by C. L. Moore
"Can't you rig up some substitute?"
"Sure," the technician said morosely, "if I had a beta ray emitting radioisotope. Just give me an atomic pile and I'll deliver your isotope—but not immediately, because it takes time. On Omega they've got the technologies. They've got their uranium piles working, and stockpiles of the necessary isotopes. They must have. But we don't. We haven't got the facilities or the time. I could build a piano in the Sahara, provided I had a year to do the mining and smelting and stuff. I could rig a deflection plate or some substitute, but it would help if I had a graphite supply and a ceramics plant and a uranium pile and all the power I needed. And a few other things. I'm trying to play Beethoven on two keys! Still, maybe I can think of something. I doubt it, though."
"Keep trying," Jeng said, and the technician snorted and went out.
The voice from the machine said, "It would be much easier if you could talk to me. I don't know what has happened to my rapportee."
"The Freak?" Jeng asked silently.
"I can't get in touch with him. Well, let's go over the list again. You're approaching your world crisis, and unless I help you—Let's try the list. First, the basic circuit—"
More explanations.
"Got that? I think you have those materials—could it be the current? Can you hear me? I can't even be sure of that now. Perhaps I'd better try to advise you—the trouble is, I've been out of touch with your world since yesterday. I don't know how events may have changed. GPC may have discovered Breden's tie-in. I may be talking to GPC now, if they've discovered ... I'll have to risk it. I can't come into your world any more than you can come into mine."
"Why not?" Jeng asked, silently again, but apparently thought processes ran similarly in Omega. The voice said:
"Did I tell you the reason for that? Varying energy potentials. Too much difference in voltage between your continuum and mine. It's a matter of entropy; in some probability universes, things happen that speed up entropy—creation of a nova can do that—and a million volts difference in potential can wipe out a planet, if it's channeled across. The same principle as lightning—leveling energy potential. The lightning can cause a good deal of damage. But this audible communication is possible without channeling. It's simply a matter of resonance, finding the tonic—the purpose of the instrument I had you build. When you've finished the transmitter, it will be tuned to my receiver here, and the vibratory principle will do the rest. But the Freak was my first contact, Ortega—"
The voice stopped. Jeng's great body surged forward, as though by mere physical effort he could somehow break through the barriers stronger than time or space.
"Ortega," the voice repeated. "Is this Ortega? Are you Ortega?"
And then, after another, longer pause:
"I said that for all I knew I might be talking to GPC, but I suppose unconsciously I assumed that that hadn't happened. Now I've realized more clearly ... I explained all this once, carefully, when I first made contact through the machine. The machine Ortega made, at my instructions, transmitted by the Freak. But I don't know what's happened on your world since then. Something must have happened, or the Freak wouldn't be out of rapport. There are two main possibilities. One, that I'm talking to GPC; second, that I'm talking to another member of Ortega's underground organization.
"In the first case, my words can't make matters worse than they've become already, and they may plant doubt in GPC's mind. Which would be something! In the second case—well, I'm trying to help you, as I tried to help Ortega. I'll repeat what I told him, then. Listen carefully."
Jeng made sure that a recorder was switched on.
"I am John Van Buren, a descendant of President Van Buren—"
John Van Buren summarized the story of Omega—whose history was the history of Jeng's own probability world up to the crossroads, sometime in 1946, over a hundred years ago.
Translated to newspaper headlines, it could be summarized thus:
August 11, 1945:
IT'S OFFICIAL: JAPS GIVE
UP!
BEDLAM BUSTS LOOSE AT
7 PLUS 1 AS CITY BUILDS
BIGGEST HANGOVER
CONGRESS CALLED
SEPTEMBER 5 TO
START SHIFT
TO PEACE
August 20, 1945:
JAP ENVOYS' QUIZ
RESUMED
FORMER POWERS MODEL
DIES IN 11-STORY PLUNGE
GIRL STRIPPED, SLAIN
IN NEW JERSEY
CUBS WIN 2 FROM GIANTS;
DODGERS, YANKEES SPLIT
RUPTURED? STOP WORRY
WITH THIS AMAZING
INVENTION (ADVT.)
February 5, 1946:
U.N. CONFERENCE
STALLED
March 12, 1946:
RUSSIA, POLAND
WITHDRAW FROM U.N.
July 20, 1946:
BLACK MARKET CRISIS
BEFORE CONGRESS
RUPTURED? STOP WORRY
WITH THIS AMAZING
INVENTION (ADVT.)
August 3, 1946:
LABOR UNREST RISES
LYNCHINGS IN MISSOURI
AND CALIFORNIA
September 10, 1946:
ATTEMPT TO REVIVE
UNITED NATIONS
March 5, 1947:
GERMANY DEMANDS
REPARATIONS
LOWERED
September 29, 1948:
RIOTS IN AFRICAN
COLONIES
July 5, 1949:
REVIVED U.N. DEMANDS
NATIONS DISARM
June 29, 1950:
STOCKS RISE SHARPLY
RUPTURED? STOP WORRY
WITH THIS AMAZING
INVENTION (ADVT.)
June 30, 1950:
U.S. AT WAR!
ATOM BOMBS BLAST
CITIES
MACARTHUR DIRECTS
COUNTERATTACK
July 10, 1950:
ALL CITIES EVACUATED
AUGUST 12, 1950:
GERM WARFARE BEGINS
-
John Van Buren said, "I suppose the main answer came when our world, as a whole, realized that there were two parts to freedom—first, freedom from, and, after that, freedom to. If we hadn't had the second point to consider, the anarchy would have continued indefinitely. A drastic cure—but the world was sick and insane after 1945. Consider all the chances we've had. And yet there was the same amount of political corruption, the same social and racial antagonisms, the same grab-and-to-hell-with-the-other-guy spirit. You can find plenty of places to put the blame—England's policy in India and Palestine, Russia's secrecy, China's civil wars—and the United States couldn't cast stones, of course. Outside of a few countries like Sweden, we were the only democracy on earth, but all we had was freedom from, not freedom to. We were groping like everyone else, and so eventually World War III started, and wasn't abortive like yours.
"Who started it? An atomic bomb dropped. That started it. And then the cities were evacuated, and there was decentralization. And the way to fight them was with biological weapons. So the plagues came. There was something called the New Bubonic, for example. We perfected that. We immunized ourselves and spread the germs, and they spread—and then they mutated and attacked us. Eventually there had to be peace. After the population was decimated.
"We forged a sword, and it turned in our hand and struck us. For ten years after the undeclared armistice everyone worked with one goal; it was a war to conquer the little, mutated bugs before they killed us all. In the end we won. And by then we'd found some new ideas—notably a method of increasing the life span.
"I'm ninety-four years old and in the prime of life. I'll live to be two hundred or more. My brain won't fail until I'm within a decade of that mark. Till then, I'll be assimilating knowledge, learning, utilizing what I know—and applying it. Perhaps that's why I was able to get in contact with your world in the first place. I had knowledge and time enough to use it. Your race starts
to decay before you're seventy.
"We haven't a Utopia. We don't want one. But we're prolonging our life span all the time, and we're beginning—only beginning. Our ships go to the stars! If there's another war, it may decimate us again, but it won't destroy us. We're not a perfect planet. There are still diseases. But there are none of the old diseases that existed a hundred years ago. We found specifics for them. New mutations keep arising, but we can hold those in check; our research laboratories are as efficient as we can make them. Medicine is one of the most honored sciences on our planet. Funds for it are available always. I don't know if it happened on your world, but it did on ours—a hundred years ago Congress refused to grant a million dollar fund for cancer research, though there was evidence even then that with such resources cancer could be cured.
"After what Congress had already spent!
"We're not perfect by any means. But we're a lot better off than you are. Your world is in a psychopathic state. You've been in the straitjacket of GPC since 1950. It's retarded adolescence. Only your organization had sense enough to realize that and to do something about it.
"I was working on telepathic research. That was how I reached the Freak. It took me three years to get in close enough contact to make him understand, and that happened only a few days ago. But all the while I was tapping his brain, getting through him a picture of your world—and filtering it out from his imaginary pictures.
"I tell you: GPC must be destroyed, or your world will die. I'll do what I can for you. But if you expect me to tell you how to build a death ray, you expect too much. It wouldn't work. A machine like this communicator, based on resonance, will work in both our worlds, but remember the main point: for a hundred years or so we've moved along different probability lines, and our entropic rate has been different. The energy potential of your continuum is different from ours, billions of volts apart. We have had to change many of our ancient equations—even the Einsteinian mass-energy formula has variations now. But, as I say, it's possible to build a machine that will produce certain vibrations in our world—and when you do that, I can hear your voice.
"As for the Freak—I don't know, frankly, why I can touch his mind. He can perceive probabilities. He needs no machine to do that; his mind is all the colloid machine necessary. It was a latent talent born in him. He was a mutant. And rather an improbable one himself. We still don't know too much about the laws of probability; the Heisenberg uncertainty factor enters into it, and when we get down to atomics and working with the genes themselves—we simply don't know all the answers. Perhaps probabilities shifted when the Freak was born. Perhaps he's a crossroads himself. It was improbable that he should ever have been conceived, and at a locus of probabilities the illogical may happen. At any rate, he can perceive probabilities."
"Not prescience, then," Jeng said to himself. "But according to Ortega's records, his visions didn't always check with Van Buren's world—and Van Buren mentions the Freak's 'imaginary pictures.' Other lines of probability? Or—after all—prescience?"
The voice from Omega went on.
"One thing: the atomic blast isn't as dangerous as you have imagined. Don't worry about the earth exploding. It won't. And as long as the planet itself survives, mankind and civilization will survive. You may have to take a long step back in order to go forward, but we did that—and perhaps our main success was in escaping from the old bugbears that held man back for hundreds of thousands of years. Almost at any time after the industrial revolution ailments like early senility and the diseases—cardiac, for example—could have been conquered, if a genuine attempt had been made. But it never was made. Habit patterns of our ancient social culture held us back. Not until 1958 was there any real investigation of cerebral infarcts. That was the first step toward conquering early senility—studying the tiny progressive hemorrhages within the brain. Alvarez had studied it before then, but he said it was apparently incurable. We've cured it.
"Remember, before you can get freedom to you must get freedom from. That's where the rank and file usually break down. Back in the days after World War Two it was commonly accepted that technology had advanced tremendously, and that a fraction of the money spent on the war, had it been devoted to research, would have paid off. But—it would have been a precedent. Congress hesitated, and everyone hesitated.
"Atomic research had been merely sporadic before 1941—but a precedent was made then, because the nations had to do research or die.
"Your world faces death now. You must get your freedom from GPC. You're trying to plug a dyke that's leaking at a thousand points.
"Smash the dyke. Follow your plan. Get Breden to explode the uranium pile.
"That will wreck GPC. It may wreck mankind a little, too. But man will survive. GPC won't. Your first and vital step is to destroy Uranium Pile Number One. Until you do that, you're doomed to fail. The uranium piles are the psychological foundation stones that keep GPC in power. Once the symbol goes—the reality can be attacked."
The voice stopped. Jeng was silent, placidly watching the machine before him, his sharp brain trying to integrate what he had just heard with the incredibly complicated possibilities already filed in his mind. The organization of the world was not simple. And the problematical factors, the variant possibilities, added infinite complications.
He put up his hand and rubbed his forehead gently. He had a slight, dull headache. He felt unreasonable irritation. There could be machines to do this integrating; such machines were quite within the realms of engineering possibility. But, of course, such machines could not be built under GPC.
So his brain would have to serve as such a machine. And, being human—and not being a hundred years old, with all the knowledge and training that age implied—Jeng knew that he was fallible. One lapse of memory might mean complete failure.
Nor could he delegate power to subordinates. He hadn't enough capable men available, with GPC's new embargo limiting transportation. The organization was lamed, half crippled. But it had to stumble on somehow. If it could only reach the immediate goal—Breden, Uranium Pile Number One, the atomic blast—then the balance would shift from failure toward success.
Had Ilsa's San Francisco man located Joseph Breden yet?
-
He had not. Breden hadn't reached San Francisco.
From a jet plane, traveling at sonic speeds, one does little sightseeing, and Breden didn't know he was bound for the West Coast until the telltale flashed upon the ceiling. He had only the vaguest memory of redirecting the plane from New York, and no memory at all of why he had done so. Realizing that it might be difficult to secure an immediate return reservation from San Francisco, now that he was on furlough time—he had spent the last half hour listening to the newscast, and had learned of the Neoculturalist investigation and the interstate embargo—he picked up the visor mike and demanded a rerouting to Denver. The jet plane made a gigantic curve and rose as it turned its nose from west to east.
So he landed at the Denver port, while Ilsa Carter's San Francisco expendable was waiting for the quarry that didn't arrive. He located a copter and set its controls, using the visor to call his wife. But Margaret didn't answer; the automatic butler said she'd be in shortly.
He sat back and tried to analyze the slight confusion in his mind. That complete relaxation of last night had not returned. There was a vague, disturbing sense of something wrong, something forgotten, too obscure to be analyzable. But he thought it was somehow connected with Margaret.
A symbol, a word, a sign—what?
He dismissed it, or tried to, and looked forward to a week's relaxation in Margaret's company. The prospect was a pleasant one.
And it was pleasant—up to the period when he looked into Margaret's eyes and felt his senses blank out.
-
He made the return trip by stages, under posthypnotic control. Afterward there were flashes of memory—finding himself in Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, knowing the vital urgency of arranging another stage in
the journey and the equal urgency of communicating with Margaret by visor.
Each stage was a unit in itself, beyond which he could not look or think. And eventually, under hypnosis and the personal guidance of an expendable, he reached the hideout.
What happened after that was vague and strange.
He remained passive. He was not called upon to do anything, except listen, learn, and understand. The time for decision was not yet. Like a man in a dream—which he was—he allowed himself to be led through the underground rooms and corridors and laboratories, listening, watching, not questioning anything, though much of what he saw had come to this world from Omega and was unlike anything he had ever known before.
The hypnotic control played him like a delicate instrument, lessening and increasing the intensity as it was needed. His stolen memories returned—memories of what Ilsa Carter had told him in her apartment, and the meaning of the Zodiacal symbol—He remained a witness, while all around him a flurry of high-tension activity went on.
There was no attempt to keep any further secrets from him. On the contrary, Jeng and the others made every effort to acquaint him with the whole history, aim and purpose of the underground organization. With Jeng, he listened to the playbacks of the voice from Omega. With Ilsa Carter, he watched De Anza and Louis being given the sedative shots. He saw the Freak, motionless as a monstrous image in his tank.
