Val who had so enthusiastically
suggested we join
the Geigs.
Twelve steps later, I decided
this was about as far as
we could go.
I stopped, slipped out of
the geiger harness, and lowered
myself ponderously to
the ground. "What'samatter,
Ron?" Val asked sleepily.
"Something wrong?"
"No, baby," I said, putting
out a hand and taking hers.
"I think we ought to rest a
little before we go any further.
It's been a long, hard
day."
It didn't take much to persuade
her. She slid down beside
me, curled up, and in a
moment she was fast asleep,
sprawled out on the sands.
Poor kid
, I thought. Maybe
we shouldn't have come to
Mars after all. But, I reminded
myself,
someone
had to do
the job.
A second thought appeared,
but I squelched it:
Why the hell me?
I looked down at Valerie's
sleeping form, and thought of
our warm, comfortable little
home on Earth. It wasn't
much, but people in love don't
need very fancy surroundings.
I watched her, sleeping
peacefully, a wayward lock of
her soft blonde hair trailing
down over one eyebrow, and
it seemed hard to believe that
we'd exchanged Earth and all
it held for us for the raw, untamed
struggle that was Mars.
But I knew I'd do it again, if
I had the chance. It's because
we wanted to keep what we
had. Heroes? Hell, no. We
just liked our comforts, and
wanted to keep them. Which
took a little work.
Time to get moving.
But
then Val stirred and rolled
over in her sleep, and I didn't
have the heart to wake her. I
sat there, holding her, staring
out over the desert, watching
the wind whip the sand up
into weird shapes.
The Geig Corps preferred
married couples, working in
teams. That's what had finally
decided it for us—we were a
good team. We had no ties on
Earth that couldn't be broken
without much difficulty. So
we volunteered.
And here we are.
Heroes.
The wind blasted a mass of
sand into my face, and I felt
it tinkle against the oxymask.
I glanced at the suit-chronometer.
Getting late. I decided
once again to wake Val.
But she was tired. And I was
tired too, tired from our
wearying journey across the
empty desert.
I started to shake Val. But
I never finished. It would be
so
nice just to lean back and
nuzzle up to her, down in the
sand. So nice. I yawned, and
stretched back.
I awoke with a sudden startled
shiver, and realized angrily
I had let myself doze off.
"Come on, Val," I said savagely,
and started to rise to
my feet.
I couldn't.
I looked down. I was neatly
bound in thin, tough, plastic
tangle-cord, swathed from
chin to boot-bottoms, my
arms imprisoned, my feet
caught. And tangle-cord is
about as easy to get out of as
a spider's web is for a trapped
fly.
It wasn't Martians that
had done it. There weren't
any Martians, hadn't been for
a million years. It was some
Earthman who had bound us.
I rolled my eyes toward
Val, and saw that she was
similarly trussed in the sticky
stuff. The tangle-cord was still
fresh, giving off a faint, repugnant
odor like that of drying
fish. It had been spun on
us only a short time ago, I
realized.
"Ron—"
"Don't try to move, baby.
This stuff can break your
neck if you twist it wrong."
She continued for a moment
to struggle futilely, and I had
to snap, "Lie still, Val!"
"A very wise statement,"
said a brittle, harsh voice
from above me. I looked up
and saw a helmeted figure
above us. He wasn't wearing
the customary skin-tight pliable
oxysuits we had. He
wore an outmoded, bulky
spacesuit and a fishbowl helmet,
all but the face area
opaque. The oxygen cannisters
weren't attached to his
back as expected, though.
They were strapped to the
back of the wheelchair in
which he sat.
Through the fishbowl I
could see hard little eyes, a
yellowed, parchment-like face,
a grim-set jaw. I didn't recognize
him, and this struck me
odd. I thought I knew everyone
on sparsely-settled Mars.
Somehow I'd missed him.
What shocked me most was
that he had no legs. The
spacesuit ended neatly at the
thighs.
He was holding in his left
hand the tanglegun with
which he had entrapped us,
and a very efficient-looking
blaster was in his right.
"I didn't want to disturb
your sleep," he said coldly.
"So I've been waiting here
for you to wake up."
I could just see it. He might
have been sitting there for
hours, complacently waiting
to see how we'd wake up.
That was when I realized he
must be totally insane. I could
feel my stomach-muscles
tighten, my throat constrict
painfully.
Then anger ripped through
me, washing away the terror.
"What's going on?" I demanded,
staring at the half
of a man who confronted us
from the wheelchair. "Who
are you?"
"You'll find out soon
enough," he said. "Suppose
now you come with me." He
reached for the tanglegun,
flipped the little switch on its
side to MELT, and shot a
stream of watery fluid over
our legs, keeping the blaster
trained on us all the while.
Our legs were free.
"You may get up now," he
said. "Slowly, without trying
to make trouble." Val and I
helped each other to our feet
as best we could, considering
our arms were still tightly
bound against the sides of our
oxysuits.
"Walk," the stranger said,
waving the tanglegun to indicate
the direction. "I'll be
right behind you." He holstered
the tanglegun.
I glimpsed the bulk of an
outboard atomic rigging behind
him, strapped to the
back of the wheelchair. He
fingered a knob on the arm of
the chair and the two exhaust
ducts behind the wheel-housings
flamed for a moment,
and the chair began to roll.
Obediently, we started
walking. You don't argue
with a blaster, even if the
man pointing it is in a wheelchair.
"What's going on, Ron?"
Val asked in a low voice as we
walked. Behind us the wheelchair
hissed steadily.
"I don't quite know, Val.
I've never seen this guy before,
and I thought I knew
everyone at the Dome."
"Quiet up there!" our captor
called, and we stopped
talking. We trudged along together,
with him following
behind; I could hear the
crunch-crunch
of the wheelchair
as its wheels chewed
into the sand. I wondered
where we were going, and
why. I wondered why we had
ever left Earth.
The answer to that came to
me quick enough: we had to.
Earth needed radioactives,
and the only way to get them
was to get out and look. The
great atomic wars of the late
20th Century had used up
much of the supply, but the
amount used to blow up half
the great cities of the world
hardly compared with the
amount we needed to put
them back together again.
In three centuries the shattered
world had been completely
rebuilt. The wreckage
of New York and Shanghai
and London and all the other
ruined cities had been hidden
by a shining new world of
gleaming towers and flying
roadways. We had profited by
our grandparents' mistakes.
They had used their atomics
to make bombs. We used ours
for fuel.
It was an atomic world.
Everything: power drills,
printing presses, typewriters,
can openers, ocean liners,
powered by the inexhaustible
energy of the dividing atom.
But though the energy is
inexhaustible, the supply of
nuclei isn't. After three centuries
of heavy consumption,
the supply failed. The mighty
machine that was Earth's industry
had started to slow
down.
And that started the chain
of events that led Val and me
to end up as a madman's prisoners,
on Mars. With every
source of uranium mined dry
on Earth, we had tried other
possibilities. All sorts of
schemes came forth. Project
Sea-Dredge was trying to get
uranium from the oceans. In
forty or fifty years, they'd
get some results, we hoped.
But there wasn't forty or
fifty years' worth of raw stuff
to tide us over until then. In a
decade or so, our power would
be just about gone. I could
picture the sort of dog-eat-dog
world we'd revert back
to. Millions of starving, freezing
humans tooth-and-clawing
in it in the useless shell of
a great atomic civilization.
So, Mars. There's not much
uranium on Mars, and it's not
easy to find or any cinch to
mine. But what little is there,
helps. It's a stopgap effort,
just to keep things moving
until Project Sea-Dredge
starts functioning.
Enter the Geig Corps: volunteers
out on the face of
Mars, combing for its uranium
deposits.
And here we are, I thought.
After we walked on a
while, a Dome became visible
up ahead. It slid up over the
crest of a hill, set back between
two hummocks on the
desert. Just out of the way
enough to escape observation.
For a puzzled moment I
thought it was our Dome, the
settlement where all of UranCo's
Geig Corps were located,
but another look told me that
this was actually quite near
us and fairly small. A one-man
Dome, of all things!
"Welcome to my home," he
said. "The name is Gregory
Ledman." He herded us off to
one side of the airlock, uttered
a few words keyed to his
voice, and motioned us inside
when the door slid up. When
we were inside he reached up,
clumsily holding the blaster,
and unscrewed the ancient
spacesuit fishbowl.
His face was a bitter,
dried-up mask. He was a man
who hated.
The place was spartanly
furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,
no decoration of any
sort. Hard bulkhead walls,
rivet-studded, glared back
at us. He had an automatic
chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,
and no other furniture.
Suddenly he drew the tanglegun
and sprayed our legs
again. We toppled heavily to
the floor. I looked up angrily.
"I imagine you want to
know the whole story," he
said. "The others did, too."
Valerie looked at me anxiously.
Her pretty face was a
dead white behind her oxymask.
"What others?"
"I never bothered to find
out their names," Ledman
said casually. "They were
other Geigs I caught unawares,
like you, out on the
desert. That's the only sport I
have left—Geig-hunting. Look
out there."
He gestured through the
translucent skin of the Dome,
and I felt sick. There was a
little heap of bones lying
there, looking oddly bright
against the redness of the
sands. They were the dried,
parched skeletons of Earthmen.
Bits of cloth and plastic,
once oxymasks and suits, still
clung to them.
Suddenly I remembered.
There had been a pattern
there all the time. We didn't
much talk about it; we chalked
it off as occupational hazards.
There had been a pattern
of disappearances on the desert.
I could think of six, eight
names now. None of them
had been particularly close
friends. You don't get time to
make close friends out here.
But we'd vowed it wouldn't
happen to us.
It had.
"You've been hunting
Geigs?" I asked. "
Why?
What've they ever done to
you?"
He smiled, as calmly as if
I'd just praised his house-keeping.
"Because I hate
you," he said blandly. "I intend
to wipe every last one of
you out, one by one."
I stared at him. I'd never
seen a man like this before; I
thought all his kind had died
at the time of the atomic
wars.
I heard Val sob, "He's a
madman!"
"No," Ledman said evenly.
"I'm quite sane, believe me.
But I'm determined to drive
the Geigs—and UranCo—off
Mars. Eventually I'll scare
you all away."
"Just pick us off in the desert?"
"Exactly," replied Ledman.
"And I have no fears of an
armed attack. This place is
well fortified. I've devoted
years to building it. And I'm
back against those hills. They
couldn't pry me out." He let
his pale hand run up into his
gnarled hair. "I've devoted
years to this. Ever since—ever
since I landed here on
Mars."
"What are you going to do
with us?" Val finally asked,
after a long silence.
He didn't smile this time.
"Kill you," he told her. "Not
your husband. I want him as
an envoy, to go back and tell
the others to clear off." He
rocked back and forth in his
wheelchair, toying with the
gleaming, deadly blaster in
his hand.
We stared in horror. It was
a nightmare—sitting there,
placidly rocking back and
forth, a nightmare.
I found myself fervently
wishing I was back out there
on the infinitely safer desert.
"Do I shock you?" he asked.
"I shouldn't—not when
you see my motives."
"We don't see them," I
snapped.
"Well, let me show you.
You're on Mars hunting uranium,
right? To mine and
ship the radioactives back to
Earth to keep the atomic engines
going. Right?"
I nodded over at our geiger
counters.
"We volunteered to come to
Mars," Val said irrelevantly.
"Ah—two young heroes,"
Ledman said acidly. "How
sad. I could almost feel sorry
for you. Almost."
"Just what is it you're
after?" I said, stalling, stalling.
"Atomics cost me my legs,"
he said. "You remember the
Sadlerville Blast?" he asked.
"Of course." And I did, too.
I'd never forget it. No one
would. How could I forget
that great accident—killing
hundreds, injuring thousands
more, sterilizing forty miles
of Mississippi land—when
the Sadlerville pile went up?
"I was there on business at
the time," Ledman said. "I
represented Ledman Atomics.
I was there to sign a new
contract for my company.
You know who I am, now?"
I nodded.
"I was fairly well shielded
when it happened. I never got
the contract, but I got a good
dose of radiation instead. Not
enough to kill me," he said.
"Just enough to necessitate
the removal of—" he indicated
the empty space at his
thighs. "So I got off lightly."
He gestured at the wheelchair
blanket.
I still didn't understand.
"But why kill us Geigs?
We
had nothing to do with it."
"You're just in this by accident,"
he said. "You see, after
the explosion and the amputation,
my fellow-members on
the board of Ledman Atomics
decided that a semi-basket
case like myself was a poor
risk as Head of the Board,
and they took my company
away. All quite legal, I assure
you. They left me almost a
pauper!" Then he snapped
the punchline at me.
"They renamed Ledman
Atomics. Who did you say you
worked for?"
I began, "Uran—"
"Don't bother. A more inventive
title than Ledman
Atomics, but not quite as
much heart, wouldn't you
say?" He grinned. "I saved
for years; then I came to
Mars, lost myself, built this
Dome, and swore to get even.
There's not a great deal of
uranium on this planet, but
enough to keep me in a style
to which, unfortunately, I'm
no longer accustomed."
He consulted his wrist
watch. "Time for my injection."
He pulled out the tanglegun
and sprayed us again,
just to make doubly certain.
"That's another little souvenir
of Sadlerville. I'm short
on red blood corpuscles."
He rolled over to a wall
table and fumbled in a container
among a pile of hypodermics.
"There are other injections,
too. Adrenalin, insulin.
Others. The Blast turned
me into a walking pin-cushion.
But I'll pay it all
back," he said. He plunged
the needle into his arm.
My eyes widened. It was
too nightmarish to be real. I
wasn't seriously worried
about his threat to wipe out
the entire Geig Corps, since
it was unlikely that one man
in a wheelchair could pick us
all off. No, it wasn't the
threat that disturbed me, so
much as the whole concept, so
strange to me, that the human
mind could be as warped
and twisted as Ledman's.
I saw the horror on Val's
face, and I knew she felt the
same way I did.
"Do you really think you
can succeed?" I taunted him.
"Really think you can kill
every Earthman on Mars? Of
all the insane, cockeyed—"
Val's quick, worried head-shake
cut me off. But Ledman
had felt my words, all right.
"Yes! I'll get even with
every one of you for taking
away my legs! If we hadn't
meddled with the atom in the
first place, I'd be as tall and
powerful as you, today—instead
of a useless cripple in a
wheelchair."
"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,"
Val said quietly.
"You've conceived an impossible
scheme of revenge and
now you're taking it out on
innocent people who've done
nothing, nothing at all to you.
That's not sane!"
His eyes blazed. "Who are
you to talk of sanity?"
Uneasily I caught Val's
glance from a corner of my
eye. Sweat was rolling down
her smooth forehead faster
than the auto-wiper could
swab it away.
"Why don't you do something?
What are you waiting
for, Ron?"
"Easy, baby," I said. I
knew what our ace in the hole
was. But I had to get Ledman
within reach of me first.
"Enough," he said. "I'm going
to turn you loose outside,
right after—"
"
Get sick!
" I hissed to Val,
low. She began immediately
to cough violently, emitting
harsh, choking sobs. "Can't
breathe!" She began to yell,
writhing in her bonds.
That did it. Ledman hadn't
much humanity left in him,
but there was a little. He lowered
the blaster a bit and
wheeled one-hand over to see
what was wrong with Val.
She continued to retch and
moan most horribly. It almost
convinced me. I saw Val's
pale, frightened face turn to
me.
He approached and peered
down at her. He opened his
mouth to say something, and
at that moment I snapped my
leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord
with a snicking rasp,
and kicked his wheelchair
over.
The blaster went off, burning
a hole through the Dome
roof. The automatic sealers
glued-in instantly. Ledman
went sprawling helplessly out
into the middle of the floor,
the wheelchair upended next
to him, its wheels slowly revolving
in the air. The blaster
flew from his hands at the
impact of landing and spun
out near me. In one quick motion
I rolled over and covered
it with my body.
Ledman clawed his way to
me with tremendous effort
and tried wildly to pry the
blaster out from under me,
but without success. I twisted
a bit, reached out with my
free leg, and booted him
across the floor. He fetched
up against the wall of the
Dome and lay there.
Val rolled over to me.
"Now if I could get free of
this stuff," I said, "I could get
him covered before he comes
to. But how?"
"Teamwork," Val said. She
swivelled around on the floor
until her head was near my
boot. "Push my oxymask off
with your foot, if you can."
I searched for the clamp
and tried to flip it. No luck,
with my heavy, clumsy boot.
I tried again, and this time it
snapped open. I got the tip
of my boot in and pried upward.
The oxymask came off,
slowly, scraping a jagged red
scratch up the side of Val's
neck as it came.
"There," she breathed.
"That's that."
I looked uneasily at Ledman.
He was groaning and
beginning to stir.
Val rolled on the floor and
her face lay near my right
arm. I saw what she had in
mind. She began to nibble the
vile-tasting tangle-cord, running
her teeth up and down
it until it started to give. She
continued unfailingly.
Finally one strand snapped.
Then another. At last I
had enough use of my hand
to reach out and grasp the
blaster. Then I pulled myself
across the floor to Ledman,
removed the tanglegun, and
melted the remaining tangle-cord
off.
My muscles were stiff and
bunched, and rising made me
wince. I turned and freed Val.
Then I turned and faced Ledman.
"I suppose you'll kill me
now," he said.
"No. That's the difference
between sane people and insane,"
I told him. "I'm not
going to kill you at all. I'm
going to see to it that you're
sent back to Earth."
"
No!
" he shouted. "No!
Anything but back there. I
don't want to face them again—not
after what they did to
me—"
"Not so loud," I broke in.
"They'll help you on Earth.
They'll take all the hatred and
sickness out of you, and turn
you into a useful member of
society again."
"I hate Earthmen," he spat
out. "I hate all of them."
"I know," I said sarcastically.
"You're just all full of
hate. You hated us so much
that you couldn't bear to hang
around on Earth for as much
as a year after the Sadlerville
Blast. You had to take right
off for Mars without a moment's
delay, didn't you? You
hated Earth so much you
had
to leave."
"Why are you telling all
this to me?"
"Because if you'd stayed
long enough, you'd have used
some of your pension money
to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic
legs, and then you
wouldn't need this wheelchair."
Ledman scowled, and then
his face went belligerent
again. "They told me I was
paralyzed below the waist.
That I'd never walk again,
even with prosthetic legs, because
I had no muscles to fit
them to."
"You left Earth too quickly,"
Val said.
"It was the only way," he
protested. "I had to get off—"
"She's right," I told him.
"The atom can take away, but
it can give as well. Soon after
you left they developed
atomic-powered
prosthetics—amazing
things, virtually robot
legs. All the survivors of
the Sadlerville Blast were
given the necessary replacement
limbs free of charge. All
except you. You were so sick
you had to get away from the
world you despised and come
here."
"You're lying," he said.
"It's not true!"
"Oh, but it is," Val smiled.
I saw him wilt visibly, and
for a moment I almost felt
sorry for him, a pathetic legless
figure propped up against
the wall of the Dome at
blaster-point. But then I remembered
he'd killed twelve
Geigs—or more—and would
have added Val to the number
had he had the chance.
"You're a very sick man,
Ledman," I said. "All this
time you could have been
happy, useful on Earth, instead
of being holed up here
nursing your hatred. You
might have been useful, on
Earth. But you decided to
channel everything out as revenge."
"I still don't believe it—those
legs. I might have walked
again. No—no, it's all a lie.
They told me I'd never walk,"
he said, weakly but stubbornly
still.
I could see his whole structure
of hate starting to topple,
and I decided to give it
the final push.
"Haven't you wondered
how I managed to break the
tangle-cord when I kicked you
over?"
"Yes—human legs aren't
strong enough to break tangle-cord
that way."
"Of course not," I said. I
gave Val the blaster and slipped
out of my oxysuit.
"Look," I said. I pointed to
my smooth, gleaming metal
legs. The almost soundless
purr of their motors was the
only noise in the room. "I was
in the Sadlerville Blast, too,"
I said. "But I didn't go crazy
with hate when I lost
my
legs."
Ledman was sobbing.
"Okay, Ledman," I said.
Val got him into his suit, and
brought him the fishbowl helmet.
"Get your helmet on and
let's go. Between the psychs
and the prosthetics men,
you'll be a new man inside of
a year."
"But I'm a murderer!"
"That's right. And you'll be
sentenced to psych adjustment.
When they're finished,
Gregory Ledman the killer
will be as dead as if they'd
electrocuted you, but there'll
be a new—and sane—Gregory
Ledman." I turned to Val.
"Got the geigers, honey?"
For the first time since
Ledman had caught us, I remembered
how tired Val had
been out on the desert. I realized
now that I had been driving
her mercilessly—me, with
my chromium legs and atomic-powered
muscles. No wonder
she was ready to fold!
And I'd been too dense to see
how unfair I had been.
She lifted the geiger harnesses,
and I put Ledman
back in his wheelchair.
Val slipped her oxymask
back on and fastened it shut.
"Let's get back to the Dome
in a hurry," I said. "We'll
turn Ledman over to the authorities.
Then we can catch
the next ship for Earth."
"Go back?
Go back?
If you
think I'm backing down now
and quitting you can find
yourself another wife! After
we dump this guy I'm sacking
in for twenty hours, and then
we're going back out there to
finish that search-pattern.
Earth needs uranium, honey,
and I know you'd never be
happy quitting in the middle
like that." She smiled. "I
can't wait to get out there
and start listening for those
tell-tale clicks."
I gave a joyful whoop and
swung her around. When I
put her down, she squeezed
my hand, hard.
"Let's get moving, fellow
hero," she said.
I pressed the stud for the
airlock, smiling.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories
September 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | desire to maintain their present way of life | monetary compensation | opportunity for a new life on Mars | heroic reputational status upon returning to Earth | 0 |
25627_61MWU4OY_4 | Which term best describes Mars' population? | THE
HUNTED
HEROES
By ROBERT SILVERBERG
The planet itself was tough enough—barren, desolate,
forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and
dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad
genius who had a motto:
Death to all Terrans!
"Let's
keep moving," I told
Val. "The surest way to
die out here on Mars is to
give up." I reached over and
turned up the pressure on her
oxymask to make things a
little easier for her. Through
the glassite of the mask, I
could see her face contorted
in an agony of fatigue.
And she probably thought
the failure of the sandcat was
all my fault, too. Val's usually
about the best wife a guy
could ask for, but when she
wants to be she can be a real
flying bother.
It was beyond her to see
that some grease monkey back
at the Dome was at fault—whoever
it was who had failed
to fasten down the engine
hood. Nothing but what had
stopped us
could
stop a sandcat:
sand in the delicate
mechanism of the atomic engine.
But no; she blamed it all on
me somehow: So we were out
walking on the spongy sand
of the Martian desert. We'd
been walking a good eight
hours.
"Can't we turn back now,
Ron?" Val pleaded. "Maybe
there isn't any uranium in
this sector at all. I think
we're crazy to keep on searching
out here!"
I started to tell her that the
UranCo chief had assured me
we'd hit something out this
way, but changed my mind.
When Val's tired and overwrought
there's no sense in
arguing with her.
I stared ahead at the bleak,
desolate wastes of the Martian
landscape. Behind us
somewhere was the comfort
of the Dome, ahead nothing
but the mazes and gullies of
this dead world.
He was a cripple in a wheelchair—helpless as a rattlesnake.
"Try to keep going, Val."
My gloved hand reached out
and clumsily enfolded hers.
"Come on, kid. Remember—we're
doing this for Earth.
We're heroes."
She glared at me. "Heroes,
hell!" she muttered. "That's
the way it looked back home,
but, out there it doesn't seem
so glorious. And UranCo's
pay is stinking."
"We didn't come out here
for the pay, Val."
"I know, I know, but just
the same—"
It must have been hell for
her. We had wandered fruitlessly
over the red sands all
day, both of us listening for
the clicks of the counter. And
the geigers had been obstinately
hushed all day, except
for their constant undercurrent
of meaningless noises.
Even though the Martian
gravity was only a fraction of
Earth's, I was starting to
tire, and I knew it must have
been really rough on Val with
her lovely but unrugged legs.
"Heroes," she said bitterly.
"We're not heroes—we're
suckers! Why did I ever let
you volunteer for the Geig
Corps and drag me along?"
Which wasn't anywhere
close to the truth. Now I
knew she was at the breaking
point, because Val didn't lie
unless she was so exhausted
she didn't know what she was
doing. She had been just as
much inflamed by the idea of
coming to Mars to help in the
search for uranium as I was.
We knew the pay was poor,
but we had felt it a sort of
obligation, something we
could do as individuals to
keep the industries of radioactives-starved
Earth going.
And we'd always had a roving
foot, both of us.
No, we had decided together
to come to Mars—the
way we decided together on
everything. Now she was
turning against me.
I tried to jolly her. "Buck
up, kid," I said. I didn't dare
turn up her oxy pressure any
higher, but it was obvious she
couldn't keep going. She was
almost sleep-walking now.
We pressed on over the
barren terrain. The geiger
kept up a fairly steady click-pattern,
but never broke into
that sudden explosive tumult
that meant we had found pay-dirt.
I started to feel tired
myself, terribly tired. I longed
to lie down on the soft,
spongy Martian sand and
bury myself.
I looked at Val. She was
dragging along with her eyes
half-shut. I felt almost guilty
for having dragged her out to
Mars, until I recalled that I
hadn't. In fact, she had come
up with the idea before I did.
I wished there was some way
of turning the weary, bedraggled
girl at my side back into
the Val who had so enthusiastically
suggested we join
the Geigs.
Twelve steps later, I decided
this was about as far as
we could go.
I stopped, slipped out of
the geiger harness, and lowered
myself ponderously to
the ground. "What'samatter,
Ron?" Val asked sleepily.
"Something wrong?"
"No, baby," I said, putting
out a hand and taking hers.
"I think we ought to rest a
little before we go any further.
It's been a long, hard
day."
It didn't take much to persuade
her. She slid down beside
me, curled up, and in a
moment she was fast asleep,
sprawled out on the sands.
Poor kid
, I thought. Maybe
we shouldn't have come to
Mars after all. But, I reminded
myself,
someone
had to do
the job.
A second thought appeared,
but I squelched it:
Why the hell me?
I looked down at Valerie's
sleeping form, and thought of
our warm, comfortable little
home on Earth. It wasn't
much, but people in love don't
need very fancy surroundings.
I watched her, sleeping
peacefully, a wayward lock of
her soft blonde hair trailing
down over one eyebrow, and
it seemed hard to believe that
we'd exchanged Earth and all
it held for us for the raw, untamed
struggle that was Mars.
But I knew I'd do it again, if
I had the chance. It's because
we wanted to keep what we
had. Heroes? Hell, no. We
just liked our comforts, and
wanted to keep them. Which
took a little work.
Time to get moving.
But
then Val stirred and rolled
over in her sleep, and I didn't
have the heart to wake her. I
sat there, holding her, staring
out over the desert, watching
the wind whip the sand up
into weird shapes.
The Geig Corps preferred
married couples, working in
teams. That's what had finally
decided it for us—we were a
good team. We had no ties on
Earth that couldn't be broken
without much difficulty. So
we volunteered.
And here we are.
Heroes.
The wind blasted a mass of
sand into my face, and I felt
it tinkle against the oxymask.
I glanced at the suit-chronometer.
Getting late. I decided
once again to wake Val.
But she was tired. And I was
tired too, tired from our
wearying journey across the
empty desert.
I started to shake Val. But
I never finished. It would be
so
nice just to lean back and
nuzzle up to her, down in the
sand. So nice. I yawned, and
stretched back.
I awoke with a sudden startled
shiver, and realized angrily
I had let myself doze off.
"Come on, Val," I said savagely,
and started to rise to
my feet.
I couldn't.
I looked down. I was neatly
bound in thin, tough, plastic
tangle-cord, swathed from
chin to boot-bottoms, my
arms imprisoned, my feet
caught. And tangle-cord is
about as easy to get out of as
a spider's web is for a trapped
fly.
It wasn't Martians that
had done it. There weren't
any Martians, hadn't been for
a million years. It was some
Earthman who had bound us.
I rolled my eyes toward
Val, and saw that she was
similarly trussed in the sticky
stuff. The tangle-cord was still
fresh, giving off a faint, repugnant
odor like that of drying
fish. It had been spun on
us only a short time ago, I
realized.
"Ron—"
"Don't try to move, baby.
This stuff can break your
neck if you twist it wrong."
She continued for a moment
to struggle futilely, and I had
to snap, "Lie still, Val!"
"A very wise statement,"
said a brittle, harsh voice
from above me. I looked up
and saw a helmeted figure
above us. He wasn't wearing
the customary skin-tight pliable
oxysuits we had. He
wore an outmoded, bulky
spacesuit and a fishbowl helmet,
all but the face area
opaque. The oxygen cannisters
weren't attached to his
back as expected, though.
They were strapped to the
back of the wheelchair in
which he sat.
Through the fishbowl I
could see hard little eyes, a
yellowed, parchment-like face,
a grim-set jaw. I didn't recognize
him, and this struck me
odd. I thought I knew everyone
on sparsely-settled Mars.
Somehow I'd missed him.
What shocked me most was
that he had no legs. The
spacesuit ended neatly at the
thighs.
He was holding in his left
hand the tanglegun with
which he had entrapped us,
and a very efficient-looking
blaster was in his right.
"I didn't want to disturb
your sleep," he said coldly.
"So I've been waiting here
for you to wake up."
I could just see it. He might
have been sitting there for
hours, complacently waiting
to see how we'd wake up.
That was when I realized he
must be totally insane. I could
feel my stomach-muscles
tighten, my throat constrict
painfully.
Then anger ripped through
me, washing away the terror.
"What's going on?" I demanded,
staring at the half
of a man who confronted us
from the wheelchair. "Who
are you?"
"You'll find out soon
enough," he said. "Suppose
now you come with me." He
reached for the tanglegun,
flipped the little switch on its
side to MELT, and shot a
stream of watery fluid over
our legs, keeping the blaster
trained on us all the while.
Our legs were free.
"You may get up now," he
said. "Slowly, without trying
to make trouble." Val and I
helped each other to our feet
as best we could, considering
our arms were still tightly
bound against the sides of our
oxysuits.
"Walk," the stranger said,
waving the tanglegun to indicate
the direction. "I'll be
right behind you." He holstered
the tanglegun.
I glimpsed the bulk of an
outboard atomic rigging behind
him, strapped to the
back of the wheelchair. He
fingered a knob on the arm of
the chair and the two exhaust
ducts behind the wheel-housings
flamed for a moment,
and the chair began to roll.
Obediently, we started
walking. You don't argue
with a blaster, even if the
man pointing it is in a wheelchair.
"What's going on, Ron?"
Val asked in a low voice as we
walked. Behind us the wheelchair
hissed steadily.
"I don't quite know, Val.
I've never seen this guy before,
and I thought I knew
everyone at the Dome."
"Quiet up there!" our captor
called, and we stopped
talking. We trudged along together,
with him following
behind; I could hear the
crunch-crunch
of the wheelchair
as its wheels chewed
into the sand. I wondered
where we were going, and
why. I wondered why we had
ever left Earth.
The answer to that came to
me quick enough: we had to.
Earth needed radioactives,
and the only way to get them
was to get out and look. The
great atomic wars of the late
20th Century had used up
much of the supply, but the
amount used to blow up half
the great cities of the world
hardly compared with the
amount we needed to put
them back together again.
In three centuries the shattered
world had been completely
rebuilt. The wreckage
of New York and Shanghai
and London and all the other
ruined cities had been hidden
by a shining new world of
gleaming towers and flying
roadways. We had profited by
our grandparents' mistakes.
They had used their atomics
to make bombs. We used ours
for fuel.
It was an atomic world.
Everything: power drills,
printing presses, typewriters,
can openers, ocean liners,
powered by the inexhaustible
energy of the dividing atom.
But though the energy is
inexhaustible, the supply of
nuclei isn't. After three centuries
of heavy consumption,
the supply failed. The mighty
machine that was Earth's industry
had started to slow
down.
And that started the chain
of events that led Val and me
to end up as a madman's prisoners,
on Mars. With every
source of uranium mined dry
on Earth, we had tried other
possibilities. All sorts of
schemes came forth. Project
Sea-Dredge was trying to get
uranium from the oceans. In
forty or fifty years, they'd
get some results, we hoped.
But there wasn't forty or
fifty years' worth of raw stuff
to tide us over until then. In a
decade or so, our power would
be just about gone. I could
picture the sort of dog-eat-dog
world we'd revert back
to. Millions of starving, freezing
humans tooth-and-clawing
in it in the useless shell of
a great atomic civilization.
So, Mars. There's not much
uranium on Mars, and it's not
easy to find or any cinch to
mine. But what little is there,
helps. It's a stopgap effort,
just to keep things moving
until Project Sea-Dredge
starts functioning.
Enter the Geig Corps: volunteers
out on the face of
Mars, combing for its uranium
deposits.
And here we are, I thought.
After we walked on a
while, a Dome became visible
up ahead. It slid up over the
crest of a hill, set back between
two hummocks on the
desert. Just out of the way
enough to escape observation.
For a puzzled moment I
thought it was our Dome, the
settlement where all of UranCo's
Geig Corps were located,
but another look told me that
this was actually quite near
us and fairly small. A one-man
Dome, of all things!
"Welcome to my home," he
said. "The name is Gregory
Ledman." He herded us off to
one side of the airlock, uttered
a few words keyed to his
voice, and motioned us inside
when the door slid up. When
we were inside he reached up,
clumsily holding the blaster,
and unscrewed the ancient
spacesuit fishbowl.
His face was a bitter,
dried-up mask. He was a man
who hated.
The place was spartanly
furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,
no decoration of any
sort. Hard bulkhead walls,
rivet-studded, glared back
at us. He had an automatic
chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,
and no other furniture.
Suddenly he drew the tanglegun
and sprayed our legs
again. We toppled heavily to
the floor. I looked up angrily.
"I imagine you want to
know the whole story," he
said. "The others did, too."
Valerie looked at me anxiously.
Her pretty face was a
dead white behind her oxymask.
"What others?"
"I never bothered to find
out their names," Ledman
said casually. "They were
other Geigs I caught unawares,
like you, out on the
desert. That's the only sport I
have left—Geig-hunting. Look
out there."
He gestured through the
translucent skin of the Dome,
and I felt sick. There was a
little heap of bones lying
there, looking oddly bright
against the redness of the
sands. They were the dried,
parched skeletons of Earthmen.
Bits of cloth and plastic,
once oxymasks and suits, still
clung to them.
Suddenly I remembered.
There had been a pattern
there all the time. We didn't
much talk about it; we chalked
it off as occupational hazards.
There had been a pattern
of disappearances on the desert.
I could think of six, eight
names now. None of them
had been particularly close
friends. You don't get time to
make close friends out here.
But we'd vowed it wouldn't
happen to us.
It had.
"You've been hunting
Geigs?" I asked. "
Why?
What've they ever done to
you?"
He smiled, as calmly as if
I'd just praised his house-keeping.
"Because I hate
you," he said blandly. "I intend
to wipe every last one of
you out, one by one."
I stared at him. I'd never
seen a man like this before; I
thought all his kind had died
at the time of the atomic
wars.
I heard Val sob, "He's a
madman!"
"No," Ledman said evenly.
"I'm quite sane, believe me.
But I'm determined to drive
the Geigs—and UranCo—off
Mars. Eventually I'll scare
you all away."
"Just pick us off in the desert?"
"Exactly," replied Ledman.
"And I have no fears of an
armed attack. This place is
well fortified. I've devoted
years to building it. And I'm
back against those hills. They
couldn't pry me out." He let
his pale hand run up into his
gnarled hair. "I've devoted
years to this. Ever since—ever
since I landed here on
Mars."
"What are you going to do
with us?" Val finally asked,
after a long silence.
He didn't smile this time.
"Kill you," he told her. "Not
your husband. I want him as
an envoy, to go back and tell
the others to clear off." He
rocked back and forth in his
wheelchair, toying with the
gleaming, deadly blaster in
his hand.
We stared in horror. It was
a nightmare—sitting there,
placidly rocking back and
forth, a nightmare.
I found myself fervently
wishing I was back out there
on the infinitely safer desert.
"Do I shock you?" he asked.
"I shouldn't—not when
you see my motives."
"We don't see them," I
snapped.
"Well, let me show you.
You're on Mars hunting uranium,
right? To mine and
ship the radioactives back to
Earth to keep the atomic engines
going. Right?"
I nodded over at our geiger
counters.
"We volunteered to come to
Mars," Val said irrelevantly.
"Ah—two young heroes,"
Ledman said acidly. "How
sad. I could almost feel sorry
for you. Almost."
"Just what is it you're
after?" I said, stalling, stalling.
"Atomics cost me my legs,"
he said. "You remember the
Sadlerville Blast?" he asked.
"Of course." And I did, too.
I'd never forget it. No one
would. How could I forget
that great accident—killing
hundreds, injuring thousands
more, sterilizing forty miles
of Mississippi land—when
the Sadlerville pile went up?
"I was there on business at
the time," Ledman said. "I
represented Ledman Atomics.
I was there to sign a new
contract for my company.
You know who I am, now?"
I nodded.
"I was fairly well shielded
when it happened. I never got
the contract, but I got a good
dose of radiation instead. Not
enough to kill me," he said.
"Just enough to necessitate
the removal of—" he indicated
the empty space at his
thighs. "So I got off lightly."
He gestured at the wheelchair
blanket.
I still didn't understand.
"But why kill us Geigs?
We
had nothing to do with it."
"You're just in this by accident,"
he said. "You see, after
the explosion and the amputation,
my fellow-members on
the board of Ledman Atomics
decided that a semi-basket
case like myself was a poor
risk as Head of the Board,
and they took my company
away. All quite legal, I assure
you. They left me almost a
pauper!" Then he snapped
the punchline at me.
"They renamed Ledman
Atomics. Who did you say you
worked for?"
I began, "Uran—"
"Don't bother. A more inventive
title than Ledman
Atomics, but not quite as
much heart, wouldn't you
say?" He grinned. "I saved
for years; then I came to
Mars, lost myself, built this
Dome, and swore to get even.
There's not a great deal of
uranium on this planet, but
enough to keep me in a style
to which, unfortunately, I'm
no longer accustomed."
He consulted his wrist
watch. "Time for my injection."
He pulled out the tanglegun
and sprayed us again,
just to make doubly certain.
"That's another little souvenir
of Sadlerville. I'm short
on red blood corpuscles."
He rolled over to a wall
table and fumbled in a container
among a pile of hypodermics.
"There are other injections,
too. Adrenalin, insulin.
Others. The Blast turned
me into a walking pin-cushion.
But I'll pay it all
back," he said. He plunged
the needle into his arm.
My eyes widened. It was
too nightmarish to be real. I
wasn't seriously worried
about his threat to wipe out
the entire Geig Corps, since
it was unlikely that one man
in a wheelchair could pick us
all off. No, it wasn't the
threat that disturbed me, so
much as the whole concept, so
strange to me, that the human
mind could be as warped
and twisted as Ledman's.
I saw the horror on Val's
face, and I knew she felt the
same way I did.
"Do you really think you
can succeed?" I taunted him.
"Really think you can kill
every Earthman on Mars? Of
all the insane, cockeyed—"
Val's quick, worried head-shake
cut me off. But Ledman
had felt my words, all right.
"Yes! I'll get even with
every one of you for taking
away my legs! If we hadn't
meddled with the atom in the
first place, I'd be as tall and
powerful as you, today—instead
of a useless cripple in a
wheelchair."
"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,"
Val said quietly.
"You've conceived an impossible
scheme of revenge and
now you're taking it out on
innocent people who've done
nothing, nothing at all to you.
That's not sane!"
His eyes blazed. "Who are
you to talk of sanity?"
Uneasily I caught Val's
glance from a corner of my
eye. Sweat was rolling down
her smooth forehead faster
than the auto-wiper could
swab it away.
"Why don't you do something?
What are you waiting
for, Ron?"
"Easy, baby," I said. I
knew what our ace in the hole
was. But I had to get Ledman
within reach of me first.
"Enough," he said. "I'm going
to turn you loose outside,
right after—"
"
Get sick!
" I hissed to Val,
low. She began immediately
to cough violently, emitting
harsh, choking sobs. "Can't
breathe!" She began to yell,
writhing in her bonds.
That did it. Ledman hadn't
much humanity left in him,
but there was a little. He lowered
the blaster a bit and
wheeled one-hand over to see
what was wrong with Val.
She continued to retch and
moan most horribly. It almost
convinced me. I saw Val's
pale, frightened face turn to
me.
He approached and peered
down at her. He opened his
mouth to say something, and
at that moment I snapped my
leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord
with a snicking rasp,
and kicked his wheelchair
over.
The blaster went off, burning
a hole through the Dome
roof. The automatic sealers
glued-in instantly. Ledman
went sprawling helplessly out
into the middle of the floor,
the wheelchair upended next
to him, its wheels slowly revolving
in the air. The blaster
flew from his hands at the
impact of landing and spun
out near me. In one quick motion
I rolled over and covered
it with my body.
Ledman clawed his way to
me with tremendous effort
and tried wildly to pry the
blaster out from under me,
but without success. I twisted
a bit, reached out with my
free leg, and booted him
across the floor. He fetched
up against the wall of the
Dome and lay there.
Val rolled over to me.
"Now if I could get free of
this stuff," I said, "I could get
him covered before he comes
to. But how?"
"Teamwork," Val said. She
swivelled around on the floor
until her head was near my
boot. "Push my oxymask off
with your foot, if you can."
I searched for the clamp
and tried to flip it. No luck,
with my heavy, clumsy boot.
I tried again, and this time it
snapped open. I got the tip
of my boot in and pried upward.
The oxymask came off,
slowly, scraping a jagged red
scratch up the side of Val's
neck as it came.
"There," she breathed.
"That's that."
I looked uneasily at Ledman.
He was groaning and
beginning to stir.
Val rolled on the floor and
her face lay near my right
arm. I saw what she had in
mind. She began to nibble the
vile-tasting tangle-cord, running
her teeth up and down
it until it started to give. She
continued unfailingly.
Finally one strand snapped.
Then another. At last I
had enough use of my hand
to reach out and grasp the
blaster. Then I pulled myself
across the floor to Ledman,
removed the tanglegun, and
melted the remaining tangle-cord
off.
My muscles were stiff and
bunched, and rising made me
wince. I turned and freed Val.
Then I turned and faced Ledman.
"I suppose you'll kill me
now," he said.
"No. That's the difference
between sane people and insane,"
I told him. "I'm not
going to kill you at all. I'm
going to see to it that you're
sent back to Earth."
"
No!
" he shouted. "No!
Anything but back there. I
don't want to face them again—not
after what they did to
me—"
"Not so loud," I broke in.
"They'll help you on Earth.
They'll take all the hatred and
sickness out of you, and turn
you into a useful member of
society again."
"I hate Earthmen," he spat
out. "I hate all of them."
"I know," I said sarcastically.
"You're just all full of
hate. You hated us so much
that you couldn't bear to hang
around on Earth for as much
as a year after the Sadlerville
Blast. You had to take right
off for Mars without a moment's
delay, didn't you? You
hated Earth so much you
had
to leave."
"Why are you telling all
this to me?"
"Because if you'd stayed
long enough, you'd have used
some of your pension money
to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic
legs, and then you
wouldn't need this wheelchair."
Ledman scowled, and then
his face went belligerent
again. "They told me I was
paralyzed below the waist.
That I'd never walk again,
even with prosthetic legs, because
I had no muscles to fit
them to."
"You left Earth too quickly,"
Val said.
"It was the only way," he
protested. "I had to get off—"
"She's right," I told him.
"The atom can take away, but
it can give as well. Soon after
you left they developed
atomic-powered
prosthetics—amazing
things, virtually robot
legs. All the survivors of
the Sadlerville Blast were
given the necessary replacement
limbs free of charge. All
except you. You were so sick
you had to get away from the
world you despised and come
here."
"You're lying," he said.
"It's not true!"
"Oh, but it is," Val smiled.
I saw him wilt visibly, and
for a moment I almost felt
sorry for him, a pathetic legless
figure propped up against
the wall of the Dome at
blaster-point. But then I remembered
he'd killed twelve
Geigs—or more—and would
have added Val to the number
had he had the chance.
"You're a very sick man,
Ledman," I said. "All this
time you could have been
happy, useful on Earth, instead
of being holed up here
nursing your hatred. You
might have been useful, on
Earth. But you decided to
channel everything out as revenge."
"I still don't believe it—those
legs. I might have walked
again. No—no, it's all a lie.
They told me I'd never walk,"
he said, weakly but stubbornly
still.
I could see his whole structure
of hate starting to topple,
and I decided to give it
the final push.
"Haven't you wondered
how I managed to break the
tangle-cord when I kicked you
over?"
"Yes—human legs aren't
strong enough to break tangle-cord
that way."
"Of course not," I said. I
gave Val the blaster and slipped
out of my oxysuit.
"Look," I said. I pointed to
my smooth, gleaming metal
legs. The almost soundless
purr of their motors was the
only noise in the room. "I was
in the Sadlerville Blast, too,"
I said. "But I didn't go crazy
with hate when I lost
my
legs."
Ledman was sobbing.
"Okay, Ledman," I said.
Val got him into his suit, and
brought him the fishbowl helmet.
"Get your helmet on and
let's go. Between the psychs
and the prosthetics men,
you'll be a new man inside of
a year."
"But I'm a murderer!"
"That's right. And you'll be
sentenced to psych adjustment.
When they're finished,
Gregory Ledman the killer
will be as dead as if they'd
electrocuted you, but there'll
be a new—and sane—Gregory
Ledman." I turned to Val.
"Got the geigers, honey?"
For the first time since
Ledman had caught us, I remembered
how tired Val had
been out on the desert. I realized
now that I had been driving
her mercilessly—me, with
my chromium legs and atomic-powered
muscles. No wonder
she was ready to fold!
And I'd been too dense to see
how unfair I had been.
She lifted the geiger harnesses,
and I put Ledman
back in his wheelchair.
Val slipped her oxymask
back on and fastened it shut.
"Let's get back to the Dome
in a hurry," I said. "We'll
turn Ledman over to the authorities.
Then we can catch
the next ship for Earth."
"Go back?
Go back?
If you
think I'm backing down now
and quitting you can find
yourself another wife! After
we dump this guy I'm sacking
in for twenty hours, and then
we're going back out there to
finish that search-pattern.
Earth needs uranium, honey,
and I know you'd never be
happy quitting in the middle
like that." She smiled. "I
can't wait to get out there
and start listening for those
tell-tale clicks."
I gave a joyful whoop and
swung her around. When I
put her down, she squeezed
my hand, hard.
"Let's get moving, fellow
hero," she said.
I pressed the stud for the
airlock, smiling.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories
September 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | congested | meager | sustainable | uninhabited | 1 |
25627_61MWU4OY_5 | How will finding uranium on Mars aid the problem on Earth? | THE
HUNTED
HEROES
By ROBERT SILVERBERG
The planet itself was tough enough—barren, desolate,
forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and
dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad
genius who had a motto:
Death to all Terrans!
"Let's
keep moving," I told
Val. "The surest way to
die out here on Mars is to
give up." I reached over and
turned up the pressure on her
oxymask to make things a
little easier for her. Through
the glassite of the mask, I
could see her face contorted
in an agony of fatigue.
And she probably thought
the failure of the sandcat was
all my fault, too. Val's usually
about the best wife a guy
could ask for, but when she
wants to be she can be a real
flying bother.
It was beyond her to see
that some grease monkey back
at the Dome was at fault—whoever
it was who had failed
to fasten down the engine
hood. Nothing but what had
stopped us
could
stop a sandcat:
sand in the delicate
mechanism of the atomic engine.
But no; she blamed it all on
me somehow: So we were out
walking on the spongy sand
of the Martian desert. We'd
been walking a good eight
hours.
"Can't we turn back now,
Ron?" Val pleaded. "Maybe
there isn't any uranium in
this sector at all. I think
we're crazy to keep on searching
out here!"
I started to tell her that the
UranCo chief had assured me
we'd hit something out this
way, but changed my mind.
When Val's tired and overwrought
there's no sense in
arguing with her.
I stared ahead at the bleak,
desolate wastes of the Martian
landscape. Behind us
somewhere was the comfort
of the Dome, ahead nothing
but the mazes and gullies of
this dead world.
He was a cripple in a wheelchair—helpless as a rattlesnake.
"Try to keep going, Val."
My gloved hand reached out
and clumsily enfolded hers.
"Come on, kid. Remember—we're
doing this for Earth.
We're heroes."
She glared at me. "Heroes,
hell!" she muttered. "That's
the way it looked back home,
but, out there it doesn't seem
so glorious. And UranCo's
pay is stinking."
"We didn't come out here
for the pay, Val."
"I know, I know, but just
the same—"
It must have been hell for
her. We had wandered fruitlessly
over the red sands all
day, both of us listening for
the clicks of the counter. And
the geigers had been obstinately
hushed all day, except
for their constant undercurrent
of meaningless noises.
Even though the Martian
gravity was only a fraction of
Earth's, I was starting to
tire, and I knew it must have
been really rough on Val with
her lovely but unrugged legs.
"Heroes," she said bitterly.
"We're not heroes—we're
suckers! Why did I ever let
you volunteer for the Geig
Corps and drag me along?"
Which wasn't anywhere
close to the truth. Now I
knew she was at the breaking
point, because Val didn't lie
unless she was so exhausted
she didn't know what she was
doing. She had been just as
much inflamed by the idea of
coming to Mars to help in the
search for uranium as I was.
We knew the pay was poor,
but we had felt it a sort of
obligation, something we
could do as individuals to
keep the industries of radioactives-starved
Earth going.
And we'd always had a roving
foot, both of us.
No, we had decided together
to come to Mars—the
way we decided together on
everything. Now she was
turning against me.
I tried to jolly her. "Buck
up, kid," I said. I didn't dare
turn up her oxy pressure any
higher, but it was obvious she
couldn't keep going. She was
almost sleep-walking now.
We pressed on over the
barren terrain. The geiger
kept up a fairly steady click-pattern,
but never broke into
that sudden explosive tumult
that meant we had found pay-dirt.
I started to feel tired
myself, terribly tired. I longed
to lie down on the soft,
spongy Martian sand and
bury myself.
I looked at Val. She was
dragging along with her eyes
half-shut. I felt almost guilty
for having dragged her out to
Mars, until I recalled that I
hadn't. In fact, she had come
up with the idea before I did.
I wished there was some way
of turning the weary, bedraggled
girl at my side back into
the Val who had so enthusiastically
suggested we join
the Geigs.
Twelve steps later, I decided
this was about as far as
we could go.
I stopped, slipped out of
the geiger harness, and lowered
myself ponderously to
the ground. "What'samatter,
Ron?" Val asked sleepily.
"Something wrong?"
"No, baby," I said, putting
out a hand and taking hers.
"I think we ought to rest a
little before we go any further.
It's been a long, hard
day."
It didn't take much to persuade
her. She slid down beside
me, curled up, and in a
moment she was fast asleep,
sprawled out on the sands.
Poor kid
, I thought. Maybe
we shouldn't have come to
Mars after all. But, I reminded
myself,
someone
had to do
the job.
A second thought appeared,
but I squelched it:
Why the hell me?
I looked down at Valerie's
sleeping form, and thought of
our warm, comfortable little
home on Earth. It wasn't
much, but people in love don't
need very fancy surroundings.
I watched her, sleeping
peacefully, a wayward lock of
her soft blonde hair trailing
down over one eyebrow, and
it seemed hard to believe that
we'd exchanged Earth and all
it held for us for the raw, untamed
struggle that was Mars.
But I knew I'd do it again, if
I had the chance. It's because
we wanted to keep what we
had. Heroes? Hell, no. We
just liked our comforts, and
wanted to keep them. Which
took a little work.
Time to get moving.
But
then Val stirred and rolled
over in her sleep, and I didn't
have the heart to wake her. I
sat there, holding her, staring
out over the desert, watching
the wind whip the sand up
into weird shapes.
The Geig Corps preferred
married couples, working in
teams. That's what had finally
decided it for us—we were a
good team. We had no ties on
Earth that couldn't be broken
without much difficulty. So
we volunteered.
And here we are.
Heroes.
The wind blasted a mass of
sand into my face, and I felt
it tinkle against the oxymask.
I glanced at the suit-chronometer.
Getting late. I decided
once again to wake Val.
But she was tired. And I was
tired too, tired from our
wearying journey across the
empty desert.
I started to shake Val. But
I never finished. It would be
so
nice just to lean back and
nuzzle up to her, down in the
sand. So nice. I yawned, and
stretched back.
I awoke with a sudden startled
shiver, and realized angrily
I had let myself doze off.
"Come on, Val," I said savagely,
and started to rise to
my feet.
I couldn't.
I looked down. I was neatly
bound in thin, tough, plastic
tangle-cord, swathed from
chin to boot-bottoms, my
arms imprisoned, my feet
caught. And tangle-cord is
about as easy to get out of as
a spider's web is for a trapped
fly.
It wasn't Martians that
had done it. There weren't
any Martians, hadn't been for
a million years. It was some
Earthman who had bound us.
I rolled my eyes toward
Val, and saw that she was
similarly trussed in the sticky
stuff. The tangle-cord was still
fresh, giving off a faint, repugnant
odor like that of drying
fish. It had been spun on
us only a short time ago, I
realized.
"Ron—"
"Don't try to move, baby.
This stuff can break your
neck if you twist it wrong."
She continued for a moment
to struggle futilely, and I had
to snap, "Lie still, Val!"
"A very wise statement,"
said a brittle, harsh voice
from above me. I looked up
and saw a helmeted figure
above us. He wasn't wearing
the customary skin-tight pliable
oxysuits we had. He
wore an outmoded, bulky
spacesuit and a fishbowl helmet,
all but the face area
opaque. The oxygen cannisters
weren't attached to his
back as expected, though.
They were strapped to the
back of the wheelchair in
which he sat.
Through the fishbowl I
could see hard little eyes, a
yellowed, parchment-like face,
a grim-set jaw. I didn't recognize
him, and this struck me
odd. I thought I knew everyone
on sparsely-settled Mars.
Somehow I'd missed him.
What shocked me most was
that he had no legs. The
spacesuit ended neatly at the
thighs.
He was holding in his left
hand the tanglegun with
which he had entrapped us,
and a very efficient-looking
blaster was in his right.
"I didn't want to disturb
your sleep," he said coldly.
"So I've been waiting here
for you to wake up."
I could just see it. He might
have been sitting there for
hours, complacently waiting
to see how we'd wake up.
That was when I realized he
must be totally insane. I could
feel my stomach-muscles
tighten, my throat constrict
painfully.
Then anger ripped through
me, washing away the terror.
"What's going on?" I demanded,
staring at the half
of a man who confronted us
from the wheelchair. "Who
are you?"
"You'll find out soon
enough," he said. "Suppose
now you come with me." He
reached for the tanglegun,
flipped the little switch on its
side to MELT, and shot a
stream of watery fluid over
our legs, keeping the blaster
trained on us all the while.
Our legs were free.
"You may get up now," he
said. "Slowly, without trying
to make trouble." Val and I
helped each other to our feet
as best we could, considering
our arms were still tightly
bound against the sides of our
oxysuits.
"Walk," the stranger said,
waving the tanglegun to indicate
the direction. "I'll be
right behind you." He holstered
the tanglegun.
I glimpsed the bulk of an
outboard atomic rigging behind
him, strapped to the
back of the wheelchair. He
fingered a knob on the arm of
the chair and the two exhaust
ducts behind the wheel-housings
flamed for a moment,
and the chair began to roll.
Obediently, we started
walking. You don't argue
with a blaster, even if the
man pointing it is in a wheelchair.
"What's going on, Ron?"
Val asked in a low voice as we
walked. Behind us the wheelchair
hissed steadily.
"I don't quite know, Val.
I've never seen this guy before,
and I thought I knew
everyone at the Dome."
"Quiet up there!" our captor
called, and we stopped
talking. We trudged along together,
with him following
behind; I could hear the
crunch-crunch
of the wheelchair
as its wheels chewed
into the sand. I wondered
where we were going, and
why. I wondered why we had
ever left Earth.
The answer to that came to
me quick enough: we had to.
Earth needed radioactives,
and the only way to get them
was to get out and look. The
great atomic wars of the late
20th Century had used up
much of the supply, but the
amount used to blow up half
the great cities of the world
hardly compared with the
amount we needed to put
them back together again.
In three centuries the shattered
world had been completely
rebuilt. The wreckage
of New York and Shanghai
and London and all the other
ruined cities had been hidden
by a shining new world of
gleaming towers and flying
roadways. We had profited by
our grandparents' mistakes.
They had used their atomics
to make bombs. We used ours
for fuel.
It was an atomic world.
Everything: power drills,
printing presses, typewriters,
can openers, ocean liners,
powered by the inexhaustible
energy of the dividing atom.
But though the energy is
inexhaustible, the supply of
nuclei isn't. After three centuries
of heavy consumption,
the supply failed. The mighty
machine that was Earth's industry
had started to slow
down.
And that started the chain
of events that led Val and me
to end up as a madman's prisoners,
on Mars. With every
source of uranium mined dry
on Earth, we had tried other
possibilities. All sorts of
schemes came forth. Project
Sea-Dredge was trying to get
uranium from the oceans. In
forty or fifty years, they'd
get some results, we hoped.
But there wasn't forty or
fifty years' worth of raw stuff
to tide us over until then. In a
decade or so, our power would
be just about gone. I could
picture the sort of dog-eat-dog
world we'd revert back
to. Millions of starving, freezing
humans tooth-and-clawing
in it in the useless shell of
a great atomic civilization.
So, Mars. There's not much
uranium on Mars, and it's not
easy to find or any cinch to
mine. But what little is there,
helps. It's a stopgap effort,
just to keep things moving
until Project Sea-Dredge
starts functioning.
Enter the Geig Corps: volunteers
out on the face of
Mars, combing for its uranium
deposits.
And here we are, I thought.
After we walked on a
while, a Dome became visible
up ahead. It slid up over the
crest of a hill, set back between
two hummocks on the
desert. Just out of the way
enough to escape observation.
For a puzzled moment I
thought it was our Dome, the
settlement where all of UranCo's
Geig Corps were located,
but another look told me that
this was actually quite near
us and fairly small. A one-man
Dome, of all things!
"Welcome to my home," he
said. "The name is Gregory
Ledman." He herded us off to
one side of the airlock, uttered
a few words keyed to his
voice, and motioned us inside
when the door slid up. When
we were inside he reached up,
clumsily holding the blaster,
and unscrewed the ancient
spacesuit fishbowl.
His face was a bitter,
dried-up mask. He was a man
who hated.
The place was spartanly
furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,
no decoration of any
sort. Hard bulkhead walls,
rivet-studded, glared back
at us. He had an automatic
chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,
and no other furniture.
Suddenly he drew the tanglegun
and sprayed our legs
again. We toppled heavily to
the floor. I looked up angrily.
"I imagine you want to
know the whole story," he
said. "The others did, too."
Valerie looked at me anxiously.
Her pretty face was a
dead white behind her oxymask.
"What others?"
"I never bothered to find
out their names," Ledman
said casually. "They were
other Geigs I caught unawares,
like you, out on the
desert. That's the only sport I
have left—Geig-hunting. Look
out there."
He gestured through the
translucent skin of the Dome,
and I felt sick. There was a
little heap of bones lying
there, looking oddly bright
against the redness of the
sands. They were the dried,
parched skeletons of Earthmen.
Bits of cloth and plastic,
once oxymasks and suits, still
clung to them.
Suddenly I remembered.
There had been a pattern
there all the time. We didn't
much talk about it; we chalked
it off as occupational hazards.
There had been a pattern
of disappearances on the desert.
I could think of six, eight
names now. None of them
had been particularly close
friends. You don't get time to
make close friends out here.
But we'd vowed it wouldn't
happen to us.
It had.
"You've been hunting
Geigs?" I asked. "
Why?
What've they ever done to
you?"
He smiled, as calmly as if
I'd just praised his house-keeping.
"Because I hate
you," he said blandly. "I intend
to wipe every last one of
you out, one by one."
I stared at him. I'd never
seen a man like this before; I
thought all his kind had died
at the time of the atomic
wars.
I heard Val sob, "He's a
madman!"
"No," Ledman said evenly.
"I'm quite sane, believe me.
But I'm determined to drive
the Geigs—and UranCo—off
Mars. Eventually I'll scare
you all away."
"Just pick us off in the desert?"
"Exactly," replied Ledman.
"And I have no fears of an
armed attack. This place is
well fortified. I've devoted
years to building it. And I'm
back against those hills. They
couldn't pry me out." He let
his pale hand run up into his
gnarled hair. "I've devoted
years to this. Ever since—ever
since I landed here on
Mars."
"What are you going to do
with us?" Val finally asked,
after a long silence.
He didn't smile this time.
"Kill you," he told her. "Not
your husband. I want him as
an envoy, to go back and tell
the others to clear off." He
rocked back and forth in his
wheelchair, toying with the
gleaming, deadly blaster in
his hand.
We stared in horror. It was
a nightmare—sitting there,
placidly rocking back and
forth, a nightmare.
I found myself fervently
wishing I was back out there
on the infinitely safer desert.
"Do I shock you?" he asked.
"I shouldn't—not when
you see my motives."
"We don't see them," I
snapped.
"Well, let me show you.
You're on Mars hunting uranium,
right? To mine and
ship the radioactives back to
Earth to keep the atomic engines
going. Right?"
I nodded over at our geiger
counters.
"We volunteered to come to
Mars," Val said irrelevantly.
"Ah—two young heroes,"
Ledman said acidly. "How
sad. I could almost feel sorry
for you. Almost."
"Just what is it you're
after?" I said, stalling, stalling.
"Atomics cost me my legs,"
he said. "You remember the
Sadlerville Blast?" he asked.
"Of course." And I did, too.
I'd never forget it. No one
would. How could I forget
that great accident—killing
hundreds, injuring thousands
more, sterilizing forty miles
of Mississippi land—when
the Sadlerville pile went up?
"I was there on business at
the time," Ledman said. "I
represented Ledman Atomics.
I was there to sign a new
contract for my company.
You know who I am, now?"
I nodded.
"I was fairly well shielded
when it happened. I never got
the contract, but I got a good
dose of radiation instead. Not
enough to kill me," he said.
"Just enough to necessitate
the removal of—" he indicated
the empty space at his
thighs. "So I got off lightly."
He gestured at the wheelchair
blanket.
I still didn't understand.
"But why kill us Geigs?
We
had nothing to do with it."
"You're just in this by accident,"
he said. "You see, after
the explosion and the amputation,
my fellow-members on
the board of Ledman Atomics
decided that a semi-basket
case like myself was a poor
risk as Head of the Board,
and they took my company
away. All quite legal, I assure
you. They left me almost a
pauper!" Then he snapped
the punchline at me.
"They renamed Ledman
Atomics. Who did you say you
worked for?"
I began, "Uran—"
"Don't bother. A more inventive
title than Ledman
Atomics, but not quite as
much heart, wouldn't you
say?" He grinned. "I saved
for years; then I came to
Mars, lost myself, built this
Dome, and swore to get even.
There's not a great deal of
uranium on this planet, but
enough to keep me in a style
to which, unfortunately, I'm
no longer accustomed."
He consulted his wrist
watch. "Time for my injection."
He pulled out the tanglegun
and sprayed us again,
just to make doubly certain.
"That's another little souvenir
of Sadlerville. I'm short
on red blood corpuscles."
He rolled over to a wall
table and fumbled in a container
among a pile of hypodermics.
"There are other injections,
too. Adrenalin, insulin.
Others. The Blast turned
me into a walking pin-cushion.
But I'll pay it all
back," he said. He plunged
the needle into his arm.
My eyes widened. It was
too nightmarish to be real. I
wasn't seriously worried
about his threat to wipe out
the entire Geig Corps, since
it was unlikely that one man
in a wheelchair could pick us
all off. No, it wasn't the
threat that disturbed me, so
much as the whole concept, so
strange to me, that the human
mind could be as warped
and twisted as Ledman's.
I saw the horror on Val's
face, and I knew she felt the
same way I did.
"Do you really think you
can succeed?" I taunted him.
"Really think you can kill
every Earthman on Mars? Of
all the insane, cockeyed—"
Val's quick, worried head-shake
cut me off. But Ledman
had felt my words, all right.
"Yes! I'll get even with
every one of you for taking
away my legs! If we hadn't
meddled with the atom in the
first place, I'd be as tall and
powerful as you, today—instead
of a useless cripple in a
wheelchair."
"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,"
Val said quietly.
"You've conceived an impossible
scheme of revenge and
now you're taking it out on
innocent people who've done
nothing, nothing at all to you.
That's not sane!"
His eyes blazed. "Who are
you to talk of sanity?"
Uneasily I caught Val's
glance from a corner of my
eye. Sweat was rolling down
her smooth forehead faster
than the auto-wiper could
swab it away.
"Why don't you do something?
What are you waiting
for, Ron?"
"Easy, baby," I said. I
knew what our ace in the hole
was. But I had to get Ledman
within reach of me first.
"Enough," he said. "I'm going
to turn you loose outside,
right after—"
"
Get sick!
" I hissed to Val,
low. She began immediately
to cough violently, emitting
harsh, choking sobs. "Can't
breathe!" She began to yell,
writhing in her bonds.
That did it. Ledman hadn't
much humanity left in him,
but there was a little. He lowered
the blaster a bit and
wheeled one-hand over to see
what was wrong with Val.
She continued to retch and
moan most horribly. It almost
convinced me. I saw Val's
pale, frightened face turn to
me.
He approached and peered
down at her. He opened his
mouth to say something, and
at that moment I snapped my
leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord
with a snicking rasp,
and kicked his wheelchair
over.
The blaster went off, burning
a hole through the Dome
roof. The automatic sealers
glued-in instantly. Ledman
went sprawling helplessly out
into the middle of the floor,
the wheelchair upended next
to him, its wheels slowly revolving
in the air. The blaster
flew from his hands at the
impact of landing and spun
out near me. In one quick motion
I rolled over and covered
it with my body.
Ledman clawed his way to
me with tremendous effort
and tried wildly to pry the
blaster out from under me,
but without success. I twisted
a bit, reached out with my
free leg, and booted him
across the floor. He fetched
up against the wall of the
Dome and lay there.
Val rolled over to me.
"Now if I could get free of
this stuff," I said, "I could get
him covered before he comes
to. But how?"
"Teamwork," Val said. She
swivelled around on the floor
until her head was near my
boot. "Push my oxymask off
with your foot, if you can."
I searched for the clamp
and tried to flip it. No luck,
with my heavy, clumsy boot.
I tried again, and this time it
snapped open. I got the tip
of my boot in and pried upward.
The oxymask came off,
slowly, scraping a jagged red
scratch up the side of Val's
neck as it came.
"There," she breathed.
"That's that."
I looked uneasily at Ledman.
He was groaning and
beginning to stir.
Val rolled on the floor and
her face lay near my right
arm. I saw what she had in
mind. She began to nibble the
vile-tasting tangle-cord, running
her teeth up and down
it until it started to give. She
continued unfailingly.
Finally one strand snapped.
Then another. At last I
had enough use of my hand
to reach out and grasp the
blaster. Then I pulled myself
across the floor to Ledman,
removed the tanglegun, and
melted the remaining tangle-cord
off.
My muscles were stiff and
bunched, and rising made me
wince. I turned and freed Val.
Then I turned and faced Ledman.
"I suppose you'll kill me
now," he said.
"No. That's the difference
between sane people and insane,"
I told him. "I'm not
going to kill you at all. I'm
going to see to it that you're
sent back to Earth."
"
No!
" he shouted. "No!
Anything but back there. I
don't want to face them again—not
after what they did to
me—"
"Not so loud," I broke in.
"They'll help you on Earth.
They'll take all the hatred and
sickness out of you, and turn
you into a useful member of
society again."
"I hate Earthmen," he spat
out. "I hate all of them."
"I know," I said sarcastically.
"You're just all full of
hate. You hated us so much
that you couldn't bear to hang
around on Earth for as much
as a year after the Sadlerville
Blast. You had to take right
off for Mars without a moment's
delay, didn't you? You
hated Earth so much you
had
to leave."
"Why are you telling all
this to me?"
"Because if you'd stayed
long enough, you'd have used
some of your pension money
to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic
legs, and then you
wouldn't need this wheelchair."
Ledman scowled, and then
his face went belligerent
again. "They told me I was
paralyzed below the waist.
That I'd never walk again,
even with prosthetic legs, because
I had no muscles to fit
them to."
"You left Earth too quickly,"
Val said.
"It was the only way," he
protested. "I had to get off—"
"She's right," I told him.
"The atom can take away, but
it can give as well. Soon after
you left they developed
atomic-powered
prosthetics—amazing
things, virtually robot
legs. All the survivors of
the Sadlerville Blast were
given the necessary replacement
limbs free of charge. All
except you. You were so sick
you had to get away from the
world you despised and come
here."
"You're lying," he said.
"It's not true!"
"Oh, but it is," Val smiled.
I saw him wilt visibly, and
for a moment I almost felt
sorry for him, a pathetic legless
figure propped up against
the wall of the Dome at
blaster-point. But then I remembered
he'd killed twelve
Geigs—or more—and would
have added Val to the number
had he had the chance.
"You're a very sick man,
Ledman," I said. "All this
time you could have been
happy, useful on Earth, instead
of being holed up here
nursing your hatred. You
might have been useful, on
Earth. But you decided to
channel everything out as revenge."
"I still don't believe it—those
legs. I might have walked
again. No—no, it's all a lie.
They told me I'd never walk,"
he said, weakly but stubbornly
still.
I could see his whole structure
of hate starting to topple,
and I decided to give it
the final push.
"Haven't you wondered
how I managed to break the
tangle-cord when I kicked you
over?"
"Yes—human legs aren't
strong enough to break tangle-cord
that way."
"Of course not," I said. I
gave Val the blaster and slipped
out of my oxysuit.
"Look," I said. I pointed to
my smooth, gleaming metal
legs. The almost soundless
purr of their motors was the
only noise in the room. "I was
in the Sadlerville Blast, too,"
I said. "But I didn't go crazy
with hate when I lost
my
legs."
Ledman was sobbing.
"Okay, Ledman," I said.
Val got him into his suit, and
brought him the fishbowl helmet.
"Get your helmet on and
let's go. Between the psychs
and the prosthetics men,
you'll be a new man inside of
a year."
"But I'm a murderer!"
"That's right. And you'll be
sentenced to psych adjustment.
When they're finished,
Gregory Ledman the killer
will be as dead as if they'd
electrocuted you, but there'll
be a new—and sane—Gregory
Ledman." I turned to Val.
"Got the geigers, honey?"
For the first time since
Ledman had caught us, I remembered
how tired Val had
been out on the desert. I realized
now that I had been driving
her mercilessly—me, with
my chromium legs and atomic-powered
muscles. No wonder
she was ready to fold!
And I'd been too dense to see
how unfair I had been.
She lifted the geiger harnesses,
and I put Ledman
back in his wheelchair.
Val slipped her oxymask
back on and fastened it shut.
"Let's get back to the Dome
in a hurry," I said. "We'll
turn Ledman over to the authorities.
Then we can catch
the next ship for Earth."
"Go back?
Go back?
If you
think I'm backing down now
and quitting you can find
yourself another wife! After
we dump this guy I'm sacking
in for twenty hours, and then
we're going back out there to
finish that search-pattern.
Earth needs uranium, honey,
and I know you'd never be
happy quitting in the middle
like that." She smiled. "I
can't wait to get out there
and start listening for those
tell-tale clicks."
I gave a joyful whoop and
swung her around. When I
put her down, she squeezed
my hand, hard.
"Let's get moving, fellow
hero," she said.
I pressed the stud for the
airlock, smiling.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories
September 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | In combination with the underwater project, it will give Earth at least 300 more years of fuel | It will cause more problems, because neighboring countries will fight over the small amount of fuel | It will render the underwater project unnecessary | It can hopefully sustain Earth's industries until the underwater project yields results | 3 |
25627_61MWU4OY_6 | What is Ledman's relation to UranCo? | THE
HUNTED
HEROES
By ROBERT SILVERBERG
The planet itself was tough enough—barren, desolate,
forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and
dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad
genius who had a motto:
Death to all Terrans!
"Let's
keep moving," I told
Val. "The surest way to
die out here on Mars is to
give up." I reached over and
turned up the pressure on her
oxymask to make things a
little easier for her. Through
the glassite of the mask, I
could see her face contorted
in an agony of fatigue.
And she probably thought
the failure of the sandcat was
all my fault, too. Val's usually
about the best wife a guy
could ask for, but when she
wants to be she can be a real
flying bother.
It was beyond her to see
that some grease monkey back
at the Dome was at fault—whoever
it was who had failed
to fasten down the engine
hood. Nothing but what had
stopped us
could
stop a sandcat:
sand in the delicate
mechanism of the atomic engine.
But no; she blamed it all on
me somehow: So we were out
walking on the spongy sand
of the Martian desert. We'd
been walking a good eight
hours.
"Can't we turn back now,
Ron?" Val pleaded. "Maybe
there isn't any uranium in
this sector at all. I think
we're crazy to keep on searching
out here!"
I started to tell her that the
UranCo chief had assured me
we'd hit something out this
way, but changed my mind.
When Val's tired and overwrought
there's no sense in
arguing with her.
I stared ahead at the bleak,
desolate wastes of the Martian
landscape. Behind us
somewhere was the comfort
of the Dome, ahead nothing
but the mazes and gullies of
this dead world.
He was a cripple in a wheelchair—helpless as a rattlesnake.
"Try to keep going, Val."
My gloved hand reached out
and clumsily enfolded hers.
"Come on, kid. Remember—we're
doing this for Earth.
We're heroes."
She glared at me. "Heroes,
hell!" she muttered. "That's
the way it looked back home,
but, out there it doesn't seem
so glorious. And UranCo's
pay is stinking."
"We didn't come out here
for the pay, Val."
"I know, I know, but just
the same—"
It must have been hell for
her. We had wandered fruitlessly
over the red sands all
day, both of us listening for
the clicks of the counter. And
the geigers had been obstinately
hushed all day, except
for their constant undercurrent
of meaningless noises.
Even though the Martian
gravity was only a fraction of
Earth's, I was starting to
tire, and I knew it must have
been really rough on Val with
her lovely but unrugged legs.
"Heroes," she said bitterly.
"We're not heroes—we're
suckers! Why did I ever let
you volunteer for the Geig
Corps and drag me along?"
Which wasn't anywhere
close to the truth. Now I
knew she was at the breaking
point, because Val didn't lie
unless she was so exhausted
she didn't know what she was
doing. She had been just as
much inflamed by the idea of
coming to Mars to help in the
search for uranium as I was.
We knew the pay was poor,
but we had felt it a sort of
obligation, something we
could do as individuals to
keep the industries of radioactives-starved
Earth going.
And we'd always had a roving
foot, both of us.
No, we had decided together
to come to Mars—the
way we decided together on
everything. Now she was
turning against me.
I tried to jolly her. "Buck
up, kid," I said. I didn't dare
turn up her oxy pressure any
higher, but it was obvious she
couldn't keep going. She was
almost sleep-walking now.
We pressed on over the
barren terrain. The geiger
kept up a fairly steady click-pattern,
but never broke into
that sudden explosive tumult
that meant we had found pay-dirt.
I started to feel tired
myself, terribly tired. I longed
to lie down on the soft,
spongy Martian sand and
bury myself.
I looked at Val. She was
dragging along with her eyes
half-shut. I felt almost guilty
for having dragged her out to
Mars, until I recalled that I
hadn't. In fact, she had come
up with the idea before I did.
I wished there was some way
of turning the weary, bedraggled
girl at my side back into
the Val who had so enthusiastically
suggested we join
the Geigs.
Twelve steps later, I decided
this was about as far as
we could go.
I stopped, slipped out of
the geiger harness, and lowered
myself ponderously to
the ground. "What'samatter,
Ron?" Val asked sleepily.
"Something wrong?"
"No, baby," I said, putting
out a hand and taking hers.
"I think we ought to rest a
little before we go any further.
It's been a long, hard
day."
It didn't take much to persuade
her. She slid down beside
me, curled up, and in a
moment she was fast asleep,
sprawled out on the sands.
Poor kid
, I thought. Maybe
we shouldn't have come to
Mars after all. But, I reminded
myself,
someone
had to do
the job.
A second thought appeared,
but I squelched it:
Why the hell me?
I looked down at Valerie's
sleeping form, and thought of
our warm, comfortable little
home on Earth. It wasn't
much, but people in love don't
need very fancy surroundings.
I watched her, sleeping
peacefully, a wayward lock of
her soft blonde hair trailing
down over one eyebrow, and
it seemed hard to believe that
we'd exchanged Earth and all
it held for us for the raw, untamed
struggle that was Mars.
But I knew I'd do it again, if
I had the chance. It's because
we wanted to keep what we
had. Heroes? Hell, no. We
just liked our comforts, and
wanted to keep them. Which
took a little work.
Time to get moving.
But
then Val stirred and rolled
over in her sleep, and I didn't
have the heart to wake her. I
sat there, holding her, staring
out over the desert, watching
the wind whip the sand up
into weird shapes.
The Geig Corps preferred
married couples, working in
teams. That's what had finally
decided it for us—we were a
good team. We had no ties on
Earth that couldn't be broken
without much difficulty. So
we volunteered.
And here we are.
Heroes.
The wind blasted a mass of
sand into my face, and I felt
it tinkle against the oxymask.
I glanced at the suit-chronometer.
Getting late. I decided
once again to wake Val.
But she was tired. And I was
tired too, tired from our
wearying journey across the
empty desert.
I started to shake Val. But
I never finished. It would be
so
nice just to lean back and
nuzzle up to her, down in the
sand. So nice. I yawned, and
stretched back.
I awoke with a sudden startled
shiver, and realized angrily
I had let myself doze off.
"Come on, Val," I said savagely,
and started to rise to
my feet.
I couldn't.
I looked down. I was neatly
bound in thin, tough, plastic
tangle-cord, swathed from
chin to boot-bottoms, my
arms imprisoned, my feet
caught. And tangle-cord is
about as easy to get out of as
a spider's web is for a trapped
fly.
It wasn't Martians that
had done it. There weren't
any Martians, hadn't been for
a million years. It was some
Earthman who had bound us.
I rolled my eyes toward
Val, and saw that she was
similarly trussed in the sticky
stuff. The tangle-cord was still
fresh, giving off a faint, repugnant
odor like that of drying
fish. It had been spun on
us only a short time ago, I
realized.
"Ron—"
"Don't try to move, baby.
This stuff can break your
neck if you twist it wrong."
She continued for a moment
to struggle futilely, and I had
to snap, "Lie still, Val!"
"A very wise statement,"
said a brittle, harsh voice
from above me. I looked up
and saw a helmeted figure
above us. He wasn't wearing
the customary skin-tight pliable
oxysuits we had. He
wore an outmoded, bulky
spacesuit and a fishbowl helmet,
all but the face area
opaque. The oxygen cannisters
weren't attached to his
back as expected, though.
They were strapped to the
back of the wheelchair in
which he sat.
Through the fishbowl I
could see hard little eyes, a
yellowed, parchment-like face,
a grim-set jaw. I didn't recognize
him, and this struck me
odd. I thought I knew everyone
on sparsely-settled Mars.
Somehow I'd missed him.
What shocked me most was
that he had no legs. The
spacesuit ended neatly at the
thighs.
He was holding in his left
hand the tanglegun with
which he had entrapped us,
and a very efficient-looking
blaster was in his right.
"I didn't want to disturb
your sleep," he said coldly.
"So I've been waiting here
for you to wake up."
I could just see it. He might
have been sitting there for
hours, complacently waiting
to see how we'd wake up.
That was when I realized he
must be totally insane. I could
feel my stomach-muscles
tighten, my throat constrict
painfully.
Then anger ripped through
me, washing away the terror.
"What's going on?" I demanded,
staring at the half
of a man who confronted us
from the wheelchair. "Who
are you?"
"You'll find out soon
enough," he said. "Suppose
now you come with me." He
reached for the tanglegun,
flipped the little switch on its
side to MELT, and shot a
stream of watery fluid over
our legs, keeping the blaster
trained on us all the while.
Our legs were free.
"You may get up now," he
said. "Slowly, without trying
to make trouble." Val and I
helped each other to our feet
as best we could, considering
our arms were still tightly
bound against the sides of our
oxysuits.
"Walk," the stranger said,
waving the tanglegun to indicate
the direction. "I'll be
right behind you." He holstered
the tanglegun.
I glimpsed the bulk of an
outboard atomic rigging behind
him, strapped to the
back of the wheelchair. He
fingered a knob on the arm of
the chair and the two exhaust
ducts behind the wheel-housings
flamed for a moment,
and the chair began to roll.
Obediently, we started
walking. You don't argue
with a blaster, even if the
man pointing it is in a wheelchair.
"What's going on, Ron?"
Val asked in a low voice as we
walked. Behind us the wheelchair
hissed steadily.
"I don't quite know, Val.
I've never seen this guy before,
and I thought I knew
everyone at the Dome."
"Quiet up there!" our captor
called, and we stopped
talking. We trudged along together,
with him following
behind; I could hear the
crunch-crunch
of the wheelchair
as its wheels chewed
into the sand. I wondered
where we were going, and
why. I wondered why we had
ever left Earth.
The answer to that came to
me quick enough: we had to.
Earth needed radioactives,
and the only way to get them
was to get out and look. The
great atomic wars of the late
20th Century had used up
much of the supply, but the
amount used to blow up half
the great cities of the world
hardly compared with the
amount we needed to put
them back together again.
In three centuries the shattered
world had been completely
rebuilt. The wreckage
of New York and Shanghai
and London and all the other
ruined cities had been hidden
by a shining new world of
gleaming towers and flying
roadways. We had profited by
our grandparents' mistakes.
They had used their atomics
to make bombs. We used ours
for fuel.
It was an atomic world.
Everything: power drills,
printing presses, typewriters,
can openers, ocean liners,
powered by the inexhaustible
energy of the dividing atom.
But though the energy is
inexhaustible, the supply of
nuclei isn't. After three centuries
of heavy consumption,
the supply failed. The mighty
machine that was Earth's industry
had started to slow
down.
And that started the chain
of events that led Val and me
to end up as a madman's prisoners,
on Mars. With every
source of uranium mined dry
on Earth, we had tried other
possibilities. All sorts of
schemes came forth. Project
Sea-Dredge was trying to get
uranium from the oceans. In
forty or fifty years, they'd
get some results, we hoped.
But there wasn't forty or
fifty years' worth of raw stuff
to tide us over until then. In a
decade or so, our power would
be just about gone. I could
picture the sort of dog-eat-dog
world we'd revert back
to. Millions of starving, freezing
humans tooth-and-clawing
in it in the useless shell of
a great atomic civilization.
So, Mars. There's not much
uranium on Mars, and it's not
easy to find or any cinch to
mine. But what little is there,
helps. It's a stopgap effort,
just to keep things moving
until Project Sea-Dredge
starts functioning.
Enter the Geig Corps: volunteers
out on the face of
Mars, combing for its uranium
deposits.
And here we are, I thought.
After we walked on a
while, a Dome became visible
up ahead. It slid up over the
crest of a hill, set back between
two hummocks on the
desert. Just out of the way
enough to escape observation.
For a puzzled moment I
thought it was our Dome, the
settlement where all of UranCo's
Geig Corps were located,
but another look told me that
this was actually quite near
us and fairly small. A one-man
Dome, of all things!
"Welcome to my home," he
said. "The name is Gregory
Ledman." He herded us off to
one side of the airlock, uttered
a few words keyed to his
voice, and motioned us inside
when the door slid up. When
we were inside he reached up,
clumsily holding the blaster,
and unscrewed the ancient
spacesuit fishbowl.
His face was a bitter,
dried-up mask. He was a man
who hated.
The place was spartanly
furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,
no decoration of any
sort. Hard bulkhead walls,
rivet-studded, glared back
at us. He had an automatic
chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,
and no other furniture.
Suddenly he drew the tanglegun
and sprayed our legs
again. We toppled heavily to
the floor. I looked up angrily.
"I imagine you want to
know the whole story," he
said. "The others did, too."
Valerie looked at me anxiously.
Her pretty face was a
dead white behind her oxymask.
"What others?"
"I never bothered to find
out their names," Ledman
said casually. "They were
other Geigs I caught unawares,
like you, out on the
desert. That's the only sport I
have left—Geig-hunting. Look
out there."
He gestured through the
translucent skin of the Dome,
and I felt sick. There was a
little heap of bones lying
there, looking oddly bright
against the redness of the
sands. They were the dried,
parched skeletons of Earthmen.
Bits of cloth and plastic,
once oxymasks and suits, still
clung to them.
Suddenly I remembered.
There had been a pattern
there all the time. We didn't
much talk about it; we chalked
it off as occupational hazards.
There had been a pattern
of disappearances on the desert.
I could think of six, eight
names now. None of them
had been particularly close
friends. You don't get time to
make close friends out here.
But we'd vowed it wouldn't
happen to us.
It had.
"You've been hunting
Geigs?" I asked. "
Why?
What've they ever done to
you?"
He smiled, as calmly as if
I'd just praised his house-keeping.
"Because I hate
you," he said blandly. "I intend
to wipe every last one of
you out, one by one."
I stared at him. I'd never
seen a man like this before; I
thought all his kind had died
at the time of the atomic
wars.
I heard Val sob, "He's a
madman!"
"No," Ledman said evenly.
"I'm quite sane, believe me.
But I'm determined to drive
the Geigs—and UranCo—off
Mars. Eventually I'll scare
you all away."
"Just pick us off in the desert?"
"Exactly," replied Ledman.
"And I have no fears of an
armed attack. This place is
well fortified. I've devoted
years to building it. And I'm
back against those hills. They
couldn't pry me out." He let
his pale hand run up into his
gnarled hair. "I've devoted
years to this. Ever since—ever
since I landed here on
Mars."
"What are you going to do
with us?" Val finally asked,
after a long silence.
He didn't smile this time.
"Kill you," he told her. "Not
your husband. I want him as
an envoy, to go back and tell
the others to clear off." He
rocked back and forth in his
wheelchair, toying with the
gleaming, deadly blaster in
his hand.
We stared in horror. It was
a nightmare—sitting there,
placidly rocking back and
forth, a nightmare.
I found myself fervently
wishing I was back out there
on the infinitely safer desert.
"Do I shock you?" he asked.
"I shouldn't—not when
you see my motives."
"We don't see them," I
snapped.
"Well, let me show you.
You're on Mars hunting uranium,
right? To mine and
ship the radioactives back to
Earth to keep the atomic engines
going. Right?"
I nodded over at our geiger
counters.
"We volunteered to come to
Mars," Val said irrelevantly.
"Ah—two young heroes,"
Ledman said acidly. "How
sad. I could almost feel sorry
for you. Almost."
"Just what is it you're
after?" I said, stalling, stalling.
"Atomics cost me my legs,"
he said. "You remember the
Sadlerville Blast?" he asked.
"Of course." And I did, too.
I'd never forget it. No one
would. How could I forget
that great accident—killing
hundreds, injuring thousands
more, sterilizing forty miles
of Mississippi land—when
the Sadlerville pile went up?
"I was there on business at
the time," Ledman said. "I
represented Ledman Atomics.
I was there to sign a new
contract for my company.
You know who I am, now?"
I nodded.
"I was fairly well shielded
when it happened. I never got
the contract, but I got a good
dose of radiation instead. Not
enough to kill me," he said.
"Just enough to necessitate
the removal of—" he indicated
the empty space at his
thighs. "So I got off lightly."
He gestured at the wheelchair
blanket.
I still didn't understand.
"But why kill us Geigs?
We
had nothing to do with it."
"You're just in this by accident,"
he said. "You see, after
the explosion and the amputation,
my fellow-members on
the board of Ledman Atomics
decided that a semi-basket
case like myself was a poor
risk as Head of the Board,
and they took my company
away. All quite legal, I assure
you. They left me almost a
pauper!" Then he snapped
the punchline at me.
"They renamed Ledman
Atomics. Who did you say you
worked for?"
I began, "Uran—"
"Don't bother. A more inventive
title than Ledman
Atomics, but not quite as
much heart, wouldn't you
say?" He grinned. "I saved
for years; then I came to
Mars, lost myself, built this
Dome, and swore to get even.
There's not a great deal of
uranium on this planet, but
enough to keep me in a style
to which, unfortunately, I'm
no longer accustomed."
He consulted his wrist
watch. "Time for my injection."
He pulled out the tanglegun
and sprayed us again,
just to make doubly certain.
"That's another little souvenir
of Sadlerville. I'm short
on red blood corpuscles."
He rolled over to a wall
table and fumbled in a container
among a pile of hypodermics.
"There are other injections,
too. Adrenalin, insulin.
Others. The Blast turned
me into a walking pin-cushion.
But I'll pay it all
back," he said. He plunged
the needle into his arm.
My eyes widened. It was
too nightmarish to be real. I
wasn't seriously worried
about his threat to wipe out
the entire Geig Corps, since
it was unlikely that one man
in a wheelchair could pick us
all off. No, it wasn't the
threat that disturbed me, so
much as the whole concept, so
strange to me, that the human
mind could be as warped
and twisted as Ledman's.
I saw the horror on Val's
face, and I knew she felt the
same way I did.
"Do you really think you
can succeed?" I taunted him.
"Really think you can kill
every Earthman on Mars? Of
all the insane, cockeyed—"
Val's quick, worried head-shake
cut me off. But Ledman
had felt my words, all right.
"Yes! I'll get even with
every one of you for taking
away my legs! If we hadn't
meddled with the atom in the
first place, I'd be as tall and
powerful as you, today—instead
of a useless cripple in a
wheelchair."
"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,"
Val said quietly.
"You've conceived an impossible
scheme of revenge and
now you're taking it out on
innocent people who've done
nothing, nothing at all to you.
That's not sane!"
His eyes blazed. "Who are
you to talk of sanity?"
Uneasily I caught Val's
glance from a corner of my
eye. Sweat was rolling down
her smooth forehead faster
than the auto-wiper could
swab it away.
"Why don't you do something?
What are you waiting
for, Ron?"
"Easy, baby," I said. I
knew what our ace in the hole
was. But I had to get Ledman
within reach of me first.
"Enough," he said. "I'm going
to turn you loose outside,
right after—"
"
Get sick!
" I hissed to Val,
low. She began immediately
to cough violently, emitting
harsh, choking sobs. "Can't
breathe!" She began to yell,
writhing in her bonds.
That did it. Ledman hadn't
much humanity left in him,
but there was a little. He lowered
the blaster a bit and
wheeled one-hand over to see
what was wrong with Val.
She continued to retch and
moan most horribly. It almost
convinced me. I saw Val's
pale, frightened face turn to
me.
He approached and peered
down at her. He opened his
mouth to say something, and
at that moment I snapped my
leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord
with a snicking rasp,
and kicked his wheelchair
over.
The blaster went off, burning
a hole through the Dome
roof. The automatic sealers
glued-in instantly. Ledman
went sprawling helplessly out
into the middle of the floor,
the wheelchair upended next
to him, its wheels slowly revolving
in the air. The blaster
flew from his hands at the
impact of landing and spun
out near me. In one quick motion
I rolled over and covered
it with my body.
Ledman clawed his way to
me with tremendous effort
and tried wildly to pry the
blaster out from under me,
but without success. I twisted
a bit, reached out with my
free leg, and booted him
across the floor. He fetched
up against the wall of the
Dome and lay there.
Val rolled over to me.
"Now if I could get free of
this stuff," I said, "I could get
him covered before he comes
to. But how?"
"Teamwork," Val said. She
swivelled around on the floor
until her head was near my
boot. "Push my oxymask off
with your foot, if you can."
I searched for the clamp
and tried to flip it. No luck,
with my heavy, clumsy boot.
I tried again, and this time it
snapped open. I got the tip
of my boot in and pried upward.
The oxymask came off,
slowly, scraping a jagged red
scratch up the side of Val's
neck as it came.
"There," she breathed.
"That's that."
I looked uneasily at Ledman.
He was groaning and
beginning to stir.
Val rolled on the floor and
her face lay near my right
arm. I saw what she had in
mind. She began to nibble the
vile-tasting tangle-cord, running
her teeth up and down
it until it started to give. She
continued unfailingly.
Finally one strand snapped.
Then another. At last I
had enough use of my hand
to reach out and grasp the
blaster. Then I pulled myself
across the floor to Ledman,
removed the tanglegun, and
melted the remaining tangle-cord
off.
My muscles were stiff and
bunched, and rising made me
wince. I turned and freed Val.
Then I turned and faced Ledman.
"I suppose you'll kill me
now," he said.
"No. That's the difference
between sane people and insane,"
I told him. "I'm not
going to kill you at all. I'm
going to see to it that you're
sent back to Earth."
"
No!
" he shouted. "No!
Anything but back there. I
don't want to face them again—not
after what they did to
me—"
"Not so loud," I broke in.
"They'll help you on Earth.
They'll take all the hatred and
sickness out of you, and turn
you into a useful member of
society again."
"I hate Earthmen," he spat
out. "I hate all of them."
"I know," I said sarcastically.
"You're just all full of
hate. You hated us so much
that you couldn't bear to hang
around on Earth for as much
as a year after the Sadlerville
Blast. You had to take right
off for Mars without a moment's
delay, didn't you? You
hated Earth so much you
had
to leave."
"Why are you telling all
this to me?"
"Because if you'd stayed
long enough, you'd have used
some of your pension money
to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic
legs, and then you
wouldn't need this wheelchair."
Ledman scowled, and then
his face went belligerent
again. "They told me I was
paralyzed below the waist.
That I'd never walk again,
even with prosthetic legs, because
I had no muscles to fit
them to."
"You left Earth too quickly,"
Val said.
"It was the only way," he
protested. "I had to get off—"
"She's right," I told him.
"The atom can take away, but
it can give as well. Soon after
you left they developed
atomic-powered
prosthetics—amazing
things, virtually robot
legs. All the survivors of
the Sadlerville Blast were
given the necessary replacement
limbs free of charge. All
except you. You were so sick
you had to get away from the
world you despised and come
here."
"You're lying," he said.
"It's not true!"
"Oh, but it is," Val smiled.
I saw him wilt visibly, and
for a moment I almost felt
sorry for him, a pathetic legless
figure propped up against
the wall of the Dome at
blaster-point. But then I remembered
he'd killed twelve
Geigs—or more—and would
have added Val to the number
had he had the chance.
"You're a very sick man,
Ledman," I said. "All this
time you could have been
happy, useful on Earth, instead
of being holed up here
nursing your hatred. You
might have been useful, on
Earth. But you decided to
channel everything out as revenge."
"I still don't believe it—those
legs. I might have walked
again. No—no, it's all a lie.
They told me I'd never walk,"
he said, weakly but stubbornly
still.
I could see his whole structure
of hate starting to topple,
and I decided to give it
the final push.
"Haven't you wondered
how I managed to break the
tangle-cord when I kicked you
over?"
"Yes—human legs aren't
strong enough to break tangle-cord
that way."
"Of course not," I said. I
gave Val the blaster and slipped
out of my oxysuit.
"Look," I said. I pointed to
my smooth, gleaming metal
legs. The almost soundless
purr of their motors was the
only noise in the room. "I was
in the Sadlerville Blast, too,"
I said. "But I didn't go crazy
with hate when I lost
my
legs."
Ledman was sobbing.
"Okay, Ledman," I said.
Val got him into his suit, and
brought him the fishbowl helmet.
"Get your helmet on and
let's go. Between the psychs
and the prosthetics men,
you'll be a new man inside of
a year."
"But I'm a murderer!"
"That's right. And you'll be
sentenced to psych adjustment.
When they're finished,
Gregory Ledman the killer
will be as dead as if they'd
electrocuted you, but there'll
be a new—and sane—Gregory
Ledman." I turned to Val.
"Got the geigers, honey?"
For the first time since
Ledman had caught us, I remembered
how tired Val had
been out on the desert. I realized
now that I had been driving
her mercilessly—me, with
my chromium legs and atomic-powered
muscles. No wonder
she was ready to fold!
And I'd been too dense to see
how unfair I had been.
She lifted the geiger harnesses,
and I put Ledman
back in his wheelchair.
Val slipped her oxymask
back on and fastened it shut.
"Let's get back to the Dome
in a hurry," I said. "We'll
turn Ledman over to the authorities.
Then we can catch
the next ship for Earth."
"Go back?
Go back?
If you
think I'm backing down now
and quitting you can find
yourself another wife! After
we dump this guy I'm sacking
in for twenty hours, and then
we're going back out there to
finish that search-pattern.
Earth needs uranium, honey,
and I know you'd never be
happy quitting in the middle
like that." She smiled. "I
can't wait to get out there
and start listening for those
tell-tale clicks."
I gave a joyful whoop and
swung her around. When I
put her down, she squeezed
my hand, hard.
"Let's get moving, fellow
hero," she said.
I pressed the stud for the
airlock, smiling.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories
September 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | He was a civilian injured by them in the Sadlerville blast | He was their CEO prior to the Sadlerville blast | He was the CEO of a competing company, Ledman Atomics | He was a member of the Board | 1 |
25627_61MWU4OY_7 | What is ironic about Ledman's quick departure to Mars? | THE
HUNTED
HEROES
By ROBERT SILVERBERG
The planet itself was tough enough—barren, desolate,
forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and
dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad
genius who had a motto:
Death to all Terrans!
"Let's
keep moving," I told
Val. "The surest way to
die out here on Mars is to
give up." I reached over and
turned up the pressure on her
oxymask to make things a
little easier for her. Through
the glassite of the mask, I
could see her face contorted
in an agony of fatigue.
And she probably thought
the failure of the sandcat was
all my fault, too. Val's usually
about the best wife a guy
could ask for, but when she
wants to be she can be a real
flying bother.
It was beyond her to see
that some grease monkey back
at the Dome was at fault—whoever
it was who had failed
to fasten down the engine
hood. Nothing but what had
stopped us
could
stop a sandcat:
sand in the delicate
mechanism of the atomic engine.
But no; she blamed it all on
me somehow: So we were out
walking on the spongy sand
of the Martian desert. We'd
been walking a good eight
hours.
"Can't we turn back now,
Ron?" Val pleaded. "Maybe
there isn't any uranium in
this sector at all. I think
we're crazy to keep on searching
out here!"
I started to tell her that the
UranCo chief had assured me
we'd hit something out this
way, but changed my mind.
When Val's tired and overwrought
there's no sense in
arguing with her.
I stared ahead at the bleak,
desolate wastes of the Martian
landscape. Behind us
somewhere was the comfort
of the Dome, ahead nothing
but the mazes and gullies of
this dead world.
He was a cripple in a wheelchair—helpless as a rattlesnake.
"Try to keep going, Val."
My gloved hand reached out
and clumsily enfolded hers.
"Come on, kid. Remember—we're
doing this for Earth.
We're heroes."
She glared at me. "Heroes,
hell!" she muttered. "That's
the way it looked back home,
but, out there it doesn't seem
so glorious. And UranCo's
pay is stinking."
"We didn't come out here
for the pay, Val."
"I know, I know, but just
the same—"
It must have been hell for
her. We had wandered fruitlessly
over the red sands all
day, both of us listening for
the clicks of the counter. And
the geigers had been obstinately
hushed all day, except
for their constant undercurrent
of meaningless noises.
Even though the Martian
gravity was only a fraction of
Earth's, I was starting to
tire, and I knew it must have
been really rough on Val with
her lovely but unrugged legs.
"Heroes," she said bitterly.
"We're not heroes—we're
suckers! Why did I ever let
you volunteer for the Geig
Corps and drag me along?"
Which wasn't anywhere
close to the truth. Now I
knew she was at the breaking
point, because Val didn't lie
unless she was so exhausted
she didn't know what she was
doing. She had been just as
much inflamed by the idea of
coming to Mars to help in the
search for uranium as I was.
We knew the pay was poor,
but we had felt it a sort of
obligation, something we
could do as individuals to
keep the industries of radioactives-starved
Earth going.
And we'd always had a roving
foot, both of us.
No, we had decided together
to come to Mars—the
way we decided together on
everything. Now she was
turning against me.
I tried to jolly her. "Buck
up, kid," I said. I didn't dare
turn up her oxy pressure any
higher, but it was obvious she
couldn't keep going. She was
almost sleep-walking now.
We pressed on over the
barren terrain. The geiger
kept up a fairly steady click-pattern,
but never broke into
that sudden explosive tumult
that meant we had found pay-dirt.
I started to feel tired
myself, terribly tired. I longed
to lie down on the soft,
spongy Martian sand and
bury myself.
I looked at Val. She was
dragging along with her eyes
half-shut. I felt almost guilty
for having dragged her out to
Mars, until I recalled that I
hadn't. In fact, she had come
up with the idea before I did.
I wished there was some way
of turning the weary, bedraggled
girl at my side back into
the Val who had so enthusiastically
suggested we join
the Geigs.
Twelve steps later, I decided
this was about as far as
we could go.
I stopped, slipped out of
the geiger harness, and lowered
myself ponderously to
the ground. "What'samatter,
Ron?" Val asked sleepily.
"Something wrong?"
"No, baby," I said, putting
out a hand and taking hers.
"I think we ought to rest a
little before we go any further.
It's been a long, hard
day."
It didn't take much to persuade
her. She slid down beside
me, curled up, and in a
moment she was fast asleep,
sprawled out on the sands.
Poor kid
, I thought. Maybe
we shouldn't have come to
Mars after all. But, I reminded
myself,
someone
had to do
the job.
A second thought appeared,
but I squelched it:
Why the hell me?
I looked down at Valerie's
sleeping form, and thought of
our warm, comfortable little
home on Earth. It wasn't
much, but people in love don't
need very fancy surroundings.
I watched her, sleeping
peacefully, a wayward lock of
her soft blonde hair trailing
down over one eyebrow, and
it seemed hard to believe that
we'd exchanged Earth and all
it held for us for the raw, untamed
struggle that was Mars.
But I knew I'd do it again, if
I had the chance. It's because
we wanted to keep what we
had. Heroes? Hell, no. We
just liked our comforts, and
wanted to keep them. Which
took a little work.
Time to get moving.
But
then Val stirred and rolled
over in her sleep, and I didn't
have the heart to wake her. I
sat there, holding her, staring
out over the desert, watching
the wind whip the sand up
into weird shapes.
The Geig Corps preferred
married couples, working in
teams. That's what had finally
decided it for us—we were a
good team. We had no ties on
Earth that couldn't be broken
without much difficulty. So
we volunteered.
And here we are.
Heroes.
The wind blasted a mass of
sand into my face, and I felt
it tinkle against the oxymask.
I glanced at the suit-chronometer.
Getting late. I decided
once again to wake Val.
But she was tired. And I was
tired too, tired from our
wearying journey across the
empty desert.
I started to shake Val. But
I never finished. It would be
so
nice just to lean back and
nuzzle up to her, down in the
sand. So nice. I yawned, and
stretched back.
I awoke with a sudden startled
shiver, and realized angrily
I had let myself doze off.
"Come on, Val," I said savagely,
and started to rise to
my feet.
I couldn't.
I looked down. I was neatly
bound in thin, tough, plastic
tangle-cord, swathed from
chin to boot-bottoms, my
arms imprisoned, my feet
caught. And tangle-cord is
about as easy to get out of as
a spider's web is for a trapped
fly.
It wasn't Martians that
had done it. There weren't
any Martians, hadn't been for
a million years. It was some
Earthman who had bound us.
I rolled my eyes toward
Val, and saw that she was
similarly trussed in the sticky
stuff. The tangle-cord was still
fresh, giving off a faint, repugnant
odor like that of drying
fish. It had been spun on
us only a short time ago, I
realized.
"Ron—"
"Don't try to move, baby.
This stuff can break your
neck if you twist it wrong."
She continued for a moment
to struggle futilely, and I had
to snap, "Lie still, Val!"
"A very wise statement,"
said a brittle, harsh voice
from above me. I looked up
and saw a helmeted figure
above us. He wasn't wearing
the customary skin-tight pliable
oxysuits we had. He
wore an outmoded, bulky
spacesuit and a fishbowl helmet,
all but the face area
opaque. The oxygen cannisters
weren't attached to his
back as expected, though.
They were strapped to the
back of the wheelchair in
which he sat.
Through the fishbowl I
could see hard little eyes, a
yellowed, parchment-like face,
a grim-set jaw. I didn't recognize
him, and this struck me
odd. I thought I knew everyone
on sparsely-settled Mars.
Somehow I'd missed him.
What shocked me most was
that he had no legs. The
spacesuit ended neatly at the
thighs.
He was holding in his left
hand the tanglegun with
which he had entrapped us,
and a very efficient-looking
blaster was in his right.
"I didn't want to disturb
your sleep," he said coldly.
"So I've been waiting here
for you to wake up."
I could just see it. He might
have been sitting there for
hours, complacently waiting
to see how we'd wake up.
That was when I realized he
must be totally insane. I could
feel my stomach-muscles
tighten, my throat constrict
painfully.
Then anger ripped through
me, washing away the terror.
"What's going on?" I demanded,
staring at the half
of a man who confronted us
from the wheelchair. "Who
are you?"
"You'll find out soon
enough," he said. "Suppose
now you come with me." He
reached for the tanglegun,
flipped the little switch on its
side to MELT, and shot a
stream of watery fluid over
our legs, keeping the blaster
trained on us all the while.
Our legs were free.
"You may get up now," he
said. "Slowly, without trying
to make trouble." Val and I
helped each other to our feet
as best we could, considering
our arms were still tightly
bound against the sides of our
oxysuits.
"Walk," the stranger said,
waving the tanglegun to indicate
the direction. "I'll be
right behind you." He holstered
the tanglegun.
I glimpsed the bulk of an
outboard atomic rigging behind
him, strapped to the
back of the wheelchair. He
fingered a knob on the arm of
the chair and the two exhaust
ducts behind the wheel-housings
flamed for a moment,
and the chair began to roll.
Obediently, we started
walking. You don't argue
with a blaster, even if the
man pointing it is in a wheelchair.
"What's going on, Ron?"
Val asked in a low voice as we
walked. Behind us the wheelchair
hissed steadily.
"I don't quite know, Val.
I've never seen this guy before,
and I thought I knew
everyone at the Dome."
"Quiet up there!" our captor
called, and we stopped
talking. We trudged along together,
with him following
behind; I could hear the
crunch-crunch
of the wheelchair
as its wheels chewed
into the sand. I wondered
where we were going, and
why. I wondered why we had
ever left Earth.
The answer to that came to
me quick enough: we had to.
Earth needed radioactives,
and the only way to get them
was to get out and look. The
great atomic wars of the late
20th Century had used up
much of the supply, but the
amount used to blow up half
the great cities of the world
hardly compared with the
amount we needed to put
them back together again.
In three centuries the shattered
world had been completely
rebuilt. The wreckage
of New York and Shanghai
and London and all the other
ruined cities had been hidden
by a shining new world of
gleaming towers and flying
roadways. We had profited by
our grandparents' mistakes.
They had used their atomics
to make bombs. We used ours
for fuel.
It was an atomic world.
Everything: power drills,
printing presses, typewriters,
can openers, ocean liners,
powered by the inexhaustible
energy of the dividing atom.
But though the energy is
inexhaustible, the supply of
nuclei isn't. After three centuries
of heavy consumption,
the supply failed. The mighty
machine that was Earth's industry
had started to slow
down.
And that started the chain
of events that led Val and me
to end up as a madman's prisoners,
on Mars. With every
source of uranium mined dry
on Earth, we had tried other
possibilities. All sorts of
schemes came forth. Project
Sea-Dredge was trying to get
uranium from the oceans. In
forty or fifty years, they'd
get some results, we hoped.
But there wasn't forty or
fifty years' worth of raw stuff
to tide us over until then. In a
decade or so, our power would
be just about gone. I could
picture the sort of dog-eat-dog
world we'd revert back
to. Millions of starving, freezing
humans tooth-and-clawing
in it in the useless shell of
a great atomic civilization.
So, Mars. There's not much
uranium on Mars, and it's not
easy to find or any cinch to
mine. But what little is there,
helps. It's a stopgap effort,
just to keep things moving
until Project Sea-Dredge
starts functioning.
Enter the Geig Corps: volunteers
out on the face of
Mars, combing for its uranium
deposits.
And here we are, I thought.
After we walked on a
while, a Dome became visible
up ahead. It slid up over the
crest of a hill, set back between
two hummocks on the
desert. Just out of the way
enough to escape observation.
For a puzzled moment I
thought it was our Dome, the
settlement where all of UranCo's
Geig Corps were located,
but another look told me that
this was actually quite near
us and fairly small. A one-man
Dome, of all things!
"Welcome to my home," he
said. "The name is Gregory
Ledman." He herded us off to
one side of the airlock, uttered
a few words keyed to his
voice, and motioned us inside
when the door slid up. When
we were inside he reached up,
clumsily holding the blaster,
and unscrewed the ancient
spacesuit fishbowl.
His face was a bitter,
dried-up mask. He was a man
who hated.
The place was spartanly
furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,
no decoration of any
sort. Hard bulkhead walls,
rivet-studded, glared back
at us. He had an automatic
chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,
and no other furniture.
Suddenly he drew the tanglegun
and sprayed our legs
again. We toppled heavily to
the floor. I looked up angrily.
"I imagine you want to
know the whole story," he
said. "The others did, too."
Valerie looked at me anxiously.
Her pretty face was a
dead white behind her oxymask.
"What others?"
"I never bothered to find
out their names," Ledman
said casually. "They were
other Geigs I caught unawares,
like you, out on the
desert. That's the only sport I
have left—Geig-hunting. Look
out there."
He gestured through the
translucent skin of the Dome,
and I felt sick. There was a
little heap of bones lying
there, looking oddly bright
against the redness of the
sands. They were the dried,
parched skeletons of Earthmen.
Bits of cloth and plastic,
once oxymasks and suits, still
clung to them.
Suddenly I remembered.
There had been a pattern
there all the time. We didn't
much talk about it; we chalked
it off as occupational hazards.
There had been a pattern
of disappearances on the desert.
I could think of six, eight
names now. None of them
had been particularly close
friends. You don't get time to
make close friends out here.
But we'd vowed it wouldn't
happen to us.
It had.
"You've been hunting
Geigs?" I asked. "
Why?
What've they ever done to
you?"
He smiled, as calmly as if
I'd just praised his house-keeping.
"Because I hate
you," he said blandly. "I intend
to wipe every last one of
you out, one by one."
I stared at him. I'd never
seen a man like this before; I
thought all his kind had died
at the time of the atomic
wars.
I heard Val sob, "He's a
madman!"
"No," Ledman said evenly.
"I'm quite sane, believe me.
But I'm determined to drive
the Geigs—and UranCo—off
Mars. Eventually I'll scare
you all away."
"Just pick us off in the desert?"
"Exactly," replied Ledman.
"And I have no fears of an
armed attack. This place is
well fortified. I've devoted
years to building it. And I'm
back against those hills. They
couldn't pry me out." He let
his pale hand run up into his
gnarled hair. "I've devoted
years to this. Ever since—ever
since I landed here on
Mars."
"What are you going to do
with us?" Val finally asked,
after a long silence.
He didn't smile this time.
"Kill you," he told her. "Not
your husband. I want him as
an envoy, to go back and tell
the others to clear off." He
rocked back and forth in his
wheelchair, toying with the
gleaming, deadly blaster in
his hand.
We stared in horror. It was
a nightmare—sitting there,
placidly rocking back and
forth, a nightmare.
I found myself fervently
wishing I was back out there
on the infinitely safer desert.
"Do I shock you?" he asked.
"I shouldn't—not when
you see my motives."
"We don't see them," I
snapped.
"Well, let me show you.
You're on Mars hunting uranium,
right? To mine and
ship the radioactives back to
Earth to keep the atomic engines
going. Right?"
I nodded over at our geiger
counters.
"We volunteered to come to
Mars," Val said irrelevantly.
"Ah—two young heroes,"
Ledman said acidly. "How
sad. I could almost feel sorry
for you. Almost."
"Just what is it you're
after?" I said, stalling, stalling.
"Atomics cost me my legs,"
he said. "You remember the
Sadlerville Blast?" he asked.
"Of course." And I did, too.
I'd never forget it. No one
would. How could I forget
that great accident—killing
hundreds, injuring thousands
more, sterilizing forty miles
of Mississippi land—when
the Sadlerville pile went up?
"I was there on business at
the time," Ledman said. "I
represented Ledman Atomics.
I was there to sign a new
contract for my company.
You know who I am, now?"
I nodded.
"I was fairly well shielded
when it happened. I never got
the contract, but I got a good
dose of radiation instead. Not
enough to kill me," he said.
"Just enough to necessitate
the removal of—" he indicated
the empty space at his
thighs. "So I got off lightly."
He gestured at the wheelchair
blanket.
I still didn't understand.
"But why kill us Geigs?
We
had nothing to do with it."
"You're just in this by accident,"
he said. "You see, after
the explosion and the amputation,
my fellow-members on
the board of Ledman Atomics
decided that a semi-basket
case like myself was a poor
risk as Head of the Board,
and they took my company
away. All quite legal, I assure
you. They left me almost a
pauper!" Then he snapped
the punchline at me.
"They renamed Ledman
Atomics. Who did you say you
worked for?"
I began, "Uran—"
"Don't bother. A more inventive
title than Ledman
Atomics, but not quite as
much heart, wouldn't you
say?" He grinned. "I saved
for years; then I came to
Mars, lost myself, built this
Dome, and swore to get even.
There's not a great deal of
uranium on this planet, but
enough to keep me in a style
to which, unfortunately, I'm
no longer accustomed."
He consulted his wrist
watch. "Time for my injection."
He pulled out the tanglegun
and sprayed us again,
just to make doubly certain.
"That's another little souvenir
of Sadlerville. I'm short
on red blood corpuscles."
He rolled over to a wall
table and fumbled in a container
among a pile of hypodermics.
"There are other injections,
too. Adrenalin, insulin.
Others. The Blast turned
me into a walking pin-cushion.
But I'll pay it all
back," he said. He plunged
the needle into his arm.
My eyes widened. It was
too nightmarish to be real. I
wasn't seriously worried
about his threat to wipe out
the entire Geig Corps, since
it was unlikely that one man
in a wheelchair could pick us
all off. No, it wasn't the
threat that disturbed me, so
much as the whole concept, so
strange to me, that the human
mind could be as warped
and twisted as Ledman's.
I saw the horror on Val's
face, and I knew she felt the
same way I did.
"Do you really think you
can succeed?" I taunted him.
"Really think you can kill
every Earthman on Mars? Of
all the insane, cockeyed—"
Val's quick, worried head-shake
cut me off. But Ledman
had felt my words, all right.
"Yes! I'll get even with
every one of you for taking
away my legs! If we hadn't
meddled with the atom in the
first place, I'd be as tall and
powerful as you, today—instead
of a useless cripple in a
wheelchair."
"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,"
Val said quietly.
"You've conceived an impossible
scheme of revenge and
now you're taking it out on
innocent people who've done
nothing, nothing at all to you.
That's not sane!"
His eyes blazed. "Who are
you to talk of sanity?"
Uneasily I caught Val's
glance from a corner of my
eye. Sweat was rolling down
her smooth forehead faster
than the auto-wiper could
swab it away.
"Why don't you do something?
What are you waiting
for, Ron?"
"Easy, baby," I said. I
knew what our ace in the hole
was. But I had to get Ledman
within reach of me first.
"Enough," he said. "I'm going
to turn you loose outside,
right after—"
"
Get sick!
" I hissed to Val,
low. She began immediately
to cough violently, emitting
harsh, choking sobs. "Can't
breathe!" She began to yell,
writhing in her bonds.
That did it. Ledman hadn't
much humanity left in him,
but there was a little. He lowered
the blaster a bit and
wheeled one-hand over to see
what was wrong with Val.
She continued to retch and
moan most horribly. It almost
convinced me. I saw Val's
pale, frightened face turn to
me.
He approached and peered
down at her. He opened his
mouth to say something, and
at that moment I snapped my
leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord
with a snicking rasp,
and kicked his wheelchair
over.
The blaster went off, burning
a hole through the Dome
roof. The automatic sealers
glued-in instantly. Ledman
went sprawling helplessly out
into the middle of the floor,
the wheelchair upended next
to him, its wheels slowly revolving
in the air. The blaster
flew from his hands at the
impact of landing and spun
out near me. In one quick motion
I rolled over and covered
it with my body.
Ledman clawed his way to
me with tremendous effort
and tried wildly to pry the
blaster out from under me,
but without success. I twisted
a bit, reached out with my
free leg, and booted him
across the floor. He fetched
up against the wall of the
Dome and lay there.
Val rolled over to me.
"Now if I could get free of
this stuff," I said, "I could get
him covered before he comes
to. But how?"
"Teamwork," Val said. She
swivelled around on the floor
until her head was near my
boot. "Push my oxymask off
with your foot, if you can."
I searched for the clamp
and tried to flip it. No luck,
with my heavy, clumsy boot.
I tried again, and this time it
snapped open. I got the tip
of my boot in and pried upward.
The oxymask came off,
slowly, scraping a jagged red
scratch up the side of Val's
neck as it came.
"There," she breathed.
"That's that."
I looked uneasily at Ledman.
He was groaning and
beginning to stir.
Val rolled on the floor and
her face lay near my right
arm. I saw what she had in
mind. She began to nibble the
vile-tasting tangle-cord, running
her teeth up and down
it until it started to give. She
continued unfailingly.
Finally one strand snapped.
Then another. At last I
had enough use of my hand
to reach out and grasp the
blaster. Then I pulled myself
across the floor to Ledman,
removed the tanglegun, and
melted the remaining tangle-cord
off.
My muscles were stiff and
bunched, and rising made me
wince. I turned and freed Val.
Then I turned and faced Ledman.
"I suppose you'll kill me
now," he said.
"No. That's the difference
between sane people and insane,"
I told him. "I'm not
going to kill you at all. I'm
going to see to it that you're
sent back to Earth."
"
No!
" he shouted. "No!
Anything but back there. I
don't want to face them again—not
after what they did to
me—"
"Not so loud," I broke in.
"They'll help you on Earth.
They'll take all the hatred and
sickness out of you, and turn
you into a useful member of
society again."
"I hate Earthmen," he spat
out. "I hate all of them."
"I know," I said sarcastically.
"You're just all full of
hate. You hated us so much
that you couldn't bear to hang
around on Earth for as much
as a year after the Sadlerville
Blast. You had to take right
off for Mars without a moment's
delay, didn't you? You
hated Earth so much you
had
to leave."
"Why are you telling all
this to me?"
"Because if you'd stayed
long enough, you'd have used
some of your pension money
to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic
legs, and then you
wouldn't need this wheelchair."
Ledman scowled, and then
his face went belligerent
again. "They told me I was
paralyzed below the waist.
That I'd never walk again,
even with prosthetic legs, because
I had no muscles to fit
them to."
"You left Earth too quickly,"
Val said.
"It was the only way," he
protested. "I had to get off—"
"She's right," I told him.
"The atom can take away, but
it can give as well. Soon after
you left they developed
atomic-powered
prosthetics—amazing
things, virtually robot
legs. All the survivors of
the Sadlerville Blast were
given the necessary replacement
limbs free of charge. All
except you. You were so sick
you had to get away from the
world you despised and come
here."
"You're lying," he said.
"It's not true!"
"Oh, but it is," Val smiled.
I saw him wilt visibly, and
for a moment I almost felt
sorry for him, a pathetic legless
figure propped up against
the wall of the Dome at
blaster-point. But then I remembered
he'd killed twelve
Geigs—or more—and would
have added Val to the number
had he had the chance.
"You're a very sick man,
Ledman," I said. "All this
time you could have been
happy, useful on Earth, instead
of being holed up here
nursing your hatred. You
might have been useful, on
Earth. But you decided to
channel everything out as revenge."
"I still don't believe it—those
legs. I might have walked
again. No—no, it's all a lie.
They told me I'd never walk,"
he said, weakly but stubbornly
still.
I could see his whole structure
of hate starting to topple,
and I decided to give it
the final push.
"Haven't you wondered
how I managed to break the
tangle-cord when I kicked you
over?"
"Yes—human legs aren't
strong enough to break tangle-cord
that way."
"Of course not," I said. I
gave Val the blaster and slipped
out of my oxysuit.
"Look," I said. I pointed to
my smooth, gleaming metal
legs. The almost soundless
purr of their motors was the
only noise in the room. "I was
in the Sadlerville Blast, too,"
I said. "But I didn't go crazy
with hate when I lost
my
legs."
Ledman was sobbing.
"Okay, Ledman," I said.
Val got him into his suit, and
brought him the fishbowl helmet.
"Get your helmet on and
let's go. Between the psychs
and the prosthetics men,
you'll be a new man inside of
a year."
"But I'm a murderer!"
"That's right. And you'll be
sentenced to psych adjustment.
When they're finished,
Gregory Ledman the killer
will be as dead as if they'd
electrocuted you, but there'll
be a new—and sane—Gregory
Ledman." I turned to Val.
"Got the geigers, honey?"
For the first time since
Ledman had caught us, I remembered
how tired Val had
been out on the desert. I realized
now that I had been driving
her mercilessly—me, with
my chromium legs and atomic-powered
muscles. No wonder
she was ready to fold!
And I'd been too dense to see
how unfair I had been.
She lifted the geiger harnesses,
and I put Ledman
back in his wheelchair.
Val slipped her oxymask
back on and fastened it shut.
"Let's get back to the Dome
in a hurry," I said. "We'll
turn Ledman over to the authorities.
Then we can catch
the next ship for Earth."
"Go back?
Go back?
If you
think I'm backing down now
and quitting you can find
yourself another wife! After
we dump this guy I'm sacking
in for twenty hours, and then
we're going back out there to
finish that search-pattern.
Earth needs uranium, honey,
and I know you'd never be
happy quitting in the middle
like that." She smiled. "I
can't wait to get out there
and start listening for those
tell-tale clicks."
I gave a joyful whoop and
swung her around. When I
put her down, she squeezed
my hand, hard.
"Let's get moving, fellow
hero," she said.
I pressed the stud for the
airlock, smiling.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories
September 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | Victims of the Sadlerville blast received a large settlement and were culturally recognized as heroes | Inventors discovered a way to create prosthetics using atomic power | In hunting Geigs, Ledman is killing the only people with the power to help him walk again | He needs uranium in order to survive and went to a place where there is scant uranium | 1 |
25627_61MWU4OY_8 | Why did Val become so tired during her trek across the desert? | THE
HUNTED
HEROES
By ROBERT SILVERBERG
The planet itself was tough enough—barren, desolate,
forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and
dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad
genius who had a motto:
Death to all Terrans!
"Let's
keep moving," I told
Val. "The surest way to
die out here on Mars is to
give up." I reached over and
turned up the pressure on her
oxymask to make things a
little easier for her. Through
the glassite of the mask, I
could see her face contorted
in an agony of fatigue.
And she probably thought
the failure of the sandcat was
all my fault, too. Val's usually
about the best wife a guy
could ask for, but when she
wants to be she can be a real
flying bother.
It was beyond her to see
that some grease monkey back
at the Dome was at fault—whoever
it was who had failed
to fasten down the engine
hood. Nothing but what had
stopped us
could
stop a sandcat:
sand in the delicate
mechanism of the atomic engine.
But no; she blamed it all on
me somehow: So we were out
walking on the spongy sand
of the Martian desert. We'd
been walking a good eight
hours.
"Can't we turn back now,
Ron?" Val pleaded. "Maybe
there isn't any uranium in
this sector at all. I think
we're crazy to keep on searching
out here!"
I started to tell her that the
UranCo chief had assured me
we'd hit something out this
way, but changed my mind.
When Val's tired and overwrought
there's no sense in
arguing with her.
I stared ahead at the bleak,
desolate wastes of the Martian
landscape. Behind us
somewhere was the comfort
of the Dome, ahead nothing
but the mazes and gullies of
this dead world.
He was a cripple in a wheelchair—helpless as a rattlesnake.
"Try to keep going, Val."
My gloved hand reached out
and clumsily enfolded hers.
"Come on, kid. Remember—we're
doing this for Earth.
We're heroes."
She glared at me. "Heroes,
hell!" she muttered. "That's
the way it looked back home,
but, out there it doesn't seem
so glorious. And UranCo's
pay is stinking."
"We didn't come out here
for the pay, Val."
"I know, I know, but just
the same—"
It must have been hell for
her. We had wandered fruitlessly
over the red sands all
day, both of us listening for
the clicks of the counter. And
the geigers had been obstinately
hushed all day, except
for their constant undercurrent
of meaningless noises.
Even though the Martian
gravity was only a fraction of
Earth's, I was starting to
tire, and I knew it must have
been really rough on Val with
her lovely but unrugged legs.
"Heroes," she said bitterly.
"We're not heroes—we're
suckers! Why did I ever let
you volunteer for the Geig
Corps and drag me along?"
Which wasn't anywhere
close to the truth. Now I
knew she was at the breaking
point, because Val didn't lie
unless she was so exhausted
she didn't know what she was
doing. She had been just as
much inflamed by the idea of
coming to Mars to help in the
search for uranium as I was.
We knew the pay was poor,
but we had felt it a sort of
obligation, something we
could do as individuals to
keep the industries of radioactives-starved
Earth going.
And we'd always had a roving
foot, both of us.
No, we had decided together
to come to Mars—the
way we decided together on
everything. Now she was
turning against me.
I tried to jolly her. "Buck
up, kid," I said. I didn't dare
turn up her oxy pressure any
higher, but it was obvious she
couldn't keep going. She was
almost sleep-walking now.
We pressed on over the
barren terrain. The geiger
kept up a fairly steady click-pattern,
but never broke into
that sudden explosive tumult
that meant we had found pay-dirt.
I started to feel tired
myself, terribly tired. I longed
to lie down on the soft,
spongy Martian sand and
bury myself.
I looked at Val. She was
dragging along with her eyes
half-shut. I felt almost guilty
for having dragged her out to
Mars, until I recalled that I
hadn't. In fact, she had come
up with the idea before I did.
I wished there was some way
of turning the weary, bedraggled
girl at my side back into
the Val who had so enthusiastically
suggested we join
the Geigs.
Twelve steps later, I decided
this was about as far as
we could go.
I stopped, slipped out of
the geiger harness, and lowered
myself ponderously to
the ground. "What'samatter,
Ron?" Val asked sleepily.
"Something wrong?"
"No, baby," I said, putting
out a hand and taking hers.
"I think we ought to rest a
little before we go any further.
It's been a long, hard
day."
It didn't take much to persuade
her. She slid down beside
me, curled up, and in a
moment she was fast asleep,
sprawled out on the sands.
Poor kid
, I thought. Maybe
we shouldn't have come to
Mars after all. But, I reminded
myself,
someone
had to do
the job.
A second thought appeared,
but I squelched it:
Why the hell me?
I looked down at Valerie's
sleeping form, and thought of
our warm, comfortable little
home on Earth. It wasn't
much, but people in love don't
need very fancy surroundings.
I watched her, sleeping
peacefully, a wayward lock of
her soft blonde hair trailing
down over one eyebrow, and
it seemed hard to believe that
we'd exchanged Earth and all
it held for us for the raw, untamed
struggle that was Mars.
But I knew I'd do it again, if
I had the chance. It's because
we wanted to keep what we
had. Heroes? Hell, no. We
just liked our comforts, and
wanted to keep them. Which
took a little work.
Time to get moving.
But
then Val stirred and rolled
over in her sleep, and I didn't
have the heart to wake her. I
sat there, holding her, staring
out over the desert, watching
the wind whip the sand up
into weird shapes.
The Geig Corps preferred
married couples, working in
teams. That's what had finally
decided it for us—we were a
good team. We had no ties on
Earth that couldn't be broken
without much difficulty. So
we volunteered.
And here we are.
Heroes.
The wind blasted a mass of
sand into my face, and I felt
it tinkle against the oxymask.
I glanced at the suit-chronometer.
Getting late. I decided
once again to wake Val.
But she was tired. And I was
tired too, tired from our
wearying journey across the
empty desert.
I started to shake Val. But
I never finished. It would be
so
nice just to lean back and
nuzzle up to her, down in the
sand. So nice. I yawned, and
stretched back.
I awoke with a sudden startled
shiver, and realized angrily
I had let myself doze off.
"Come on, Val," I said savagely,
and started to rise to
my feet.
I couldn't.
I looked down. I was neatly
bound in thin, tough, plastic
tangle-cord, swathed from
chin to boot-bottoms, my
arms imprisoned, my feet
caught. And tangle-cord is
about as easy to get out of as
a spider's web is for a trapped
fly.
It wasn't Martians that
had done it. There weren't
any Martians, hadn't been for
a million years. It was some
Earthman who had bound us.
I rolled my eyes toward
Val, and saw that she was
similarly trussed in the sticky
stuff. The tangle-cord was still
fresh, giving off a faint, repugnant
odor like that of drying
fish. It had been spun on
us only a short time ago, I
realized.
"Ron—"
"Don't try to move, baby.
This stuff can break your
neck if you twist it wrong."
She continued for a moment
to struggle futilely, and I had
to snap, "Lie still, Val!"
"A very wise statement,"
said a brittle, harsh voice
from above me. I looked up
and saw a helmeted figure
above us. He wasn't wearing
the customary skin-tight pliable
oxysuits we had. He
wore an outmoded, bulky
spacesuit and a fishbowl helmet,
all but the face area
opaque. The oxygen cannisters
weren't attached to his
back as expected, though.
They were strapped to the
back of the wheelchair in
which he sat.
Through the fishbowl I
could see hard little eyes, a
yellowed, parchment-like face,
a grim-set jaw. I didn't recognize
him, and this struck me
odd. I thought I knew everyone
on sparsely-settled Mars.
Somehow I'd missed him.
What shocked me most was
that he had no legs. The
spacesuit ended neatly at the
thighs.
He was holding in his left
hand the tanglegun with
which he had entrapped us,
and a very efficient-looking
blaster was in his right.
"I didn't want to disturb
your sleep," he said coldly.
"So I've been waiting here
for you to wake up."
I could just see it. He might
have been sitting there for
hours, complacently waiting
to see how we'd wake up.
That was when I realized he
must be totally insane. I could
feel my stomach-muscles
tighten, my throat constrict
painfully.
Then anger ripped through
me, washing away the terror.
"What's going on?" I demanded,
staring at the half
of a man who confronted us
from the wheelchair. "Who
are you?"
"You'll find out soon
enough," he said. "Suppose
now you come with me." He
reached for the tanglegun,
flipped the little switch on its
side to MELT, and shot a
stream of watery fluid over
our legs, keeping the blaster
trained on us all the while.
Our legs were free.
"You may get up now," he
said. "Slowly, without trying
to make trouble." Val and I
helped each other to our feet
as best we could, considering
our arms were still tightly
bound against the sides of our
oxysuits.
"Walk," the stranger said,
waving the tanglegun to indicate
the direction. "I'll be
right behind you." He holstered
the tanglegun.
I glimpsed the bulk of an
outboard atomic rigging behind
him, strapped to the
back of the wheelchair. He
fingered a knob on the arm of
the chair and the two exhaust
ducts behind the wheel-housings
flamed for a moment,
and the chair began to roll.
Obediently, we started
walking. You don't argue
with a blaster, even if the
man pointing it is in a wheelchair.
"What's going on, Ron?"
Val asked in a low voice as we
walked. Behind us the wheelchair
hissed steadily.
"I don't quite know, Val.
I've never seen this guy before,
and I thought I knew
everyone at the Dome."
"Quiet up there!" our captor
called, and we stopped
talking. We trudged along together,
with him following
behind; I could hear the
crunch-crunch
of the wheelchair
as its wheels chewed
into the sand. I wondered
where we were going, and
why. I wondered why we had
ever left Earth.
The answer to that came to
me quick enough: we had to.
Earth needed radioactives,
and the only way to get them
was to get out and look. The
great atomic wars of the late
20th Century had used up
much of the supply, but the
amount used to blow up half
the great cities of the world
hardly compared with the
amount we needed to put
them back together again.
In three centuries the shattered
world had been completely
rebuilt. The wreckage
of New York and Shanghai
and London and all the other
ruined cities had been hidden
by a shining new world of
gleaming towers and flying
roadways. We had profited by
our grandparents' mistakes.
They had used their atomics
to make bombs. We used ours
for fuel.
It was an atomic world.
Everything: power drills,
printing presses, typewriters,
can openers, ocean liners,
powered by the inexhaustible
energy of the dividing atom.
But though the energy is
inexhaustible, the supply of
nuclei isn't. After three centuries
of heavy consumption,
the supply failed. The mighty
machine that was Earth's industry
had started to slow
down.
And that started the chain
of events that led Val and me
to end up as a madman's prisoners,
on Mars. With every
source of uranium mined dry
on Earth, we had tried other
possibilities. All sorts of
schemes came forth. Project
Sea-Dredge was trying to get
uranium from the oceans. In
forty or fifty years, they'd
get some results, we hoped.
But there wasn't forty or
fifty years' worth of raw stuff
to tide us over until then. In a
decade or so, our power would
be just about gone. I could
picture the sort of dog-eat-dog
world we'd revert back
to. Millions of starving, freezing
humans tooth-and-clawing
in it in the useless shell of
a great atomic civilization.
So, Mars. There's not much
uranium on Mars, and it's not
easy to find or any cinch to
mine. But what little is there,
helps. It's a stopgap effort,
just to keep things moving
until Project Sea-Dredge
starts functioning.
Enter the Geig Corps: volunteers
out on the face of
Mars, combing for its uranium
deposits.
And here we are, I thought.
After we walked on a
while, a Dome became visible
up ahead. It slid up over the
crest of a hill, set back between
two hummocks on the
desert. Just out of the way
enough to escape observation.
For a puzzled moment I
thought it was our Dome, the
settlement where all of UranCo's
Geig Corps were located,
but another look told me that
this was actually quite near
us and fairly small. A one-man
Dome, of all things!
"Welcome to my home," he
said. "The name is Gregory
Ledman." He herded us off to
one side of the airlock, uttered
a few words keyed to his
voice, and motioned us inside
when the door slid up. When
we were inside he reached up,
clumsily holding the blaster,
and unscrewed the ancient
spacesuit fishbowl.
His face was a bitter,
dried-up mask. He was a man
who hated.
The place was spartanly
furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,
no decoration of any
sort. Hard bulkhead walls,
rivet-studded, glared back
at us. He had an automatic
chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,
and no other furniture.
Suddenly he drew the tanglegun
and sprayed our legs
again. We toppled heavily to
the floor. I looked up angrily.
"I imagine you want to
know the whole story," he
said. "The others did, too."
Valerie looked at me anxiously.
Her pretty face was a
dead white behind her oxymask.
"What others?"
"I never bothered to find
out their names," Ledman
said casually. "They were
other Geigs I caught unawares,
like you, out on the
desert. That's the only sport I
have left—Geig-hunting. Look
out there."
He gestured through the
translucent skin of the Dome,
and I felt sick. There was a
little heap of bones lying
there, looking oddly bright
against the redness of the
sands. They were the dried,
parched skeletons of Earthmen.
Bits of cloth and plastic,
once oxymasks and suits, still
clung to them.
Suddenly I remembered.
There had been a pattern
there all the time. We didn't
much talk about it; we chalked
it off as occupational hazards.
There had been a pattern
of disappearances on the desert.
I could think of six, eight
names now. None of them
had been particularly close
friends. You don't get time to
make close friends out here.
But we'd vowed it wouldn't
happen to us.
It had.
"You've been hunting
Geigs?" I asked. "
Why?
What've they ever done to
you?"
He smiled, as calmly as if
I'd just praised his house-keeping.
"Because I hate
you," he said blandly. "I intend
to wipe every last one of
you out, one by one."
I stared at him. I'd never
seen a man like this before; I
thought all his kind had died
at the time of the atomic
wars.
I heard Val sob, "He's a
madman!"
"No," Ledman said evenly.
"I'm quite sane, believe me.
But I'm determined to drive
the Geigs—and UranCo—off
Mars. Eventually I'll scare
you all away."
"Just pick us off in the desert?"
"Exactly," replied Ledman.
"And I have no fears of an
armed attack. This place is
well fortified. I've devoted
years to building it. And I'm
back against those hills. They
couldn't pry me out." He let
his pale hand run up into his
gnarled hair. "I've devoted
years to this. Ever since—ever
since I landed here on
Mars."
"What are you going to do
with us?" Val finally asked,
after a long silence.
He didn't smile this time.
"Kill you," he told her. "Not
your husband. I want him as
an envoy, to go back and tell
the others to clear off." He
rocked back and forth in his
wheelchair, toying with the
gleaming, deadly blaster in
his hand.
We stared in horror. It was
a nightmare—sitting there,
placidly rocking back and
forth, a nightmare.
I found myself fervently
wishing I was back out there
on the infinitely safer desert.
"Do I shock you?" he asked.
"I shouldn't—not when
you see my motives."
"We don't see them," I
snapped.
"Well, let me show you.
You're on Mars hunting uranium,
right? To mine and
ship the radioactives back to
Earth to keep the atomic engines
going. Right?"
I nodded over at our geiger
counters.
"We volunteered to come to
Mars," Val said irrelevantly.
"Ah—two young heroes,"
Ledman said acidly. "How
sad. I could almost feel sorry
for you. Almost."
"Just what is it you're
after?" I said, stalling, stalling.
"Atomics cost me my legs,"
he said. "You remember the
Sadlerville Blast?" he asked.
"Of course." And I did, too.
I'd never forget it. No one
would. How could I forget
that great accident—killing
hundreds, injuring thousands
more, sterilizing forty miles
of Mississippi land—when
the Sadlerville pile went up?
"I was there on business at
the time," Ledman said. "I
represented Ledman Atomics.
I was there to sign a new
contract for my company.
You know who I am, now?"
I nodded.
"I was fairly well shielded
when it happened. I never got
the contract, but I got a good
dose of radiation instead. Not
enough to kill me," he said.
"Just enough to necessitate
the removal of—" he indicated
the empty space at his
thighs. "So I got off lightly."
He gestured at the wheelchair
blanket.
I still didn't understand.
"But why kill us Geigs?
We
had nothing to do with it."
"You're just in this by accident,"
he said. "You see, after
the explosion and the amputation,
my fellow-members on
the board of Ledman Atomics
decided that a semi-basket
case like myself was a poor
risk as Head of the Board,
and they took my company
away. All quite legal, I assure
you. They left me almost a
pauper!" Then he snapped
the punchline at me.
"They renamed Ledman
Atomics. Who did you say you
worked for?"
I began, "Uran—"
"Don't bother. A more inventive
title than Ledman
Atomics, but not quite as
much heart, wouldn't you
say?" He grinned. "I saved
for years; then I came to
Mars, lost myself, built this
Dome, and swore to get even.
There's not a great deal of
uranium on this planet, but
enough to keep me in a style
to which, unfortunately, I'm
no longer accustomed."
He consulted his wrist
watch. "Time for my injection."
He pulled out the tanglegun
and sprayed us again,
just to make doubly certain.
"That's another little souvenir
of Sadlerville. I'm short
on red blood corpuscles."
He rolled over to a wall
table and fumbled in a container
among a pile of hypodermics.
"There are other injections,
too. Adrenalin, insulin.
Others. The Blast turned
me into a walking pin-cushion.
But I'll pay it all
back," he said. He plunged
the needle into his arm.
My eyes widened. It was
too nightmarish to be real. I
wasn't seriously worried
about his threat to wipe out
the entire Geig Corps, since
it was unlikely that one man
in a wheelchair could pick us
all off. No, it wasn't the
threat that disturbed me, so
much as the whole concept, so
strange to me, that the human
mind could be as warped
and twisted as Ledman's.
I saw the horror on Val's
face, and I knew she felt the
same way I did.
"Do you really think you
can succeed?" I taunted him.
"Really think you can kill
every Earthman on Mars? Of
all the insane, cockeyed—"
Val's quick, worried head-shake
cut me off. But Ledman
had felt my words, all right.
"Yes! I'll get even with
every one of you for taking
away my legs! If we hadn't
meddled with the atom in the
first place, I'd be as tall and
powerful as you, today—instead
of a useless cripple in a
wheelchair."
"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,"
Val said quietly.
"You've conceived an impossible
scheme of revenge and
now you're taking it out on
innocent people who've done
nothing, nothing at all to you.
That's not sane!"
His eyes blazed. "Who are
you to talk of sanity?"
Uneasily I caught Val's
glance from a corner of my
eye. Sweat was rolling down
her smooth forehead faster
than the auto-wiper could
swab it away.
"Why don't you do something?
What are you waiting
for, Ron?"
"Easy, baby," I said. I
knew what our ace in the hole
was. But I had to get Ledman
within reach of me first.
"Enough," he said. "I'm going
to turn you loose outside,
right after—"
"
Get sick!
" I hissed to Val,
low. She began immediately
to cough violently, emitting
harsh, choking sobs. "Can't
breathe!" She began to yell,
writhing in her bonds.
That did it. Ledman hadn't
much humanity left in him,
but there was a little. He lowered
the blaster a bit and
wheeled one-hand over to see
what was wrong with Val.
She continued to retch and
moan most horribly. It almost
convinced me. I saw Val's
pale, frightened face turn to
me.
He approached and peered
down at her. He opened his
mouth to say something, and
at that moment I snapped my
leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord
with a snicking rasp,
and kicked his wheelchair
over.
The blaster went off, burning
a hole through the Dome
roof. The automatic sealers
glued-in instantly. Ledman
went sprawling helplessly out
into the middle of the floor,
the wheelchair upended next
to him, its wheels slowly revolving
in the air. The blaster
flew from his hands at the
impact of landing and spun
out near me. In one quick motion
I rolled over and covered
it with my body.
Ledman clawed his way to
me with tremendous effort
and tried wildly to pry the
blaster out from under me,
but without success. I twisted
a bit, reached out with my
free leg, and booted him
across the floor. He fetched
up against the wall of the
Dome and lay there.
Val rolled over to me.
"Now if I could get free of
this stuff," I said, "I could get
him covered before he comes
to. But how?"
"Teamwork," Val said. She
swivelled around on the floor
until her head was near my
boot. "Push my oxymask off
with your foot, if you can."
I searched for the clamp
and tried to flip it. No luck,
with my heavy, clumsy boot.
I tried again, and this time it
snapped open. I got the tip
of my boot in and pried upward.
The oxymask came off,
slowly, scraping a jagged red
scratch up the side of Val's
neck as it came.
"There," she breathed.
"That's that."
I looked uneasily at Ledman.
He was groaning and
beginning to stir.
Val rolled on the floor and
her face lay near my right
arm. I saw what she had in
mind. She began to nibble the
vile-tasting tangle-cord, running
her teeth up and down
it until it started to give. She
continued unfailingly.
Finally one strand snapped.
Then another. At last I
had enough use of my hand
to reach out and grasp the
blaster. Then I pulled myself
across the floor to Ledman,
removed the tanglegun, and
melted the remaining tangle-cord
off.
My muscles were stiff and
bunched, and rising made me
wince. I turned and freed Val.
Then I turned and faced Ledman.
"I suppose you'll kill me
now," he said.
"No. That's the difference
between sane people and insane,"
I told him. "I'm not
going to kill you at all. I'm
going to see to it that you're
sent back to Earth."
"
No!
" he shouted. "No!
Anything but back there. I
don't want to face them again—not
after what they did to
me—"
"Not so loud," I broke in.
"They'll help you on Earth.
They'll take all the hatred and
sickness out of you, and turn
you into a useful member of
society again."
"I hate Earthmen," he spat
out. "I hate all of them."
"I know," I said sarcastically.
"You're just all full of
hate. You hated us so much
that you couldn't bear to hang
around on Earth for as much
as a year after the Sadlerville
Blast. You had to take right
off for Mars without a moment's
delay, didn't you? You
hated Earth so much you
had
to leave."
"Why are you telling all
this to me?"
"Because if you'd stayed
long enough, you'd have used
some of your pension money
to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic
legs, and then you
wouldn't need this wheelchair."
Ledman scowled, and then
his face went belligerent
again. "They told me I was
paralyzed below the waist.
That I'd never walk again,
even with prosthetic legs, because
I had no muscles to fit
them to."
"You left Earth too quickly,"
Val said.
"It was the only way," he
protested. "I had to get off—"
"She's right," I told him.
"The atom can take away, but
it can give as well. Soon after
you left they developed
atomic-powered
prosthetics—amazing
things, virtually robot
legs. All the survivors of
the Sadlerville Blast were
given the necessary replacement
limbs free of charge. All
except you. You were so sick
you had to get away from the
world you despised and come
here."
"You're lying," he said.
"It's not true!"
"Oh, but it is," Val smiled.
I saw him wilt visibly, and
for a moment I almost felt
sorry for him, a pathetic legless
figure propped up against
the wall of the Dome at
blaster-point. But then I remembered
he'd killed twelve
Geigs—or more—and would
have added Val to the number
had he had the chance.
"You're a very sick man,
Ledman," I said. "All this
time you could have been
happy, useful on Earth, instead
of being holed up here
nursing your hatred. You
might have been useful, on
Earth. But you decided to
channel everything out as revenge."
"I still don't believe it—those
legs. I might have walked
again. No—no, it's all a lie.
They told me I'd never walk,"
he said, weakly but stubbornly
still.
I could see his whole structure
of hate starting to topple,
and I decided to give it
the final push.
"Haven't you wondered
how I managed to break the
tangle-cord when I kicked you
over?"
"Yes—human legs aren't
strong enough to break tangle-cord
that way."
"Of course not," I said. I
gave Val the blaster and slipped
out of my oxysuit.
"Look," I said. I pointed to
my smooth, gleaming metal
legs. The almost soundless
purr of their motors was the
only noise in the room. "I was
in the Sadlerville Blast, too,"
I said. "But I didn't go crazy
with hate when I lost
my
legs."
Ledman was sobbing.
"Okay, Ledman," I said.
Val got him into his suit, and
brought him the fishbowl helmet.
"Get your helmet on and
let's go. Between the psychs
and the prosthetics men,
you'll be a new man inside of
a year."
"But I'm a murderer!"
"That's right. And you'll be
sentenced to psych adjustment.
When they're finished,
Gregory Ledman the killer
will be as dead as if they'd
electrocuted you, but there'll
be a new—and sane—Gregory
Ledman." I turned to Val.
"Got the geigers, honey?"
For the first time since
Ledman had caught us, I remembered
how tired Val had
been out on the desert. I realized
now that I had been driving
her mercilessly—me, with
my chromium legs and atomic-powered
muscles. No wonder
she was ready to fold!
And I'd been too dense to see
how unfair I had been.
She lifted the geiger harnesses,
and I put Ledman
back in his wheelchair.
Val slipped her oxymask
back on and fastened it shut.
"Let's get back to the Dome
in a hurry," I said. "We'll
turn Ledman over to the authorities.
Then we can catch
the next ship for Earth."
"Go back?
Go back?
If you
think I'm backing down now
and quitting you can find
yourself another wife! After
we dump this guy I'm sacking
in for twenty hours, and then
we're going back out there to
finish that search-pattern.
Earth needs uranium, honey,
and I know you'd never be
happy quitting in the middle
like that." She smiled. "I
can't wait to get out there
and start listening for those
tell-tale clicks."
I gave a joyful whoop and
swung her around. When I
put her down, she squeezed
my hand, hard.
"Let's get moving, fellow
hero," she said.
I pressed the stud for the
airlock, smiling.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories
September 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | She did not have the technology that enabled Ron to persist | She became consumed with resentment for having traveled to Mars | She had trouble adjusting to the Martian climate and terrain | Uranium was seeping through her space suit | 0 |
60283_2TNPZ0VC_1 | What is ironic about Sias' view of those who 'cling tenaciously, and ignorantly to the old religion'? | The Birds and the Bees
BY DAVE E. FISHER
Which goes to prove that, in some
instances, being heroic is easy!
I was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the
soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and
thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,
cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the
magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of
course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the
very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder
to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.
Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.
In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose
names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.
But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man
returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content
to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the
ancient evils, wars, emergencies.
"Sias! Sias—" And they were upon me.
That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must
soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped
through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were
babbling in excitement.
Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition
states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are
seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of
many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not
been for the friendship of Xeon.
"Sias," they were saying, "the Maternite's gone."
I stared in amazement.
"Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—"
"Oh my gods!" Xeon shouted. "I tell you it's gone! Will you—"
Melia interrupted him quietly. "Xeon, will you lose all respect for
the Elder?" Then turned to me, and said calmly, "The watcher at the
Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the
warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated
in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone."
"All of it?" I asked.
"There is nothing left," Melia insisted. "Can more be made? And if not,
what will happen with no more children?"
"That is for the priests to say, not I," I replied. In moments of
emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I
have never before been in a real emergency.
A man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs
nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I
often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.
They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young
men do.
As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and
consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware
that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an
emergency. For a machine had failed!
Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They
were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them
to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far
as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been
negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.
Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who
knows the mysterious workings of the machines?
I hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting
for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the
steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past
the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated
themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.
Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel
impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers
and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to
sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the
pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.
He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually
smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached
the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had
assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave
had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for
those left were the most earnest and intelligent.
"I would not bore you," he said, "with details of which only the gods
are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is
an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus
assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be
born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact
number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods
claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial."
A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered
around the Hall.
"But now," he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with
even a stutter here and there, "an unprecedented situation has arisen.
Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has
actually failed."
Cries of "Treason" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for
the priest had I not been able to insure order.
"That is not the worst," he cried, as if in defiance. "All the Prelife
has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there
will be no more children!"
At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times
that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy
years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and
began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years
roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked,
"Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the
machines may produce more children for us?
"As I have said," he replied, "give the machines but a bit of Prelife
and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are
helpless."
Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the
Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to
think.
Rocsates leaned forward and asked, "Must there not—must there not have
been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it;
and yet it came from somewhere."
"Riddles are not called for," I answered severely.
"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?" he asked, in that
irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. "Must there not, long ago,
have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not
even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of
the story of the animals of old—"
"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates," I was forced to interrupt.
"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to
do—" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I
hastened to explain the legend of the animals. "It is said that many
thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the
earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said
they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and
although not mute, they could not speak."
Rocsates' voice made itself heard. "It is true. Such creatures did
indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films."
"If it be so," I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, "and I would
not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of
men—if it were so, then, what of it?"
"May it not be," Rocsates put in, "that these animals had no machines
to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines
to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then
we would yet have these animals among us."
"And how, then, did these animals reproduce?" I asked.
"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that
says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite
Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced
from within their own bodies?"
At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and
I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon
and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most
attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of "Heresy" and "Treason",
went on:
"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient
records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or
disprove my words."
"You wish to search the films—" I began.
"Not the films, Sias, but the books."
Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,
and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,
being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.
Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.
And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—
"Sias," he went on, "if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it
not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the
only place where it may be found?"
Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows
the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted
permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the
Conclave adjourned.
Several weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.
I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon
when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.
"Some of those among you are She's," he began. "And you know you are
different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer
and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,
your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you
may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we
should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we
do. Yet there is one other distinction.
"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there
exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a
cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what
reason?"
"Rocsates," I interrupted. "All this is fascinating, of course. But if
you could be quick—"
"Of course," he replied. "In the course of my reading I have read
many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have
discovered:
"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books
were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.
Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the
then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another
land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another
race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is
somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!"
These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the
crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and
amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.
"In fact," Rocsates added, sitting down, "this process of reproduction
seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of
over-population."
Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his
neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that
something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the
assembled overwhelmed him.
"It seems," I shouted, "that there is a flaw in your logic." For if
such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with
no harm done. "For if people reproduced too often, why then this
reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they
would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,
where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?"
Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together
with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, "Perhaps
the process of reproduction was of
such
a pleasure that the Conclave
ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!"
At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond
power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,
however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and
thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.
Now indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish
in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this
they cannot do until they meet again.
I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,
whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again
desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave
to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.
The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when
Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder
a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His
appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.
His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent
and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.
I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the
formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was
on his feet and I gave way.
"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction," he began. "After
many searchings, I came upon this—" and he held forth the object he
had carried in. "It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex
Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet." He
dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes.
There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's
attention. He went on, speaking low. "The word 'Sex' is not defined,
but it seems to mean...." His words trailed off. He was obviously
unsure of how to continue. "I had better start at the beginning, I
suppose," he said. "You see, once upon a time there were birds and
bees...."
When he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,
with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of
'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.
It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear
to move. I cleared my throat.
"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With
no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved
into nothingness?"
"I do not think so," Rocsates replied after a while. "What to us is
an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the
breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in
some, at least, of the She's."
We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.
"Then we must experiment," I said. "But whom could we ask to submit to
such horror?"
"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers," Rocsates
replied. "The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the
breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from
dungeon. Are there any objections?"
There were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would
undergo such an ordeal for the City?
"And who will be the partner?" I asked.
"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It
shall be he," Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall
and stood, noble and naked.
Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,
but Xeon stepped forward.
"My lords," he said, "would not better results be obtained were we to
conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that
the gods may help us?"
His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true
friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table
was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's
position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft
fields might be some slight help.
I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.
It was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It
had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—
We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first
stars.
"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described," I muttered.
"They may indeed have succeeded," Rocsates replied. "There is mentioned
a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately."
"It doesn't matter," I said disconsolately. "Who could ask them to go
through such an ordeal again?"
And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.
Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm
about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.
"Sias," he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.
I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.
"Sias, we come to tell.... We will...." He raised his eyes to mine and
said manfully, "We shall try again."
I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—
"We beg one favor," Xeon went on. "We are agreed that—Well, we should
like to be left alone, in private, to try."
"Of course," I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My
relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and
spoke again.
"We do not deserve praise, Sias," he said. "The truth is, we ... we
sort of enjoy it."
I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.
My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our
race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice. | Sias' reactions to Rocsates' ideas suggest that he is ignorant in a similar way | Sias' refusal to adhere to any set of principles will get him imprisoned | Sias subscribes to an iteration of the same religion many of the elders do | Sias does not realize that the Conclave is ruled by that same religion | 0 |
60283_2TNPZ0VC_2 | What is the significance of the Maternite? | The Birds and the Bees
BY DAVE E. FISHER
Which goes to prove that, in some
instances, being heroic is easy!
I was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the
soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and
thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,
cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the
magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of
course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the
very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder
to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.
Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.
In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose
names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.
But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man
returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content
to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the
ancient evils, wars, emergencies.
"Sias! Sias—" And they were upon me.
That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must
soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped
through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were
babbling in excitement.
Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition
states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are
seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of
many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not
been for the friendship of Xeon.
"Sias," they were saying, "the Maternite's gone."
I stared in amazement.
"Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—"
"Oh my gods!" Xeon shouted. "I tell you it's gone! Will you—"
Melia interrupted him quietly. "Xeon, will you lose all respect for
the Elder?" Then turned to me, and said calmly, "The watcher at the
Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the
warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated
in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone."
"All of it?" I asked.
"There is nothing left," Melia insisted. "Can more be made? And if not,
what will happen with no more children?"
"That is for the priests to say, not I," I replied. In moments of
emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I
have never before been in a real emergency.
A man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs
nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I
often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.
They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young
men do.
As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and
consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware
that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an
emergency. For a machine had failed!
Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They
were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them
to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far
as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been
negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.
Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who
knows the mysterious workings of the machines?
I hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting
for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the
steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past
the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated
themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.
Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel
impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers
and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to
sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the
pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.
He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually
smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached
the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had
assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave
had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for
those left were the most earnest and intelligent.
"I would not bore you," he said, "with details of which only the gods
are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is
an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus
assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be
born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact
number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods
claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial."
A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered
around the Hall.
"But now," he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with
even a stutter here and there, "an unprecedented situation has arisen.
Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has
actually failed."
Cries of "Treason" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for
the priest had I not been able to insure order.
"That is not the worst," he cried, as if in defiance. "All the Prelife
has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there
will be no more children!"
At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times
that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy
years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and
began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years
roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked,
"Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the
machines may produce more children for us?
"As I have said," he replied, "give the machines but a bit of Prelife
and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are
helpless."
Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the
Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to
think.
Rocsates leaned forward and asked, "Must there not—must there not have
been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it;
and yet it came from somewhere."
"Riddles are not called for," I answered severely.
"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?" he asked, in that
irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. "Must there not, long ago,
have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not
even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of
the story of the animals of old—"
"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates," I was forced to interrupt.
"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to
do—" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I
hastened to explain the legend of the animals. "It is said that many
thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the
earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said
they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and
although not mute, they could not speak."
Rocsates' voice made itself heard. "It is true. Such creatures did
indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films."
"If it be so," I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, "and I would
not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of
men—if it were so, then, what of it?"
"May it not be," Rocsates put in, "that these animals had no machines
to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines
to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then
we would yet have these animals among us."
"And how, then, did these animals reproduce?" I asked.
"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that
says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite
Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced
from within their own bodies?"
At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and
I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon
and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most
attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of "Heresy" and "Treason",
went on:
"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient
records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or
disprove my words."
"You wish to search the films—" I began.
"Not the films, Sias, but the books."
Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,
and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,
being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.
Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.
And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—
"Sias," he went on, "if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it
not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the
only place where it may be found?"
Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows
the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted
permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the
Conclave adjourned.
Several weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.
I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon
when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.
"Some of those among you are She's," he began. "And you know you are
different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer
and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,
your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you
may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we
should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we
do. Yet there is one other distinction.
"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there
exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a
cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what
reason?"
"Rocsates," I interrupted. "All this is fascinating, of course. But if
you could be quick—"
"Of course," he replied. "In the course of my reading I have read
many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have
discovered:
"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books
were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.
Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the
then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another
land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another
race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is
somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!"
These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the
crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and
amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.
"In fact," Rocsates added, sitting down, "this process of reproduction
seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of
over-population."
Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his
neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that
something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the
assembled overwhelmed him.
"It seems," I shouted, "that there is a flaw in your logic." For if
such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with
no harm done. "For if people reproduced too often, why then this
reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they
would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,
where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?"
Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together
with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, "Perhaps
the process of reproduction was of
such
a pleasure that the Conclave
ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!"
At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond
power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,
however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and
thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.
Now indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish
in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this
they cannot do until they meet again.
I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,
whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again
desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave
to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.
The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when
Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder
a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His
appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.
His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent
and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.
I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the
formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was
on his feet and I gave way.
"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction," he began. "After
many searchings, I came upon this—" and he held forth the object he
had carried in. "It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex
Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet." He
dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes.
There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's
attention. He went on, speaking low. "The word 'Sex' is not defined,
but it seems to mean...." His words trailed off. He was obviously
unsure of how to continue. "I had better start at the beginning, I
suppose," he said. "You see, once upon a time there were birds and
bees...."
When he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,
with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of
'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.
It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear
to move. I cleared my throat.
"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With
no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved
into nothingness?"
"I do not think so," Rocsates replied after a while. "What to us is
an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the
breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in
some, at least, of the She's."
We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.
"Then we must experiment," I said. "But whom could we ask to submit to
such horror?"
"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers," Rocsates
replied. "The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the
breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from
dungeon. Are there any objections?"
There were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would
undergo such an ordeal for the City?
"And who will be the partner?" I asked.
"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It
shall be he," Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall
and stood, noble and naked.
Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,
but Xeon stepped forward.
"My lords," he said, "would not better results be obtained were we to
conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that
the gods may help us?"
His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true
friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table
was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's
position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft
fields might be some slight help.
I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.
It was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It
had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—
We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first
stars.
"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described," I muttered.
"They may indeed have succeeded," Rocsates replied. "There is mentioned
a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately."
"It doesn't matter," I said disconsolately. "Who could ask them to go
through such an ordeal again?"
And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.
Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm
about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.
"Sias," he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.
I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.
"Sias, we come to tell.... We will...." He raised his eyes to mine and
said manfully, "We shall try again."
I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—
"We beg one favor," Xeon went on. "We are agreed that—Well, we should
like to be left alone, in private, to try."
"Of course," I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My
relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and
spoke again.
"We do not deserve praise, Sias," he said. "The truth is, we ... we
sort of enjoy it."
I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.
My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our
race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice. | It determines how many children will be born in the span of a year | It reduces the prevalence of female biological sex organs | It produces enough breastmilk to sustain newborn infants | It decides which of the elders will be sacrificed to the gods | 0 |
60283_2TNPZ0VC_3 | Since humans stopped reproducing among themselves, what has been the greatest impact on human biology? | The Birds and the Bees
BY DAVE E. FISHER
Which goes to prove that, in some
instances, being heroic is easy!
I was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the
soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and
thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,
cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the
magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of
course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the
very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder
to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.
Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.
In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose
names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.
But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man
returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content
to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the
ancient evils, wars, emergencies.
"Sias! Sias—" And they were upon me.
That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must
soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped
through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were
babbling in excitement.
Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition
states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are
seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of
many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not
been for the friendship of Xeon.
"Sias," they were saying, "the Maternite's gone."
I stared in amazement.
"Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—"
"Oh my gods!" Xeon shouted. "I tell you it's gone! Will you—"
Melia interrupted him quietly. "Xeon, will you lose all respect for
the Elder?" Then turned to me, and said calmly, "The watcher at the
Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the
warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated
in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone."
"All of it?" I asked.
"There is nothing left," Melia insisted. "Can more be made? And if not,
what will happen with no more children?"
"That is for the priests to say, not I," I replied. In moments of
emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I
have never before been in a real emergency.
A man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs
nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I
often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.
They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young
men do.
As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and
consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware
that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an
emergency. For a machine had failed!
Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They
were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them
to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far
as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been
negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.
Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who
knows the mysterious workings of the machines?
I hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting
for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the
steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past
the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated
themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.
Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel
impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers
and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to
sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the
pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.
He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually
smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached
the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had
assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave
had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for
those left were the most earnest and intelligent.
"I would not bore you," he said, "with details of which only the gods
are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is
an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus
assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be
born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact
number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods
claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial."
A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered
around the Hall.
"But now," he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with
even a stutter here and there, "an unprecedented situation has arisen.
Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has
actually failed."
Cries of "Treason" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for
the priest had I not been able to insure order.
"That is not the worst," he cried, as if in defiance. "All the Prelife
has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there
will be no more children!"
At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times
that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy
years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and
began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years
roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked,
"Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the
machines may produce more children for us?
"As I have said," he replied, "give the machines but a bit of Prelife
and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are
helpless."
Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the
Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to
think.
Rocsates leaned forward and asked, "Must there not—must there not have
been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it;
and yet it came from somewhere."
"Riddles are not called for," I answered severely.
"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?" he asked, in that
irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. "Must there not, long ago,
have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not
even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of
the story of the animals of old—"
"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates," I was forced to interrupt.
"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to
do—" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I
hastened to explain the legend of the animals. "It is said that many
thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the
earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said
they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and
although not mute, they could not speak."
Rocsates' voice made itself heard. "It is true. Such creatures did
indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films."
"If it be so," I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, "and I would
not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of
men—if it were so, then, what of it?"
"May it not be," Rocsates put in, "that these animals had no machines
to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines
to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then
we would yet have these animals among us."
"And how, then, did these animals reproduce?" I asked.
"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that
says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite
Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced
from within their own bodies?"
At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and
I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon
and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most
attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of "Heresy" and "Treason",
went on:
"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient
records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or
disprove my words."
"You wish to search the films—" I began.
"Not the films, Sias, but the books."
Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,
and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,
being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.
Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.
And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—
"Sias," he went on, "if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it
not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the
only place where it may be found?"
Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows
the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted
permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the
Conclave adjourned.
Several weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.
I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon
when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.
"Some of those among you are She's," he began. "And you know you are
different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer
and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,
your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you
may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we
should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we
do. Yet there is one other distinction.
"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there
exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a
cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what
reason?"
"Rocsates," I interrupted. "All this is fascinating, of course. But if
you could be quick—"
"Of course," he replied. "In the course of my reading I have read
many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have
discovered:
"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books
were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.
Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the
then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another
land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another
race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is
somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!"
These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the
crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and
amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.
"In fact," Rocsates added, sitting down, "this process of reproduction
seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of
over-population."
Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his
neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that
something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the
assembled overwhelmed him.
"It seems," I shouted, "that there is a flaw in your logic." For if
such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with
no harm done. "For if people reproduced too often, why then this
reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they
would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,
where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?"
Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together
with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, "Perhaps
the process of reproduction was of
such
a pleasure that the Conclave
ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!"
At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond
power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,
however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and
thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.
Now indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish
in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this
they cannot do until they meet again.
I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,
whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again
desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave
to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.
The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when
Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder
a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His
appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.
His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent
and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.
I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the
formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was
on his feet and I gave way.
"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction," he began. "After
many searchings, I came upon this—" and he held forth the object he
had carried in. "It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex
Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet." He
dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes.
There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's
attention. He went on, speaking low. "The word 'Sex' is not defined,
but it seems to mean...." His words trailed off. He was obviously
unsure of how to continue. "I had better start at the beginning, I
suppose," he said. "You see, once upon a time there were birds and
bees...."
When he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,
with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of
'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.
It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear
to move. I cleared my throat.
"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With
no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved
into nothingness?"
"I do not think so," Rocsates replied after a while. "What to us is
an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the
breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in
some, at least, of the She's."
We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.
"Then we must experiment," I said. "But whom could we ask to submit to
such horror?"
"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers," Rocsates
replied. "The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the
breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from
dungeon. Are there any objections?"
There were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would
undergo such an ordeal for the City?
"And who will be the partner?" I asked.
"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It
shall be he," Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall
and stood, noble and naked.
Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,
but Xeon stepped forward.
"My lords," he said, "would not better results be obtained were we to
conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that
the gods may help us?"
His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true
friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table
was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's
position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft
fields might be some slight help.
I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.
It was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It
had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—
We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first
stars.
"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described," I muttered.
"They may indeed have succeeded," Rocsates replied. "There is mentioned
a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately."
"It doesn't matter," I said disconsolately. "Who could ask them to go
through such an ordeal again?"
And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.
Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm
about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.
"Sias," he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.
I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.
"Sias, we come to tell.... We will...." He raised his eyes to mine and
said manfully, "We shall try again."
I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—
"We beg one favor," Xeon went on. "We are agreed that—Well, we should
like to be left alone, in private, to try."
"Of course," I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My
relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and
spoke again.
"We do not deserve praise, Sias," he said. "The truth is, we ... we
sort of enjoy it."
I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.
My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our
race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice. | significant reduction of the appearance and function of sex organs | more predictable measures for increasing the global population | gradual decrease in the overall intellectual quotient of a society | a lower prevalence of birth defects and learning disabilities | 0 |
60283_2TNPZ0VC_4 | All of the following terms describe the people's reaction to the destruction of the Maternite EXCEPT for: | The Birds and the Bees
BY DAVE E. FISHER
Which goes to prove that, in some
instances, being heroic is easy!
I was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the
soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and
thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,
cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the
magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of
course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the
very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder
to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.
Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.
In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose
names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.
But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man
returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content
to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the
ancient evils, wars, emergencies.
"Sias! Sias—" And they were upon me.
That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must
soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped
through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were
babbling in excitement.
Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition
states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are
seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of
many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not
been for the friendship of Xeon.
"Sias," they were saying, "the Maternite's gone."
I stared in amazement.
"Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—"
"Oh my gods!" Xeon shouted. "I tell you it's gone! Will you—"
Melia interrupted him quietly. "Xeon, will you lose all respect for
the Elder?" Then turned to me, and said calmly, "The watcher at the
Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the
warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated
in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone."
"All of it?" I asked.
"There is nothing left," Melia insisted. "Can more be made? And if not,
what will happen with no more children?"
"That is for the priests to say, not I," I replied. In moments of
emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I
have never before been in a real emergency.
A man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs
nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I
often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.
They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young
men do.
As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and
consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware
that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an
emergency. For a machine had failed!
Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They
were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them
to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far
as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been
negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.
Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who
knows the mysterious workings of the machines?
I hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting
for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the
steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past
the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated
themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.
Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel
impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers
and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to
sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the
pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.
He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually
smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached
the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had
assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave
had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for
those left were the most earnest and intelligent.
"I would not bore you," he said, "with details of which only the gods
are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is
an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus
assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be
born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact
number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods
claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial."
A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered
around the Hall.
"But now," he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with
even a stutter here and there, "an unprecedented situation has arisen.
Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has
actually failed."
Cries of "Treason" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for
the priest had I not been able to insure order.
"That is not the worst," he cried, as if in defiance. "All the Prelife
has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there
will be no more children!"
At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times
that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy
years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and
began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years
roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked,
"Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the
machines may produce more children for us?
"As I have said," he replied, "give the machines but a bit of Prelife
and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are
helpless."
Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the
Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to
think.
Rocsates leaned forward and asked, "Must there not—must there not have
been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it;
and yet it came from somewhere."
"Riddles are not called for," I answered severely.
"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?" he asked, in that
irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. "Must there not, long ago,
have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not
even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of
the story of the animals of old—"
"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates," I was forced to interrupt.
"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to
do—" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I
hastened to explain the legend of the animals. "It is said that many
thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the
earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said
they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and
although not mute, they could not speak."
Rocsates' voice made itself heard. "It is true. Such creatures did
indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films."
"If it be so," I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, "and I would
not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of
men—if it were so, then, what of it?"
"May it not be," Rocsates put in, "that these animals had no machines
to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines
to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then
we would yet have these animals among us."
"And how, then, did these animals reproduce?" I asked.
"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that
says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite
Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced
from within their own bodies?"
At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and
I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon
and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most
attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of "Heresy" and "Treason",
went on:
"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient
records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or
disprove my words."
"You wish to search the films—" I began.
"Not the films, Sias, but the books."
Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,
and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,
being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.
Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.
And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—
"Sias," he went on, "if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it
not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the
only place where it may be found?"
Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows
the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted
permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the
Conclave adjourned.
Several weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.
I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon
when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.
"Some of those among you are She's," he began. "And you know you are
different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer
and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,
your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you
may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we
should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we
do. Yet there is one other distinction.
"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there
exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a
cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what
reason?"
"Rocsates," I interrupted. "All this is fascinating, of course. But if
you could be quick—"
"Of course," he replied. "In the course of my reading I have read
many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have
discovered:
"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books
were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.
Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the
then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another
land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another
race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is
somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!"
These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the
crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and
amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.
"In fact," Rocsates added, sitting down, "this process of reproduction
seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of
over-population."
Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his
neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that
something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the
assembled overwhelmed him.
"It seems," I shouted, "that there is a flaw in your logic." For if
such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with
no harm done. "For if people reproduced too often, why then this
reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they
would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,
where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?"
Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together
with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, "Perhaps
the process of reproduction was of
such
a pleasure that the Conclave
ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!"
At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond
power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,
however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and
thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.
Now indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish
in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this
they cannot do until they meet again.
I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,
whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again
desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave
to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.
The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when
Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder
a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His
appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.
His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent
and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.
I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the
formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was
on his feet and I gave way.
"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction," he began. "After
many searchings, I came upon this—" and he held forth the object he
had carried in. "It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex
Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet." He
dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes.
There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's
attention. He went on, speaking low. "The word 'Sex' is not defined,
but it seems to mean...." His words trailed off. He was obviously
unsure of how to continue. "I had better start at the beginning, I
suppose," he said. "You see, once upon a time there were birds and
bees...."
When he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,
with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of
'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.
It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear
to move. I cleared my throat.
"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With
no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved
into nothingness?"
"I do not think so," Rocsates replied after a while. "What to us is
an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the
breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in
some, at least, of the She's."
We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.
"Then we must experiment," I said. "But whom could we ask to submit to
such horror?"
"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers," Rocsates
replied. "The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the
breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from
dungeon. Are there any objections?"
There were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would
undergo such an ordeal for the City?
"And who will be the partner?" I asked.
"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It
shall be he," Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall
and stood, noble and naked.
Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,
but Xeon stepped forward.
"My lords," he said, "would not better results be obtained were we to
conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that
the gods may help us?"
His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true
friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table
was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's
position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft
fields might be some slight help.
I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.
It was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It
had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—
We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first
stars.
"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described," I muttered.
"They may indeed have succeeded," Rocsates replied. "There is mentioned
a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately."
"It doesn't matter," I said disconsolately. "Who could ask them to go
through such an ordeal again?"
And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.
Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm
about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.
"Sias," he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.
I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.
"Sias, we come to tell.... We will...." He raised his eyes to mine and
said manfully, "We shall try again."
I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—
"We beg one favor," Xeon went on. "We are agreed that—Well, we should
like to be left alone, in private, to try."
"Of course," I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My
relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and
spoke again.
"We do not deserve praise, Sias," he said. "The truth is, we ... we
sort of enjoy it."
I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.
My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our
race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice. | perplexed | panicked | obtuse | accusatory | 3 |
60283_2TNPZ0VC_5 | Which sentence describes the central theme of this story? | The Birds and the Bees
BY DAVE E. FISHER
Which goes to prove that, in some
instances, being heroic is easy!
I was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the
soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and
thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,
cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the
magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of
course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the
very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder
to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.
Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.
In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose
names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.
But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man
returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content
to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the
ancient evils, wars, emergencies.
"Sias! Sias—" And they were upon me.
That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must
soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped
through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were
babbling in excitement.
Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition
states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are
seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of
many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not
been for the friendship of Xeon.
"Sias," they were saying, "the Maternite's gone."
I stared in amazement.
"Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—"
"Oh my gods!" Xeon shouted. "I tell you it's gone! Will you—"
Melia interrupted him quietly. "Xeon, will you lose all respect for
the Elder?" Then turned to me, and said calmly, "The watcher at the
Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the
warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated
in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone."
"All of it?" I asked.
"There is nothing left," Melia insisted. "Can more be made? And if not,
what will happen with no more children?"
"That is for the priests to say, not I," I replied. In moments of
emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I
have never before been in a real emergency.
A man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs
nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I
often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.
They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young
men do.
As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and
consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware
that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an
emergency. For a machine had failed!
Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They
were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them
to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far
as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been
negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.
Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who
knows the mysterious workings of the machines?
I hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting
for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the
steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past
the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated
themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.
Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel
impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers
and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to
sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the
pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.
He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually
smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached
the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had
assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave
had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for
those left were the most earnest and intelligent.
"I would not bore you," he said, "with details of which only the gods
are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is
an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus
assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be
born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact
number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods
claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial."
A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered
around the Hall.
"But now," he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with
even a stutter here and there, "an unprecedented situation has arisen.
Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has
actually failed."
Cries of "Treason" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for
the priest had I not been able to insure order.
"That is not the worst," he cried, as if in defiance. "All the Prelife
has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there
will be no more children!"
At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times
that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy
years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and
began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years
roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked,
"Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the
machines may produce more children for us?
"As I have said," he replied, "give the machines but a bit of Prelife
and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are
helpless."
Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the
Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to
think.
Rocsates leaned forward and asked, "Must there not—must there not have
been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it;
and yet it came from somewhere."
"Riddles are not called for," I answered severely.
"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?" he asked, in that
irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. "Must there not, long ago,
have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not
even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of
the story of the animals of old—"
"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates," I was forced to interrupt.
"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to
do—" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I
hastened to explain the legend of the animals. "It is said that many
thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the
earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said
they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and
although not mute, they could not speak."
Rocsates' voice made itself heard. "It is true. Such creatures did
indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films."
"If it be so," I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, "and I would
not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of
men—if it were so, then, what of it?"
"May it not be," Rocsates put in, "that these animals had no machines
to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines
to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then
we would yet have these animals among us."
"And how, then, did these animals reproduce?" I asked.
"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that
says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite
Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced
from within their own bodies?"
At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and
I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon
and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most
attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of "Heresy" and "Treason",
went on:
"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient
records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or
disprove my words."
"You wish to search the films—" I began.
"Not the films, Sias, but the books."
Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,
and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,
being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.
Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.
And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—
"Sias," he went on, "if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it
not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the
only place where it may be found?"
Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows
the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted
permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the
Conclave adjourned.
Several weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.
I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon
when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.
"Some of those among you are She's," he began. "And you know you are
different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer
and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,
your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you
may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we
should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we
do. Yet there is one other distinction.
"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there
exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a
cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what
reason?"
"Rocsates," I interrupted. "All this is fascinating, of course. But if
you could be quick—"
"Of course," he replied. "In the course of my reading I have read
many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have
discovered:
"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books
were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.
Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the
then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another
land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another
race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is
somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!"
These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the
crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and
amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.
"In fact," Rocsates added, sitting down, "this process of reproduction
seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of
over-population."
Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his
neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that
something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the
assembled overwhelmed him.
"It seems," I shouted, "that there is a flaw in your logic." For if
such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with
no harm done. "For if people reproduced too often, why then this
reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they
would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,
where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?"
Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together
with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, "Perhaps
the process of reproduction was of
such
a pleasure that the Conclave
ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!"
At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond
power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,
however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and
thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.
Now indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish
in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this
they cannot do until they meet again.
I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,
whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again
desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave
to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.
The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when
Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder
a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His
appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.
His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent
and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.
I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the
formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was
on his feet and I gave way.
"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction," he began. "After
many searchings, I came upon this—" and he held forth the object he
had carried in. "It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex
Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet." He
dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes.
There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's
attention. He went on, speaking low. "The word 'Sex' is not defined,
but it seems to mean...." His words trailed off. He was obviously
unsure of how to continue. "I had better start at the beginning, I
suppose," he said. "You see, once upon a time there were birds and
bees...."
When he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,
with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of
'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.
It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear
to move. I cleared my throat.
"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With
no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved
into nothingness?"
"I do not think so," Rocsates replied after a while. "What to us is
an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the
breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in
some, at least, of the She's."
We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.
"Then we must experiment," I said. "But whom could we ask to submit to
such horror?"
"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers," Rocsates
replied. "The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the
breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from
dungeon. Are there any objections?"
There were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would
undergo such an ordeal for the City?
"And who will be the partner?" I asked.
"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It
shall be he," Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall
and stood, noble and naked.
Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,
but Xeon stepped forward.
"My lords," he said, "would not better results be obtained were we to
conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that
the gods may help us?"
His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true
friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table
was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's
position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft
fields might be some slight help.
I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.
It was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It
had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—
We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first
stars.
"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described," I muttered.
"They may indeed have succeeded," Rocsates replied. "There is mentioned
a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately."
"It doesn't matter," I said disconsolately. "Who could ask them to go
through such an ordeal again?"
And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.
Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm
about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.
"Sias," he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.
I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.
"Sias, we come to tell.... We will...." He raised his eyes to mine and
said manfully, "We shall try again."
I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—
"We beg one favor," Xeon went on. "We are agreed that—Well, we should
like to be left alone, in private, to try."
"Of course," I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My
relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and
spoke again.
"We do not deserve praise, Sias," he said. "The truth is, we ... we
sort of enjoy it."
I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.
My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our
race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice. | History is doomed to repeat itself because humans fail to learn from their mistakes. | A society that does not include younger generations in its governing bodies will fail to evolve. | The death of curiosity, combined with overreliance on technology, will lead to an ignorant society. | Too much emphasis on masculine ways of thinking and innovating will ruin a society. | 2 |
60283_2TNPZ0VC_6 | The overall reaction to Rocsates' suggestions is symbolic of: | The Birds and the Bees
BY DAVE E. FISHER
Which goes to prove that, in some
instances, being heroic is easy!
I was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the
soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and
thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,
cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the
magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of
course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the
very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder
to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.
Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.
In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose
names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.
But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man
returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content
to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the
ancient evils, wars, emergencies.
"Sias! Sias—" And they were upon me.
That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must
soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped
through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were
babbling in excitement.
Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition
states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are
seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of
many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not
been for the friendship of Xeon.
"Sias," they were saying, "the Maternite's gone."
I stared in amazement.
"Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—"
"Oh my gods!" Xeon shouted. "I tell you it's gone! Will you—"
Melia interrupted him quietly. "Xeon, will you lose all respect for
the Elder?" Then turned to me, and said calmly, "The watcher at the
Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the
warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated
in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone."
"All of it?" I asked.
"There is nothing left," Melia insisted. "Can more be made? And if not,
what will happen with no more children?"
"That is for the priests to say, not I," I replied. In moments of
emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I
have never before been in a real emergency.
A man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs
nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I
often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.
They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young
men do.
As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and
consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware
that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an
emergency. For a machine had failed!
Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They
were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them
to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far
as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been
negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.
Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who
knows the mysterious workings of the machines?
I hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting
for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the
steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past
the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated
themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.
Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel
impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers
and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to
sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the
pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.
He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually
smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached
the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had
assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave
had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for
those left were the most earnest and intelligent.
"I would not bore you," he said, "with details of which only the gods
are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is
an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus
assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be
born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact
number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods
claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial."
A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered
around the Hall.
"But now," he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with
even a stutter here and there, "an unprecedented situation has arisen.
Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has
actually failed."
Cries of "Treason" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for
the priest had I not been able to insure order.
"That is not the worst," he cried, as if in defiance. "All the Prelife
has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there
will be no more children!"
At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times
that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy
years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and
began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years
roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked,
"Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the
machines may produce more children for us?
"As I have said," he replied, "give the machines but a bit of Prelife
and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are
helpless."
Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the
Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to
think.
Rocsates leaned forward and asked, "Must there not—must there not have
been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it;
and yet it came from somewhere."
"Riddles are not called for," I answered severely.
"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?" he asked, in that
irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. "Must there not, long ago,
have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not
even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of
the story of the animals of old—"
"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates," I was forced to interrupt.
"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to
do—" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I
hastened to explain the legend of the animals. "It is said that many
thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the
earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said
they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and
although not mute, they could not speak."
Rocsates' voice made itself heard. "It is true. Such creatures did
indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films."
"If it be so," I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, "and I would
not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of
men—if it were so, then, what of it?"
"May it not be," Rocsates put in, "that these animals had no machines
to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines
to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then
we would yet have these animals among us."
"And how, then, did these animals reproduce?" I asked.
"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that
says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite
Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced
from within their own bodies?"
At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and
I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon
and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most
attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of "Heresy" and "Treason",
went on:
"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient
records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or
disprove my words."
"You wish to search the films—" I began.
"Not the films, Sias, but the books."
Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,
and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,
being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.
Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.
And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—
"Sias," he went on, "if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it
not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the
only place where it may be found?"
Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows
the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted
permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the
Conclave adjourned.
Several weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.
I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon
when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.
"Some of those among you are She's," he began. "And you know you are
different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer
and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,
your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you
may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we
should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we
do. Yet there is one other distinction.
"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there
exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a
cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what
reason?"
"Rocsates," I interrupted. "All this is fascinating, of course. But if
you could be quick—"
"Of course," he replied. "In the course of my reading I have read
many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have
discovered:
"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books
were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.
Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the
then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another
land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another
race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is
somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!"
These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the
crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and
amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.
"In fact," Rocsates added, sitting down, "this process of reproduction
seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of
over-population."
Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his
neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that
something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the
assembled overwhelmed him.
"It seems," I shouted, "that there is a flaw in your logic." For if
such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with
no harm done. "For if people reproduced too often, why then this
reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they
would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,
where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?"
Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together
with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, "Perhaps
the process of reproduction was of
such
a pleasure that the Conclave
ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!"
At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond
power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,
however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and
thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.
Now indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish
in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this
they cannot do until they meet again.
I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,
whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again
desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave
to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.
The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when
Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder
a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His
appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.
His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent
and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.
I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the
formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was
on his feet and I gave way.
"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction," he began. "After
many searchings, I came upon this—" and he held forth the object he
had carried in. "It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex
Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet." He
dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes.
There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's
attention. He went on, speaking low. "The word 'Sex' is not defined,
but it seems to mean...." His words trailed off. He was obviously
unsure of how to continue. "I had better start at the beginning, I
suppose," he said. "You see, once upon a time there were birds and
bees...."
When he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,
with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of
'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.
It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear
to move. I cleared my throat.
"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With
no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved
into nothingness?"
"I do not think so," Rocsates replied after a while. "What to us is
an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the
breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in
some, at least, of the She's."
We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.
"Then we must experiment," I said. "But whom could we ask to submit to
such horror?"
"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers," Rocsates
replied. "The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the
breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from
dungeon. Are there any objections?"
There were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would
undergo such an ordeal for the City?
"And who will be the partner?" I asked.
"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It
shall be he," Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall
and stood, noble and naked.
Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,
but Xeon stepped forward.
"My lords," he said, "would not better results be obtained were we to
conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that
the gods may help us?"
His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true
friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table
was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's
position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft
fields might be some slight help.
I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.
It was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It
had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—
We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first
stars.
"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described," I muttered.
"They may indeed have succeeded," Rocsates replied. "There is mentioned
a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately."
"It doesn't matter," I said disconsolately. "Who could ask them to go
through such an ordeal again?"
And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.
Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm
about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.
"Sias," he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.
I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.
"Sias, we come to tell.... We will...." He raised his eyes to mine and
said manfully, "We shall try again."
I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—
"We beg one favor," Xeon went on. "We are agreed that—Well, we should
like to be left alone, in private, to try."
"Of course," I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My
relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and
spoke again.
"We do not deserve praise, Sias," he said. "The truth is, we ... we
sort of enjoy it."
I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.
My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our
race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice. | Inefficiency of government | Resistance to intellectualism | Potential of innovation | Overzealousness for power | 1 |
60283_2TNPZ0VC_7 | In describing the Conclave's reaction to the Maternite emergency, the author is making a comparison to: | The Birds and the Bees
BY DAVE E. FISHER
Which goes to prove that, in some
instances, being heroic is easy!
I was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the
soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and
thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,
cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the
magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of
course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the
very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder
to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.
Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.
In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose
names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.
But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man
returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content
to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the
ancient evils, wars, emergencies.
"Sias! Sias—" And they were upon me.
That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must
soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped
through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were
babbling in excitement.
Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition
states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are
seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of
many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not
been for the friendship of Xeon.
"Sias," they were saying, "the Maternite's gone."
I stared in amazement.
"Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—"
"Oh my gods!" Xeon shouted. "I tell you it's gone! Will you—"
Melia interrupted him quietly. "Xeon, will you lose all respect for
the Elder?" Then turned to me, and said calmly, "The watcher at the
Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the
warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated
in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone."
"All of it?" I asked.
"There is nothing left," Melia insisted. "Can more be made? And if not,
what will happen with no more children?"
"That is for the priests to say, not I," I replied. In moments of
emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I
have never before been in a real emergency.
A man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs
nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I
often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.
They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young
men do.
As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and
consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware
that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an
emergency. For a machine had failed!
Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They
were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them
to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far
as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been
negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.
Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who
knows the mysterious workings of the machines?
I hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting
for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the
steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past
the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated
themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.
Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel
impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers
and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to
sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the
pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.
He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually
smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached
the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had
assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave
had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for
those left were the most earnest and intelligent.
"I would not bore you," he said, "with details of which only the gods
are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is
an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus
assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be
born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact
number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods
claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial."
A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered
around the Hall.
"But now," he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with
even a stutter here and there, "an unprecedented situation has arisen.
Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has
actually failed."
Cries of "Treason" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for
the priest had I not been able to insure order.
"That is not the worst," he cried, as if in defiance. "All the Prelife
has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there
will be no more children!"
At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times
that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy
years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and
began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years
roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked,
"Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the
machines may produce more children for us?
"As I have said," he replied, "give the machines but a bit of Prelife
and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are
helpless."
Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the
Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to
think.
Rocsates leaned forward and asked, "Must there not—must there not have
been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it;
and yet it came from somewhere."
"Riddles are not called for," I answered severely.
"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?" he asked, in that
irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. "Must there not, long ago,
have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not
even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of
the story of the animals of old—"
"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates," I was forced to interrupt.
"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to
do—" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I
hastened to explain the legend of the animals. "It is said that many
thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the
earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said
they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and
although not mute, they could not speak."
Rocsates' voice made itself heard. "It is true. Such creatures did
indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films."
"If it be so," I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, "and I would
not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of
men—if it were so, then, what of it?"
"May it not be," Rocsates put in, "that these animals had no machines
to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines
to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then
we would yet have these animals among us."
"And how, then, did these animals reproduce?" I asked.
"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that
says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite
Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced
from within their own bodies?"
At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and
I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon
and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most
attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of "Heresy" and "Treason",
went on:
"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient
records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or
disprove my words."
"You wish to search the films—" I began.
"Not the films, Sias, but the books."
Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,
and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,
being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.
Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.
And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—
"Sias," he went on, "if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it
not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the
only place where it may be found?"
Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows
the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted
permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the
Conclave adjourned.
Several weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.
I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon
when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.
"Some of those among you are She's," he began. "And you know you are
different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer
and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,
your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you
may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we
should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we
do. Yet there is one other distinction.
"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there
exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a
cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what
reason?"
"Rocsates," I interrupted. "All this is fascinating, of course. But if
you could be quick—"
"Of course," he replied. "In the course of my reading I have read
many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have
discovered:
"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books
were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.
Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the
then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another
land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another
race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is
somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!"
These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the
crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and
amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.
"In fact," Rocsates added, sitting down, "this process of reproduction
seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of
over-population."
Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his
neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that
something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the
assembled overwhelmed him.
"It seems," I shouted, "that there is a flaw in your logic." For if
such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with
no harm done. "For if people reproduced too often, why then this
reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they
would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,
where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?"
Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together
with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, "Perhaps
the process of reproduction was of
such
a pleasure that the Conclave
ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!"
At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond
power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,
however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and
thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.
Now indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish
in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this
they cannot do until they meet again.
I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,
whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again
desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave
to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.
The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when
Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder
a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His
appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.
His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent
and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.
I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the
formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was
on his feet and I gave way.
"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction," he began. "After
many searchings, I came upon this—" and he held forth the object he
had carried in. "It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex
Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet." He
dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes.
There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's
attention. He went on, speaking low. "The word 'Sex' is not defined,
but it seems to mean...." His words trailed off. He was obviously
unsure of how to continue. "I had better start at the beginning, I
suppose," he said. "You see, once upon a time there were birds and
bees...."
When he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,
with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of
'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.
It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear
to move. I cleared my throat.
"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With
no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved
into nothingness?"
"I do not think so," Rocsates replied after a while. "What to us is
an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the
breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in
some, at least, of the She's."
We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.
"Then we must experiment," I said. "But whom could we ask to submit to
such horror?"
"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers," Rocsates
replied. "The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the
breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from
dungeon. Are there any objections?"
There were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would
undergo such an ordeal for the City?
"And who will be the partner?" I asked.
"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It
shall be he," Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall
and stood, noble and naked.
Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,
but Xeon stepped forward.
"My lords," he said, "would not better results be obtained were we to
conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that
the gods may help us?"
His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true
friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table
was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's
position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft
fields might be some slight help.
I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.
It was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It
had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—
We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first
stars.
"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described," I muttered.
"They may indeed have succeeded," Rocsates replied. "There is mentioned
a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately."
"It doesn't matter," I said disconsolately. "Who could ask them to go
through such an ordeal again?"
And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.
Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm
about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.
"Sias," he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.
I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.
"Sias, we come to tell.... We will...." He raised his eyes to mine and
said manfully, "We shall try again."
I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—
"We beg one favor," Xeon went on. "We are agreed that—Well, we should
like to be left alone, in private, to try."
"Of course," I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My
relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and
spoke again.
"We do not deserve praise, Sias," he said. "The truth is, we ... we
sort of enjoy it."
I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.
My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our
race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice. | how authoritarian governments, though less humane, are often more effective in executing policies | how modern leaders revert to ceremony and argument instead of problem-solving | how the filibuster prevents governments from making real progress for its people | how young members and elder members of governments typically reach an impasse | 1 |
60283_2TNPZ0VC_8 | What is ironic about keeping their books stored away in an airtight compartment? | The Birds and the Bees
BY DAVE E. FISHER
Which goes to prove that, in some
instances, being heroic is easy!
I was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the
soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and
thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,
cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the
magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of
course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the
very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder
to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.
Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.
In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose
names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.
But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man
returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content
to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the
ancient evils, wars, emergencies.
"Sias! Sias—" And they were upon me.
That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must
soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped
through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were
babbling in excitement.
Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition
states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are
seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of
many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not
been for the friendship of Xeon.
"Sias," they were saying, "the Maternite's gone."
I stared in amazement.
"Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—"
"Oh my gods!" Xeon shouted. "I tell you it's gone! Will you—"
Melia interrupted him quietly. "Xeon, will you lose all respect for
the Elder?" Then turned to me, and said calmly, "The watcher at the
Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the
warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated
in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone."
"All of it?" I asked.
"There is nothing left," Melia insisted. "Can more be made? And if not,
what will happen with no more children?"
"That is for the priests to say, not I," I replied. In moments of
emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I
have never before been in a real emergency.
A man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs
nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I
often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.
They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young
men do.
As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and
consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware
that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an
emergency. For a machine had failed!
Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They
were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them
to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far
as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been
negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.
Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who
knows the mysterious workings of the machines?
I hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting
for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the
steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past
the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated
themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.
Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel
impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers
and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to
sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the
pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.
He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually
smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached
the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had
assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave
had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for
those left were the most earnest and intelligent.
"I would not bore you," he said, "with details of which only the gods
are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is
an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus
assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be
born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact
number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods
claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial."
A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered
around the Hall.
"But now," he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with
even a stutter here and there, "an unprecedented situation has arisen.
Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has
actually failed."
Cries of "Treason" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for
the priest had I not been able to insure order.
"That is not the worst," he cried, as if in defiance. "All the Prelife
has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there
will be no more children!"
At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times
that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy
years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and
began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years
roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked,
"Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the
machines may produce more children for us?
"As I have said," he replied, "give the machines but a bit of Prelife
and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are
helpless."
Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the
Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to
think.
Rocsates leaned forward and asked, "Must there not—must there not have
been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it;
and yet it came from somewhere."
"Riddles are not called for," I answered severely.
"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?" he asked, in that
irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. "Must there not, long ago,
have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not
even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of
the story of the animals of old—"
"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates," I was forced to interrupt.
"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to
do—" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I
hastened to explain the legend of the animals. "It is said that many
thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the
earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said
they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and
although not mute, they could not speak."
Rocsates' voice made itself heard. "It is true. Such creatures did
indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films."
"If it be so," I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, "and I would
not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of
men—if it were so, then, what of it?"
"May it not be," Rocsates put in, "that these animals had no machines
to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines
to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then
we would yet have these animals among us."
"And how, then, did these animals reproduce?" I asked.
"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that
says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite
Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced
from within their own bodies?"
At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and
I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon
and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most
attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of "Heresy" and "Treason",
went on:
"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient
records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or
disprove my words."
"You wish to search the films—" I began.
"Not the films, Sias, but the books."
Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,
and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,
being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.
Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.
And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—
"Sias," he went on, "if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it
not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the
only place where it may be found?"
Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows
the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted
permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the
Conclave adjourned.
Several weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.
I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon
when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.
"Some of those among you are She's," he began. "And you know you are
different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer
and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,
your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you
may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we
should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we
do. Yet there is one other distinction.
"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there
exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a
cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what
reason?"
"Rocsates," I interrupted. "All this is fascinating, of course. But if
you could be quick—"
"Of course," he replied. "In the course of my reading I have read
many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have
discovered:
"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books
were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.
Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the
then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another
land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another
race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is
somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!"
These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the
crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and
amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.
"In fact," Rocsates added, sitting down, "this process of reproduction
seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of
over-population."
Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his
neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that
something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the
assembled overwhelmed him.
"It seems," I shouted, "that there is a flaw in your logic." For if
such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with
no harm done. "For if people reproduced too often, why then this
reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they
would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,
where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?"
Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together
with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, "Perhaps
the process of reproduction was of
such
a pleasure that the Conclave
ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!"
At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond
power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,
however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and
thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.
Now indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish
in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this
they cannot do until they meet again.
I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,
whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again
desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave
to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.
The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when
Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder
a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His
appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.
His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent
and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.
I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the
formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was
on his feet and I gave way.
"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction," he began. "After
many searchings, I came upon this—" and he held forth the object he
had carried in. "It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex
Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet." He
dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes.
There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's
attention. He went on, speaking low. "The word 'Sex' is not defined,
but it seems to mean...." His words trailed off. He was obviously
unsure of how to continue. "I had better start at the beginning, I
suppose," he said. "You see, once upon a time there were birds and
bees...."
When he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,
with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of
'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.
It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear
to move. I cleared my throat.
"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With
no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved
into nothingness?"
"I do not think so," Rocsates replied after a while. "What to us is
an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the
breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in
some, at least, of the She's."
We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.
"Then we must experiment," I said. "But whom could we ask to submit to
such horror?"
"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers," Rocsates
replied. "The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the
breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from
dungeon. Are there any objections?"
There were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would
undergo such an ordeal for the City?
"And who will be the partner?" I asked.
"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It
shall be he," Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall
and stood, noble and naked.
Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,
but Xeon stepped forward.
"My lords," he said, "would not better results be obtained were we to
conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that
the gods may help us?"
His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true
friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table
was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's
position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft
fields might be some slight help.
I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.
It was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It
had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—
We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first
stars.
"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described," I muttered.
"They may indeed have succeeded," Rocsates replied. "There is mentioned
a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately."
"It doesn't matter," I said disconsolately. "Who could ask them to go
through such an ordeal again?"
And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.
Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm
about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.
"Sias," he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.
I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.
"Sias, we come to tell.... We will...." He raised his eyes to mine and
said manfully, "We shall try again."
I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—
"We beg one favor," Xeon went on. "We are agreed that—Well, we should
like to be left alone, in private, to try."
"Of course," I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My
relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and
spoke again.
"We do not deserve praise, Sias," he said. "The truth is, we ... we
sort of enjoy it."
I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.
My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our
race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice. | There is nothing in the books that can help Melopolis repair the Maternite or save its population | The books were already designed with technology that would keep them intact forever | There is little use in preserving something if the meaning is lost upon those preserving it | The books contain antiquated knowledge that will only set Melopolis back further | 2 |
60283_2TNPZ0VC_9 | Why does Sias believe that the ancients declared 70 as the minimum age for a member of the Conclave? | The Birds and the Bees
BY DAVE E. FISHER
Which goes to prove that, in some
instances, being heroic is easy!
I was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the
soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and
thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,
cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the
magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of
course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the
very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder
to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.
Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.
In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose
names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.
But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man
returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content
to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the
ancient evils, wars, emergencies.
"Sias! Sias—" And they were upon me.
That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must
soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped
through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were
babbling in excitement.
Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition
states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are
seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of
many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not
been for the friendship of Xeon.
"Sias," they were saying, "the Maternite's gone."
I stared in amazement.
"Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—"
"Oh my gods!" Xeon shouted. "I tell you it's gone! Will you—"
Melia interrupted him quietly. "Xeon, will you lose all respect for
the Elder?" Then turned to me, and said calmly, "The watcher at the
Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the
warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated
in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone."
"All of it?" I asked.
"There is nothing left," Melia insisted. "Can more be made? And if not,
what will happen with no more children?"
"That is for the priests to say, not I," I replied. In moments of
emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I
have never before been in a real emergency.
A man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs
nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I
often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.
They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young
men do.
As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and
consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware
that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an
emergency. For a machine had failed!
Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They
were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them
to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far
as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been
negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.
Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who
knows the mysterious workings of the machines?
I hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting
for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the
steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past
the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated
themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.
Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel
impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers
and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to
sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the
pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.
He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually
smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached
the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had
assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave
had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for
those left were the most earnest and intelligent.
"I would not bore you," he said, "with details of which only the gods
are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is
an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus
assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be
born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact
number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods
claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial."
A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered
around the Hall.
"But now," he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with
even a stutter here and there, "an unprecedented situation has arisen.
Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has
actually failed."
Cries of "Treason" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for
the priest had I not been able to insure order.
"That is not the worst," he cried, as if in defiance. "All the Prelife
has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there
will be no more children!"
At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times
that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy
years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and
began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years
roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked,
"Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the
machines may produce more children for us?
"As I have said," he replied, "give the machines but a bit of Prelife
and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are
helpless."
Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the
Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to
think.
Rocsates leaned forward and asked, "Must there not—must there not have
been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it;
and yet it came from somewhere."
"Riddles are not called for," I answered severely.
"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?" he asked, in that
irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. "Must there not, long ago,
have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not
even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of
the story of the animals of old—"
"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates," I was forced to interrupt.
"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to
do—" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I
hastened to explain the legend of the animals. "It is said that many
thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the
earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said
they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and
although not mute, they could not speak."
Rocsates' voice made itself heard. "It is true. Such creatures did
indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films."
"If it be so," I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, "and I would
not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of
men—if it were so, then, what of it?"
"May it not be," Rocsates put in, "that these animals had no machines
to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines
to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then
we would yet have these animals among us."
"And how, then, did these animals reproduce?" I asked.
"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that
says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite
Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced
from within their own bodies?"
At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and
I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon
and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most
attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of "Heresy" and "Treason",
went on:
"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient
records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or
disprove my words."
"You wish to search the films—" I began.
"Not the films, Sias, but the books."
Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,
and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,
being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.
Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.
And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—
"Sias," he went on, "if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it
not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the
only place where it may be found?"
Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows
the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted
permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the
Conclave adjourned.
Several weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.
I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon
when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.
"Some of those among you are She's," he began. "And you know you are
different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer
and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,
your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you
may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we
should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we
do. Yet there is one other distinction.
"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there
exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a
cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what
reason?"
"Rocsates," I interrupted. "All this is fascinating, of course. But if
you could be quick—"
"Of course," he replied. "In the course of my reading I have read
many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have
discovered:
"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books
were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.
Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the
then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another
land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another
race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is
somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!"
These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the
crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and
amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.
"In fact," Rocsates added, sitting down, "this process of reproduction
seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of
over-population."
Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his
neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that
something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the
assembled overwhelmed him.
"It seems," I shouted, "that there is a flaw in your logic." For if
such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with
no harm done. "For if people reproduced too often, why then this
reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they
would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,
where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?"
Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together
with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, "Perhaps
the process of reproduction was of
such
a pleasure that the Conclave
ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!"
At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond
power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,
however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and
thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.
Now indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish
in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this
they cannot do until they meet again.
I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,
whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again
desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave
to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.
The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when
Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder
a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His
appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.
His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent
and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.
I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the
formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was
on his feet and I gave way.
"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction," he began. "After
many searchings, I came upon this—" and he held forth the object he
had carried in. "It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex
Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet." He
dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes.
There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's
attention. He went on, speaking low. "The word 'Sex' is not defined,
but it seems to mean...." His words trailed off. He was obviously
unsure of how to continue. "I had better start at the beginning, I
suppose," he said. "You see, once upon a time there were birds and
bees...."
When he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,
with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of
'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.
It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear
to move. I cleared my throat.
"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With
no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved
into nothingness?"
"I do not think so," Rocsates replied after a while. "What to us is
an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the
breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in
some, at least, of the She's."
We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.
"Then we must experiment," I said. "But whom could we ask to submit to
such horror?"
"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers," Rocsates
replied. "The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the
breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from
dungeon. Are there any objections?"
There were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would
undergo such an ordeal for the City?
"And who will be the partner?" I asked.
"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It
shall be he," Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall
and stood, noble and naked.
Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,
but Xeon stepped forward.
"My lords," he said, "would not better results be obtained were we to
conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that
the gods may help us?"
His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true
friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table
was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's
position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft
fields might be some slight help.
I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.
It was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It
had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—
We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first
stars.
"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described," I muttered.
"They may indeed have succeeded," Rocsates replied. "There is mentioned
a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately."
"It doesn't matter," I said disconsolately. "Who could ask them to go
through such an ordeal again?"
And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.
Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm
about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.
"Sias," he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.
I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.
"Sias, we come to tell.... We will...." He raised his eyes to mine and
said manfully, "We shall try again."
I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—
"We beg one favor," Xeon went on. "We are agreed that—Well, we should
like to be left alone, in private, to try."
"Of course," I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My
relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and
spoke again.
"We do not deserve praise, Sias," he said. "The truth is, we ... we
sort of enjoy it."
I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.
My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our
race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice. | They are the ones who remember things from previous generations that get lost to time | They do not have the energy to riot amongst themselves | They are closest in lineage to the predecessors that generated the machines | They have had sufficient life experience at that point | 1 |
32836_VRNCK2U5_1 | Var and Neena most likely belong to which group: | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
WHEN THE MOUNTAIN SHOOK
By Robert Abernathy
Illustrated by Kelly Freas
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its
cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare
with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and
conquer....
At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered
among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense
and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the
dying sun.
Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.
The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a
warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening
twilight, even as her love was about him.
Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass."
He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but
there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other
direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to
sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with
vengeance.
"Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago."
She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black
mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He
felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this.
For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass,
she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to
follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would
be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse
was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the
last days.
"Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to
the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.
It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen
reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and
strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an
avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening
from the crevices of the rock.
"Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.
Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the
best I can do now. Come on."
There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the
sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer
ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be
crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings
cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might
never have won through.
It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's
cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the
glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was
sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from
the rocks above. They heard no sound.
The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.
Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep
watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their
childhood; but neither had been here before.
But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to
make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly
with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling
in the light that poured from within.
They felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a
shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight
of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was
disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a
tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;
beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.
The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked
voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in
thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here."
"You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he
had not meant to be.
The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.
Come in! You're letting in the wind."
Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that
all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast
against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from
the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began
a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to
descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into
lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then
turned questioningly to the young pair.
"We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can
spare it. We're pursued."
"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves
comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world
is as bad as it was when I was last in it."
Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded
them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of
weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no
doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young."
Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history
briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before
very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would
recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud
between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us
off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours
behind us."
"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the
Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families."
Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be
able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.
"And what will you do now?"
Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're
overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear
to follow us."
"To the mountain, you mean."
"And into it, if need be."
The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she
nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you—are you willing to follow
your lover in this?"
Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at
Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why,
I will lead, if his courage should fail him."
The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this
thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you
are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to
guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves
and on all men."
"We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their
mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world
crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the
Ryzgas will come forth."
"Do you believe that?"
"As one believes stories."
"It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated
farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the
First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they
come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard
them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,
the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled
below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the
power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.
Var stared down at his hands.
"The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race
as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before
the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such
tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled
the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.
They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to
its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of
their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of
those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great
and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.
"Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only
fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the
Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age.
If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will
find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and
strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks
of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And
we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity
that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.
"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science
that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their
weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making
sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them.
Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the
completion of the last of the starships.
"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the
memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a
picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...."
Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old
man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their
vision, and they saw—
Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city
that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's
darkness—that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted
the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a
shaking of the earth.
Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead,
poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces,
naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where
the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half
sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long
last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion—a rebellion without
hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of
the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood.
Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still
fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the
shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the
lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned.
Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept
outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had
shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were
lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense
white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound.
They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship,
and it was leaving.
It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the
millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others
cried desolately—
wait!
Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping
fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist
and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and
the ship was gone.
The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the
citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,
and the city burned and burned....
Var blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm
tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that
he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a
vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived
through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man
who was the Mountain Watcher.
"Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on
Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to
rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's
heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep,
their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone
dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely.
"I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the
old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain
in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance,
folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy
world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again."
The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally,
"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if
in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking."
Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her
mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var
looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher
seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his
own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,
"You are tired. Best sleep until morning."
Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and
that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and
drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave
swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.
Var woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had
been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic
gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how
it was.
He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that
sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep
had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him
coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know
the face.
Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, "Who are you?
Where's the Watcher?"
The other flashed white teeth in a smile. "I'm the Watcher," he
answered. "Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the
day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here."
"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—"
"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They
were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away."
Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, "Thank you,
Watcher."
"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are
rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga
mountain?"
Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, "We have no
alternative."
There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh
breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and
they followed him outside.
The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain.
It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right
and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by
the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and
gave nothing back.
Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling
a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river
dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the
curling fog hid everything.
"You have an alternative," said the Watcher crisply. The two took their
eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his
face was unsmiling. "It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the
north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking
your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other
direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers
will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will
be too late for them to overtake Var."
That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked
at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into
one.
They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: "
It
would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet
these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone
irreparable.... But to become
I
and
you
again—that cannot be
borne.
"
They said in unison, "No. Not that."
The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, "Very well. I will
give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the
Ryzga mountain."
Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of
the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little
dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.
"You are ready to go," said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice
was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the
Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.
Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's
mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, "You
don't blame us?"
"You have taken life in your own hands," rasped the Watcher. "Who does
that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!"
They groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling
river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream
bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would
cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at
last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that
the pursuit already halved their lead.
They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the
doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into
the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so
little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.
Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently,
head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond
slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe
from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an
abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness
had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it
had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the
mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not
living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in
response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle
circuits....
The two stood shivering together.
The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they
heard a great voice crying, "There they are!"
Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that
they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was
too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the
thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: "Young fools! I've
caught you now!"
Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.
Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: "Go
back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!"
Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and
for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the
mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of
sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling
Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the
grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist
billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him
exhorting his men to haste.
Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent
whisper said, "Come on!"
Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness.
At Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he
muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle
of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising
potential that seemed to whisper
Ready ... ready....
The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the
featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var
summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more—
Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being,
pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out.
The immaterial globe of light danced on before them.
"Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet
further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had
made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into
these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense
had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not
blocked....
Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote
vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor
under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense
energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that
was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the
mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make
ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that
might be near at hand.
From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay,
then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the
dark burrow:
"
Stop!
—before you go too far!"
Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go
free."
In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with
that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each
knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own—that
neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world
outside should crumble to ruin around them.
"Follow us, then!"
They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain
increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound
was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream.
Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo
the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood
before their monstrous and inhuman power.
Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena
saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded
room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward
to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.
Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded
with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched
light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the
progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this
must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened
and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid
shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....
For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at
this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of
their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life.
They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once:
perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and
only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over
the threshold.
There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,
above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a
massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.
Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their
last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.
He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of
changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,
with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;
his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.
That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,
conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet
not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's
manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and
assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.
With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite
open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and
unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible
symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to
close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....
He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the
interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new,
but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like
metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The
image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily
have been totally strange.
"Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality—good. Physically
excellent stock...." There was a complicated and incomprehensible
schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand
years—more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all
initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We
can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool
progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating
in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient,
crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will—
toward the stars, the
stars!
The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones
indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest...."
Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed
by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply
ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by
the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's
face.
The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:
Decision!
He turned
toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for
one spot upon it.
Neena screamed.
Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up
seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes
and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.
There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster
crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.
But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it
remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The
Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip
closed down on all his motor nerves.
Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into
the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and
such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's
efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as
misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to
wrestle with the mind.
Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream
monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy
tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a
real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates
with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There
will be no new beginning for you in
our
world, Ryzga! In two thousand
years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you
built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and
energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way."
Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still.
"Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine
civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed
its fuel. After us
man
could not survive on the Earth, because the
conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be
something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end
of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right."
The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The
Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his
paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp
and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has
failed.
Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief,
he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he
raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.
In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first
in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at
Var.
Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz?
Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go
beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?" | A mutated strain between the slaves and masters of the Ryzgas | Descendants of the slaves of the Ryzgas | Members of an alien group that destroyed the Ryzgas | Descendants of the Ryzga masters | 1 |
32836_VRNCK2U5_2 | What power does Var possess? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
WHEN THE MOUNTAIN SHOOK
By Robert Abernathy
Illustrated by Kelly Freas
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its
cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare
with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and
conquer....
At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered
among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense
and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the
dying sun.
Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.
The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a
warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening
twilight, even as her love was about him.
Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass."
He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but
there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other
direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to
sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with
vengeance.
"Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago."
She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black
mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He
felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this.
For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass,
she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to
follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would
be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse
was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the
last days.
"Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to
the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.
It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen
reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and
strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an
avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening
from the crevices of the rock.
"Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.
Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the
best I can do now. Come on."
There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the
sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer
ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be
crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings
cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might
never have won through.
It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's
cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the
glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was
sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from
the rocks above. They heard no sound.
The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.
Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep
watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their
childhood; but neither had been here before.
But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to
make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly
with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling
in the light that poured from within.
They felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a
shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight
of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was
disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a
tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;
beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.
The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked
voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in
thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here."
"You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he
had not meant to be.
The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.
Come in! You're letting in the wind."
Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that
all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast
against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from
the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began
a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to
descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into
lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then
turned questioningly to the young pair.
"We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can
spare it. We're pursued."
"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves
comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world
is as bad as it was when I was last in it."
Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded
them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of
weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no
doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young."
Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history
briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before
very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would
recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud
between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us
off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours
behind us."
"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the
Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families."
Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be
able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.
"And what will you do now?"
Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're
overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear
to follow us."
"To the mountain, you mean."
"And into it, if need be."
The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she
nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you—are you willing to follow
your lover in this?"
Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at
Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why,
I will lead, if his courage should fail him."
The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this
thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you
are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to
guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves
and on all men."
"We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their
mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world
crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the
Ryzgas will come forth."
"Do you believe that?"
"As one believes stories."
"It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated
farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the
First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they
come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard
them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,
the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled
below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the
power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.
Var stared down at his hands.
"The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race
as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before
the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such
tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled
the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.
They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to
its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of
their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of
those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great
and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.
"Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only
fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the
Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age.
If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will
find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and
strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks
of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And
we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity
that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.
"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science
that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their
weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making
sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them.
Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the
completion of the last of the starships.
"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the
memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a
picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...."
Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old
man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their
vision, and they saw—
Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city
that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's
darkness—that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted
the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a
shaking of the earth.
Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead,
poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces,
naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where
the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half
sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long
last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion—a rebellion without
hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of
the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood.
Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still
fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the
shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the
lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned.
Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept
outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had
shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were
lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense
white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound.
They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship,
and it was leaving.
It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the
millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others
cried desolately—
wait!
Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping
fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist
and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and
the ship was gone.
The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the
citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,
and the city burned and burned....
Var blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm
tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that
he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a
vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived
through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man
who was the Mountain Watcher.
"Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on
Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to
rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's
heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep,
their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone
dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely.
"I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the
old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain
in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance,
folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy
world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again."
The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally,
"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if
in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking."
Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her
mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var
looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher
seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his
own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,
"You are tired. Best sleep until morning."
Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and
that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and
drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave
swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.
Var woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had
been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic
gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how
it was.
He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that
sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep
had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him
coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know
the face.
Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, "Who are you?
Where's the Watcher?"
The other flashed white teeth in a smile. "I'm the Watcher," he
answered. "Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the
day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here."
"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—"
"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They
were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away."
Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, "Thank you,
Watcher."
"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are
rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga
mountain?"
Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, "We have no
alternative."
There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh
breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and
they followed him outside.
The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain.
It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right
and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by
the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and
gave nothing back.
Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling
a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river
dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the
curling fog hid everything.
"You have an alternative," said the Watcher crisply. The two took their
eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his
face was unsmiling. "It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the
north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking
your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other
direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers
will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will
be too late for them to overtake Var."
That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked
at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into
one.
They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: "
It
would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet
these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone
irreparable.... But to become
I
and
you
again—that cannot be
borne.
"
They said in unison, "No. Not that."
The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, "Very well. I will
give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the
Ryzga mountain."
Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of
the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little
dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.
"You are ready to go," said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice
was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the
Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.
Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's
mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, "You
don't blame us?"
"You have taken life in your own hands," rasped the Watcher. "Who does
that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!"
They groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling
river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream
bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would
cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at
last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that
the pursuit already halved their lead.
They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the
doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into
the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so
little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.
Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently,
head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond
slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe
from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an
abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness
had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it
had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the
mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not
living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in
response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle
circuits....
The two stood shivering together.
The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they
heard a great voice crying, "There they are!"
Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that
they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was
too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the
thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: "Young fools! I've
caught you now!"
Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.
Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: "Go
back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!"
Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and
for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the
mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of
sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling
Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the
grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist
billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him
exhorting his men to haste.
Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent
whisper said, "Come on!"
Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness.
At Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he
muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle
of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising
potential that seemed to whisper
Ready ... ready....
The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the
featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var
summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more—
Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being,
pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out.
The immaterial globe of light danced on before them.
"Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet
further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had
made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into
these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense
had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not
blocked....
Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote
vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor
under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense
energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that
was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the
mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make
ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that
might be near at hand.
From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay,
then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the
dark burrow:
"
Stop!
—before you go too far!"
Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go
free."
In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with
that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each
knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own—that
neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world
outside should crumble to ruin around them.
"Follow us, then!"
They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain
increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound
was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream.
Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo
the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood
before their monstrous and inhuman power.
Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena
saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded
room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward
to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.
Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded
with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched
light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the
progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this
must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened
and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid
shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....
For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at
this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of
their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life.
They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once:
perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and
only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over
the threshold.
There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,
above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a
massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.
Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their
last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.
He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of
changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,
with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;
his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.
That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,
conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet
not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's
manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and
assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.
With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite
open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and
unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible
symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to
close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....
He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the
interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new,
but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like
metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The
image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily
have been totally strange.
"Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality—good. Physically
excellent stock...." There was a complicated and incomprehensible
schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand
years—more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all
initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We
can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool
progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating
in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient,
crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will—
toward the stars, the
stars!
The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones
indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest...."
Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed
by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply
ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by
the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's
face.
The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:
Decision!
He turned
toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for
one spot upon it.
Neena screamed.
Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up
seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes
and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.
There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster
crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.
But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it
remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The
Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip
closed down on all his motor nerves.
Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into
the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and
such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's
efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as
misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to
wrestle with the mind.
Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream
monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy
tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a
real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates
with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There
will be no new beginning for you in
our
world, Ryzga! In two thousand
years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you
built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and
energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way."
Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still.
"Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine
civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed
its fuel. After us
man
could not survive on the Earth, because the
conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be
something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end
of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right."
The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The
Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his
paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp
and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has
failed.
Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief,
he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he
raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.
In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first
in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at
Var.
Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz?
Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go
beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?" | the ability to change his appearance | the ability to travel through air | the ability to communicate telepathically | the ability to change the form of physical objects | 2 |
32836_VRNCK2U5_3 | What message for humanity does the author wish to communicate, regarding the fate of the Ryzgas? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
WHEN THE MOUNTAIN SHOOK
By Robert Abernathy
Illustrated by Kelly Freas
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its
cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare
with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and
conquer....
At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered
among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense
and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the
dying sun.
Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.
The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a
warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening
twilight, even as her love was about him.
Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass."
He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but
there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other
direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to
sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with
vengeance.
"Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago."
She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black
mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He
felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this.
For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass,
she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to
follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would
be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse
was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the
last days.
"Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to
the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.
It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen
reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and
strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an
avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening
from the crevices of the rock.
"Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.
Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the
best I can do now. Come on."
There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the
sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer
ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be
crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings
cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might
never have won through.
It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's
cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the
glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was
sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from
the rocks above. They heard no sound.
The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.
Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep
watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their
childhood; but neither had been here before.
But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to
make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly
with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling
in the light that poured from within.
They felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a
shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight
of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was
disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a
tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;
beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.
The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked
voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in
thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here."
"You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he
had not meant to be.
The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.
Come in! You're letting in the wind."
Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that
all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast
against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from
the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began
a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to
descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into
lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then
turned questioningly to the young pair.
"We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can
spare it. We're pursued."
"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves
comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world
is as bad as it was when I was last in it."
Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded
them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of
weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no
doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young."
Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history
briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before
very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would
recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud
between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us
off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours
behind us."
"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the
Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families."
Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be
able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.
"And what will you do now?"
Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're
overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear
to follow us."
"To the mountain, you mean."
"And into it, if need be."
The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she
nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you—are you willing to follow
your lover in this?"
Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at
Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why,
I will lead, if his courage should fail him."
The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this
thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you
are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to
guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves
and on all men."
"We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their
mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world
crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the
Ryzgas will come forth."
"Do you believe that?"
"As one believes stories."
"It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated
farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the
First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they
come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard
them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,
the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled
below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the
power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.
Var stared down at his hands.
"The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race
as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before
the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such
tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled
the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.
They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to
its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of
their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of
those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great
and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.
"Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only
fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the
Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age.
If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will
find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and
strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks
of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And
we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity
that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.
"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science
that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their
weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making
sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them.
Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the
completion of the last of the starships.
"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the
memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a
picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...."
Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old
man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their
vision, and they saw—
Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city
that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's
darkness—that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted
the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a
shaking of the earth.
Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead,
poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces,
naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where
the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half
sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long
last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion—a rebellion without
hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of
the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood.
Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still
fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the
shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the
lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned.
Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept
outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had
shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were
lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense
white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound.
They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship,
and it was leaving.
It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the
millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others
cried desolately—
wait!
Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping
fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist
and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and
the ship was gone.
The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the
citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,
and the city burned and burned....
Var blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm
tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that
he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a
vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived
through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man
who was the Mountain Watcher.
"Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on
Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to
rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's
heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep,
their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone
dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely.
"I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the
old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain
in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance,
folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy
world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again."
The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally,
"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if
in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking."
Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her
mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var
looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher
seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his
own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,
"You are tired. Best sleep until morning."
Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and
that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and
drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave
swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.
Var woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had
been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic
gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how
it was.
He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that
sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep
had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him
coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know
the face.
Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, "Who are you?
Where's the Watcher?"
The other flashed white teeth in a smile. "I'm the Watcher," he
answered. "Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the
day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here."
"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—"
"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They
were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away."
Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, "Thank you,
Watcher."
"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are
rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga
mountain?"
Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, "We have no
alternative."
There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh
breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and
they followed him outside.
The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain.
It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right
and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by
the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and
gave nothing back.
Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling
a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river
dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the
curling fog hid everything.
"You have an alternative," said the Watcher crisply. The two took their
eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his
face was unsmiling. "It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the
north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking
your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other
direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers
will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will
be too late for them to overtake Var."
That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked
at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into
one.
They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: "
It
would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet
these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone
irreparable.... But to become
I
and
you
again—that cannot be
borne.
"
They said in unison, "No. Not that."
The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, "Very well. I will
give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the
Ryzga mountain."
Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of
the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little
dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.
"You are ready to go," said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice
was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the
Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.
Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's
mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, "You
don't blame us?"
"You have taken life in your own hands," rasped the Watcher. "Who does
that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!"
They groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling
river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream
bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would
cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at
last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that
the pursuit already halved their lead.
They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the
doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into
the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so
little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.
Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently,
head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond
slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe
from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an
abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness
had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it
had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the
mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not
living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in
response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle
circuits....
The two stood shivering together.
The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they
heard a great voice crying, "There they are!"
Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that
they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was
too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the
thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: "Young fools! I've
caught you now!"
Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.
Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: "Go
back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!"
Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and
for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the
mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of
sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling
Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the
grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist
billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him
exhorting his men to haste.
Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent
whisper said, "Come on!"
Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness.
At Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he
muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle
of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising
potential that seemed to whisper
Ready ... ready....
The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the
featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var
summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more—
Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being,
pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out.
The immaterial globe of light danced on before them.
"Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet
further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had
made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into
these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense
had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not
blocked....
Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote
vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor
under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense
energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that
was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the
mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make
ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that
might be near at hand.
From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay,
then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the
dark burrow:
"
Stop!
—before you go too far!"
Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go
free."
In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with
that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each
knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own—that
neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world
outside should crumble to ruin around them.
"Follow us, then!"
They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain
increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound
was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream.
Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo
the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood
before their monstrous and inhuman power.
Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena
saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded
room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward
to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.
Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded
with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched
light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the
progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this
must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened
and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid
shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....
For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at
this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of
their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life.
They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once:
perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and
only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over
the threshold.
There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,
above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a
massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.
Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their
last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.
He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of
changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,
with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;
his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.
That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,
conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet
not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's
manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and
assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.
With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite
open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and
unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible
symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to
close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....
He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the
interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new,
but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like
metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The
image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily
have been totally strange.
"Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality—good. Physically
excellent stock...." There was a complicated and incomprehensible
schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand
years—more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all
initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We
can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool
progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating
in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient,
crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will—
toward the stars, the
stars!
The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones
indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest...."
Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed
by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply
ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by
the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's
face.
The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:
Decision!
He turned
toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for
one spot upon it.
Neena screamed.
Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up
seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes
and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.
There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster
crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.
But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it
remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The
Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip
closed down on all his motor nerves.
Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into
the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and
such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's
efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as
misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to
wrestle with the mind.
Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream
monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy
tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a
real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates
with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There
will be no new beginning for you in
our
world, Ryzga! In two thousand
years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you
built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and
energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way."
Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still.
"Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine
civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed
its fuel. After us
man
could not survive on the Earth, because the
conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be
something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end
of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right."
The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The
Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his
paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp
and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has
failed.
Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief,
he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he
raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.
In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first
in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at
Var.
Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz?
Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go
beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?" | While social stratification may benefit one group temporarily, eventually it will shatter social institutions | Humans are doomed to repeat history until they wipe out their entire race | We should be grateful for natural gifts bestowed by the Earth, and not try to seek more beyond life's simple pleasures | Actions and decisions made in the name of love can breed destructive hatred | 2 |
32836_VRNCK2U5_4 | Which lingering effect of the Ryzgas' downfall makes life challenging for people like Var and Neena? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
WHEN THE MOUNTAIN SHOOK
By Robert Abernathy
Illustrated by Kelly Freas
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its
cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare
with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and
conquer....
At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered
among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense
and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the
dying sun.
Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.
The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a
warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening
twilight, even as her love was about him.
Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass."
He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but
there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other
direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to
sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with
vengeance.
"Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago."
She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black
mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He
felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this.
For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass,
she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to
follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would
be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse
was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the
last days.
"Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to
the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.
It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen
reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and
strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an
avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening
from the crevices of the rock.
"Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.
Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the
best I can do now. Come on."
There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the
sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer
ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be
crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings
cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might
never have won through.
It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's
cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the
glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was
sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from
the rocks above. They heard no sound.
The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.
Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep
watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their
childhood; but neither had been here before.
But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to
make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly
with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling
in the light that poured from within.
They felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a
shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight
of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was
disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a
tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;
beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.
The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked
voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in
thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here."
"You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he
had not meant to be.
The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.
Come in! You're letting in the wind."
Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that
all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast
against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from
the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began
a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to
descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into
lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then
turned questioningly to the young pair.
"We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can
spare it. We're pursued."
"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves
comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world
is as bad as it was when I was last in it."
Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded
them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of
weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no
doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young."
Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history
briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before
very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would
recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud
between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us
off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours
behind us."
"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the
Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families."
Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be
able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.
"And what will you do now?"
Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're
overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear
to follow us."
"To the mountain, you mean."
"And into it, if need be."
The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she
nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you—are you willing to follow
your lover in this?"
Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at
Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why,
I will lead, if his courage should fail him."
The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this
thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you
are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to
guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves
and on all men."
"We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their
mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world
crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the
Ryzgas will come forth."
"Do you believe that?"
"As one believes stories."
"It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated
farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the
First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they
come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard
them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,
the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled
below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the
power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.
Var stared down at his hands.
"The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race
as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before
the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such
tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled
the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.
They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to
its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of
their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of
those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great
and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.
"Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only
fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the
Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age.
If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will
find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and
strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks
of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And
we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity
that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.
"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science
that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their
weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making
sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them.
Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the
completion of the last of the starships.
"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the
memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a
picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...."
Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old
man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their
vision, and they saw—
Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city
that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's
darkness—that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted
the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a
shaking of the earth.
Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead,
poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces,
naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where
the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half
sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long
last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion—a rebellion without
hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of
the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood.
Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still
fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the
shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the
lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned.
Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept
outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had
shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were
lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense
white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound.
They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship,
and it was leaving.
It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the
millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others
cried desolately—
wait!
Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping
fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist
and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and
the ship was gone.
The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the
citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,
and the city burned and burned....
Var blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm
tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that
he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a
vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived
through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man
who was the Mountain Watcher.
"Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on
Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to
rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's
heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep,
their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone
dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely.
"I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the
old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain
in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance,
folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy
world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again."
The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally,
"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if
in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking."
Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her
mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var
looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher
seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his
own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,
"You are tired. Best sleep until morning."
Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and
that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and
drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave
swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.
Var woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had
been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic
gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how
it was.
He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that
sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep
had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him
coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know
the face.
Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, "Who are you?
Where's the Watcher?"
The other flashed white teeth in a smile. "I'm the Watcher," he
answered. "Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the
day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here."
"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—"
"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They
were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away."
Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, "Thank you,
Watcher."
"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are
rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga
mountain?"
Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, "We have no
alternative."
There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh
breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and
they followed him outside.
The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain.
It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right
and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by
the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and
gave nothing back.
Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling
a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river
dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the
curling fog hid everything.
"You have an alternative," said the Watcher crisply. The two took their
eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his
face was unsmiling. "It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the
north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking
your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other
direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers
will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will
be too late for them to overtake Var."
That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked
at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into
one.
They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: "
It
would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet
these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone
irreparable.... But to become
I
and
you
again—that cannot be
borne.
"
They said in unison, "No. Not that."
The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, "Very well. I will
give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the
Ryzga mountain."
Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of
the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little
dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.
"You are ready to go," said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice
was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the
Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.
Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's
mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, "You
don't blame us?"
"You have taken life in your own hands," rasped the Watcher. "Who does
that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!"
They groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling
river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream
bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would
cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at
last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that
the pursuit already halved their lead.
They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the
doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into
the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so
little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.
Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently,
head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond
slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe
from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an
abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness
had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it
had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the
mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not
living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in
response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle
circuits....
The two stood shivering together.
The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they
heard a great voice crying, "There they are!"
Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that
they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was
too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the
thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: "Young fools! I've
caught you now!"
Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.
Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: "Go
back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!"
Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and
for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the
mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of
sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling
Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the
grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist
billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him
exhorting his men to haste.
Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent
whisper said, "Come on!"
Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness.
At Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he
muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle
of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising
potential that seemed to whisper
Ready ... ready....
The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the
featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var
summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more—
Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being,
pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out.
The immaterial globe of light danced on before them.
"Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet
further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had
made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into
these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense
had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not
blocked....
Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote
vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor
under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense
energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that
was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the
mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make
ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that
might be near at hand.
From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay,
then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the
dark burrow:
"
Stop!
—before you go too far!"
Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go
free."
In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with
that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each
knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own—that
neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world
outside should crumble to ruin around them.
"Follow us, then!"
They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain
increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound
was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream.
Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo
the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood
before their monstrous and inhuman power.
Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena
saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded
room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward
to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.
Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded
with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched
light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the
progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this
must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened
and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid
shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....
For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at
this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of
their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life.
They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once:
perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and
only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over
the threshold.
There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,
above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a
massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.
Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their
last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.
He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of
changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,
with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;
his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.
That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,
conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet
not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's
manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and
assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.
With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite
open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and
unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible
symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to
close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....
He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the
interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new,
but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like
metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The
image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily
have been totally strange.
"Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality—good. Physically
excellent stock...." There was a complicated and incomprehensible
schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand
years—more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all
initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We
can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool
progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating
in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient,
crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will—
toward the stars, the
stars!
The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones
indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest...."
Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed
by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply
ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by
the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's
face.
The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:
Decision!
He turned
toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for
one spot upon it.
Neena screamed.
Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up
seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes
and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.
There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster
crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.
But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it
remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The
Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip
closed down on all his motor nerves.
Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into
the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and
such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's
efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as
misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to
wrestle with the mind.
Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream
monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy
tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a
real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates
with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There
will be no new beginning for you in
our
world, Ryzga! In two thousand
years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you
built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and
energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way."
Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still.
"Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine
civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed
its fuel. After us
man
could not survive on the Earth, because the
conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be
something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end
of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right."
The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The
Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his
paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp
and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has
failed.
Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief,
he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he
raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.
In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first
in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at
Var.
Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz?
Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go
beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?" | The Ryzgas littered the planet with wreckage of their old creations, which renders it inhabitable | The Ryzgas destroyed or used up all of their materials, so Var and Neena's people can only construct things with their dreams | The Ryzgas manipulate the entire planet through their Control Center, so all outcomes are predestined | The Ryzgas toxified the environment, which has caused a genetic mutation among their descendants | 1 |
32836_VRNCK2U5_5 | What is the Watcher's purpose in spinning the vision of when the Ryzgas fell? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
WHEN THE MOUNTAIN SHOOK
By Robert Abernathy
Illustrated by Kelly Freas
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its
cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare
with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and
conquer....
At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered
among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense
and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the
dying sun.
Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.
The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a
warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening
twilight, even as her love was about him.
Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass."
He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but
there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other
direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to
sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with
vengeance.
"Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago."
She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black
mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He
felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this.
For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass,
she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to
follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would
be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse
was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the
last days.
"Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to
the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.
It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen
reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and
strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an
avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening
from the crevices of the rock.
"Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.
Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the
best I can do now. Come on."
There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the
sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer
ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be
crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings
cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might
never have won through.
It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's
cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the
glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was
sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from
the rocks above. They heard no sound.
The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.
Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep
watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their
childhood; but neither had been here before.
But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to
make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly
with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling
in the light that poured from within.
They felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a
shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight
of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was
disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a
tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;
beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.
The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked
voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in
thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here."
"You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he
had not meant to be.
The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.
Come in! You're letting in the wind."
Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that
all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast
against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from
the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began
a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to
descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into
lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then
turned questioningly to the young pair.
"We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can
spare it. We're pursued."
"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves
comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world
is as bad as it was when I was last in it."
Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded
them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of
weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no
doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young."
Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history
briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before
very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would
recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud
between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us
off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours
behind us."
"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the
Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families."
Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be
able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.
"And what will you do now?"
Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're
overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear
to follow us."
"To the mountain, you mean."
"And into it, if need be."
The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she
nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you—are you willing to follow
your lover in this?"
Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at
Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why,
I will lead, if his courage should fail him."
The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this
thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you
are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to
guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves
and on all men."
"We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their
mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world
crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the
Ryzgas will come forth."
"Do you believe that?"
"As one believes stories."
"It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated
farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the
First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they
come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard
them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,
the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled
below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the
power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.
Var stared down at his hands.
"The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race
as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before
the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such
tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled
the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.
They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to
its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of
their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of
those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great
and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.
"Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only
fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the
Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age.
If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will
find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and
strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks
of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And
we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity
that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.
"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science
that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their
weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making
sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them.
Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the
completion of the last of the starships.
"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the
memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a
picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...."
Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old
man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their
vision, and they saw—
Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city
that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's
darkness—that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted
the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a
shaking of the earth.
Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead,
poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces,
naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where
the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half
sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long
last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion—a rebellion without
hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of
the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood.
Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still
fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the
shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the
lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned.
Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept
outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had
shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were
lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense
white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound.
They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship,
and it was leaving.
It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the
millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others
cried desolately—
wait!
Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping
fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist
and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and
the ship was gone.
The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the
citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,
and the city burned and burned....
Var blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm
tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that
he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a
vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived
through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man
who was the Mountain Watcher.
"Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on
Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to
rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's
heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep,
their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone
dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely.
"I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the
old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain
in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance,
folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy
world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again."
The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally,
"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if
in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking."
Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her
mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var
looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher
seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his
own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,
"You are tired. Best sleep until morning."
Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and
that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and
drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave
swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.
Var woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had
been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic
gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how
it was.
He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that
sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep
had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him
coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know
the face.
Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, "Who are you?
Where's the Watcher?"
The other flashed white teeth in a smile. "I'm the Watcher," he
answered. "Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the
day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here."
"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—"
"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They
were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away."
Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, "Thank you,
Watcher."
"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are
rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga
mountain?"
Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, "We have no
alternative."
There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh
breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and
they followed him outside.
The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain.
It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right
and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by
the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and
gave nothing back.
Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling
a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river
dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the
curling fog hid everything.
"You have an alternative," said the Watcher crisply. The two took their
eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his
face was unsmiling. "It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the
north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking
your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other
direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers
will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will
be too late for them to overtake Var."
That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked
at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into
one.
They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: "
It
would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet
these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone
irreparable.... But to become
I
and
you
again—that cannot be
borne.
"
They said in unison, "No. Not that."
The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, "Very well. I will
give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the
Ryzga mountain."
Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of
the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little
dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.
"You are ready to go," said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice
was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the
Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.
Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's
mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, "You
don't blame us?"
"You have taken life in your own hands," rasped the Watcher. "Who does
that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!"
They groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling
river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream
bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would
cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at
last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that
the pursuit already halved their lead.
They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the
doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into
the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so
little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.
Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently,
head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond
slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe
from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an
abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness
had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it
had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the
mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not
living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in
response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle
circuits....
The two stood shivering together.
The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they
heard a great voice crying, "There they are!"
Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that
they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was
too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the
thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: "Young fools! I've
caught you now!"
Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.
Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: "Go
back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!"
Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and
for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the
mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of
sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling
Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the
grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist
billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him
exhorting his men to haste.
Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent
whisper said, "Come on!"
Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness.
At Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he
muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle
of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising
potential that seemed to whisper
Ready ... ready....
The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the
featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var
summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more—
Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being,
pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out.
The immaterial globe of light danced on before them.
"Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet
further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had
made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into
these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense
had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not
blocked....
Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote
vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor
under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense
energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that
was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the
mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make
ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that
might be near at hand.
From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay,
then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the
dark burrow:
"
Stop!
—before you go too far!"
Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go
free."
In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with
that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each
knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own—that
neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world
outside should crumble to ruin around them.
"Follow us, then!"
They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain
increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound
was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream.
Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo
the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood
before their monstrous and inhuman power.
Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena
saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded
room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward
to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.
Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded
with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched
light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the
progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this
must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened
and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid
shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....
For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at
this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of
their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life.
They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once:
perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and
only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over
the threshold.
There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,
above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a
massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.
Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their
last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.
He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of
changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,
with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;
his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.
That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,
conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet
not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's
manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and
assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.
With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite
open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and
unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible
symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to
close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....
He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the
interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new,
but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like
metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The
image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily
have been totally strange.
"Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality—good. Physically
excellent stock...." There was a complicated and incomprehensible
schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand
years—more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all
initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We
can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool
progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating
in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient,
crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will—
toward the stars, the
stars!
The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones
indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest...."
Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed
by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply
ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by
the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's
face.
The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:
Decision!
He turned
toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for
one spot upon it.
Neena screamed.
Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up
seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes
and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.
There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster
crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.
But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it
remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The
Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip
closed down on all his motor nerves.
Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into
the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and
such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's
efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as
misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to
wrestle with the mind.
Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream
monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy
tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a
real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates
with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There
will be no new beginning for you in
our
world, Ryzga! In two thousand
years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you
built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and
energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way."
Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still.
"Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine
civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed
its fuel. After us
man
could not survive on the Earth, because the
conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be
something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end
of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right."
The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The
Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his
paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp
and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has
failed.
Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief,
he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he
raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.
In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first
in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at
Var.
Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz?
Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go
beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?" | To tell a story of human selfishness and evil in order to arm Var and Neena against the Ryzgas | To instill a sensible amount of fear in Var and Neena before they sacrifice the world for their romance | To persuade Var and Neena not to go further in their journey without understanding the potential consequences | To convey a neutral account of history in order to inform Var and Neena of what they're up against | 2 |
32836_VRNCK2U5_6 | What is ironic about the conclusion of the story? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
WHEN THE MOUNTAIN SHOOK
By Robert Abernathy
Illustrated by Kelly Freas
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its
cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare
with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and
conquer....
At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered
among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense
and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the
dying sun.
Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.
The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a
warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening
twilight, even as her love was about him.
Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass."
He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but
there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other
direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to
sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with
vengeance.
"Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago."
She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black
mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He
felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this.
For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass,
she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to
follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would
be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse
was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the
last days.
"Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to
the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.
It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen
reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and
strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an
avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening
from the crevices of the rock.
"Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.
Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the
best I can do now. Come on."
There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the
sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer
ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be
crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings
cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might
never have won through.
It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's
cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the
glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was
sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from
the rocks above. They heard no sound.
The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.
Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep
watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their
childhood; but neither had been here before.
But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to
make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly
with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling
in the light that poured from within.
They felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a
shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight
of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was
disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a
tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;
beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.
The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked
voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in
thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here."
"You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he
had not meant to be.
The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.
Come in! You're letting in the wind."
Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that
all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast
against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from
the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began
a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to
descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into
lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then
turned questioningly to the young pair.
"We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can
spare it. We're pursued."
"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves
comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world
is as bad as it was when I was last in it."
Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded
them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of
weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no
doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young."
Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history
briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before
very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would
recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud
between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us
off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours
behind us."
"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the
Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families."
Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be
able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.
"And what will you do now?"
Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're
overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear
to follow us."
"To the mountain, you mean."
"And into it, if need be."
The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she
nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you—are you willing to follow
your lover in this?"
Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at
Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why,
I will lead, if his courage should fail him."
The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this
thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you
are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to
guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves
and on all men."
"We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their
mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world
crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the
Ryzgas will come forth."
"Do you believe that?"
"As one believes stories."
"It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated
farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the
First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they
come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard
them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,
the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled
below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the
power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.
Var stared down at his hands.
"The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race
as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before
the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such
tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled
the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.
They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to
its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of
their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of
those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great
and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.
"Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only
fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the
Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age.
If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will
find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and
strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks
of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And
we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity
that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.
"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science
that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their
weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making
sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them.
Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the
completion of the last of the starships.
"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the
memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a
picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...."
Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old
man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their
vision, and they saw—
Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city
that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's
darkness—that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted
the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a
shaking of the earth.
Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead,
poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces,
naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where
the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half
sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long
last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion—a rebellion without
hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of
the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood.
Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still
fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the
shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the
lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned.
Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept
outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had
shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were
lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense
white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound.
They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship,
and it was leaving.
It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the
millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others
cried desolately—
wait!
Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping
fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist
and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and
the ship was gone.
The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the
citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,
and the city burned and burned....
Var blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm
tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that
he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a
vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived
through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man
who was the Mountain Watcher.
"Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on
Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to
rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's
heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep,
their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone
dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely.
"I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the
old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain
in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance,
folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy
world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again."
The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally,
"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if
in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking."
Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her
mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var
looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher
seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his
own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,
"You are tired. Best sleep until morning."
Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and
that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and
drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave
swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.
Var woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had
been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic
gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how
it was.
He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that
sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep
had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him
coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know
the face.
Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, "Who are you?
Where's the Watcher?"
The other flashed white teeth in a smile. "I'm the Watcher," he
answered. "Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the
day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here."
"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—"
"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They
were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away."
Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, "Thank you,
Watcher."
"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are
rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga
mountain?"
Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, "We have no
alternative."
There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh
breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and
they followed him outside.
The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain.
It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right
and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by
the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and
gave nothing back.
Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling
a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river
dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the
curling fog hid everything.
"You have an alternative," said the Watcher crisply. The two took their
eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his
face was unsmiling. "It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the
north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking
your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other
direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers
will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will
be too late for them to overtake Var."
That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked
at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into
one.
They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: "
It
would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet
these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone
irreparable.... But to become
I
and
you
again—that cannot be
borne.
"
They said in unison, "No. Not that."
The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, "Very well. I will
give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the
Ryzga mountain."
Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of
the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little
dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.
"You are ready to go," said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice
was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the
Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.
Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's
mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, "You
don't blame us?"
"You have taken life in your own hands," rasped the Watcher. "Who does
that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!"
They groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling
river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream
bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would
cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at
last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that
the pursuit already halved their lead.
They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the
doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into
the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so
little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.
Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently,
head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond
slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe
from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an
abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness
had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it
had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the
mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not
living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in
response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle
circuits....
The two stood shivering together.
The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they
heard a great voice crying, "There they are!"
Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that
they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was
too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the
thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: "Young fools! I've
caught you now!"
Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.
Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: "Go
back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!"
Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and
for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the
mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of
sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling
Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the
grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist
billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him
exhorting his men to haste.
Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent
whisper said, "Come on!"
Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness.
At Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he
muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle
of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising
potential that seemed to whisper
Ready ... ready....
The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the
featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var
summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more—
Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being,
pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out.
The immaterial globe of light danced on before them.
"Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet
further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had
made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into
these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense
had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not
blocked....
Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote
vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor
under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense
energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that
was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the
mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make
ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that
might be near at hand.
From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay,
then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the
dark burrow:
"
Stop!
—before you go too far!"
Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go
free."
In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with
that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each
knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own—that
neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world
outside should crumble to ruin around them.
"Follow us, then!"
They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain
increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound
was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream.
Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo
the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood
before their monstrous and inhuman power.
Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena
saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded
room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward
to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.
Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded
with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched
light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the
progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this
must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened
and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid
shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....
For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at
this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of
their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life.
They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once:
perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and
only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over
the threshold.
There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,
above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a
massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.
Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their
last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.
He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of
changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,
with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;
his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.
That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,
conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet
not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's
manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and
assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.
With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite
open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and
unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible
symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to
close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....
He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the
interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new,
but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like
metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The
image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily
have been totally strange.
"Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality—good. Physically
excellent stock...." There was a complicated and incomprehensible
schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand
years—more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all
initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We
can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool
progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating
in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient,
crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will—
toward the stars, the
stars!
The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones
indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest...."
Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed
by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply
ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by
the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's
face.
The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:
Decision!
He turned
toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for
one spot upon it.
Neena screamed.
Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up
seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes
and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.
There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster
crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.
But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it
remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The
Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip
closed down on all his motor nerves.
Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into
the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and
such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's
efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as
misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to
wrestle with the mind.
Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream
monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy
tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a
real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates
with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There
will be no new beginning for you in
our
world, Ryzga! In two thousand
years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you
built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and
energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way."
Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still.
"Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine
civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed
its fuel. After us
man
could not survive on the Earth, because the
conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be
something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end
of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right."
The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The
Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his
paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp
and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has
failed.
Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief,
he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he
raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.
In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first
in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at
Var.
Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz?
Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go
beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?" | The slave masters of the Ryzgas were ultimately eradicated by their own slaves | Humans seem to feel they have no other alternative than to kill and cause suffering before they can establish peace | Var will likely be killed or imprisoned for life, and Neena will bear the mark of shame for eternity | Despite the Watcher's message, Var continued his journey to the mountain in pursuit of personal gain | 0 |
32836_VRNCK2U5_7 | What causes the shaking of the mountain? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
WHEN THE MOUNTAIN SHOOK
By Robert Abernathy
Illustrated by Kelly Freas
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its
cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare
with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and
conquer....
At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered
among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense
and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the
dying sun.
Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.
The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a
warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening
twilight, even as her love was about him.
Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass."
He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but
there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other
direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to
sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with
vengeance.
"Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago."
She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black
mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He
felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this.
For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass,
she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to
follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would
be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse
was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the
last days.
"Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to
the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.
It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen
reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and
strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an
avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening
from the crevices of the rock.
"Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.
Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the
best I can do now. Come on."
There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the
sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer
ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be
crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings
cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might
never have won through.
It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's
cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the
glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was
sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from
the rocks above. They heard no sound.
The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.
Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep
watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their
childhood; but neither had been here before.
But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to
make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly
with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling
in the light that poured from within.
They felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a
shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight
of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was
disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a
tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;
beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.
The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked
voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in
thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here."
"You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he
had not meant to be.
The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.
Come in! You're letting in the wind."
Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that
all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast
against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from
the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began
a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to
descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into
lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then
turned questioningly to the young pair.
"We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can
spare it. We're pursued."
"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves
comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world
is as bad as it was when I was last in it."
Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded
them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of
weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no
doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young."
Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history
briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before
very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would
recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud
between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us
off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours
behind us."
"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the
Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families."
Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be
able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.
"And what will you do now?"
Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're
overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear
to follow us."
"To the mountain, you mean."
"And into it, if need be."
The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she
nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you—are you willing to follow
your lover in this?"
Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at
Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why,
I will lead, if his courage should fail him."
The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this
thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you
are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to
guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves
and on all men."
"We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their
mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world
crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the
Ryzgas will come forth."
"Do you believe that?"
"As one believes stories."
"It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated
farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the
First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they
come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard
them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,
the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled
below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the
power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.
Var stared down at his hands.
"The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race
as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before
the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such
tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled
the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.
They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to
its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of
their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of
those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great
and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.
"Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only
fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the
Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age.
If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will
find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and
strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks
of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And
we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity
that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.
"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science
that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their
weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making
sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them.
Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the
completion of the last of the starships.
"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the
memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a
picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...."
Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old
man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their
vision, and they saw—
Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city
that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's
darkness—that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted
the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a
shaking of the earth.
Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead,
poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces,
naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where
the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half
sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long
last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion—a rebellion without
hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of
the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood.
Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still
fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the
shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the
lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned.
Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept
outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had
shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were
lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense
white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound.
They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship,
and it was leaving.
It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the
millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others
cried desolately—
wait!
Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping
fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist
and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and
the ship was gone.
The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the
citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,
and the city burned and burned....
Var blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm
tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that
he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a
vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived
through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man
who was the Mountain Watcher.
"Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on
Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to
rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's
heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep,
their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone
dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely.
"I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the
old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain
in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance,
folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy
world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again."
The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally,
"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if
in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking."
Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her
mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var
looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher
seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his
own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,
"You are tired. Best sleep until morning."
Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and
that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and
drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave
swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.
Var woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had
been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic
gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how
it was.
He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that
sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep
had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him
coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know
the face.
Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, "Who are you?
Where's the Watcher?"
The other flashed white teeth in a smile. "I'm the Watcher," he
answered. "Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the
day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here."
"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—"
"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They
were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away."
Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, "Thank you,
Watcher."
"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are
rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga
mountain?"
Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, "We have no
alternative."
There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh
breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and
they followed him outside.
The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain.
It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right
and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by
the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and
gave nothing back.
Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling
a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river
dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the
curling fog hid everything.
"You have an alternative," said the Watcher crisply. The two took their
eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his
face was unsmiling. "It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the
north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking
your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other
direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers
will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will
be too late for them to overtake Var."
That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked
at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into
one.
They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: "
It
would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet
these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone
irreparable.... But to become
I
and
you
again—that cannot be
borne.
"
They said in unison, "No. Not that."
The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, "Very well. I will
give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the
Ryzga mountain."
Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of
the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little
dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.
"You are ready to go," said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice
was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the
Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.
Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's
mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, "You
don't blame us?"
"You have taken life in your own hands," rasped the Watcher. "Who does
that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!"
They groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling
river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream
bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would
cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at
last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that
the pursuit already halved their lead.
They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the
doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into
the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so
little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.
Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently,
head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond
slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe
from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an
abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness
had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it
had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the
mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not
living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in
response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle
circuits....
The two stood shivering together.
The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they
heard a great voice crying, "There they are!"
Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that
they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was
too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the
thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: "Young fools! I've
caught you now!"
Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.
Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: "Go
back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!"
Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and
for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the
mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of
sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling
Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the
grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist
billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him
exhorting his men to haste.
Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent
whisper said, "Come on!"
Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness.
At Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he
muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle
of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising
potential that seemed to whisper
Ready ... ready....
The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the
featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var
summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more—
Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being,
pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out.
The immaterial globe of light danced on before them.
"Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet
further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had
made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into
these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense
had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not
blocked....
Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote
vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor
under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense
energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that
was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the
mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make
ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that
might be near at hand.
From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay,
then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the
dark burrow:
"
Stop!
—before you go too far!"
Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go
free."
In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with
that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each
knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own—that
neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world
outside should crumble to ruin around them.
"Follow us, then!"
They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain
increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound
was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream.
Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo
the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood
before their monstrous and inhuman power.
Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena
saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded
room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward
to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.
Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded
with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched
light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the
progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this
must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened
and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid
shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....
For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at
this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of
their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life.
They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once:
perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and
only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over
the threshold.
There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,
above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a
massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.
Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their
last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.
He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of
changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,
with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;
his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.
That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,
conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet
not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's
manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and
assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.
With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite
open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and
unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible
symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to
close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....
He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the
interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new,
but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like
metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The
image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily
have been totally strange.
"Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality—good. Physically
excellent stock...." There was a complicated and incomprehensible
schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand
years—more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all
initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We
can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool
progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating
in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient,
crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will—
toward the stars, the
stars!
The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones
indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest...."
Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed
by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply
ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by
the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's
face.
The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:
Decision!
He turned
toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for
one spot upon it.
Neena screamed.
Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up
seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes
and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.
There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster
crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.
But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it
remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The
Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip
closed down on all his motor nerves.
Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into
the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and
such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's
efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as
misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to
wrestle with the mind.
Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream
monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy
tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a
real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates
with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There
will be no new beginning for you in
our
world, Ryzga! In two thousand
years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you
built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and
energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way."
Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still.
"Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine
civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed
its fuel. After us
man
could not survive on the Earth, because the
conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be
something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end
of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right."
The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The
Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his
paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp
and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has
failed.
Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief,
he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he
raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.
In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first
in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at
Var.
Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz?
Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go
beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?" | The awakening of the Ryzgas | Machines | Earthquakes and tremors | Dreams spun by the Ryzgas | 1 |
32836_VRNCK2U5_8 | Why were the Ryzgas not afraid that someone might enter their mountain? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
WHEN THE MOUNTAIN SHOOK
By Robert Abernathy
Illustrated by Kelly Freas
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its
cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare
with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and
conquer....
At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered
among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense
and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the
dying sun.
Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.
The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a
warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening
twilight, even as her love was about him.
Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass."
He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but
there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other
direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to
sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with
vengeance.
"Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago."
She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black
mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He
felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this.
For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass,
she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to
follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would
be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse
was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the
last days.
"Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to
the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.
It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen
reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and
strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an
avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening
from the crevices of the rock.
"Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.
Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the
best I can do now. Come on."
There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the
sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer
ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be
crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings
cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might
never have won through.
It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's
cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the
glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was
sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from
the rocks above. They heard no sound.
The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.
Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep
watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their
childhood; but neither had been here before.
But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to
make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly
with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling
in the light that poured from within.
They felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a
shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight
of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was
disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a
tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;
beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.
The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked
voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in
thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here."
"You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he
had not meant to be.
The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.
Come in! You're letting in the wind."
Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that
all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast
against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from
the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began
a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to
descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into
lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then
turned questioningly to the young pair.
"We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can
spare it. We're pursued."
"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves
comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world
is as bad as it was when I was last in it."
Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded
them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of
weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no
doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young."
Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history
briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before
very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would
recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud
between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us
off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours
behind us."
"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the
Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families."
Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be
able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.
"And what will you do now?"
Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're
overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear
to follow us."
"To the mountain, you mean."
"And into it, if need be."
The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she
nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you—are you willing to follow
your lover in this?"
Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at
Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why,
I will lead, if his courage should fail him."
The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this
thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you
are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to
guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves
and on all men."
"We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their
mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world
crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the
Ryzgas will come forth."
"Do you believe that?"
"As one believes stories."
"It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated
farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the
First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they
come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard
them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,
the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled
below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the
power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.
Var stared down at his hands.
"The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race
as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before
the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such
tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled
the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.
They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to
its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of
their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of
those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great
and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.
"Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only
fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the
Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age.
If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will
find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and
strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks
of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And
we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity
that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.
"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science
that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their
weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making
sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them.
Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the
completion of the last of the starships.
"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the
memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a
picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...."
Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old
man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their
vision, and they saw—
Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city
that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's
darkness—that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted
the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a
shaking of the earth.
Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead,
poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces,
naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where
the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half
sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long
last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion—a rebellion without
hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of
the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood.
Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still
fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the
shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the
lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned.
Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept
outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had
shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were
lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense
white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound.
They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship,
and it was leaving.
It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the
millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others
cried desolately—
wait!
Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping
fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist
and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and
the ship was gone.
The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the
citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,
and the city burned and burned....
Var blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm
tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that
he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a
vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived
through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man
who was the Mountain Watcher.
"Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on
Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to
rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's
heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep,
their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone
dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely.
"I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the
old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain
in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance,
folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy
world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again."
The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally,
"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if
in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking."
Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her
mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var
looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher
seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his
own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,
"You are tired. Best sleep until morning."
Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and
that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and
drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave
swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.
Var woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had
been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic
gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how
it was.
He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that
sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep
had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him
coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know
the face.
Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, "Who are you?
Where's the Watcher?"
The other flashed white teeth in a smile. "I'm the Watcher," he
answered. "Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the
day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here."
"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—"
"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They
were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away."
Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, "Thank you,
Watcher."
"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are
rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga
mountain?"
Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, "We have no
alternative."
There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh
breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and
they followed him outside.
The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain.
It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right
and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by
the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and
gave nothing back.
Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling
a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river
dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the
curling fog hid everything.
"You have an alternative," said the Watcher crisply. The two took their
eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his
face was unsmiling. "It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the
north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking
your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other
direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers
will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will
be too late for them to overtake Var."
That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked
at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into
one.
They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: "
It
would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet
these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone
irreparable.... But to become
I
and
you
again—that cannot be
borne.
"
They said in unison, "No. Not that."
The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, "Very well. I will
give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the
Ryzga mountain."
Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of
the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little
dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.
"You are ready to go," said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice
was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the
Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.
Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's
mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, "You
don't blame us?"
"You have taken life in your own hands," rasped the Watcher. "Who does
that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!"
They groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling
river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream
bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would
cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at
last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that
the pursuit already halved their lead.
They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the
doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into
the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so
little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.
Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently,
head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond
slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe
from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an
abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness
had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it
had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the
mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not
living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in
response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle
circuits....
The two stood shivering together.
The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they
heard a great voice crying, "There they are!"
Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that
they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was
too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the
thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: "Young fools! I've
caught you now!"
Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.
Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: "Go
back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!"
Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and
for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the
mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of
sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling
Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the
grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist
billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him
exhorting his men to haste.
Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent
whisper said, "Come on!"
Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness.
At Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he
muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle
of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising
potential that seemed to whisper
Ready ... ready....
The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the
featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var
summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more—
Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being,
pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out.
The immaterial globe of light danced on before them.
"Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet
further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had
made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into
these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense
had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not
blocked....
Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote
vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor
under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense
energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that
was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the
mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make
ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that
might be near at hand.
From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay,
then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the
dark burrow:
"
Stop!
—before you go too far!"
Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go
free."
In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with
that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each
knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own—that
neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world
outside should crumble to ruin around them.
"Follow us, then!"
They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain
increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound
was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream.
Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo
the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood
before their monstrous and inhuman power.
Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena
saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded
room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward
to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.
Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded
with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched
light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the
progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this
must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened
and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid
shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....
For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at
this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of
their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life.
They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once:
perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and
only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over
the threshold.
There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,
above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a
massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.
Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their
last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.
He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of
changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,
with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;
his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.
That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,
conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet
not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's
manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and
assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.
With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite
open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and
unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible
symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to
close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....
He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the
interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new,
but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like
metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The
image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily
have been totally strange.
"Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality—good. Physically
excellent stock...." There was a complicated and incomprehensible
schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand
years—more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all
initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We
can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool
progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating
in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient,
crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will—
toward the stars, the
stars!
The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones
indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest...."
Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed
by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply
ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by
the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's
face.
The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:
Decision!
He turned
toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for
one spot upon it.
Neena screamed.
Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up
seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes
and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.
There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster
crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.
But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it
remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The
Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip
closed down on all his motor nerves.
Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into
the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and
such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's
efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as
misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to
wrestle with the mind.
Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream
monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy
tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a
real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates
with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There
will be no new beginning for you in
our
world, Ryzga! In two thousand
years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you
built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and
energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way."
Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still.
"Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine
civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed
its fuel. After us
man
could not survive on the Earth, because the
conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be
something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end
of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right."
The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The
Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his
paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp
and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has
failed.
Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief,
he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he
raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.
In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first
in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at
Var.
Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz?
Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go
beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?" | They did not believe that anyone would want to return to a terrifying society that the Ryzgas left behind | They commissioned the Watcher to spin dreadful dreams about what might happen if people attempted to do so | They thought that their descendants would eventually die out without access to raw materials | They were convinced that no one would be able to penetrate the mountain without advanced technology | 3 |
32836_VRNCK2U5_9 | How is the Ryzga different from Var and Neena? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
WHEN THE MOUNTAIN SHOOK
By Robert Abernathy
Illustrated by Kelly Freas
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its
cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare
with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and
conquer....
At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered
among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense
and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the
dying sun.
Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.
The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a
warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening
twilight, even as her love was about him.
Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass."
He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but
there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other
direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to
sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with
vengeance.
"Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago."
She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black
mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He
felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this.
For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass,
she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to
follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would
be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse
was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the
last days.
"Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to
the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.
It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen
reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and
strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an
avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening
from the crevices of the rock.
"Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.
Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the
best I can do now. Come on."
There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the
sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer
ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be
crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings
cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might
never have won through.
It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's
cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the
glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was
sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from
the rocks above. They heard no sound.
The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.
Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep
watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their
childhood; but neither had been here before.
But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to
make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly
with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling
in the light that poured from within.
They felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a
shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight
of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was
disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a
tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;
beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.
The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked
voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in
thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here."
"You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he
had not meant to be.
The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.
Come in! You're letting in the wind."
Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that
all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast
against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from
the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began
a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to
descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into
lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then
turned questioningly to the young pair.
"We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can
spare it. We're pursued."
"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves
comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world
is as bad as it was when I was last in it."
Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded
them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of
weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no
doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young."
Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history
briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before
very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would
recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud
between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us
off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours
behind us."
"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the
Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families."
Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be
able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.
"And what will you do now?"
Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're
overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear
to follow us."
"To the mountain, you mean."
"And into it, if need be."
The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she
nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you—are you willing to follow
your lover in this?"
Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at
Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why,
I will lead, if his courage should fail him."
The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this
thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you
are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to
guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves
and on all men."
"We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their
mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world
crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the
Ryzgas will come forth."
"Do you believe that?"
"As one believes stories."
"It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated
farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the
First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they
come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard
them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,
the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled
below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the
power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.
Var stared down at his hands.
"The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race
as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before
the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such
tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled
the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.
They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to
its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of
their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of
those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great
and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.
"Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only
fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the
Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age.
If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will
find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and
strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks
of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And
we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity
that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.
"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science
that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their
weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making
sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them.
Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the
completion of the last of the starships.
"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the
memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a
picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...."
Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old
man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their
vision, and they saw—
Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city
that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's
darkness—that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted
the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a
shaking of the earth.
Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead,
poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces,
naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where
the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half
sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long
last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion—a rebellion without
hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of
the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood.
Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still
fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the
shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the
lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned.
Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept
outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had
shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were
lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense
white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound.
They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship,
and it was leaving.
It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the
millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others
cried desolately—
wait!
Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping
fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist
and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and
the ship was gone.
The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the
citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,
and the city burned and burned....
Var blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm
tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that
he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a
vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived
through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man
who was the Mountain Watcher.
"Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on
Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to
rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's
heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep,
their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone
dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely.
"I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the
old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain
in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance,
folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy
world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again."
The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally,
"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if
in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking."
Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her
mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var
looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher
seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his
own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,
"You are tired. Best sleep until morning."
Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and
that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and
drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave
swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.
Var woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had
been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic
gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how
it was.
He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that
sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep
had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him
coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know
the face.
Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, "Who are you?
Where's the Watcher?"
The other flashed white teeth in a smile. "I'm the Watcher," he
answered. "Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the
day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here."
"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—"
"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They
were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away."
Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, "Thank you,
Watcher."
"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are
rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga
mountain?"
Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, "We have no
alternative."
There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh
breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and
they followed him outside.
The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain.
It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right
and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by
the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and
gave nothing back.
Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling
a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river
dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the
curling fog hid everything.
"You have an alternative," said the Watcher crisply. The two took their
eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his
face was unsmiling. "It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the
north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking
your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other
direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers
will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will
be too late for them to overtake Var."
That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked
at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into
one.
They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: "
It
would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet
these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone
irreparable.... But to become
I
and
you
again—that cannot be
borne.
"
They said in unison, "No. Not that."
The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, "Very well. I will
give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the
Ryzga mountain."
Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of
the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little
dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.
"You are ready to go," said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice
was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the
Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.
Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's
mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, "You
don't blame us?"
"You have taken life in your own hands," rasped the Watcher. "Who does
that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!"
They groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling
river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream
bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would
cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at
last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that
the pursuit already halved their lead.
They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the
doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into
the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so
little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.
Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently,
head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond
slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe
from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an
abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness
had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it
had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the
mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not
living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in
response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle
circuits....
The two stood shivering together.
The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they
heard a great voice crying, "There they are!"
Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that
they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was
too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the
thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: "Young fools! I've
caught you now!"
Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.
Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: "Go
back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!"
Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and
for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the
mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of
sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling
Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the
grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist
billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him
exhorting his men to haste.
Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent
whisper said, "Come on!"
Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness.
At Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he
muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle
of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising
potential that seemed to whisper
Ready ... ready....
The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the
featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var
summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more—
Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being,
pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out.
The immaterial globe of light danced on before them.
"Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet
further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had
made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into
these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense
had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not
blocked....
Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote
vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor
under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense
energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that
was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the
mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make
ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that
might be near at hand.
From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay,
then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the
dark burrow:
"
Stop!
—before you go too far!"
Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go
free."
In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with
that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each
knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own—that
neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world
outside should crumble to ruin around them.
"Follow us, then!"
They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain
increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound
was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream.
Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo
the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood
before their monstrous and inhuman power.
Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena
saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded
room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward
to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.
Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded
with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched
light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the
progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this
must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened
and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid
shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....
For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at
this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of
their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life.
They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once:
perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and
only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over
the threshold.
There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,
above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a
massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.
Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their
last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.
He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of
changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,
with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;
his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.
That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,
conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet
not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's
manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and
assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.
With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite
open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and
unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible
symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to
close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....
He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the
interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new,
but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like
metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The
image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily
have been totally strange.
"Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality—good. Physically
excellent stock...." There was a complicated and incomprehensible
schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand
years—more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all
initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We
can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool
progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating
in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient,
crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will—
toward the stars, the
stars!
The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones
indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest...."
Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed
by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply
ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by
the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's
face.
The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:
Decision!
He turned
toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for
one spot upon it.
Neena screamed.
Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up
seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes
and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.
There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster
crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.
But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it
remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The
Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip
closed down on all his motor nerves.
Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into
the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and
such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's
efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as
misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to
wrestle with the mind.
Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream
monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy
tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a
real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates
with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There
will be no new beginning for you in
our
world, Ryzga! In two thousand
years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you
built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and
energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way."
Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still.
"Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine
civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed
its fuel. After us
man
could not survive on the Earth, because the
conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be
something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end
of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right."
The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The
Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his
paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp
and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has
failed.
Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief,
he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he
raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.
In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first
in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at
Var.
Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz?
Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go
beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?" | He ages backwards | He cannot spin dreams | He is immortal | He is a zombie | 1 |
31355_7INGZJ49_1 | The four men are ranked according to: | Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Space Science Fiction May 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
TO EACH HIS STAR
by
BRYCE WALTON
"Nothing around those other suns but ashes and dried
blood," old Dunbar told the space-wrecked, desperate men.
"Only one way to go, where we can float down through the
clouds to Paradise. That's straight ahead to the sun with
the red rim around it."
But Dunbar's eyes were old and uncertain. How could they
believe in his choice when every star in this forsaken
section of space was surrounded by a beckoning red rim?
There was just blackness, frosty glimmering terrible blackness, going
out and out forever in all directions. Russell didn't think they could
remain sane in all this blackness much longer. Bitterly he thought of
how they would die—not knowing within maybe thousands of light years
where they were, or where they were going.
After the wreck, the four of them had floated a while, floated and
drifted together, four men in bulbous pressure suits like small
individual rockets, held together by an awful pressing need for each
other and by the "gravity-rope" beam.
Dunbar, the oldest of the four, an old space-buster with a face
wrinkled like a dried prune, burned by cosmic rays and the suns of
worlds so far away they were scarcely credible, had taken command.
Suddenly, Old Dunbar had known where they were. Suddenly, Dunbar knew
where they were going.
They could talk to one another through the etheric transmitters inside
their helmets. They could live ... if this was living ... a long time,
if only a man's brain would hold up, Russell thought. The suits were
complete units. 700 pounds each, all enclosing shelters, with
atmosphere pressure, temperature control, mobility in space, and
electric power. Each suit had its own power-plant, reprocessing
continuously the precious air breathed by the occupants, putting it
back into circulation again after enriching it. Packed with food
concentrates. Each suit a rocket, each human being part of a rocket,
and the special "life-gun" that went with each suit each blast of
which sent a man a few hundred thousand miles further on toward
wherever he was going.
Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of
gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had
never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,
taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where
he was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,
knew too, but were afraid to admit it.
But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that old
Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.
A lot of time had rushed past into darkness. Russell had no idea now
how long the four of them had been plunging toward the red-rimmed sun
that never seemed to get any nearer. When the ultra-drive had gone
crazy the four of them had blanked out and nobody could say now how
long an interim that had been. Nobody knew what happened to a man who
suffered a space-time warping like that. When they had regained
consciousness, the ship was pretty banged up, and the meteor-repeller
shields cracked. A meteor ripped the ship down the center like an old
breakfast cannister.
How long ago that had been, Russell didn't know. All Russell knew was
that they were millions of light years from any place he had ever
heard about, where the galactic space lanterns had absolutely no
recognizable pattern. But Dunbar knew. And Russell was looking at
Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking
about how Dunbar looked inside that suit—and hating Dunbar more and
more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling
optimism—because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and
calling their destination Paradise.
Russell wanted to laugh, but the last time he'd given way to this
impulse, the results inside his helmet had been too unpleasant to
repeat.
Sometimes Russell thought of other things besides his growing hatred
of the old man. Sometimes he thought about the ship, lost back there
in the void, and he wondered if wrecked space ships were ever found.
Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked
ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back
on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like
strange seeds down the night winds of Venus.
And a human was smaller still, thought Russell when he was not hating
Dunbar. Out here, a human being is the smallest thing of all. He
thought then of what Dunbar would say to such a thought, how Dunbar
would laugh that high piping squawking laugh of his and say that the
human being was bigger than the Universe itself.
Dunbar had a big answer for every little thing.
When the four of them had escaped from that prison colony on a
sizzling hot asteroid rock in the Ronlwhyn system, that wasn't enough
for Dunbar. Hell no—Dunbar had to start talking about a place they
could go where they'd never be apprehended, in a system no one else
had ever heard of, where they could live like gods on a green soft
world like the Earth had been a long time back.
And Dunbar had spouted endlessly about a world of treasure they would
find, if they would just follow old Dunbar. That's what all four of
them had been trying to find all their lives in the big cold grabbag
of eternity—a rich star, a rich far fertile star where no one else
had ever been, loaded with treasure that had no name, that no one had
ever heard of before. And was, because of that, the richest treasure
of all.
We all look alike out here in these big rocket pressure suits, Russell
thought. No one for God only knew how many of millions of light years
away could see or care. Still—we might have a chance to live, even
now, Russell thought—if it weren't for old crazy Dunbar.
They might have a chance if Alvar and Johnson weren't so damn lacking
in self-confidence as to put all their trust in that crazed old
rum-dum. Russell had known now for some time that they were going in
the wrong direction. No reason for knowing. Just a hunch. And Russell
was sure his hunch was right.
Russell said. "Look—look to your left and to your right and behind
us. Four suns. You guys see those other three suns all around you,
don't you?"
"Sure," someone said.
"Well, if you'll notice," Russell said, "the one on the left also now
has a red rim around it. Can't you guys see that?"
"Yeah, I see it," Alvar said.
"So now," Johnson said, "there's two suns with red rims around them."
"We're about in the middle of those four suns aren't we, Dunbar?"
Russell said.
"That's right, boys!" yelled old Dunbar in that sickeningly optimistic
voice. Like a hysterical old woman's. "Just about in the sweet dark
old middle."
"You're still sure it's the sun up ahead ... that's the only one with
life on it, Dunbar ... the only one we can live on?" Russell asked.
"That's right! That's right," Dunbar yelled. "That's the only one—and
it's a paradise. Not just a place to live, boys—but a place you'll
have trouble believing in because it's like a dream!"
"And none of these other three suns have worlds we could live on,
Dunbar?" Russell asked. Keep the old duck talking like this and maybe
Alvar and Johnson would see that he was cracked.
"Yeah," said Alvar. "You still say that, Dunbar?"
"No life, boys, nothing," Dunbar laughed. "Nothing on these other
worlds but ashes ... just ashes and iron and dried blood, dried a
million years or more."
"When in hell were you ever here?" Johnson said. "You say you were
here before. You never said when, or why or anything!"
"It was a long time back boys. Don't remember too well, but it was
when we had an old ship called the DOG STAR that I was here. A pirate
ship and I was second in command, and we came through this sector.
That was—hell, it musta' been fifty years ago. I been too many places
nobody's ever bothered to name or chart, to remember where it is, but
I been here. I remember those four suns all spotted to form a perfect
circle from this point, with us squarely in the middle. We explored
all these suns and the worlds that go round 'em. Trust me, boys, and
we'll reach the right one. And that one's just like Paradise."
"Paradise is it," Russell whispered hoarsely.
"Paradise and there we'll be like gods, like Mercuries with wings
flying on nights of sweet song. These other suns, don't let them
bother you. They're Jezebels of stars. All painted up in the darkness
and pretty and waiting and calling and lying! They make you think of
nice green worlds all running waters and dews and forests thick as
fleas on a wet dog. But it ain't there, boys. I know this place. I
been here, long time back."
Russell said tightly. "It'll take us a long time won't it? If it's got
air we can breath, and water we can drink and shade we can rest
in—that'll be paradise enough for us. But it'll take a long time
won't it? And what if it isn't there—what if after all the time we
spend hoping and getting there—there won't be nothing but ashes and
cracked clay?"
"I know we're going right," Dunbar said cheerfully. "I can tell. Like
I said—you can tell it because of the red rim around it."
"But the sun on our left, you can see—it's got a red rim too now,"
Russell said.
"Yeah, that's right," said Alvar. "Sometimes I see a red rim around
the one we're going for, sometimes a red rim around that one on the
left. Now, sometimes I'm not sure either of them's got a red rim. You
said that one had a red rim, Dunbar, and I wanted to believe it. So
now maybe we're all seeing a red rim that was never there."
Old Dunbar laughed. The sound brought blood hotly to Russell's face.
"We're heading to the right one, boys. Don't doubt me ... I been here.
We explored all these sun systems. And I remember it all. The second
planet from that red-rimmed sun. You come down through a soft
atmosphere, floating like in a dream. You see the green lakes coming
up through the clouds and the women dancing and the music playing. I
remember seeing a ship there that brought those women there, a long
long time before ever I got there. A land like heaven and women like
angels singing and dancing and laughing with red lips and arms white
as milk, and soft silky hair floating in the winds."
Russell was very sick of the old man's voice. He was at least glad he
didn't have to look at the old man now. His bald head, his skinny
bobbing neck, his simpering watery blue eyes. But he still had to
suffer that immutable babbling, that idiotic cheerfulness ... and
knowing all the time the old man was crazy, that he was leading them
wrong.
I'd break away, go it alone to the right sun, Russell thought—but I'd
never make it alone. A little while out here alone and I'd be nuttier
than old Dunbar will ever be, even if he keeps on getting nuttier all
the time.
Somewhere, sometime then ... Russell got the idea that the only way
was to get rid of Dunbar.
You mean to tell us there are people living by that red-rimmed sun,"
Russell said.
"Lost people ... lost ... who knows how long," Dunbar said, as the
four of them hurtled along. "You never know where you'll find people
on a world somewhere nobody's ever named or knows about. Places where
a lost ship's landed and never got up again, or wrecked itself so far
off the lanes they'll never be found except by accident for millions
of years. That's what this world is, boys. Must have been a ship load
of beautiful people, maybe actresses and people like that being hauled
to some outpost to entertain. They're like angels now, living in a
land all free from care. Every place you see green forests and fields
and blue lakes, and at nights there's three moons that come around the
sky in a thousand different colors. And it never gets cold ... it's
always spring, always spring, boys, and the music plays all night,
every night of a long long year...."
Russell suddenly shouted. "Keep quiet, Dunbar. Shut up will you?"
Johnson said. "Dunbar—how long'll it take us?"
"Six months to a year, I'd say," Dunbar yelled happily. "That is—of
our hereditary time."
"What?" croaked Alvar.
Johnson didn't say anything at all.
Russell screamed at Dunbar, then quieted down. He whispered. "Six
months to a year—out here—cooped up in these damn suits. You're
crazy as hell, Dunbar. Crazy ... crazy! Nobody could stand it. We'll
all be crazier than you are—"
"We'll make it, boys. Trust ole' Dunbar. What's a year when we know
we're getting to Paradise at the end of it? What's a year out here ...
it's paradise ain't it, compared with that prison hole we were rotting
in? We can make it. We have the food concentrates, and all the rest.
All we need's the will, boys, and we got that. The whole damn Universe
isn't big enough to kill the will of a human being, boys. I been over
a whole lot of it, and I know. In the old days—"
"The hell with the old days," screamed Russell.
"Now quiet down, Russ," Dunbar said in a kind of dreadful crooning
whisper. "You calm down now. You younger fellows—you don't look at
things the way we used to. Thing is, we got to go straight. People
trapped like this liable to start meandering. Liable to start losing
the old will-power."
He chuckled.
"Yeah," said Alvar. "Someone says maybe we ought to go left, and
someone says to go right, and someone else says to go in another
direction. And then someone says maybe they'd better go back the old
way. An' pretty soon something breaks, or the food runs out, and
you're a million million miles from someplace you don't care about any
more because you're dead. All frozen up in space ... preserved like a
piece of meat in a cold storage locker. And then maybe in a million
years or so some lousy insect man from Jupiter comes along and finds
you and takes you away to a museum...."
"Shut up!" Johnson yelled.
Dunbar laughed. "Boys, boys, don't get panicky. Keep your heads. Just
stick to old Dunbar and he'll see you through. I'm always lucky. Only
one way to go ... an' that's straight ahead to the sun with the
red-rim around it ... and then we tune in the gravity repellers, and
coast down, floating and singing down through the clouds to
paradise."
After that they traveled on for what seemed months to Russell, but it
couldn't have been over a day or two of the kind of time-sense he had
inherited from Earth.
Then he saw how the other two stars also were beginning to develop red
rims. He yelled this fact out to the others. And Alvar said. "Russ's
right. That sun to the right, and the one behind us ... now they ALL
have red rims around them. Dunbar—" A pause and no awareness of
motion.
Dunbar laughed. "Sure, they all maybe have a touch of red, but it
isn't the same, boys. I can tell the difference. Trust me—"
Russell half choked on his words. "You old goat! With those old eyes
of yours, you couldn't see your way into a fire!"
"Don't get panicky now. Keep your heads. In another year, we'll be
there—"
"God, you gotta' be sure," Alvar said. "I don't mind dyin' out here.
But after a year of this, and then to get to a world that was only
ashes, and not able to go any further—"
"I always come through, boys. I'm lucky. Angel women will take us to
their houses on the edges of cool lakes, little houses that sit there
in the sun like fancy jewels. And we'll walk under colored fountains,
pretty colored fountains just splashing and splashing like pretty rain
on our hungry hides. That's worth waiting for."
Russell did it before he hardly realized he was killing the old man.
It was something he had had to do for a long time and that made it
easy. There was a flash of burning oxygen from inside the suit of
Dunbar. If he'd aimed right, Russell knew the fire-bullet should have
pierced Dunbar's back. Now the fire was gone, extinguished
automatically by units inside the suit. The suit was still inflated,
self-sealing. Nothing appeared to have changed. The four of them
hurtling on together, but inside that first suit up there on the front
of the gravity rope, Dunbar was dead.
He was dead and his mouth was shut for good.
Dunbar's last faint cry from inside his suit still rang in Russell's
ears, and he knew Alvar and Johnson had heard it too. Alvar and
Johnson both called Dunbar's name a few times. There was no answer.
"Russ—you shouldn't have done that," Johnson whispered. "You
shouldn't have done that to the old man!"
"No," Alvar said, so low he could barely be heard. "You shouldn't have
done it."
"I did it for the three of us," Russell said. "It was either him or us.
Lies ... lies that was all he had left in his crazy head. Paradise ...
don't tell me you guys don't see the red rims around all four suns, all
four suns all around us. Don't tell me you guys didn't know he was batty,
that you really believed all that stuff he was spouting all the time!"
"Maybe he was lying, maybe not," Johnson said. "Now he's dead anyway."
"Maybe he was wrong, crazy, full of lies," Alvar said. "But now he's
dead."
"How could he see any difference in those four stars?" Russell said,
louder.
"He thought he was right," Alvar said. "He wanted to take us to
paradise. He was happy, nothing could stop the old man—but he's dead
now."
He sighed.
"He was taking us wrong ... wrong!" Russell screamed. "Angels—music
all night—houses like jewels—and women like angels—"
"
Shhhh
," said Alvar. It was quiet. How could it be so quiet, Russell
thought? And up ahead the old man's pressure suit with a corpse inside
went on ahead, leading the other three at the front of the
gravity-rope.
"Maybe he was wrong," Alvar said. "But now do we know which way is
right?"
Sometime later, Johnson said, "We got to decide now. Let's forget the
old man. Let's forget him and all that's gone and let's start now and
decide what to do."
And Alvar said, "Guess he was crazy all right, and I guess we trusted
him because we didn't have the strength to make up our own minds. Why
does a crazy man's laugh sound so good when you're desperate and don't
know what to do?"
"I always had a feeling we were going wrong," Johnson said. "Anyway,
it's forgotten, Russ. It's swallowed up in the darkness all around.
It's never been."
Russell said, "I've had a hunch all along that maybe the old man was
here before, and that he was right about there being a star here with
a world we can live on. But I've known we was heading wrong. I've had
a hunch all along that the right star was the one to the left."
"I don't know," Johnson sighed. "I been feeling partial toward that
one on the right. What about you, Alvar?"
"I always thought we were going straight in the opposite direction
from what we should, I guess. I always wanted to turn around and go
back. It won't make over maybe a month's difference. And what does a
month matter anyway out here—hell there never was any time out here
until we came along. We make our own time here, and a month don't
matter to me."
Sweat ran down Russell's face. His voice trembled. "No—that's wrong.
You're both wrong." He could see himself going it alone. Going crazy
because he was alone. He'd have broken away, gone his own direction,
long ago but for that fear.
"How can we tell which of us is right?" Alvar said. "It's like
everything was changing all the time out here. Sometimes I'd swear
none of those suns had red rims, and at other times—like the old man
said, they're all pretty and lying and saying nothing, just changing
all the time. Jezebel stars, the old man said."
"I know I'm right," Russell pleaded. "My hunches always been right.
My hunch got us out of that prison didn't it? Listen—I tell you it's
that star to the left—"
"The one to the right," said Johnson.
"We been going away from the right one all the time," said Alvar.
"We got to stay together," said Russell. "Nobody could spend a year
out here ... alone...."
"Ah ... in another month or so we'd be lousy company anyway," Alvar
said. "Maybe a guy could get to the point where he'd sleep most of the
time ... just wake up enough times to give himself another boost with
the old life-gun."
"We got to face it," Johnson said finally. "We three don't go on
together any more."
"That's it," said Alvar. "There's three suns that look like they might
be right seeing as how we all agree the old man was wrong. But we
believe there is one we can live by, because we all seem to agree that
the old man might have been right about that. If we stick together,
the chance is three to one against us. But if each of us makes for one
star, one of us has a chance to live. Maybe not in paradise like the
old man said, but a place where we can live. And maybe there'll be
intelligent life, maybe even a ship, and whoever gets the right star
can come and help the other two...."
"No ... God no...." Russell whispered over and over. "None of us can
ever make it alone...."
Alvar said, "We each take the star he likes best. I'll go back the
other way. Russ, you take the left. And you, Johnson, go to the
right."
Johnson started to laugh. Russell was yelling wildly at them, and
above his own yelling he could hear Johnson's rising laughter. "Every
guy's got a star of his own," Johnson said when he stopped laughing.
"And we got ours. A nice red-rimmed sun for each of us to call his
very own."
"Okay," Alvar said. "We cut off the gravity rope, and each to his own
sun."
Now Russell wasn't saying anything.
"And the old man," Alvar said, "can keep right on going toward what he
thought was right. And he'll keep on going. Course he won't be able to
give himself another boost with the life-gun, but he'll keep going.
Someday he'll get to that red-rimmed star of his. Out here in space,
once you're going, you never stop ... and I guess there isn't any
other body to pull him off his course. And what will time matter to
old Dunbar? Even less than to us, I guess. He's dead and he won't
care."
"Ready," Johnson said. "I'll cut off the gravity rope."
"I'm ready," Alvar said. "To go back toward whatever it was I started
from."
"Ready, Russ?"
Russell couldn't say anything. He stared at the endless void which now
he would share with no one. Not even crazy old Dunbar.
"All right," Johnson said. "Good-bye."
Russell felt the release, felt the sudden inexplicable isolation and
aloneness even before Alvar and Johnson used their life-guns and shot
out of sight, Johnson toward the left and Alvar back toward that other
red-rimmed sun behind them.
And old Dunbar shooting right on ahead. And all three of them
dwindling and dwindling and blinking out like little lights.
Fading, he could hear their voices. "Each to his own star," Johnson
said. "On a bee line."
"On a bee line," Alvar said.
Russell used his own life-gun and in a little while he didn't hear
Alvar or Johnson's voices, nor could he see them. They were thousands
of miles away, and going further all the time.
Russell's head fell forward against the front of his helmet, and he
closed his eyes. "Maybe," he thought, "I shouldn't have killed the old
man. Maybe one sun's as good as another...."
Then he raised his body and looked out into the year of blackness that
waited for him, stretching away to the red-rimmed sun. Even if he were
right—he was sure now he'd never make it alone.
The body inside the pressure suit drifted into a low-level orbit
around the second planet from the sun of its choice, and drifted there
a long time. A strato-cruiser detected it by chance because of the
strong concentration of radio-activity that came from it.
They took the body down to one of the small, quiet towns on the edge
of one of the many blue lakes where the domed houses were like bright
joyful jewels. They got the leathery, well-preserved body from the
pressure suit.
"An old man," one of them mused. "A very old man. From one of the lost
sectors. I wonder how and why he came so very far from his home?"
"Wrecked a ship out there, probably," one of the others said. "But he
managed to get this far. It looks as though a small meteor fragment
pierced his body. Here. You see?"
"Yes," another of them said. "But what amazes me is that this old man
picked this planet out of all the others. The only one in this entire
sector that would sustain life."
"Maybe he was just a very lucky old man. Yes ... a man who attains
such an age was usually lucky. Or at least that is what they say about
the lost sectors."
"Maybe he knew the way here. Maybe he was here before—sometime."
The other shook his head. "I don't think so. They say some humans from
that far sector did land here—but that's probably only a myth. And if
they did, it was well over a thousand years ago."
Another said. "He has a fine face, this old man. A noble face. Whoever
he is ... wherever he came from, he died bravely and he knew the way,
though he never reached this haven of the lost alive."
"Nor is it irony that he reached here dead," said the Lake Chieftain.
He had been listening and he stepped forward and raised his arm. "He
was old. It is obvious that he fought bravely, that he had great
courage, and that he knew the way. He will be given a burial suitable
to his stature, and he will rest here among the brave.
"Let the women dance and the music play for this old man. Let the
trumpets speak, and the rockets fly up. And let flowers be strewn over
the path above which the women will carry him to rest." | experience | strength | health | age | 3 |
31355_7INGZJ49_2 | What fuels Russell's loathing of Dunbar? | Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Space Science Fiction May 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
TO EACH HIS STAR
by
BRYCE WALTON
"Nothing around those other suns but ashes and dried
blood," old Dunbar told the space-wrecked, desperate men.
"Only one way to go, where we can float down through the
clouds to Paradise. That's straight ahead to the sun with
the red rim around it."
But Dunbar's eyes were old and uncertain. How could they
believe in his choice when every star in this forsaken
section of space was surrounded by a beckoning red rim?
There was just blackness, frosty glimmering terrible blackness, going
out and out forever in all directions. Russell didn't think they could
remain sane in all this blackness much longer. Bitterly he thought of
how they would die—not knowing within maybe thousands of light years
where they were, or where they were going.
After the wreck, the four of them had floated a while, floated and
drifted together, four men in bulbous pressure suits like small
individual rockets, held together by an awful pressing need for each
other and by the "gravity-rope" beam.
Dunbar, the oldest of the four, an old space-buster with a face
wrinkled like a dried prune, burned by cosmic rays and the suns of
worlds so far away they were scarcely credible, had taken command.
Suddenly, Old Dunbar had known where they were. Suddenly, Dunbar knew
where they were going.
They could talk to one another through the etheric transmitters inside
their helmets. They could live ... if this was living ... a long time,
if only a man's brain would hold up, Russell thought. The suits were
complete units. 700 pounds each, all enclosing shelters, with
atmosphere pressure, temperature control, mobility in space, and
electric power. Each suit had its own power-plant, reprocessing
continuously the precious air breathed by the occupants, putting it
back into circulation again after enriching it. Packed with food
concentrates. Each suit a rocket, each human being part of a rocket,
and the special "life-gun" that went with each suit each blast of
which sent a man a few hundred thousand miles further on toward
wherever he was going.
Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of
gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had
never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,
taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where
he was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,
knew too, but were afraid to admit it.
But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that old
Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.
A lot of time had rushed past into darkness. Russell had no idea now
how long the four of them had been plunging toward the red-rimmed sun
that never seemed to get any nearer. When the ultra-drive had gone
crazy the four of them had blanked out and nobody could say now how
long an interim that had been. Nobody knew what happened to a man who
suffered a space-time warping like that. When they had regained
consciousness, the ship was pretty banged up, and the meteor-repeller
shields cracked. A meteor ripped the ship down the center like an old
breakfast cannister.
How long ago that had been, Russell didn't know. All Russell knew was
that they were millions of light years from any place he had ever
heard about, where the galactic space lanterns had absolutely no
recognizable pattern. But Dunbar knew. And Russell was looking at
Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking
about how Dunbar looked inside that suit—and hating Dunbar more and
more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling
optimism—because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and
calling their destination Paradise.
Russell wanted to laugh, but the last time he'd given way to this
impulse, the results inside his helmet had been too unpleasant to
repeat.
Sometimes Russell thought of other things besides his growing hatred
of the old man. Sometimes he thought about the ship, lost back there
in the void, and he wondered if wrecked space ships were ever found.
Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked
ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back
on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like
strange seeds down the night winds of Venus.
And a human was smaller still, thought Russell when he was not hating
Dunbar. Out here, a human being is the smallest thing of all. He
thought then of what Dunbar would say to such a thought, how Dunbar
would laugh that high piping squawking laugh of his and say that the
human being was bigger than the Universe itself.
Dunbar had a big answer for every little thing.
When the four of them had escaped from that prison colony on a
sizzling hot asteroid rock in the Ronlwhyn system, that wasn't enough
for Dunbar. Hell no—Dunbar had to start talking about a place they
could go where they'd never be apprehended, in a system no one else
had ever heard of, where they could live like gods on a green soft
world like the Earth had been a long time back.
And Dunbar had spouted endlessly about a world of treasure they would
find, if they would just follow old Dunbar. That's what all four of
them had been trying to find all their lives in the big cold grabbag
of eternity—a rich star, a rich far fertile star where no one else
had ever been, loaded with treasure that had no name, that no one had
ever heard of before. And was, because of that, the richest treasure
of all.
We all look alike out here in these big rocket pressure suits, Russell
thought. No one for God only knew how many of millions of light years
away could see or care. Still—we might have a chance to live, even
now, Russell thought—if it weren't for old crazy Dunbar.
They might have a chance if Alvar and Johnson weren't so damn lacking
in self-confidence as to put all their trust in that crazed old
rum-dum. Russell had known now for some time that they were going in
the wrong direction. No reason for knowing. Just a hunch. And Russell
was sure his hunch was right.
Russell said. "Look—look to your left and to your right and behind
us. Four suns. You guys see those other three suns all around you,
don't you?"
"Sure," someone said.
"Well, if you'll notice," Russell said, "the one on the left also now
has a red rim around it. Can't you guys see that?"
"Yeah, I see it," Alvar said.
"So now," Johnson said, "there's two suns with red rims around them."
"We're about in the middle of those four suns aren't we, Dunbar?"
Russell said.
"That's right, boys!" yelled old Dunbar in that sickeningly optimistic
voice. Like a hysterical old woman's. "Just about in the sweet dark
old middle."
"You're still sure it's the sun up ahead ... that's the only one with
life on it, Dunbar ... the only one we can live on?" Russell asked.
"That's right! That's right," Dunbar yelled. "That's the only one—and
it's a paradise. Not just a place to live, boys—but a place you'll
have trouble believing in because it's like a dream!"
"And none of these other three suns have worlds we could live on,
Dunbar?" Russell asked. Keep the old duck talking like this and maybe
Alvar and Johnson would see that he was cracked.
"Yeah," said Alvar. "You still say that, Dunbar?"
"No life, boys, nothing," Dunbar laughed. "Nothing on these other
worlds but ashes ... just ashes and iron and dried blood, dried a
million years or more."
"When in hell were you ever here?" Johnson said. "You say you were
here before. You never said when, or why or anything!"
"It was a long time back boys. Don't remember too well, but it was
when we had an old ship called the DOG STAR that I was here. A pirate
ship and I was second in command, and we came through this sector.
That was—hell, it musta' been fifty years ago. I been too many places
nobody's ever bothered to name or chart, to remember where it is, but
I been here. I remember those four suns all spotted to form a perfect
circle from this point, with us squarely in the middle. We explored
all these suns and the worlds that go round 'em. Trust me, boys, and
we'll reach the right one. And that one's just like Paradise."
"Paradise is it," Russell whispered hoarsely.
"Paradise and there we'll be like gods, like Mercuries with wings
flying on nights of sweet song. These other suns, don't let them
bother you. They're Jezebels of stars. All painted up in the darkness
and pretty and waiting and calling and lying! They make you think of
nice green worlds all running waters and dews and forests thick as
fleas on a wet dog. But it ain't there, boys. I know this place. I
been here, long time back."
Russell said tightly. "It'll take us a long time won't it? If it's got
air we can breath, and water we can drink and shade we can rest
in—that'll be paradise enough for us. But it'll take a long time
won't it? And what if it isn't there—what if after all the time we
spend hoping and getting there—there won't be nothing but ashes and
cracked clay?"
"I know we're going right," Dunbar said cheerfully. "I can tell. Like
I said—you can tell it because of the red rim around it."
"But the sun on our left, you can see—it's got a red rim too now,"
Russell said.
"Yeah, that's right," said Alvar. "Sometimes I see a red rim around
the one we're going for, sometimes a red rim around that one on the
left. Now, sometimes I'm not sure either of them's got a red rim. You
said that one had a red rim, Dunbar, and I wanted to believe it. So
now maybe we're all seeing a red rim that was never there."
Old Dunbar laughed. The sound brought blood hotly to Russell's face.
"We're heading to the right one, boys. Don't doubt me ... I been here.
We explored all these sun systems. And I remember it all. The second
planet from that red-rimmed sun. You come down through a soft
atmosphere, floating like in a dream. You see the green lakes coming
up through the clouds and the women dancing and the music playing. I
remember seeing a ship there that brought those women there, a long
long time before ever I got there. A land like heaven and women like
angels singing and dancing and laughing with red lips and arms white
as milk, and soft silky hair floating in the winds."
Russell was very sick of the old man's voice. He was at least glad he
didn't have to look at the old man now. His bald head, his skinny
bobbing neck, his simpering watery blue eyes. But he still had to
suffer that immutable babbling, that idiotic cheerfulness ... and
knowing all the time the old man was crazy, that he was leading them
wrong.
I'd break away, go it alone to the right sun, Russell thought—but I'd
never make it alone. A little while out here alone and I'd be nuttier
than old Dunbar will ever be, even if he keeps on getting nuttier all
the time.
Somewhere, sometime then ... Russell got the idea that the only way
was to get rid of Dunbar.
You mean to tell us there are people living by that red-rimmed sun,"
Russell said.
"Lost people ... lost ... who knows how long," Dunbar said, as the
four of them hurtled along. "You never know where you'll find people
on a world somewhere nobody's ever named or knows about. Places where
a lost ship's landed and never got up again, or wrecked itself so far
off the lanes they'll never be found except by accident for millions
of years. That's what this world is, boys. Must have been a ship load
of beautiful people, maybe actresses and people like that being hauled
to some outpost to entertain. They're like angels now, living in a
land all free from care. Every place you see green forests and fields
and blue lakes, and at nights there's three moons that come around the
sky in a thousand different colors. And it never gets cold ... it's
always spring, always spring, boys, and the music plays all night,
every night of a long long year...."
Russell suddenly shouted. "Keep quiet, Dunbar. Shut up will you?"
Johnson said. "Dunbar—how long'll it take us?"
"Six months to a year, I'd say," Dunbar yelled happily. "That is—of
our hereditary time."
"What?" croaked Alvar.
Johnson didn't say anything at all.
Russell screamed at Dunbar, then quieted down. He whispered. "Six
months to a year—out here—cooped up in these damn suits. You're
crazy as hell, Dunbar. Crazy ... crazy! Nobody could stand it. We'll
all be crazier than you are—"
"We'll make it, boys. Trust ole' Dunbar. What's a year when we know
we're getting to Paradise at the end of it? What's a year out here ...
it's paradise ain't it, compared with that prison hole we were rotting
in? We can make it. We have the food concentrates, and all the rest.
All we need's the will, boys, and we got that. The whole damn Universe
isn't big enough to kill the will of a human being, boys. I been over
a whole lot of it, and I know. In the old days—"
"The hell with the old days," screamed Russell.
"Now quiet down, Russ," Dunbar said in a kind of dreadful crooning
whisper. "You calm down now. You younger fellows—you don't look at
things the way we used to. Thing is, we got to go straight. People
trapped like this liable to start meandering. Liable to start losing
the old will-power."
He chuckled.
"Yeah," said Alvar. "Someone says maybe we ought to go left, and
someone says to go right, and someone else says to go in another
direction. And then someone says maybe they'd better go back the old
way. An' pretty soon something breaks, or the food runs out, and
you're a million million miles from someplace you don't care about any
more because you're dead. All frozen up in space ... preserved like a
piece of meat in a cold storage locker. And then maybe in a million
years or so some lousy insect man from Jupiter comes along and finds
you and takes you away to a museum...."
"Shut up!" Johnson yelled.
Dunbar laughed. "Boys, boys, don't get panicky. Keep your heads. Just
stick to old Dunbar and he'll see you through. I'm always lucky. Only
one way to go ... an' that's straight ahead to the sun with the
red-rim around it ... and then we tune in the gravity repellers, and
coast down, floating and singing down through the clouds to
paradise."
After that they traveled on for what seemed months to Russell, but it
couldn't have been over a day or two of the kind of time-sense he had
inherited from Earth.
Then he saw how the other two stars also were beginning to develop red
rims. He yelled this fact out to the others. And Alvar said. "Russ's
right. That sun to the right, and the one behind us ... now they ALL
have red rims around them. Dunbar—" A pause and no awareness of
motion.
Dunbar laughed. "Sure, they all maybe have a touch of red, but it
isn't the same, boys. I can tell the difference. Trust me—"
Russell half choked on his words. "You old goat! With those old eyes
of yours, you couldn't see your way into a fire!"
"Don't get panicky now. Keep your heads. In another year, we'll be
there—"
"God, you gotta' be sure," Alvar said. "I don't mind dyin' out here.
But after a year of this, and then to get to a world that was only
ashes, and not able to go any further—"
"I always come through, boys. I'm lucky. Angel women will take us to
their houses on the edges of cool lakes, little houses that sit there
in the sun like fancy jewels. And we'll walk under colored fountains,
pretty colored fountains just splashing and splashing like pretty rain
on our hungry hides. That's worth waiting for."
Russell did it before he hardly realized he was killing the old man.
It was something he had had to do for a long time and that made it
easy. There was a flash of burning oxygen from inside the suit of
Dunbar. If he'd aimed right, Russell knew the fire-bullet should have
pierced Dunbar's back. Now the fire was gone, extinguished
automatically by units inside the suit. The suit was still inflated,
self-sealing. Nothing appeared to have changed. The four of them
hurtling on together, but inside that first suit up there on the front
of the gravity rope, Dunbar was dead.
He was dead and his mouth was shut for good.
Dunbar's last faint cry from inside his suit still rang in Russell's
ears, and he knew Alvar and Johnson had heard it too. Alvar and
Johnson both called Dunbar's name a few times. There was no answer.
"Russ—you shouldn't have done that," Johnson whispered. "You
shouldn't have done that to the old man!"
"No," Alvar said, so low he could barely be heard. "You shouldn't have
done it."
"I did it for the three of us," Russell said. "It was either him or us.
Lies ... lies that was all he had left in his crazy head. Paradise ...
don't tell me you guys don't see the red rims around all four suns, all
four suns all around us. Don't tell me you guys didn't know he was batty,
that you really believed all that stuff he was spouting all the time!"
"Maybe he was lying, maybe not," Johnson said. "Now he's dead anyway."
"Maybe he was wrong, crazy, full of lies," Alvar said. "But now he's
dead."
"How could he see any difference in those four stars?" Russell said,
louder.
"He thought he was right," Alvar said. "He wanted to take us to
paradise. He was happy, nothing could stop the old man—but he's dead
now."
He sighed.
"He was taking us wrong ... wrong!" Russell screamed. "Angels—music
all night—houses like jewels—and women like angels—"
"
Shhhh
," said Alvar. It was quiet. How could it be so quiet, Russell
thought? And up ahead the old man's pressure suit with a corpse inside
went on ahead, leading the other three at the front of the
gravity-rope.
"Maybe he was wrong," Alvar said. "But now do we know which way is
right?"
Sometime later, Johnson said, "We got to decide now. Let's forget the
old man. Let's forget him and all that's gone and let's start now and
decide what to do."
And Alvar said, "Guess he was crazy all right, and I guess we trusted
him because we didn't have the strength to make up our own minds. Why
does a crazy man's laugh sound so good when you're desperate and don't
know what to do?"
"I always had a feeling we were going wrong," Johnson said. "Anyway,
it's forgotten, Russ. It's swallowed up in the darkness all around.
It's never been."
Russell said, "I've had a hunch all along that maybe the old man was
here before, and that he was right about there being a star here with
a world we can live on. But I've known we was heading wrong. I've had
a hunch all along that the right star was the one to the left."
"I don't know," Johnson sighed. "I been feeling partial toward that
one on the right. What about you, Alvar?"
"I always thought we were going straight in the opposite direction
from what we should, I guess. I always wanted to turn around and go
back. It won't make over maybe a month's difference. And what does a
month matter anyway out here—hell there never was any time out here
until we came along. We make our own time here, and a month don't
matter to me."
Sweat ran down Russell's face. His voice trembled. "No—that's wrong.
You're both wrong." He could see himself going it alone. Going crazy
because he was alone. He'd have broken away, gone his own direction,
long ago but for that fear.
"How can we tell which of us is right?" Alvar said. "It's like
everything was changing all the time out here. Sometimes I'd swear
none of those suns had red rims, and at other times—like the old man
said, they're all pretty and lying and saying nothing, just changing
all the time. Jezebel stars, the old man said."
"I know I'm right," Russell pleaded. "My hunches always been right.
My hunch got us out of that prison didn't it? Listen—I tell you it's
that star to the left—"
"The one to the right," said Johnson.
"We been going away from the right one all the time," said Alvar.
"We got to stay together," said Russell. "Nobody could spend a year
out here ... alone...."
"Ah ... in another month or so we'd be lousy company anyway," Alvar
said. "Maybe a guy could get to the point where he'd sleep most of the
time ... just wake up enough times to give himself another boost with
the old life-gun."
"We got to face it," Johnson said finally. "We three don't go on
together any more."
"That's it," said Alvar. "There's three suns that look like they might
be right seeing as how we all agree the old man was wrong. But we
believe there is one we can live by, because we all seem to agree that
the old man might have been right about that. If we stick together,
the chance is three to one against us. But if each of us makes for one
star, one of us has a chance to live. Maybe not in paradise like the
old man said, but a place where we can live. And maybe there'll be
intelligent life, maybe even a ship, and whoever gets the right star
can come and help the other two...."
"No ... God no...." Russell whispered over and over. "None of us can
ever make it alone...."
Alvar said, "We each take the star he likes best. I'll go back the
other way. Russ, you take the left. And you, Johnson, go to the
right."
Johnson started to laugh. Russell was yelling wildly at them, and
above his own yelling he could hear Johnson's rising laughter. "Every
guy's got a star of his own," Johnson said when he stopped laughing.
"And we got ours. A nice red-rimmed sun for each of us to call his
very own."
"Okay," Alvar said. "We cut off the gravity rope, and each to his own
sun."
Now Russell wasn't saying anything.
"And the old man," Alvar said, "can keep right on going toward what he
thought was right. And he'll keep on going. Course he won't be able to
give himself another boost with the life-gun, but he'll keep going.
Someday he'll get to that red-rimmed star of his. Out here in space,
once you're going, you never stop ... and I guess there isn't any
other body to pull him off his course. And what will time matter to
old Dunbar? Even less than to us, I guess. He's dead and he won't
care."
"Ready," Johnson said. "I'll cut off the gravity rope."
"I'm ready," Alvar said. "To go back toward whatever it was I started
from."
"Ready, Russ?"
Russell couldn't say anything. He stared at the endless void which now
he would share with no one. Not even crazy old Dunbar.
"All right," Johnson said. "Good-bye."
Russell felt the release, felt the sudden inexplicable isolation and
aloneness even before Alvar and Johnson used their life-guns and shot
out of sight, Johnson toward the left and Alvar back toward that other
red-rimmed sun behind them.
And old Dunbar shooting right on ahead. And all three of them
dwindling and dwindling and blinking out like little lights.
Fading, he could hear their voices. "Each to his own star," Johnson
said. "On a bee line."
"On a bee line," Alvar said.
Russell used his own life-gun and in a little while he didn't hear
Alvar or Johnson's voices, nor could he see them. They were thousands
of miles away, and going further all the time.
Russell's head fell forward against the front of his helmet, and he
closed his eyes. "Maybe," he thought, "I shouldn't have killed the old
man. Maybe one sun's as good as another...."
Then he raised his body and looked out into the year of blackness that
waited for him, stretching away to the red-rimmed sun. Even if he were
right—he was sure now he'd never make it alone.
The body inside the pressure suit drifted into a low-level orbit
around the second planet from the sun of its choice, and drifted there
a long time. A strato-cruiser detected it by chance because of the
strong concentration of radio-activity that came from it.
They took the body down to one of the small, quiet towns on the edge
of one of the many blue lakes where the domed houses were like bright
joyful jewels. They got the leathery, well-preserved body from the
pressure suit.
"An old man," one of them mused. "A very old man. From one of the lost
sectors. I wonder how and why he came so very far from his home?"
"Wrecked a ship out there, probably," one of the others said. "But he
managed to get this far. It looks as though a small meteor fragment
pierced his body. Here. You see?"
"Yes," another of them said. "But what amazes me is that this old man
picked this planet out of all the others. The only one in this entire
sector that would sustain life."
"Maybe he was just a very lucky old man. Yes ... a man who attains
such an age was usually lucky. Or at least that is what they say about
the lost sectors."
"Maybe he knew the way here. Maybe he was here before—sometime."
The other shook his head. "I don't think so. They say some humans from
that far sector did land here—but that's probably only a myth. And if
they did, it was well over a thousand years ago."
Another said. "He has a fine face, this old man. A noble face. Whoever
he is ... wherever he came from, he died bravely and he knew the way,
though he never reached this haven of the lost alive."
"Nor is it irony that he reached here dead," said the Lake Chieftain.
He had been listening and he stepped forward and raised his arm. "He
was old. It is obvious that he fought bravely, that he had great
courage, and that he knew the way. He will be given a burial suitable
to his stature, and he will rest here among the brave.
"Let the women dance and the music play for this old man. Let the
trumpets speak, and the rockets fly up. And let flowers be strewn over
the path above which the women will carry him to rest." | Dunbar's optimism | Dunbar's age | Dunbar's delusions | Dunbar's laugh | 0 |
31355_7INGZJ49_3 | What do the four men seek/value most in a star? That no one had ever heard of it before | Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Space Science Fiction May 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
TO EACH HIS STAR
by
BRYCE WALTON
"Nothing around those other suns but ashes and dried
blood," old Dunbar told the space-wrecked, desperate men.
"Only one way to go, where we can float down through the
clouds to Paradise. That's straight ahead to the sun with
the red rim around it."
But Dunbar's eyes were old and uncertain. How could they
believe in his choice when every star in this forsaken
section of space was surrounded by a beckoning red rim?
There was just blackness, frosty glimmering terrible blackness, going
out and out forever in all directions. Russell didn't think they could
remain sane in all this blackness much longer. Bitterly he thought of
how they would die—not knowing within maybe thousands of light years
where they were, or where they were going.
After the wreck, the four of them had floated a while, floated and
drifted together, four men in bulbous pressure suits like small
individual rockets, held together by an awful pressing need for each
other and by the "gravity-rope" beam.
Dunbar, the oldest of the four, an old space-buster with a face
wrinkled like a dried prune, burned by cosmic rays and the suns of
worlds so far away they were scarcely credible, had taken command.
Suddenly, Old Dunbar had known where they were. Suddenly, Dunbar knew
where they were going.
They could talk to one another through the etheric transmitters inside
their helmets. They could live ... if this was living ... a long time,
if only a man's brain would hold up, Russell thought. The suits were
complete units. 700 pounds each, all enclosing shelters, with
atmosphere pressure, temperature control, mobility in space, and
electric power. Each suit had its own power-plant, reprocessing
continuously the precious air breathed by the occupants, putting it
back into circulation again after enriching it. Packed with food
concentrates. Each suit a rocket, each human being part of a rocket,
and the special "life-gun" that went with each suit each blast of
which sent a man a few hundred thousand miles further on toward
wherever he was going.
Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of
gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had
never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,
taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where
he was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,
knew too, but were afraid to admit it.
But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that old
Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.
A lot of time had rushed past into darkness. Russell had no idea now
how long the four of them had been plunging toward the red-rimmed sun
that never seemed to get any nearer. When the ultra-drive had gone
crazy the four of them had blanked out and nobody could say now how
long an interim that had been. Nobody knew what happened to a man who
suffered a space-time warping like that. When they had regained
consciousness, the ship was pretty banged up, and the meteor-repeller
shields cracked. A meteor ripped the ship down the center like an old
breakfast cannister.
How long ago that had been, Russell didn't know. All Russell knew was
that they were millions of light years from any place he had ever
heard about, where the galactic space lanterns had absolutely no
recognizable pattern. But Dunbar knew. And Russell was looking at
Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking
about how Dunbar looked inside that suit—and hating Dunbar more and
more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling
optimism—because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and
calling their destination Paradise.
Russell wanted to laugh, but the last time he'd given way to this
impulse, the results inside his helmet had been too unpleasant to
repeat.
Sometimes Russell thought of other things besides his growing hatred
of the old man. Sometimes he thought about the ship, lost back there
in the void, and he wondered if wrecked space ships were ever found.
Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked
ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back
on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like
strange seeds down the night winds of Venus.
And a human was smaller still, thought Russell when he was not hating
Dunbar. Out here, a human being is the smallest thing of all. He
thought then of what Dunbar would say to such a thought, how Dunbar
would laugh that high piping squawking laugh of his and say that the
human being was bigger than the Universe itself.
Dunbar had a big answer for every little thing.
When the four of them had escaped from that prison colony on a
sizzling hot asteroid rock in the Ronlwhyn system, that wasn't enough
for Dunbar. Hell no—Dunbar had to start talking about a place they
could go where they'd never be apprehended, in a system no one else
had ever heard of, where they could live like gods on a green soft
world like the Earth had been a long time back.
And Dunbar had spouted endlessly about a world of treasure they would
find, if they would just follow old Dunbar. That's what all four of
them had been trying to find all their lives in the big cold grabbag
of eternity—a rich star, a rich far fertile star where no one else
had ever been, loaded with treasure that had no name, that no one had
ever heard of before. And was, because of that, the richest treasure
of all.
We all look alike out here in these big rocket pressure suits, Russell
thought. No one for God only knew how many of millions of light years
away could see or care. Still—we might have a chance to live, even
now, Russell thought—if it weren't for old crazy Dunbar.
They might have a chance if Alvar and Johnson weren't so damn lacking
in self-confidence as to put all their trust in that crazed old
rum-dum. Russell had known now for some time that they were going in
the wrong direction. No reason for knowing. Just a hunch. And Russell
was sure his hunch was right.
Russell said. "Look—look to your left and to your right and behind
us. Four suns. You guys see those other three suns all around you,
don't you?"
"Sure," someone said.
"Well, if you'll notice," Russell said, "the one on the left also now
has a red rim around it. Can't you guys see that?"
"Yeah, I see it," Alvar said.
"So now," Johnson said, "there's two suns with red rims around them."
"We're about in the middle of those four suns aren't we, Dunbar?"
Russell said.
"That's right, boys!" yelled old Dunbar in that sickeningly optimistic
voice. Like a hysterical old woman's. "Just about in the sweet dark
old middle."
"You're still sure it's the sun up ahead ... that's the only one with
life on it, Dunbar ... the only one we can live on?" Russell asked.
"That's right! That's right," Dunbar yelled. "That's the only one—and
it's a paradise. Not just a place to live, boys—but a place you'll
have trouble believing in because it's like a dream!"
"And none of these other three suns have worlds we could live on,
Dunbar?" Russell asked. Keep the old duck talking like this and maybe
Alvar and Johnson would see that he was cracked.
"Yeah," said Alvar. "You still say that, Dunbar?"
"No life, boys, nothing," Dunbar laughed. "Nothing on these other
worlds but ashes ... just ashes and iron and dried blood, dried a
million years or more."
"When in hell were you ever here?" Johnson said. "You say you were
here before. You never said when, or why or anything!"
"It was a long time back boys. Don't remember too well, but it was
when we had an old ship called the DOG STAR that I was here. A pirate
ship and I was second in command, and we came through this sector.
That was—hell, it musta' been fifty years ago. I been too many places
nobody's ever bothered to name or chart, to remember where it is, but
I been here. I remember those four suns all spotted to form a perfect
circle from this point, with us squarely in the middle. We explored
all these suns and the worlds that go round 'em. Trust me, boys, and
we'll reach the right one. And that one's just like Paradise."
"Paradise is it," Russell whispered hoarsely.
"Paradise and there we'll be like gods, like Mercuries with wings
flying on nights of sweet song. These other suns, don't let them
bother you. They're Jezebels of stars. All painted up in the darkness
and pretty and waiting and calling and lying! They make you think of
nice green worlds all running waters and dews and forests thick as
fleas on a wet dog. But it ain't there, boys. I know this place. I
been here, long time back."
Russell said tightly. "It'll take us a long time won't it? If it's got
air we can breath, and water we can drink and shade we can rest
in—that'll be paradise enough for us. But it'll take a long time
won't it? And what if it isn't there—what if after all the time we
spend hoping and getting there—there won't be nothing but ashes and
cracked clay?"
"I know we're going right," Dunbar said cheerfully. "I can tell. Like
I said—you can tell it because of the red rim around it."
"But the sun on our left, you can see—it's got a red rim too now,"
Russell said.
"Yeah, that's right," said Alvar. "Sometimes I see a red rim around
the one we're going for, sometimes a red rim around that one on the
left. Now, sometimes I'm not sure either of them's got a red rim. You
said that one had a red rim, Dunbar, and I wanted to believe it. So
now maybe we're all seeing a red rim that was never there."
Old Dunbar laughed. The sound brought blood hotly to Russell's face.
"We're heading to the right one, boys. Don't doubt me ... I been here.
We explored all these sun systems. And I remember it all. The second
planet from that red-rimmed sun. You come down through a soft
atmosphere, floating like in a dream. You see the green lakes coming
up through the clouds and the women dancing and the music playing. I
remember seeing a ship there that brought those women there, a long
long time before ever I got there. A land like heaven and women like
angels singing and dancing and laughing with red lips and arms white
as milk, and soft silky hair floating in the winds."
Russell was very sick of the old man's voice. He was at least glad he
didn't have to look at the old man now. His bald head, his skinny
bobbing neck, his simpering watery blue eyes. But he still had to
suffer that immutable babbling, that idiotic cheerfulness ... and
knowing all the time the old man was crazy, that he was leading them
wrong.
I'd break away, go it alone to the right sun, Russell thought—but I'd
never make it alone. A little while out here alone and I'd be nuttier
than old Dunbar will ever be, even if he keeps on getting nuttier all
the time.
Somewhere, sometime then ... Russell got the idea that the only way
was to get rid of Dunbar.
You mean to tell us there are people living by that red-rimmed sun,"
Russell said.
"Lost people ... lost ... who knows how long," Dunbar said, as the
four of them hurtled along. "You never know where you'll find people
on a world somewhere nobody's ever named or knows about. Places where
a lost ship's landed and never got up again, or wrecked itself so far
off the lanes they'll never be found except by accident for millions
of years. That's what this world is, boys. Must have been a ship load
of beautiful people, maybe actresses and people like that being hauled
to some outpost to entertain. They're like angels now, living in a
land all free from care. Every place you see green forests and fields
and blue lakes, and at nights there's three moons that come around the
sky in a thousand different colors. And it never gets cold ... it's
always spring, always spring, boys, and the music plays all night,
every night of a long long year...."
Russell suddenly shouted. "Keep quiet, Dunbar. Shut up will you?"
Johnson said. "Dunbar—how long'll it take us?"
"Six months to a year, I'd say," Dunbar yelled happily. "That is—of
our hereditary time."
"What?" croaked Alvar.
Johnson didn't say anything at all.
Russell screamed at Dunbar, then quieted down. He whispered. "Six
months to a year—out here—cooped up in these damn suits. You're
crazy as hell, Dunbar. Crazy ... crazy! Nobody could stand it. We'll
all be crazier than you are—"
"We'll make it, boys. Trust ole' Dunbar. What's a year when we know
we're getting to Paradise at the end of it? What's a year out here ...
it's paradise ain't it, compared with that prison hole we were rotting
in? We can make it. We have the food concentrates, and all the rest.
All we need's the will, boys, and we got that. The whole damn Universe
isn't big enough to kill the will of a human being, boys. I been over
a whole lot of it, and I know. In the old days—"
"The hell with the old days," screamed Russell.
"Now quiet down, Russ," Dunbar said in a kind of dreadful crooning
whisper. "You calm down now. You younger fellows—you don't look at
things the way we used to. Thing is, we got to go straight. People
trapped like this liable to start meandering. Liable to start losing
the old will-power."
He chuckled.
"Yeah," said Alvar. "Someone says maybe we ought to go left, and
someone says to go right, and someone else says to go in another
direction. And then someone says maybe they'd better go back the old
way. An' pretty soon something breaks, or the food runs out, and
you're a million million miles from someplace you don't care about any
more because you're dead. All frozen up in space ... preserved like a
piece of meat in a cold storage locker. And then maybe in a million
years or so some lousy insect man from Jupiter comes along and finds
you and takes you away to a museum...."
"Shut up!" Johnson yelled.
Dunbar laughed. "Boys, boys, don't get panicky. Keep your heads. Just
stick to old Dunbar and he'll see you through. I'm always lucky. Only
one way to go ... an' that's straight ahead to the sun with the
red-rim around it ... and then we tune in the gravity repellers, and
coast down, floating and singing down through the clouds to
paradise."
After that they traveled on for what seemed months to Russell, but it
couldn't have been over a day or two of the kind of time-sense he had
inherited from Earth.
Then he saw how the other two stars also were beginning to develop red
rims. He yelled this fact out to the others. And Alvar said. "Russ's
right. That sun to the right, and the one behind us ... now they ALL
have red rims around them. Dunbar—" A pause and no awareness of
motion.
Dunbar laughed. "Sure, they all maybe have a touch of red, but it
isn't the same, boys. I can tell the difference. Trust me—"
Russell half choked on his words. "You old goat! With those old eyes
of yours, you couldn't see your way into a fire!"
"Don't get panicky now. Keep your heads. In another year, we'll be
there—"
"God, you gotta' be sure," Alvar said. "I don't mind dyin' out here.
But after a year of this, and then to get to a world that was only
ashes, and not able to go any further—"
"I always come through, boys. I'm lucky. Angel women will take us to
their houses on the edges of cool lakes, little houses that sit there
in the sun like fancy jewels. And we'll walk under colored fountains,
pretty colored fountains just splashing and splashing like pretty rain
on our hungry hides. That's worth waiting for."
Russell did it before he hardly realized he was killing the old man.
It was something he had had to do for a long time and that made it
easy. There was a flash of burning oxygen from inside the suit of
Dunbar. If he'd aimed right, Russell knew the fire-bullet should have
pierced Dunbar's back. Now the fire was gone, extinguished
automatically by units inside the suit. The suit was still inflated,
self-sealing. Nothing appeared to have changed. The four of them
hurtling on together, but inside that first suit up there on the front
of the gravity rope, Dunbar was dead.
He was dead and his mouth was shut for good.
Dunbar's last faint cry from inside his suit still rang in Russell's
ears, and he knew Alvar and Johnson had heard it too. Alvar and
Johnson both called Dunbar's name a few times. There was no answer.
"Russ—you shouldn't have done that," Johnson whispered. "You
shouldn't have done that to the old man!"
"No," Alvar said, so low he could barely be heard. "You shouldn't have
done it."
"I did it for the three of us," Russell said. "It was either him or us.
Lies ... lies that was all he had left in his crazy head. Paradise ...
don't tell me you guys don't see the red rims around all four suns, all
four suns all around us. Don't tell me you guys didn't know he was batty,
that you really believed all that stuff he was spouting all the time!"
"Maybe he was lying, maybe not," Johnson said. "Now he's dead anyway."
"Maybe he was wrong, crazy, full of lies," Alvar said. "But now he's
dead."
"How could he see any difference in those four stars?" Russell said,
louder.
"He thought he was right," Alvar said. "He wanted to take us to
paradise. He was happy, nothing could stop the old man—but he's dead
now."
He sighed.
"He was taking us wrong ... wrong!" Russell screamed. "Angels—music
all night—houses like jewels—and women like angels—"
"
Shhhh
," said Alvar. It was quiet. How could it be so quiet, Russell
thought? And up ahead the old man's pressure suit with a corpse inside
went on ahead, leading the other three at the front of the
gravity-rope.
"Maybe he was wrong," Alvar said. "But now do we know which way is
right?"
Sometime later, Johnson said, "We got to decide now. Let's forget the
old man. Let's forget him and all that's gone and let's start now and
decide what to do."
And Alvar said, "Guess he was crazy all right, and I guess we trusted
him because we didn't have the strength to make up our own minds. Why
does a crazy man's laugh sound so good when you're desperate and don't
know what to do?"
"I always had a feeling we were going wrong," Johnson said. "Anyway,
it's forgotten, Russ. It's swallowed up in the darkness all around.
It's never been."
Russell said, "I've had a hunch all along that maybe the old man was
here before, and that he was right about there being a star here with
a world we can live on. But I've known we was heading wrong. I've had
a hunch all along that the right star was the one to the left."
"I don't know," Johnson sighed. "I been feeling partial toward that
one on the right. What about you, Alvar?"
"I always thought we were going straight in the opposite direction
from what we should, I guess. I always wanted to turn around and go
back. It won't make over maybe a month's difference. And what does a
month matter anyway out here—hell there never was any time out here
until we came along. We make our own time here, and a month don't
matter to me."
Sweat ran down Russell's face. His voice trembled. "No—that's wrong.
You're both wrong." He could see himself going it alone. Going crazy
because he was alone. He'd have broken away, gone his own direction,
long ago but for that fear.
"How can we tell which of us is right?" Alvar said. "It's like
everything was changing all the time out here. Sometimes I'd swear
none of those suns had red rims, and at other times—like the old man
said, they're all pretty and lying and saying nothing, just changing
all the time. Jezebel stars, the old man said."
"I know I'm right," Russell pleaded. "My hunches always been right.
My hunch got us out of that prison didn't it? Listen—I tell you it's
that star to the left—"
"The one to the right," said Johnson.
"We been going away from the right one all the time," said Alvar.
"We got to stay together," said Russell. "Nobody could spend a year
out here ... alone...."
"Ah ... in another month or so we'd be lousy company anyway," Alvar
said. "Maybe a guy could get to the point where he'd sleep most of the
time ... just wake up enough times to give himself another boost with
the old life-gun."
"We got to face it," Johnson said finally. "We three don't go on
together any more."
"That's it," said Alvar. "There's three suns that look like they might
be right seeing as how we all agree the old man was wrong. But we
believe there is one we can live by, because we all seem to agree that
the old man might have been right about that. If we stick together,
the chance is three to one against us. But if each of us makes for one
star, one of us has a chance to live. Maybe not in paradise like the
old man said, but a place where we can live. And maybe there'll be
intelligent life, maybe even a ship, and whoever gets the right star
can come and help the other two...."
"No ... God no...." Russell whispered over and over. "None of us can
ever make it alone...."
Alvar said, "We each take the star he likes best. I'll go back the
other way. Russ, you take the left. And you, Johnson, go to the
right."
Johnson started to laugh. Russell was yelling wildly at them, and
above his own yelling he could hear Johnson's rising laughter. "Every
guy's got a star of his own," Johnson said when he stopped laughing.
"And we got ours. A nice red-rimmed sun for each of us to call his
very own."
"Okay," Alvar said. "We cut off the gravity rope, and each to his own
sun."
Now Russell wasn't saying anything.
"And the old man," Alvar said, "can keep right on going toward what he
thought was right. And he'll keep on going. Course he won't be able to
give himself another boost with the life-gun, but he'll keep going.
Someday he'll get to that red-rimmed star of his. Out here in space,
once you're going, you never stop ... and I guess there isn't any
other body to pull him off his course. And what will time matter to
old Dunbar? Even less than to us, I guess. He's dead and he won't
care."
"Ready," Johnson said. "I'll cut off the gravity rope."
"I'm ready," Alvar said. "To go back toward whatever it was I started
from."
"Ready, Russ?"
Russell couldn't say anything. He stared at the endless void which now
he would share with no one. Not even crazy old Dunbar.
"All right," Johnson said. "Good-bye."
Russell felt the release, felt the sudden inexplicable isolation and
aloneness even before Alvar and Johnson used their life-guns and shot
out of sight, Johnson toward the left and Alvar back toward that other
red-rimmed sun behind them.
And old Dunbar shooting right on ahead. And all three of them
dwindling and dwindling and blinking out like little lights.
Fading, he could hear their voices. "Each to his own star," Johnson
said. "On a bee line."
"On a bee line," Alvar said.
Russell used his own life-gun and in a little while he didn't hear
Alvar or Johnson's voices, nor could he see them. They were thousands
of miles away, and going further all the time.
Russell's head fell forward against the front of his helmet, and he
closed his eyes. "Maybe," he thought, "I shouldn't have killed the old
man. Maybe one sun's as good as another...."
Then he raised his body and looked out into the year of blackness that
waited for him, stretching away to the red-rimmed sun. Even if he were
right—he was sure now he'd never make it alone.
The body inside the pressure suit drifted into a low-level orbit
around the second planet from the sun of its choice, and drifted there
a long time. A strato-cruiser detected it by chance because of the
strong concentration of radio-activity that came from it.
They took the body down to one of the small, quiet towns on the edge
of one of the many blue lakes where the domed houses were like bright
joyful jewels. They got the leathery, well-preserved body from the
pressure suit.
"An old man," one of them mused. "A very old man. From one of the lost
sectors. I wonder how and why he came so very far from his home?"
"Wrecked a ship out there, probably," one of the others said. "But he
managed to get this far. It looks as though a small meteor fragment
pierced his body. Here. You see?"
"Yes," another of them said. "But what amazes me is that this old man
picked this planet out of all the others. The only one in this entire
sector that would sustain life."
"Maybe he was just a very lucky old man. Yes ... a man who attains
such an age was usually lucky. Or at least that is what they say about
the lost sectors."
"Maybe he knew the way here. Maybe he was here before—sometime."
The other shook his head. "I don't think so. They say some humans from
that far sector did land here—but that's probably only a myth. And if
they did, it was well over a thousand years ago."
Another said. "He has a fine face, this old man. A noble face. Whoever
he is ... wherever he came from, he died bravely and he knew the way,
though he never reached this haven of the lost alive."
"Nor is it irony that he reached here dead," said the Lake Chieftain.
He had been listening and he stepped forward and raised his arm. "He
was old. It is obvious that he fought bravely, that he had great
courage, and that he knew the way. He will be given a burial suitable
to his stature, and he will rest here among the brave.
"Let the women dance and the music play for this old man. Let the
trumpets speak, and the rockets fly up. And let flowers be strewn over
the path above which the women will carry him to rest." | obscurity of location | population of women | geographical features | prevalence of riches | 0 |