The High Ones and Other Stories

by Poul Anderson

  "If the dis-fields were going," he said absent-mindedly, "I'd pull the planet into chunks for you."

  Laird saw the pale taut faces around him. Sweat was shining on foreheads, and a couple of men looked sick. Joana forgot her position enough to come shivering into his arms.

  But the visage she lifted in a minute was exultant and eager, with the thoughtless cruelty of a swooping hawk. "There's an end of Earth, gentlemen!"

  "Nothing they have can stop us," murmured her exec dazedly. "Why, this one ship, protected by one of those spacewarp screens you spoke of, sir—this one little ship could sail in and lay the Solar System waste."

  * * * *

  Daryesh nodded. It was entirely possible. Not much energy was required, since the generators of Vwyrdda served only as catalysts releasing fantastically greater forces. And Sol had none of the defensive science which had enabled his world to hold out for a while. Yes, it could be done.

  He stiffened with the sudden furious thought of Laird: That's it, Daryesh! That's the answer.

  The thought-stream was his own too, flowing through the same brain, and indeed it was simple. They could have the whole ship armed and armored beyond the touch of Janya. And since none of the technicians aboard understood the machines, and since they were now wholly trusted, they could install robotcontrols without anyone's knowing.

  Then—the massed Grand Fleet of Janya—a flick of the main switch—man-killing energies would flood the cruiser's interior, and only corpses would remain aboard. Dead men and the robots that would open fire on the Fleet. This one ship could ruin all the barbarian hopes in a few bursts of incredible flame. And the robots could then be set to destroy her as well, lest by some chance the remaining Janyards manage to board her.

  And we—we can escape in the initial confusion, Daryesh. We can give orders to the robot to spare the captain's gig, and we can get Joana aboard and head for Sol! There'll be no one left to pursue!

  Slowly, the Vwyrddan's thought made reply: A good plan. Yes, a bold stroke. We'll do it!

  "What's the matter, Daryesh?" Joana's voice was suddenly anxious. "You look—"

  "Just thinking, that's all. Never think, Captain Rostov. Bad for the brain."

  Later, as he kissed her, Laird felt ill at thought of the treachery he planned. Her friends, her world, her cause—wiped out in a single shattering blow, and he would have struck it. He wondered if she would speak to him ever again, once it was over.

  Daryesh, the heartless devil, seemed only to find a sardonic amusement in the situation.

  And later, when Laird slept, Daryesh thought that the young man's scheme was good. Certainly he'd fall in with it. It would keep Laird busy till they were at the Grand Fleet rendezvous. And after that it would be too late. The Janyard victory would be sealed. All he, Daryesh, had to do when the time came was keep away from that master switch. If Laird tried to reach it their opposed wills would only result in nullity—which was victory for Janya.

  He liked this new civilization. It had a freshness, a vigor and hopefulness which he could not find in Laird's memories of Earth. It had a tough-minded purposefulness that would get it far. And being young and fluid, it would be amenable to such pressures of psychology and force as he chose to apply.

  Vwyrdda, his mind whispered. Vwyrdda, we'll make them over in your image. You'll live again!

  * * * *

  Grand Fleet!

  A million capital ships and their auxiliaries lay marshaled at a dim red dwarf of a sun, massed together and spinning in the same mighty orbit. Against the incandescent whiteness of stars and the blackness of the old deeps, armored flanks gleamed like flame as far as eyes could see, rank after rank, tier upon tier, of titanic sharks swimming through space—guns and armor and torpedoes and bombs and men to smash a planet and end a civilization. The sight was too big, imagination could not make the leap, and the human mind had only a dazed impression of vastness beyond vision.

  This was the great spearhead of Janya, a shining lance poised to drive through Sol's thin defense lines and roar out of the sky to rain hell on the seat of empire. They can't really be human any more, thought Laird sickly. Space and strangeness have changed them too much. No human being could think of destroying Man's home. Then, fiercely: All right Daryesh. This is our chance!

  Not yet, Laird. Wait a while. Wait till we have a legitimate excuse for leaving the ship.

  Well—come up to the control room with me. I want to stay near that switch. Lord, Lord, everything that is Man and me depends on us now!

  Daryesh agreed with a certain reluctance that faintly puzzled the part of his mind open to Laird. The other half, crouched deep in his subconscious, knew the reason: It was waiting the posthypnotic signal, the key event which would trigger its emergence into the higher brain-centers.

  The ship bore a tangled and unfinished look. All its conventional armament had been ripped out and the machines of Vwyrdda installed in its place. A robot brain, half-alive in its complexity, was gunner and pilot and ruling intelligence of the vessel now, and only the double mind of one man knew what orders had really been given it. When the main switch is thrown, you will flood the ship with ten units of disrupting radiation. Then, when the captain's gig is well away, you will destroy this fleet, sparing only that one boat. When no more ships in operative condition are in range, you will activate the disintegrators and dissolve this whole vessel and all its contents to basic energy.

  With a certain morbid fascination, Laird looked at that switch. An ordinary double-throw knife type—Lord of space, could it be possible, was it logical that all history should depend on the angle it made with the control panel? He pulled his eyes away, stared out at the swarming ships and the greater host of the stars, lit a cigaret with shaking hands, paced and sweated and waited.

  Joana came to him, a couple of crewmen marching solemnly behind. Her eyes shone and her cheeks were flushed and the turret light was like molten copper in her hair. No woman, thought Laird, had ever been so lovely, and he was going to destroy that to which she had given her life.

  "Daryesh!" Laughter danced in her voice. "Daryesh, the high admiral wants to see us in his flagship. He'll probably ask for a demonstration, and then I think the fleet will start for Sol at once with us in the van. Daryesh—oh, Daryesh, the war is almost over!"

  Now! blazed the thought of Laird, and his hand reached for the main switch. Now—easily, causally, with a remark about letting the generators warm up—and then go with her, overpower those guardsmen in their surprise and head for home!

  And Daryesh's mind reunited itself at that signal, and the hand froze …

  No!

  What? But—

  The memory of the suppressed half of Daryesh's mind was open to Laird, and the triumph of the whole of it, and Laird knew that his defeat was here.

  * * * *

  So simple, so cruelly simple—Daryesh could stop him, lock the body in a conflict of wills, and that would be enough. For while Laird slept, while Daryesh's own major ego was unconscious, the trained subconscious of the Vwyrddan had taken over. It had written, in its self-created somnambulism, a letter to Joana explaining the whole truth, and had put it where it would easily be found once they started looking through his effects in search of an explanation for his paralysis. And the letter directed, among other things, that Daryesh's body should be kept under restraint until certain specified methods known to Vwyrddan psychiatry—drugs, electric waves, hypnosis—had been applied to eradicate the Laird half of his mind.

  Janyard victory was near.

  "Daryesh!" Joana's voice seemed to come from immensely far away; her face swam in a haze and a roar of fainting consciousness. "Daryesh, what's the matter? Oh, my dear, what's wrong?"

  Grimly, the Vwyrddan thought: Give up, Laird. Surrender to me, and you can keep your ego. I'll destroy that letter. See, my whole mind is open to you now—you can see that I mean it honestly this time. I'd rather avoid treatment if possible, and I do owe you something. But surrender n
ow, or be wiped out of your own brain.

  Defeat and ruin—and nothing but slow distorting death as reward for resistance. Laird's will caved in, his mind too chaotic for clear thought. Only one dull impulse came: I give up. You win, Daryesh.

  The collapsed body picked itself off the floor. Joana was bending anxiously over him. "Oh, what is it, what's wrong?"

  Daryesh collected himself and smiled shakily. "Excitement will do this to me, now and then. I haven't fully mastered this alien nervous system yet. I'm all right now. Let's go."

  Laird's hand reached out and pulled the switch over.

  Daryesh shouted, an animal roar from the throat, and tried to recover it, and the body toppled again in a stasis of locked wills.

  It was like a deliverance from hell, and still it was but the inevitable logic of events, as Laird's own self reunited. Half of him still shaking with defeat, half realizing its own victory, he thought savagely:

  None of them noticed me do that. They were paying too much attention to my face. Or if they did, we've proved to them before that it's only a harmless regulating switch. And—the lethal radiations are already flooding us! If you don't cooperate now, Daryesh, I'll hold us here till we're both dead!

  So simple, so simple. Because, sharing Daryesh's memory, Laird had shared his knowledge of self-deception techniques. He had anticipated, with the buried half of his mind, that the Vwyrddan might pull some such trick, and had installed a posthypnotic command of his own. In a situation like this, when everything looked hopeless, his conscious mind was to surrender, and then his subconscious would order that the switch be thrown.

  Cooperate, Daryesh! You're as fond of living as I. Cooperate, and let's get the hell out of here!

  Grudgingly, wrily: You win, Laird.

  The body rose again, and leaned on Joana's arm, and made its slow way toward the boat blisters. The undetectable rays of death poured through them, piling up their cumulative effects. In three minutes, a nervous system would be ruined.

  Too slow, too slow. "Come on, Joana. Run!"

  "Why—" She stopped, and a hard suspicion came into the faces of the two men behind her. "Daryesh—what do you mean? What's come over you?"

  "Ma'm … " One of the crewmen stepped forward. "Ma'm, I wonder … I saw him pull down the main switch. And now he's in a hurry to leave the ship. And none of us really know how all that machinery ticks."

  Laird pulled the gun out of Joana's holster and shot him. The other gasped, reaching for his own side arm, and Laird's weapon blazed again.

  His fist leaped out, striking Joana on the angle of the jaw, and she sagged. He caught her up and started to run.

  A pair of crewmen stood in the corridor leading to the boats. "What's the matter, sir?" one asked.

  "Collapsed—radiation from the machines—got to get her to a hospital ship," gasped Daryesh.

  They stood aside, wonderingly, and he spun the dogs of the blister valve and stepped into the gig. "Shall we come, sir?" asked one of the men.

  "No!" Laird felt a little dizzy. The radiation was streaming through him, and death was coming with giant strides. "No—" He smashed a fist into the insistent face, slammed the valve back, and vaulted to the pilot's chair.

  The engines hummed, warming up. Fists and feet battered on the valve. The sickness made him retch.

  O Joana, if this kills you—

  He threw the main-drive switch. Acceleration jammed him back as the gig leaped free.

  Staring out the ports, he saw fire blossom in space as the great guns of Vwyrdda opened up.

  * * * *

  My glass was empty. I signalled for a refill and sat just how much of the yarn one could believe.

  "I've read the histories," I said slowly. "I do know that some mysterious catastrophe annihilated the massed fleet of Janya and turned the balance of the war. Sol speared in and won inside of a year. And you mean that you did it?"

  "In a way. Or Daryesh did. We were acting as one personality, you know. He was a thoroughgoing realist, and the moment he saw his defeat he switched wholeheartedly to the other side."

  "But—Lord, man! Why've we never heard anything about this? You mean you never told anyone, never rebuilt any of those machines, never did anything?"

  Laird's dark, worn face twisted in a bleak smile. "Certainly. This civilization isn't ready for such things. Even Vwyrdda wasn't, and it'll take us millions of years to reach their stage. Besides, it was part of the bargain."

  "Bargain?"

  "Just as certainly. Daryesh and I still had to live together, you know. Life under suspicion of mutual trickery, never trusting your own brain, would have been intolerable. We reached an agreement during that long voyage back to Sol, and used Vwyrddan methods of autohypnosis to assure that it could not be broken."

  He looked somberly out at the lunar night. "That's why I said the genie in the bottle killed me. Inevitably, the two personalities merged, became one. And that one was, of course, mostly Daryesh, with overtones of Laird.

  "Oh, it isn't so horrible. We retain the memories of our separate existences, and the continuity which is the most basic attribute of the ego. In fact, Laird's life was so limited, so blind to all the possibilities and wonder of the universe, that I don't regret him very often. Once in a while I still get nostalgic moments and have to talk to a human. But I always pick one who won't know whether or not to believe me, and won't be able to do much of anything about it if he should."

  "And why did you go into Survey?" I asked, very softly.

  "I want to get a good look at the universe before the change. Daryesh wants to orient himself, gather enough data for a sound basis of decision. When we—I—switch over to the new immortal body, there'll be work to do, a galaxy to remake in a newer and better pattern by Vwyrddan standards! It'll take millennia, but we've got all time before us. Or I do—what do I mean, anyway?" He ran a hand through his gray-streaked hair.

  "But Laird's part of the bargain was that there should be as nearly normal a human life as possible until this body gets inconveniently old. So—" He shrugged. "So that's how it worked out."

  We sat for a while longer, saying little, and then he got up. "Excuse me," he said. "There's my wife. Thanks for the talk."

  I saw him walk over to greet a tall, handsome red-haired woman. His voice drifted back: "Hello, Joana—"

  They walked out of the room together in perfectly ordinary and human fashion.

  I wonder what history has in store for us.

  * * * *

  THE SOLDIER FROM THE STARS

  It was an old pattern of history—the loss of human freedom, the foundations of culture destroyed. But man will always build anew.

  * * * *

  It was early morning, local time, when I felt the plane tilt forward and start the long swoop down. I stirred uncomfortably, stretching stiffened muscles and blinking open sandy eyelids. You don't sleep well when you are burdened with such knowledge as ours.

  Not that I had much responsibility. I was only a guard for Samuels and Langford; throughout the whole business, I was little except an observer. But maybe I had a chance to observe more than anyone else, which is why I am writing this for those who will come after us.

  There were a good dozen others crowded into the plane, Secret Service men and brawny soldiers with loaded rifles between their knees. But they were an empty gesture, and we all knew it. Taruz of Thashtivar had said sardonically that the envoys might have one guard apiece if it would make them happier. That was me.

  Samuels moved in the seat next to mine. The clear pale dawnlight came through a window and touched his hair with a white halo. His face looked old and gray, not like the famous statesman and American plenipotentiary he was supposed to be. But then, we all felt small on that cold morning.

  He tried to smile. "Hello, Hillyer," he said to me. "Have a good night's rest?"

  "Hardly, sir. Just dozing."

  "I wish I could have done as much," Samuels sighed. "Oh, well."

  Dr. Lan
gford pushed his nose against the window. "I always did want to see the Azores," he remarked. "But I never thought it would be under such circumstances."

  He looked more human, less chilled and bloodless, than the rest of us. His keen eagle features were curved into a humorless grin, and the grizzled bush of hair as disordered as ever.

  You may have heard of Dr. Langford, the physicist who was led through cybernetics into biology, neurology, psychology, and more understanding of history than most professors in that field. He was the best suited man in the country to act as Samuels' scientific advisor, though I wondered what good that would be.