Shugart rasped: “It’s for his own good. This is one of the finest brains in the world, and it’s falling apart. We’ve tried everything. Radical procedures—silence, psychosurgery, chemotherapy—are too much for him to take. Remember what happened when Dr. Reynolds tried electroshock? So we’ve got to work with what we’ve got.”
The old man stirred.
Old as he might be, and insane if they liked, but he wasn’t going to linger out here and listen. A quarter after one in the morning, and the whole Institute was gathered here in Shugart’s office, plotting the recovery of himself.
“All right,” he gasped, rolling in, “what is this?”
They gaped at him.
“All of you!” he said strongly. “What are you doing to me? Is it a hoax?”
Shugart moved restlessly. Maria Reynolds reached up to pat her hair, avoiding his eyes.
“You, Doctor Reynolds? Want to explain? I mean—I mean,” he said in a changed tone, no longer gasping, “there seems to be only one explanation. There’s a conspiracy of some sort, and I’m the target.”
Maureen got up and walked toward him. “Come in, Doctor,” she said, in a voice of resignation tinged with pleasure. “Maybe it’s better this way. We’re not going to get very far continuing to He to you, are we? So I guess we’ll have to tell you the truth.”
The tune rocked crazily through his head. The old man spun his chair and turned pleadingly to Maureen. “Of course, Doctor,” she said, understanding without words, and fetched him a fizzy drink. “Only a litde stimulant,” she coaxed.
The old man glanced at Dr. Shugart. Shugart laughed. “Who do you think has been prescribing for you? There isn’t a human being in the Institute without a first-rate degree. Maureen’s our internist—with, of course, a thorough grounding in psychology.”
The old man drank reproachfully, looking at Maureen. She said, clouding: “I know. It isn’t fair, but we had to get you well.”
“Why?”
Maureen said somberly: “A brain like yours doesn’t come along too often. I’m not a physicist, but as I understand it Congruence comes close to doing what Einstein tried with the unified field theory. You were on the point of doing something more when you—when you—”
“When I went crazy,” the old man said crudely. She shook her head. “All right, I used a bad word. But that’s it, isn’t it?” The girl nodded. “I see.”
But the stimulant wasn’t doing much good. Ninety-five years, he thought confused, and perhaps I won’t see that other mountain. It was hard to accept, hard to believe he had been hoaxed, hard to believe that it wasn’t working, that the delusions would not be cured. “I’m flattered,” he whispered hoarsely, and tried to hand the glass back to Maureen. It clattered to the floor and bounced without breaking. Maria with her schizoid detachment, Ernie with his worries, Sam Krabbe and his surly anger—doctors acting parts? The room swooped around Sidorenko; he was cut off from his reference points. And they were all afraid; he could see it, it was a gamble they had taken, that he would never find out, and now they didn’t know what would happen. And he—
He didn’t know either.
“I’m sorry to be so much trouble,” he gasped.
“You mustn’t feel personal guilt,” Dr. Shugart said anxiously. “These personality disorders—personality traits—go with greatness. Sir Oliver Lodge swore he believed in levitation. Think of Newton, sleepless and paranoid. Think of Einstein. Religious mania is very common,” the doctor assured him, “and you were spared that, at least. Well, almost—of course, certain aspects of your—”
“Shut up!” cried Maureen, and reached for the old man’s wrist. He stared up at her, touched by the worry in her face, trying to find words to tell her there was nothing to worry about, nothing to fear. He felt his heart lunging against his ribs and his breathing seemed, oddly, to have stopped. He made a convulsive effort and drew an enormous, loud breath. Why, that was almost—what did they call it?—a death rattle. He did it again.
“Doctor!” moaned the nurse, but he found the strength to shake his wrist free of her. This was interesting. He was beginning to remember something, or to imagine something—
They were all coming toward him.
“Leave me alone,” he croaked. He held them off while he practiced breathing again; it wasn’t hard; he could do it. He closed his eyes. He heard Maureen catch her breath and opened them to glare at her, then closed them again.
Noah Sidorenko’s brain was perfectly lucid.
He saw—or remembered? But it was as though he were seeing it with an internal eye—all of his previous life, the childhood, the government office where he had received the first scholarship, the four professors quizzing him for his doctor’s, even the cloudy days of therapy and breakdown.
The old man thought: It all began 90 years ago, I was all right until then … and he had to laugh, though laughing choked him, because 90 years ago he had been all of five years old. But up until then there had been nothing to worry about.
Was it the crash? Yes. And fire. The white man. The song about the bear. The terrible auto smash, just outside his window—for his window had looked out on an elevated automobile highway in Brooklyn, the Gowanus Parkway, where
7.
cars raced bumper to bumper, 50 miles an hour, within five yards of the bed he slept in. Whoosh. Whoosh. All day long and all night. At night the strokes were slow, a lagging wire-brush riff; in the mornings and evenings they were faster, whooshwhooshwhoosh, a quick rataplan. He listened to them and dreamed tunes around diem. And there was the night he had gone to sleep and wakened screaming, screaming.
His mother rushed in—poor woman, she was already widowed. (Though she was only 25, the old man thought with amazement. Twenty-five! Maureen was that.) She rushed in, and though the boy Noah was terrified he could see through the shadow of his own terror of hers. “Momma, Momma, the white man!” She caught him in her arms. “Please, my God, what’s the matter?” But he couldn’t answer, except with sobs and incoherent words about the white man; it was a code, and she was not skilled to read it. And time passed, ten minutes or so. He was not comforted—he was still crying and afraid—• but his mother was warm and she soothed him. She bounced him on her knee, ka-bump, Va-hump, Ya-bump, and even though he was crying he remembered the song with that beat, He SAW anOTHer MOUNTain, he SAW anOTHer MOUNTain, and the cars whooshed by and in the next room the little TV set murmured and laughed. “You’re missing your program, Momma,” he said; “Go to sleep, dear,” she answered; he was almost relaxed. Crash. Outside the window two cars collided violently. A taxicab was bound for New York with a boy in a satin jacket at the wheel and four others crammed in the back; the boy at the wheel was high on marijuana and he hit the divider. The cab leaped crazily across into the Long Island-bound lane. There was not much traffic that night, but there was one car too many. In it a 30-year-old advertising salesman rushed to meet his wife and baby at Idlewild. He never met them. The cars struck. The stolen taxicab was hurled back into its own lane, its gas tank split, its doors flung open. Four boys in the jackets of the Gerritsen Tigers died at once and the fifth was thrown against the retaining wall—not dead; but not with enough life left to him to matter. He stood up and tried to run, and the burning gasoline made him a white-hot phantom, auraed and terrible. He lurched clear across the roadway to just outside Noah’s window and died there, flaming, hanging over the wall, 15 feet above the wreck of the space salesman’s convertible.
“The white man!” screamed someone in Noah’s room, but it was not the boy but his mother. She looked from the white-named man outside to her son, with eyes of fear and horror; and from then on it was never the same for him.
“From the time I was five,” the old man said aloud, wondering, “it was never the same. She thought I was—1 don’t know. A devil. She thought I had the power of second sight, because I’d been scared by the accident before it happened.”
He looked around the room. “And my son!” h
e cried. “I knew when he died—telepathy, at a distance of a good eight thousand miles. And—” he stopped, thinking. “There were other things,” he mumbled …
Dr. Shugart fussed kindly: “Impossible, don’t you see? It’s all part of your delusion. Surely a scientist should know that this—witchcraft can’t be true! If only you hadn’t come down here tonight, when you were so close to a cure …”
Noah Sidorenko said terribly: “Do you want to cure me again?”
“Doctor!”
The old man shouted: “You’ve done it a hundred times, and a hundred times, with pain and fear, I’ve had to undo the cure—not because I want to! My God, no. But because I can’t help myself. And now you want me to go through it again. 1 won t let you cure me!” He pushed the electric buttons; die chair began to spin but too slowly, too slowly. The old man fought his way to his feet, shouting at them. “Don’t you see? I don’t want to do this, but it does itself ; it’s like a baby that's getting born, I can’t stop it now. It’s difficult to have a baby. A woman in labor,” he cried, seeing the worry in dieir eyes, knowing he must seem insane, “a woman in labor is having a fit, she struggles and screams—and what can a doctor do for her? Kill the pain? Yes, and perhaps kill die baby widi it. That happened, over and over, until the doctors learned how, and—and you don’t know how …
“You mustn’t kill it this time! Let me suffer. Don’t cure mel”
And they stood there looking at him. No one spoke at all.
The room was utterly silent; the old man asked himself, Can I have convinced them? But diat was so improbable. His words were such poor substitutes for the thoughts that raced about his thumping head. But—the thoughts, yes, they were clear now; maybe for the first time. He understood. Psionic power, telepathy, precognition, all the other hard-to-handie gifts that filled the gap between metaphysics and muscle … they lay next door to madness. Worse! By definition, they were “madness”, as a diamond can be “dirt” if it clogs the jet of a rocket. They were mad, since they didn’t fit self-defining “sane” science.
But how many times he had come so close, all the same! And how often, how helpfully, he had been “cured.” The delusional pattern had been so clear to “sane” science; and with insulin shock and hypnosynthesis, with electrodes in his shaved scalp and psychodrama, with Group therapy and the silence—with every pill and incantation of the sciences of the mind they had, time after time, rooted out the devils. Precognition had been frightened out of him by his mother’s panic. Telepathy had been electroshocked out of him in the Winford Retreat. But they returned and returned.
Handle them? No, the old man admitted, he couldn’t handle them, not yet. But if God was good and gave him more time, an hour or two perhaps … or maybe some years; if the doctor was improperly kind and allowed him his “delusion”—why, he might learn to handle them after all. He might, for example, be able to peer into minds at will and not only when some randomly chosen mind, half-shattered itself, created such a clamorous beacon of noise that then the (telepathically) nearly deaf might hear it. He might be able to stare into the future at will, instead of having his attention chance-caught by the flicker of some catastrophic terror projecting its shadow ahead. And this ancient and useless hulk that was his body, for example. He might yet force it to live, to move, to walk about, to stand-
To stand?
The old man stood perfectly motionless beside his chair. To stand? And then, rather late, he followed the direction of the staring eyes of Maureen and Shugart and the others.
He was standing.
But not as he had visioned it, in wretched bedridden hours. He was standing tall and straight; but between the felt soles of his slippers and the rubber tiles of the office floor there were eight inches of untroubled air.
No. They wouldn’t cure him again, not ever. And with luck, he realized slowly, he might now proceed to infect the world.
The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgra..
When I was still in my teens, L. Sprague de Camp published a wonderful novel called Lest Darkness Fall, which had to do with a man who was thrust back through time into the years just before Rome fell to the barbarians, and through skill and sagacity averted that fall and, thus, the Dark Ages. This is both a sort of belated rejoinder to de Camp and a snap at the heels of the pronatalists and other sweet, dangerous people who believe that there is some way of dealing with the world’s ills that does not include population limitation.
This is the story of Phineas Snodgrass, inventor. He built a time machine.
He built a time machine and in it he went back some two thousand years, to about the time of the birth of Christ. He made himself known to the Emperor Augustus, his lady Livia and other rich and powerful Romans of the day and, quickly making friends, secured their cooperation in bringing about a rapid transformation of Year One living habits. (He stole the idea from a science-fiction novel by L. Sprague de Camp, called Lest Darkness Fall.)
His time machine wasn’t very big, but his heart was, so Snodgrass selected his cargo with the plan of providing the maximum immediate help for the world’s people. The principal features of ancient Rome were dirt and disease, pain and death. Snodgrass decided to make the Roman world healthy and to keep its people alive through twentieth-century medicine. Everything else could take care of itself, once the human race was free of its terrible plagues and early deaths.
Snodgrass introduced penicillin and aureomycin and painless dentistry. He ground lenses for spectacles and explained the surgical techniques for removing cataracts. He taught anesthesia and the germ theory of disease, and showed how to purify drinking water. He built Kleenex factories and taught the Romans to cover their mouths when they coughed. He demanded, and got, covers for the open Roman sewers, and he pioneered the practice of the balanced diet.
Snodgrass brought health to the ancient world, and kept his own health, too. He lived to more than a hundred years. He died, in fact, in the year a.d. 100, a very contented man.
When Snodgrass arrived in Augustus’s great palace on the Palatine Hill, there were some 250,000,000 human beings alive in the world. He persuaded the principate to share his blessings with all the world, benefiting not only the hundred million subjects of the Empire, but the other one hundred millions in Asia and the tens of millions in Africa, the Western Hemisphere and all the Pacific islands.
Everybody got healthy.
Infant mortality dropped at once, from 90 deaths in a hundred to fewer than two. Life expectancies doubled immediately. Everyone was well, and demonstrated their health by having more children, who grew in health to maturity and had more.
It is a feeble population that cannot double itself every generation if it tries.
These Romans, Goths, and Mongols were tough. Every 30 years the population of the world increased by a factor of two. In the year a.d. 30, the world population was a half billion. In a.d. 60, it was a full billion. By the time Snodgrass passed away, a happy man, it was as large as it is today.
It is too bad that Snodgrass did not have room in his time machine for the blueprints of cargo ships, the texts on metallurgy to build the tools that would make the reapers that would harvest the fields—for the triple-expansion steam turbines that would generate the electricity that would power the machines that would run the cities—for all the technology that 2,000 subsequent years had brought about.
But he didn’t.
Consequently, by the time of his death conditions were no longer quite perfect. A great many were badly housed.
On the whole, Snodgrass was pleased, for all these things could surely take care of themselves. With a healthy world
the deadly mission of pihneas snodgrass ■ 93
population, the increase of numbers would be a mere spur to research. Boundless nature, once its ways were studied, would surely provide for any number of human beings.
Indeed it did. Steam engines on the Newcomen design were lifting water to irrigate fields to grow food long before his death. The Ni
le was dammed at Aswan in the year 55. Battery-powered streetcars replaced oxcarts in Rome and Alexandria before a.d. 75, and the galley slaves were freed by huge, clumsy diesel outboards that drove the food ships across the Mediterranean a few years later.
In the year a.d. 200 the world had now something over twenty billion souls, and technology was running neck-and-neck with expansion. Nuclear-driven ploughs had cleared the Teutoburg Wald, where Varus’s bones were still mouldering, and fertilizer made from ion-exchange mining of the sea produced fantastic crops of hybrid grains. In a.d. 300 the world population stood at a quarter of a trillion. Hydrogen fusion produced fabulous quantities of energy from the sea; atomic transmutation converted any matter into food. This was necessary, because there was no longer any room for farms. The Earth was getting crowded. By the middle of the sixth century the 60,000,000 square miles of land surface on the Earth was so well covered that no human being standing anywhere on dry land could stretch out his arms in any direction without touching another human being standing beside him.
But everyone was healthy, and science marched on. The seas were drained, which immediately tripled the available land area. (In 50 years the sea bottoms were also full.) Energy which had come from the fusion of marine hydrogen now came by the tapping of the full energy output of the Sun, through gigantic “mirrors” composed of pure force. The other planets froze, of course; but this no longer mattered, since in the decades that followed they were disintegrated for the sake of the energy at their cores. So was the Sun. Maintaining life on Earth on such artificial standards was prodigal of energy consumption; in time every star in the Galaxy was transmitting its total power output to the Earth, and plans were afoot to tap Andromeda, which would care for all necessary expansion for—30 years.
In the Problem Pit Page 11
